Our Current Consumerist Culture is Doomed AF

Business as usual means we're risking our lives for conveniences we didn't expect to have when I was young, and we pretty happily lived without. It's not a call to go back to the stone age, just fifty years or so. 

In my house growing up, we rarely drove places despite being almost 5k from the closest mall. As kids, if we wanted to go anywhere, we could bus, bike, or walk. My parents lived their entire lives without ever being in an airplane. That's a luxury of excess, they said. That entire Aristotelean ethics is gone now. "Waste not, want not" was successfully drilling into our little heads. Now we'd rather buy new than get something fixed.

I went to the bike shop at 10 am yesterday, and the streets were jam-packed, cars honking, people swearing at each other. That's after getting light rail installed. We're living in a car culture in which cars loom largest when even considering how to move from point A to B. I'm not sure it's possible to undo this kind of conditioning until we're scrambling to survive. We need the biggest vehicles possible to buy the most crap possible to feel brief moments of joy without any semblance of actual fulfillment because it's never enough. 

Last week, David King, chair of the global Climate Crisis Advisory Group, wrote that our survival is still possible, but only with radical steps taken. In a nutshell, the shit is hitting the fan largely because fossil fuel giants are in bed with governments everywhere:

"GDP growth remains sacred, while climate, biodiversity, health, and social equity are sacrificed, condemning future generations to inherit a ravaged planet. . . . On our current path, civilisation as we know it will disappear. . . . But we have agency to change this, and a thriving future is still on the table. To grasp it, we must embark on a radical journey encompassing an essential "4R planet" pathway. This means: reducing emissions; removing the excess greenhouse gases (GHGs) already in the atmosphere; repairing ecosystems; and strengthening local and global resilience against inevitable climate impacts. It's absurd to think, as some influential fossil fuel leaders claim, that we can continue our economies based on burning fossil fuels because scientists are finding ways to capture the emissions from continued use. . . . 

We often hear that, in response to the climate crisis, we need to make sacrifices. But this framing is flawed. We must find joy in nurturing what is around us, from nature to the things we own. Fulfilment should come from quality, not quantity, and from nature, not new things. We are a part of the natural world and depend on it We can choose to transition our societies into a sustainable period of ecological civilisation. Over the coming decades, as we are faced with a self-inflicted set of global challenges, the need for such a cultural transformation will drive action. This process must begin now." 

In Canada, the Pathways Alliance, representing our largest fossil fuel companies, try to convince people that they're committed to climate action, then promote just carbon capture, then advocate against any emission reduction policies. That will never work. We need to do all the things and accept that it will effect our lives. We can choose to live differently now and live pretty much like we did 50 years ago, or we can ignore all these concerns and be in a Mad Max scenario within our lifetime. 

In case you're not at all concerned about what's coming our way, check out Josh Ellis's primer on wet bulb threshold:

"Humans are endothermic, meaning we make our own body heat. We have to stay in a Goldilocks zone between too hot and too cold. If we're too hot, we sweat; our sweat evaporates and it cools us off. With me so far? But evaporation slows down the more ambient moisture is suspended in the air, which is what we call "humidity". The more humid the air, the slower liquids evaporate in that air; if it's too humid, they won't evaporate really at all from a practical standpoint. If it's warm and you sweat and your sweat doesn't evaporate, you will rapidly experience heart arrhythmia, brain dysfunction and soon afterwards you will find out whether all the rumors about an afterlife are true. Congratulations! You have crossed the wet bulb threshold.

For our purposes, the wet bulb threshold is when it's hot enough to make you sweat but too humid for that sweat to evaporate and maintain your core temperature. The more humid the air, the lower the temperature needed to cross the threshold. (I'm aware that this is a drastic simplification of the physics, but for practical purposes it'll do.) If it's reached wet bulb threshold where you are, the only way to not die is to externally lower your core temperature, which for all practical purposes means air conditioning. Fans don't help and neither do evaporative (or "swamp") coolers because both rely on evaporation. You need to artificially cool your body or the air enough to maintain thermal homeostasis. Or stay submerged in a cold bath until the temperature goes down. There is no toughing it out, no building up resistance to it. Young, old, fit, unfit, it will kill you. The first person I ever met who survived heat stroke was 12 when it happened. He was a suburban kid playing softball too long in the humid Texas heat. It fried his brain.

The higher the humidity the lower the wet bulb threshold, which is why people are dying in super humid Delhi at 35°C/95°F but can walk around much longer in 50°C/125°F in Death Valley, which is drier than Ben Shapiro's wife at a Magic: The Gathering tournament. Wet bulb threshold is what's killing people in these heat waves in India and Mexico right now. It's dangerous because the danger isn't immediately obvious the way it is when you're wandering around in the snow in a t-shirt and booty shorts. It creeps up on you. 

It's going to become a very serious problem in Europe soon, where summers are starting to cross the threshold. Why? Because architecture in Europe, especially Western Europe and the British Isles, was not designed to disperse heat. It was designed to retain it. Houses in warmer climes are designed to allow airflow through the house from the shaded side to the sunnier side. British houses trap heat, so when it gets hot, it's so much worse. 27°C/80°F in a midterrace house here feels like 41°C/105°F in a Texas shotgun shack. 

