Category Archives: Apocalypse When?

[This article, written by Alan Urban for the website okdoomer.io is an updated mirror image of the arguments I made in my 2009 book Brace for Impact. Not many people agree, so I wanted you to see it.]

That’s right. Our entire global industrial civilization is going to collapse. And soon, which means within the lifetimes of most people alive today.

I realize this is quite the claim, and a pretty terrifying one if you’re under 50 or so. In this article, I will list 10 problems the world is facing, each of which could cause the collapse of civilization all on its own. Which means, if even one of these problems isn’t solved, our civilization is doomed.

Before I continue, let me explain what I mean by “collapse.” First of all, it doesn’t necessarily mean that humans will go extinct. While that is certainly a plausible scenario given the many existential threats we are facing, I still believe it is unlikely. Small groups of humans survived in very difficult conditions for tens of thousands of years.

Continue reading……..

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We’ve been here before, might have to do it again.

An astonishing study using new genetic methods to research human history has discovered evidence that bolsters my long-held belief that the impending crash of industrial society does not necessarily imply the extinction of the human race. My belief has not been based on science, of course — I am not a scientist — but rather on the conviction that the earth is far more varied in its micro-environments, and that people are far more resilient than today’s fragile, air-conditioned population is able to contemplate.

Now comes potential scientific validation. Continue reading →

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Palliative care, as I understand it, is given to a patient when doctors have given up on finding a cure, or even reversing the progression of the patient’s disease. The purpose of palliative care is to keep the patient as comfortable as possible, by treating the symptoms, while he is circling the drain. No doctor will ever explain it this way, but that is how I understand it.

Several decades ago, Mother Earth’s doctors advised her strongly that if she wished to live long and prosper, she had to cut down on her binge-like consumption of several highly toxic things: fossil fuels, synthetic fertilizer, plastic, toxic “forever chemicals” and the like. She and her caretakers — all volunteers who make their living from fossil fuels, synthetic fertilizer, plastic, etc. — ignored the advice and continued the binging.  Continue reading →

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Canadian wildfires this spring made the air unhealthy not only here in Toronto, but across the midwestern and northeastern United Stets.

Acrid smoke from unrestrained wildfires burning in remote Canadian forests this spring and summer has repeatedly fouled the air and dimmed the sun in vast swaths of the US Northeast and Midwest. Because of it, for a time the air quality in New York City was the worst of any city in the world.

Meanwhile the entire Southern US is locked in a heat wave of unprecedented severity and length, with the entire area seeing prolonged temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit and as high as 120 degrees. This weekend, one-third of the US population is under extreme-heat advisories. In south Florida, forecasters predicted even less rain and hotter temperatures because of the infiltration of dust in the air — dust blowing in from the Sahara Desert in Africa! Continue reading →

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For empires, as with people, when it’s over, it’s over.

It is extremely uncomfortable being a citizen of an empire that is circling the drain of history. Like passengers on a doomed airplane, we can watch the onboard movie with all the concentration we can muster, we can pull the shade on the window and deploy earbuds all we want, but we know. We are going down. The whole vast structure of society, stressed by the spiraling descent, groans and warps as it tries to hold together for a little longer. 

There are places, and times, in which it is relatively easy to ignore reality. But not completely, and not for long. Like the knowledge of our own inevitable death, we can avoid thinking about it for years at a time, yet it is never not with us. Events that do not touch us directly cast a shadow over us, darkening our skies — to use Winston Churchill’s brilliant metaphor — like a gathering storm.  Continue reading →

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During the final three decades of the 20th Century, the world experienced at most 100 major disasters — both natural and industrial —  every year, with annual damages averaging $70 billion. During the most recent two decades, the world has been afflicted with up to 500 major disasters every year. Annual damages have averaged $170 billion — in 2011 and 2017, over $300 billion. The upward trend is expected to continue without interruption.

Remarkably, this mounting crisis is on just about no one’s radar, except the United Nations, whose Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has been screaming the alarm for years. Its most recent annual report on the situation begins with these words: Continue reading →

The idea of an impending American collapse is enjoying a better class of friends these days. Long relegated to the low-income housing of blogs like The Daily Impact and The Doomstead Diner and the like, consideration of collapse is appearing with ever more frequency in respectable publications and websites, places people don’t mind admitting that they read. Just today two major works in two highfalutin’ places have come to my attention. I think it’s a trend, frankly.

First James Fallows, a writer and thinker I much admire, has a piece in The Atlantic titled “The End of the Roman Empire Wasn’t That Bad: Maybe the end of the American one won’t be either.” Now this is a notch above the typical whistling-past-the-graveyard pieces that the shills for infinite growth forever and ever have been putting out since it became obvious to the enlightened — that would be us — who saw that the end was clearly near. Continue reading →

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I was a little slow getting a look at the controversial new documentary from Michael Moore’s shop, Planet of the Humans. Eight million people beat me to it. I was anxious to see it, not only because everything put out under his name has been interesting and valuable, but mainly because of the hysterical meltdown it caused among promoters of renewable energy — environmentalists — who called the film wrong! and misguided! and divisive! and harmful to the movement! They — liberal environmentalists and their revered organizations, now — called him an “eco-fascist” (may I ask please WTF is that?) and “the new flack for the oil and gas industry.”  They even got the film pulled from YouTube (for 11 days) over an accusation that the film used four seconds of someone else’s footage without permission, something that is explicitly allowed under copyright law.  Continue reading →

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Just when you’ve figured out where the enemy is and where the threats are, they come at you from a different direction.

Kills you. Because the bullet travels faster than the sound of the shot, you can be dead before the sound arrives. Which is kind of what is going on now — deadly events are arriving at such a pace, and from such strange directions, that we are dying in large numbers without a clue about what hit us.

Some of us who have been predicting many of these outcomes — the collapse of the industrial age, which seems now to be well under way — have been caught as flatfooted as the choristers who have been singing hymns to eternal growth while we have been grousing about time running out. Continue reading →

I am not a pundit. But I play one on YouTube. Dean Walker, of the website livingresilience.net and the YouTube podcast The Poetry of Predicament — sites that try to help people deal with the angst of awareness of the impending crash of the Industrial Age — discusses our shared awareness of the nastiness to come.