Reply #273: Hedges reminds me of Jeremiah "The Weeping Prophet" (and a sign board guy too)

[NAO]

Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people! Jeremiah 9:1

The biblical Jeremiah lamented and wept because the people were on a road to self-destruction, and the priests and kings were corrupt beyond comprehension and were at the heart of the self-destructive ways. He also lamented over the fact that the people's "hearts were hardened" and they would not listen but just went full bore ahead into self-destruction.

And, yes, Hedges does remind me of one of the guys on the street corner with a sandwich sign saying "The End Is Near". I have used that trick on myself to sooth my fears. But in reality, Hedges is not crazy, he has his eyes wide open, he is looking at scientific facts, he is making astute commentary and drawing valid conclusions from those facts. His assessment is corroborated by many other scientific fact based, reason driven thinkers.

The twin facts of declining oil reserves/declining oil production and fossil fuel driven emission driven climate change make the way in which humanity will catastrophically perish difficult to determine. There are two possibilities.

Scenario #1 is climate change could wreck havoc on the human race, really on all life on earth resulting in massive dislocations, droughts, famines, and the die-off of billions.

Scenario #2 is oil production could decline before climate change REALLY becomes lethal. This would result in massive interruptions in the entire world infrastructure, and specifically to the global food production and distribution system. But nearly everything in the economy depends on oil, and it's shortage or a rise in it's cost would have a massive force multiplier effect on the world economy and all aspects of life on earth. Now in this scenario, the scenario of declining oil production, we would see a huge increase in reliance on coal, which is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels. The accelerating spike in emissions from an increasing shift to coal would rapidly bring on Scenario #1, to compound the misery already caused by scenario #2.

So although scenario #1 looks extremely bleak, it is actually the brighter of the two scenarios, because if billions die-off that will drastically reduce the rate of depletion of petroleum reserves. With the problems created by fossil fuels (climate change and massive crippling over dependence on a non-renewable resource), those who survive the die-off are going to need those last, difficult to extract fossil fuels to survive the climate change, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the collapse of civilization.