Also, European houses simply weren't designed for central HVAC; almost no one has it here, even window ones like Americans often have. And if everyone got one, it would cause an ecological apocalypse, because HVAC is the most inefficient, energy chomping thing humans do. Also, AC units are basically reverse heat pumps: if everyone in Britain suddenly had one, the ambient temperature of the island would go up probably by a couple of degrees Celsius. This, of course, would make the AC units run harder, and so you get a feedback loop. If India adopted AC en masse, it would use so much power and create so much heat that it would basically cause an apocalypse. But without it, unless they migrate permanently or seasonally, millions will be miserable half the year and hundreds of thousands will die every year. 

Oh, and of course crossing the wet bulb threshold means animals and plants can't keep themselves cool either. Hence these poor monkeys falling out of trees in Mexico right now. It's already affecting agriculture in hot humid areas. We're in serious trouble from this. So that's what we mean when we talk about "wet bulb temperatures" as a consequence of climate collapse. Which, as I've said, many of us have been doing for years and years now. Pity the rest of you didn't listen or do anything about it."

And then he wrote the following day after many flipped out at him, some unappreciative of his use of metaphor:

"Listen: it sounds like my wet bulb post scared the shit out of a whole lot of people. I'm sorry to have done that to you, but you need to be scared, honestly. Scary things are coming and nobody is going to step in at the last minute and solve everything for us. 

But there's hope.

I am not a "climate doomer" despite what people seem to think. I don't think the human race is doomed yet. I don't know for sure, but neither does anyone else. The truth is, I simply don't care. I'm not going down without a fight. But the Western way of life? Oh yeah. Doomed af. We can no longer pretend we live on a planet with infinite resources that we can do whatever we feel like doing to without consequences. Humans are absolutely capable of trashing the Earth like a Padre Island Airbnb on Cinco de Mayo. We can watch it happen. We are. 

Western society is based on consumer capitalism, and in consumer capitalism there is no such thing as "enough". You will never buy enough shit; no one ever makes enough money. Infinite growth is the basis of this ideology. It's stupid and has no basis in physical reality. We are overusing our resources and we're trashing the life support systems on this big rock whirling around in space. We're making it uninhabitable for a lot of species, including - as with the wet bulb problem - ourselves. 

This is simply dumb. Dumb people think this is good. So the system that overuses these resources and shits all over the planet? It's gotta go. It's gotta go no matter how much that sucks for people. The earth has a cancer called consumer capitalism, and it needs chemo. Chemo is shitty, but not as bad as being dead. 

What sets me apart from doomers is that I believe we can find a way to live that isn't as wasteful and doesn't treat our fragile planetary ecosystem like a fucking trap house. We can use less, think more, accept human responsibilities along with our human rights. A lot of people disagree with this, but I'm absolutely okay with telling each and every one of those people to fuck off for the greedy idiots they are. I don't take them or their ideology seriously and you shouldn't either. They're just not very smart, these people. In order to survive wet bulb threshold heat waves, or floods or droughts or increasingly psychotic storms, you gotta accept that you need to change the way you think and live. We all do. I've been doing it a long time now. It's not actually terrible. I don't buy things new I can buy used; I never buy what I can make; I never buy or make replacements for things I can fix or repair or upcycle. I spend time I might have worked to earn money to buy things to learn how to make and fix them instead.I'm not perfect about this shit. It's impossible to be in this society. But if everyone started to think this way, it would be a start at reducing our footprints. We can take less from the world and do more to preserve the ecosystem that keeps us and every other thing alive.

I'm not a hippie, I don't talk about Gaia our Mother Earth and shit. I'm not a Marxist. I'm not into ideology. I'm into survival by any means necessary. And survival means fitting into the order of the world, not treating it like a rental car. We own this ride, or it owns us. Late stage capitalism and the lifestyle it creates cannot fit onto this planet. Why do you think the richest people wanna go to space? They don't want to explore, they want to exploit. Otherwise they'd focus on fixing this planet instead of pimping the next one. 

How do we stop being bitches and act like grownups who give a shit about where we live? I don't have all the answers, just some of them. I try to tell people what my answers are. Some people don't like that. But I truly do not give a shit about those people. They're zombies to me. They don't think, they're just hungry. Always hungry. You can't talk to them. Fuck em. It's up to the rest of us to work around them and their stupid "akshually we've never had a true free market" bullshit. For the sane people, our job is to figure out how to do the least harm to the world and each other while trying to live the best lives we possibly can. This is much more important than buying a house or putting money into a 401k or living that baller lyfe. This is what matters. 

So if you're scared and you don't want your brain to cook in your skull on some hot humid day in the near future, you're gonna have to decide you don't want to, and you're gonna have to decide how you can pitch in to keep it from happening to you or anyone else. I'm writing a book now to try to help you figure that out, how to survive even if you can't afford to buy a climate proof bunker or move to Alaska or whatever. It's one of my two current projects (the other one is an open source free social network nobody owns). But until that's done, I want you to be afraid, because being afraid will make you aware of yourself and the world around you. 

Hard times are coming. Can't stop that now. But we can choose how we rise to meet and face them and try to shape the world that comes after them.