Is Imminent Extinction Likely?

Let's explore and rant about it

There are so many things I wish I could write about all at once.

First, I want to say how much I appreciate the community of readers here and, especially, the comments people leave. I learn so much from them. I love being challenged. Also, sometimes it is very helpful for me to know that people understand what I am trying to convey, as I often feel very alone in how I approach many subjects.

Particularly, the response to my last essay was very helpful — a big relief — for me. I explored how monistic idealism — the thesis that consciousness is the foundation of reality or the ontological primitive — meshes perfectly with Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields, and how this can help us understand the variety of occult and esoteric knowledge systems across the world, without dismissing them as superstition or fantasy.

This is, perhaps, a relatively original idea. I think it can be extremely helpful for humanity’s future, if we are going to have a future. I will tease out the implications further in future essays. It matters to me that people care, and find value in this exploration.

I wrote, above, if we are going to have a future. Today I want to dive into this heavy topic, quite deeply.

If I express what is true in my heart, I have to say that I feel it is likely (more than possible but less than inevitable) we are heading for near-term human extinction. I am not thinking it will be fifty or a hundred years. It could be much sooner… more like ten or twenty. Of course I deeply hope and pray this is not the case. I absolutely could be wrong, and I absolutely want to be wrong.

PollyAnna-ish statistician Hannah Ritchie thinks that climate doomerism is akin to climate denialism in promoting inaction. I consider that total garbage. Realism is not capitulation. I intend to review her new book, Not the End of the World, soon. I hope her optimism turns out to be accurate. I am dubious.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

While I was unfortunately ridiculed as a “doomsday thinker” by The New York Times and other media outlets after 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl came out in 2006, I was actually very hopeful back then. I believed humanity could, should and would undergo a massive, collective awakening to move in a new direction — that we still had enough time to redesign, reinvent, our social and technical infrastructure. Through my company Evolver and our documentary, 2012: Time for Change, we promoted local currencies, mutual aid networks, permaculture, applied systems thinking, and so on.

I felt a strong presentiment, based on what seemed to me to be obvious logic, that even the most dire projections of the International Panel on Climate Change were very conservative. They neglected the possibility of runaway warming due to interlocking feedback loops. Also, there were little-discussed outliers like the possibility of the “methane time bomb” erupting from beneath the Arctic and Siberian permafrost, where vast amounts of frozen methane are frozen but thawing quickly.

The big problem with methane is that it is thirty times more potent as a heat-trapping gas than carbon dioxide, even though it only stays in the atmosphere for ten years while CO2 keeps floating around for a century. In previous epochs of mass extinction, scientists found a sudden spike in temperatures leading to a huge wipeout of species. This is most likely caused by warming reaching a certain threshold and thawing out the methane stored underground and in the ice, which then unleashes heat-trapping gas that spikes temperatures as much as ten degrees Celsius in one decade. Obviously, all of the world’s forest would die at that point, as well as the oceanic plankton that produces 60% of the oxygen we breathe. Agriculture would become impossible. All of us would starve and also suffocate from lack of oxygen — even Zuckerberg in his underground Hawaiian grotto.

Sadly, our information ecology is deeply corrupted. Our political leaders are bought-and-sold tools of Wall Street and the fossil fuel industrial complex. Honestly, all of them — even the Democrats — are guilty of crimes against humanity as well as ecocide. I more or less ruined myself and drove myself partly insane trying to warn everyone about this precipice we were rushing toward, after the publication of my 2012 book in 2006 and even before that, as soon as I had a modicum of fame and cultural cache. Sadly I ran into personal problems I hadn’t worked out yet. Generally, I found, except for extremely rare exceptions, people were easily able to delude themselves. Inevitably, people would choose short-term self-interest over sacrificing any part of their success in the current system for something as abstract as the future of the Earth, even though they must have known, on some level (subliminally), they were dooming their own descendants by not raising the alarm and confronting the ecological crisis head on. So it goes.

I’ve gone through long periods — years — of being deeply discouraged and depressed about all of this. Finally I emerged with more of a Zen-like sense of surrender, non-attachment, and inner freedom. Today, I feel joy in each day and every moment I get to be here on Earth, to participate, write, love, reflect. However I cannot say how I would feel if I was in my twenties today instead of my late fifties. I would probably feel enraged at the older generations and deeply betrayed.

Personally I tend to think the epidemic of mental illness, including depression and anxiety, is largely due to suppressed ecological grief and sensible fear about the future. I detest the psychopharmacological complex that treats all mental disorders with SSRIs and other medications. I feel it would have been much healthier to allow people to fully feel their feelings — perhaps we would have had a revolution already. Some would have gone insane but a certain degree of madness is justified today. Our civilization of “imperial modernity” is insane, considering we are driving our species to extinction for no good reason. Mainly to increase the short-term profits of the already wealthy.

By the way I don’t always find anger an unhealthy emotion: It can provide tremendous productive fuel. I sometimes enjoy luxuriating in my rage.

I also feel a great deal of sadness, grief, and anger over how people are lied to, hoodwinked, and deceived, particularly by the incredibly powerful and insidious Right Wing (although I also detest the craven Democratic Party). Of course, the investors behind the Daily Wire sold a hydrofracking company, Frac Tech, for $3.2 billion, and were able to invest $4.2 million into Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson¹. These days, friends keep sending me Tucker Carlsen videos as if he is some kind of truth-teller instead of a moronic lackey doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industrial complex. Obviously, people have nowhere to turn. They are like wounded animals, twisting in their cages, chewing on anything, no matter how despicable, that assuages their pain for a moment.

This newsletter is partly inspired by reading the Guardian article, “‘Our yields are going to be appalling’: one of wettest winters in decades hits England’s farms.” This only reinforces what I read everyday on Twitter, where I follow a number of devastated climate scientists who cannot believe what they are seeing. One issue is the unprecedented rapid warming of the world’s oceans. As most of you probably know, 2023 saw a massive spike in global warming, with this month the warmest on record. Temperatures appear to be .5 degree Celsius warmer than a year ago. We appear to have shot past 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels and may be at 1.7 degrees warmer now, with temperatures rising faster and no sign of leveling off.