Why the World is Unravelling

An Age of Apocalypse is Telling Us: If We Don’t Change, We Die

Image Credit: alexx_60

The 2020s have been brutal so far — absolutely brutal. They’re an era in history when catastrophe doesn’t seem to end. We’ve lurched from pandemic to war to heatwave to wildfires to never-ending inflation to natural disaster. 

When I look at the world, at our civilization, I see one in serious and real trouble. Let’s zoom even further out for a second, and try to put all this in perspective.

These catastrophes aren’t unconnected. They’re not just “bad luck” or misfortune. The gods didn’t suddenly decide to punish us. There is a message here, only we are still not listening. That message is about our global economy, our lifestyles, and our futures.

Let me try to explain.

Until the 2010s, we had a number of Existential Threats as a civilization. By now, you should know what they are. Climate change — which was accelerating, the temperature rising faster than even the worst predictions. Mass extinction — species were beginning to die off in vast numbers, for only the sixth time in deep history, hundreds of millions of years. Economic inequality — our economies were descending into unhealthy places, the normal distribution of a small number of poor and relatively rich but not too rich and a broad middle class bifurcating into a number of ultra rich, and a giant underclass below them.

Enter the late 2010s. Those threats began to explode. Into new ones. Inequality bred political instability. Fascism arose in a giant wave across the West. Unnoticed, almost, Putin transformed Russia into a neo-fascist empire. Climate change intensified to the point of genuine catastrophe — megafires and megafloods and so forth became parts of our everyday vocabulary.

Now we’re in the 2020s. And our Existential Risks are multiplying. Before, there were just five, roughly speaking. Climate change, inequality and instability, fascism. But now? We have to add more to the list. Pandemics. Mass Extinction. Ecological collapse.

And we’re just three years into the 2020s.

What is going here? Why is this an age of apocalypse?

The message that we aren’t hearing is that our global economy is leading us to disaster.

How does it work? Well, right about now, the thing we call the global economy works like this. We in the West, and notably America, have an insatiable appetite for stuff. All kinds of stuff. It doesn’t matter what it is, really. Sneakers, jeans, gadgets, computers, electronics, screens to spend our days glued to. Our lives are made of stuff.

We take having all that stuff — cheaply — for granted. We don’t think about it at all, that we can stroll down to the market or mall or just click on Amazon and poof! There it is. The stuff we want. What is it today? A new pair of sneakers. Some new bedsheets. Maybe a designer towel. A handbag. Some more makeup. A new piece of athletic gear. Another phone.

But there are three very, very big problems with all this.

All this stuff is made of hydrocarbons. All of it. Either it’s plastic and foam — like sneakers and gadgets and electronics. Or it’s synthetic textiles, like clothes and bedsheets. Or it’s made with electricity and steel and iron still derived from hydrocarbons. 

Our entire world is made of fossil fuels. We in the West live lives made of hydrocarbons — and we’re completely oblivious mostly, to it. We don’t understand that we literally wear chunks of oil made of synthetic fibres called “clothes.” Or that the sneakers we wear on our feet are also quite literally chunks of oil. Or the bedsheets we sleep on, synthetic, are also oil. Our food is made with fertilisers that come from…you guessed it…hydrocarbons. We don’t understand that we live, eat, sleep hydrocarbons.

Now. All that was bad enough when it only had one set of “negative externalities,” as economists call it — negative side effects. That set was climate change, mass extinction, and ecological collapse. Hydrocarbons, the way we were using them, extracting them, distributing them, were polluting the skies and rivers and warming the atmosphere and killing off life on the planet — so fast that the planet was juddering in pain, transforming more rapidly than it had for hundreds of millions of years.

But now another set of negative externalities is coming from our hydrocarbon intensive lifestyles, too. We eat, live, sleep hydrocarbons. Trace the thing we call the global economy back. China transforms all those hydrocarbons into the stuff of our lives — bedsheets, sneakers, gadgets what have you. But the hydrocarbons come from Russia. And Saudi Arabia.

And then Russia turns right around and wages war. See what’s really happening here? Oil turns into goods in one direction, which end up in Western hands — and money flows right back in other, from the West to China to Russia, further destabilising our global politics. 

Our global economy is at the root of all the Existential Threats we now face. It’s clearest in the example of hydrocarbons. Now it should be clear for any thoughtful person to see they have several sets of negative externalities. They cause climate change, mass extinction and ecological collapse. But they also prop up neo fascist states like Russia, and dictators like Putin. Who then destabilise us, by installing Manchurian candidates for President, like Trump, or flooding the zone, which is our public spaces, with far right propaganda, destabilising us.