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She wailed the question to a passing TV helicopter as she struggled down a street in New Orleans, chest-deep in the filthy floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina. The memory has stuck to my conscience like a burr to a saddle blanket for all these seventeen years, not only because of the depth of human misery and desperation the question expressed, but because of the assumption behind it: that someone, somewhere, knows what we are supposed to do, and if we could only find out what it is, and do it, or have done it, everything would be all right again.
It would be a very long time before things would be all right again in New Orleans. Katrina was the most expensive tropical cyclone ever recorded in America or the world, doing an estimated $125 billion in property damage. Not for 12 years would another hurricane — Harvey — equal that amount of destruction.
Hurricanes that did more than a billion dollars’ worth of damage were rare until the turn of the century. There were only two in the 1960s, then four in the 70s, seven in the 80s, 12 in the 90s. But in the 2000s, the decade of Katrina, there were 19. In 2005 alone, there were five billion-dollar cyclones in addition to Katrina. The upward trend has continued since, and continues now.
But before 2005, to be confronted by the newly massive power of a global-warming-fueled cyclone was a rare and unexpected event that left survivors in shock, and asking the question; what were we supposed to do?
And the numbers of survivors asking that question has increased exponentially since 2005, and not just because of hurricanes. When you see your house, your neighborhood, even your town burned to the ground by a rampaging wildfire, what are you supposed to do? When you see your crops wilt from thirst and your land turn to dust, what are you supposed to do? When rising sea water floods your city without benefit of any storm, what are you supposed to do?
I am not going to pretend to know what we are supposed to do. That’s way above my pay grade. But as a long-time chronicler of these things, I can tell you what we are doing.
Nearly half of us have staked our claim on the banks of that big river in Egypt — Denial. These folks accept the blandishments of industrial advertising that assure them everything is going to be all right because a) it’s just bad weather, and we’ve always had bad weather, and b) if it turns out to be more than that, our wondrous industrial technology will come up with a solution. (In other words, the thing that caused this problem will, when it feels like it, solve it.) In the meantime, what you are supposed to do is — keep consuming. And keep voting for the people who are dedicated to making it easy for industry to complete the destruction of our planet.
The other half of us have accepted that climate change is real, caused by humans and poses an imminent existential threat to us all. But what are they supposed to do? They can’t move to a safer place in the country, because they can’t afford it, and they have to cling to their corporate job in the city to pay their bills. Learning to grow their own food? Impossible in a high-rise condo, and anyway they don’t have the time. Same for producing their own energy.
So what are they supposed to do? It’s a mystery.
A tiny sliver of that minority have moved off the grid (well away from the coasts and rivers), taken up Permaculture, and downsized their lives so that they have less stuff but are assured of living much longer.
Is that what we are es-posed to do? Don’t know, can’t say.
“… they have less stuff but are assured of living much longer.”
Hah! Wanna’ bet?!?
Than a 30th floor condo dweller in New York City? Absolutely.
“Adjusted for inflation, $1,000,000 in 1960 is equal to $9,483,061 in 2022
annual inflation over this period was 3.69%. add three 000’s to the end of those figures and it pretty much explains why disasters are more expensive nowadays than 60 years ago.
i won’t even get into the fact that there are more people, thus more property, to be damaged.
and surely we can’t get into the discussion of how many “important people” fly in their private jets to climate change conferences where they tell us to stop using fossil fuels. they fly out after leaving their gazillion dollar coastal mansions, most of the time.
yep. joe 6pack is the problem.
this issue needs to be taken seriously, by sensible people, not compromised experts. as much as us little people are told to cut back, it just allows the profligate few to behave even more badly.
I regularly visit a handful of ‘Prepper’ posts on You Tube. These folks usually seem quite sane and sober, and have developed (or adopted) a variety of pragmatic communal approaches aimed at surviving the impending fall. Such programs involve subsistence farming, basic medicine, weaponry, food preservation, alternative energy sourcing, construction, tanning, tinkering, tailoring, and the like. Administrative and religious functions are addressed as well.
All bases covered; all well and good! But the real problem for future prepper communities may be one that naval admirals as far back as WWI have identified. They recognized that the main drawback of the modern battleship, no matter how huge or heavily armed, is that it is inherently “target intensive”.
Such will be the problem for these prepper farm settlements. The self-isolation that most will certainly adopt may be their undoing. The nomadic gangs that must inevitably form, as the cities and towns disintegrate, will enjoy the tactical advantages of ruthlessness, mobility and surprise. Historically, tribal barbarians have typically overthrown the remnants of numerous declining civilizations, often right down to the last village and farm. The scattered prepper communities of the coming dystopia will be prime targets. It’ll be like Joshua’s ragged horde against the hapless Canaanites, or the Vikings’ vile attacks on the northern seacoast towns…only with a Mad Max panache.
“The nomadic gangs” … “will enjoy the tactical advantages of ruthlessness, mobility and surprise. ”
And Grade A military firepower. The prepper community never fails to ignore this aspect of living a life of pastoral leisure in a post-apocalyptic world.
As for Tom’s question, ” … what we are es-posed to do?,” I would suggest looking into Solar Radiation Management.
