In Buffalo, NY, where I reside, it’s been an easy summer. Other than elevated temperatures consistently reaching into the 80s, all seems normal. We’re not in a drought, and there have been no fires. If I hadn’t moved back here after decades away, I might well be oblivious to the persistent 10°F temperature rise compared to my college days. Last summer was far hotter. People were commenting. Whether that signified an awareness of climate change or not, I don’t know. What I do know is the weather extremes predicted by science 50 years ago are now engulfing the world. It’s not just fires. More extreme rainfalls are occurring too, from Texas to Bangladesh. Extreme heat creates both fire-inducing droughts and crop-drowning rainfall. Both undermine agriculture, the foundation of civilization.
The world we’re living in today, one of increasingly challenging, life-taking weather extremes, comes down to two words: fossil fuels. Since life arose on the planet, it was regulated by slow change over eons invisible in a human being’s lifetime. On the most fundamental level, Earth’s life is governed by the First Law of Thermodynamics. The Law of Conservation of Mass understates this. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only change forms. When matter is burned, it creates heat.
By burning the physically stored energy of coal and oil, we have converted tens of millions of years of stored physical energy into heat and pollution. The heat has built relentlessly, reducing mountain snowpack that feeds our rivers, melting glaciers that raise sea levels, and fueling the life-taking, uncontrollable wildfires and floods we are witnessing or are victims of today.
As scientists publish ever more refined studies on climate change, humanity as a whole has not taken significant, necessary action. Our political leaders, generally of low wisdom and misled by cabinets full of industrialists profiting from destroying the planet, are active participants with war chests funded by AIPAC and the fossil fuel industry. Both feed a fatal ecocidal agenda, now rounding the bottom of the J-curve and fated to impact us exponentially. This will not be the linear progression we’ve seen since the first lumps of coal were burned. The future includes crop failure on a horrifying scale.
When I was born in 1961, the world population was three billion, already above what our planet could sustain without damage. Without the boost of ultimately deadly fossil fuels, we would not be over eight billion today. Through their energy, we literally increased the calories available to the world. This was a noble cause for those wishing to solve world hunger, if tragically not solving waste, spoilage, and inequitable food distribution. Why should I have steak available as children starve in African nations?
Population is a notoriously controversial subject for good reason. Racism and genocide are constant features of the human condition. However, the question isn’t whether we’re overpopulated or not. We are. The question is who lives and who dies as fossil fuels approach their end. Without their energy, tragedy is inevitable. Yet with them, tragedies grow day after day as fires and floods consume lives.
The poorest, sickest, youngest, elderly, and indigenous—who have lived the lightest on the Earth—are the most immediate victims of climate change for location, physical health, and socioeconomic reasons. We can now see the peril extends to all of us, even those of supposedly reasonable middle-class means (shrinking for decades with the rise of obscene wealth). That wealth, derived from harming the planet as all wealth is, has been a manifestation of the survival instinct ultimately made fatal by the very tools we have created. Staving off mortality has been an obsession through the ages. Many of the billionaires fueling the destruction of the planet and shredding our always shaky social fabric are so deluded as to think they can beat death. Most of us in developed nations have bought into smaller manifestations of this drive for security, for instance, insurance. It’s no small irony that the systems we invented to make us more secure grow ever more likely to end us with each molecule of CO₂ released. Insurance worked to some degree, but the homes we own don’t stand when fires and floods impose their will, and there’s not enough money in the system to insure against the wrath of Earth.
In fact, insurers are denying climate change-caused disaster claims, boosting rates to unaffordability and pulling out of high-risk regions. Banks (that cynically seek profit from the crisis regardless of human tragedy) and actuaries are fully aware of the threats we face. Meanwhile, worrying about the future has stopped us from living as humans in the present, creating the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, dependent on the impoverishment of the planet and her systems that make life possible. I touched on that in Whole Earth Ponzi Scheme. We built a reality-defying matrix denying our physical connection to the Earth long before Keanu Reeves. It started with agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, an understandable development in that quest for security we relentlessly seek with enormous unforeseen consequences. Yes, agriculture gave rise to science, technology, and higher thought, but also standing armies and borders to be protected rather than resources to be shared and regenerated.
What we have been brainwashed to believe is necessary for modern life is absurd. The invention of the car carried us away from our communities and families. Television and movies brought us a fantasy world, making us dissatisfied with our own. Front porches and friendly neighbors gave way to gated communities and security systems. We have been taught to distrust each other. It’s profitable, and perhaps smartphones were the coup de gras. Or maybe that will be AI. Social media is a poor replacement for an impromptu lemonade on a neighbor’s porch during an after-dinner family stroll. Does anyone sit down as a family for dinner anymore?
Is it any wonder mass shootings in 2026 are nearly a daily event now?
BTW, the Amish don’t carry insurance. They rely on communities and common funds where mutual support is assured. It’s not a commercial venture. We could do worse than adopt much of the philosophy of the Amish.
As we experience and witness deadly climate change heat, fires, and floods that destroy lives, the Trump “administration” is redefining what constitutes terrorism. Trump’s NSPM-7 directive titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence attacks non-profits and our right to assemble and protest. It’s laid out in detail on Whitehouse.gov, an inside-out piece of “logic” that decries ICE agents being doxxed, designates Antifa as a terrorist organization (no such organization exists; it’s simply holding anti-fascist views), and without irony calls out “violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.”
When masked agents of a federal police force are unleashed with licenses to kill, it is obvious who is preventing the functioning of a democratic society.
The document calls for crackdowns on a conveniently broad range of views, open to wide interpretation. “Common threads” include:
Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
Here are some pictures of extremism.
Double indemnity is a clause in an insurance policy that provides for payment of double the face value of the contract in case of accidental death. It seems appropriate to mention that here because, as I pointed out, insurance is beginning to fail, and our lives are now in a double indemnity situation. We’re in the tightening clench of fascism and climate change. Both are bringing death. However, there are no insurance policies to cover either. Our only insurance is to emulate the Amish and cover each other as best we can.
Here are four excellent Substack writers I know doing a fine job of that from different but complementary perspectives.
Margi Prideaux survived Australia’s devastating Black Summer of 2019-2020. She has been building a diverse regional community based on agriculture. We can no longer assume food will always arrive on our tables from Big Ag.
Jessica Wildfire has lived through climate chaos firsthand. She’s been working for years on learning practical survival skills in an urban setting, such as harvesting rainwater off your roof, and has generously offered an illustrated survival guide to share her knowledge.
Justin McAffee offers excellent insight into previous civilization collapses and more hardcore strategic advice on preparing for collapse. He often teams up with Max Wilbert, who lives on the front lines of environmental activism.
In the face of fascism, any of us in favor of human rights are enemy combatants now. We have exceeded the Paris Accord’s 1.5°C limit on global warming. Unmitigated release of CO₂, CH₄, and other greenhouse gases is being done with impunity under trashed environmental regulations carried out by fossil fuel lackeys and climate change deniers. The emergency is no longer down the road, it is here.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.