An SRM regime is coming soon, to a planet near you. There are NO other options, and the fact that we are not talking about this basic reality is … what?
Par for the course?
Greg and Max: Cities are already disintegrating, there are plenty of desperate homeless people and well armed gangs but prepper and permaculture groups are not being invaded. P&P groups are neither battleships nor remnants of declining civilizations, they are the seeds of emerging cultures. There will likely come a time when they will need to defend themselves but they will be doing so on terrain they are familiar with that includes their homes, “Grade A military firepower” is not exclusive to either group, except that one has to carry it a long ways. Not sure how you imagine the raiders will be so mobile, public transportation, hot rods? “A life of pastoral leisure” is not the expectation of anyone who has attempted to grow even a small portion of their own food. That is the fantasy of rich urbanites who keep a doomstead they expect to escape to when the SHTF.
You have a point. And for the sake of my progeny, I hope you’re right.
What are es-posed to do? The short and harsh answer is “die” of course.
Do I really believe that? No. But it may be the harsh reality of nature we will have to deal with.
Saw the (excuse the pun) warm-up act in 2021 with the NW and Canadian heat dome. BC lost over 600 people. Mostly elderly and ill health. No A/C, no mobility, emergency health services taxed to the breaking point. I was sitting in 50C heat in Canada.
I don’t know why this event, atmospheric river in Vancouver area in 2021, and the recent flooding in Pakistan, are not putting the fear of global warming in everyone? As you stated, all are now residing in “De-Nile”.
I know what I’m doing and it probably is either inappropriate or not enough. Building infrastructure designed to accommodate zero carbon, I don’t know, but its all we got at the moment.
Maybe its the same mindset I developed when asked while living in Northern Ontario if I missed the mountains in BC. “Whether you’re going up a big hill or a mountain its all the same, you put one foot in front of the other”. Its all we got…
“Building infrastructure to…….zero carbon” If by that you mean, say, building a garden and its soil, or a rocket mass heater, you are genuinely reducing your foot print and preparing for a future of reduced resources. If it means e-cars and heat pumps or such, you might reconsider. Best wishes in your efforts.
You gotta go with what you have, not what you wish to have – to paraphrase the army general’s quote.
What I learned from the Corona Virus pandemic in 2020. I was working on parts of the grid infrastructure throughout most of Texas. It seemed like we were driving in a dystopian plot as the few remaining survivors. It was freakin’ eerie, especially around Dallas.
This is what it looks like to get the carbon emissions reduced to the levels required. A near complete shutdown of our present economic activity. I’m not a big supporter of the economic infrastructure status quo by any means; however, we cannot abruptly go from 60 to Zero hitting the brakes either.
The changes are a slow curve in direction. The point is we start making the turn. Did we make it soon enough? Most certainly not.
However, we cannot maintain the fantasy of a zero carbon, permaculture, agrarian civilization either. All are most welcome to live that way and hope any who do are happy. What I am trying to do is get this plane to a safe landing. We don’t go from 30,000 ft to a full and safe stop on the tarmac by wishes and magic. Physics is involved whether we like it or not.
That’s why in a crisis Captain Kirk usually went to Scotty the Engineer. :-) (Oh, that’s good. I’m using that one again too!).
“What I am trying to do is get this plane to a safe landing.”
Same here, one of the reasons I bring up nuclear power plants whenever I get the chance, as at least I can say to myself when all is said and done, I tried to do my part.
Speaking of which, all 7 of Ukraine’s NPPs are at the moment and into the foreseeable future, running on auxiliary power.
In other words, these existential threats are disconnected from the grid … indefinitely!
Ho hum.
What I find comical, is current fears regarding refugees centers around Ukrainians, and the very real possibility that 10 to 15 million of them will be forced to flee westward* this winter due to power outages, when the obvious greater danger is, 740 million Europeans may have to pack and leave Europe at any moment, should there be a “failure” at even one of Ukraine’s NPPs.
It only takes one, and matters not which way the wind is blowing, this is the lesson WE ALL LEARNED from Fukushima, the lesson of cascading failures, one failure will lead to another and another and before you know you know it there will be dozen for more spent fuel pool fires raging out of control, and you will have to abandon most, if not all, of whatever continent you happen to call your own.
Kidding, of course. We learned nothing from Fukushima, and the fact that you can get up to 10 years in prison for bringing up the subject in Japan, is not an excuse.
*And fleeing eastward. The number one destination for Ukrainian refugees, when broken down by nation-state, is Russia.
Imagine that. As self-described objective journalist Krystal Ball so eloquelently stated on her uber-popular YouTube channel, Breaking Points (the alternative to CNN!), when informed of the destination of a near majority of these distressed peoples, “Ewwwwwwwwwww!!”
Max, what would happen if a spent fuel pool lost it’s water supply? I’ve heard many say it’ll be bad, but I have not come across anyone who can explain what will happen – step by step?
Moresoma, (reply not showing under your post). The spent fuel rod pools are a big cooling bath. They keep the fuel at appropriate temperatures as the water is cycled and heat exchanged. No different than someone cooling off a boiled egg under the faucet.
As you can imagine, when the water goes away there is not a suitable medium to keep the fuel rod temperatures from running away into a meltdown or explosion.
I would have to do more reading, however I believe the underground spent fuel repositories keep the rods far enough away, or sealed so they do not interact and cause temperature rise. The fuel can naturally decay over 5-20,000 years or whatever the half life is.
The reason I am not a cheerleader for nuclear power is because of the administrative burden and logistics. And the use of enriched uranium, see below.
It is a real dilemma. We have made this Faustian bargain with Power as manifested through electricity and fossil fuels. All we can do is work our way out of the bargain bit by bit.
The reason I proposed the heretical economic paradigm of Affordability to supplant the existing Return On Investment. ROI means nothing if there is nothing left to use the profits.
May as well be Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island.
(And who travels with a chest full of cash anyway? Oh snap!! Thurston was a drug smuggler trying to launder money!! That changes everything. That story is going on Medium).
reply to moresoma:
Hard to say, truth be told. As someone who has spent 20 years on the internet asking the same question,* I’ve reached a simple conclusion, there are “powerful forces” who do not want these questions to be asked, let alone answered.
A readable pdf. on the subject of fuel pool fires in general, and Fukushima in particular.
Reducing the Dangers from Fires in Spent Fuel Pools Frank N. von
von Hippel and Michael Schoeppner
https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs24vonhippel.pdf
The bottom-line as far as spent fuel pools and Fukushima goes; the Official Narrative of the event makes it clear that if Japan hadn’t gotten EXTEMELY lucky, the nation as we know it would no longer exist, due to loss of power at one electric generating plant.
* Oh the unanswered questions I’ve asked. Thousands.
What happens if a two thousand pound warhead detonates in a spent fuel pool?
Can dry cask storage in Ukraine, or anywhere for that matter, be blown to bits by a basic artillery round, or would it take something greater?
After a radiological thermal plume from a spent fuel pool fire passes over a region, how long would it be before it can be inhabited again? One generation? 5 generations? Never?
It depends?
Does anyone understand the concept of cascading failures, on a very small planet where our nuclear power plants tend to be arranged in clusters?
Speaking of which, how many NPPs are now in operation below the Three Gorges Dam? One dozen? What happens when a NPP is submerged to a depth of 30 meters?
If 200 nuclear power plants are vaporized in a thermonuclear exchange (a conservative estimate), will the ozone layer of this planet remain intact?
And so on.
One of the theories I have, the deeper we get into the The Panic, as I call it, regardless of it increasing threats and dangers, the more pro-nuclear power we will become.
Hubbert saw The Panic coming 60 years ago, and I believe it was the reason he was very much pro-nuclear.
https://i0.wp.com/ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/hubbert-_nuclear_fossil-fuel-to-50001.png
You have made a good argument FOR nuclear reactors IF bean counters were not involved in procurement.
But since bean counters are in control of procurement, it seems to me that you have presented a compelling case AGAINST nuclear reactors.
Just ask the Canadians how many they’ve sold. Those reactors have been comparatively safe for generations – they really learned the lesson from the NRX. And that’s not even addressing long term management of high level waste, let alone short term.
It seems to me that a world without industrial civilization is bad enough. We don’t need radioactive poisoning as well. So, sadly, with the world as we know it, No to Nukes.
CANDU reactors use heavy water (deuterium) and non-enriched uranium. Didn’t need plutonium (by-product of uranium enrichment, or primary product?), or want plutonium because nuclear warheads were such a stupid idea – ever.
The reactors are designed to be refueled on the go. They do not need to be shutdown to refuel.
25 years I was in the last public tour of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) which is 7,200 ft. underground at an existing nickel mine. The neutrino “capture” sphere was about 3m in diameter and empty at the time awaiting completion with heavy water filling. The heavy water slows down the neutrino causing a “quantum shockwave” emitting a photon. Photo-multipliers detect the photon.
Waiting in the entrance shaft to the facility were mini tanker cars, the kind used on mining gauge track. IIRC there were three of them. Each little tanker car (think miniature railway at the local amusement park) held $100 million in heavy water, or $300 million total. Ontario Hydro (now Ontario Power) donated the water to the experiment. Leased actually for $1. The experiment had to return every milliliter of course. The filtering and volumetric instrumentation for recording was a phenomenal little piece of engineering.
Let me clarify, not for you, but for others who may be unaware. Plutonium is a nuclear reaction product and does not exist in nature, so cannot be a by-product of initial U enrichment. Pu is made in a reactor core, and separated at the secondary enrichment.
But an enrichment facility is an enrichment facility, and once you have one you can have a nuclear weapon. Candu does not require enriched U, which makes the fuel a whole lot cheaper, but no use to the military without that enrichment facility.
Another difference: Candu reactors are walk-away safe – an electromagnet holds an independent set of control rods above the reactor core. If electricity fails, the electromagnets lose their power and the rods fall under the force of gravity. Since the reactor is designed so that a hot spot in one part of the core spreads only slowly, there is lots of time for the ‘shut-down’ rods to prevent a catastrophe. Not that this matters to a bean counter. Or a war lord.
Enrichment – reprocessing facility