Apocalypse

Those species that do not live in compliance with the law become extinct. In the scale of biological time, they become extinct very rapidly. And this is going to be very bad news for the people of your culture - the worst they've ever heard. (From a novel: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn)
Man is the first species of living being in our biosphere that has acquired the power to wreck the biosphere and, in wrecking it, to liquidate himself. Arnold Toynbee, Mankind and Mother Earth
Mindlessness is what links environmental catastrophe, nuclear war, and genocidal oblivion. How Democracy Ends: David Runciman p87
The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power for a small, global elite—are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year [2012] in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward. Chris Hedges
. . . our world is in trouble - right now, at this moment in time, not is some blurry, fuzzy, distant future that no one cares about because we´ll all be gone by the time the worst, unimaginable horrors migbht occur. A world that we have conquered and altered is beginning to turn against us. As a result, we are in trouble. This is the Way the World Ends, How Droughts and Die-Offs, Heat Waves and Hurricanes are converging on America by Jeff Nesbit. (pg 264)
Our way of life is going to be very different in the future than the way it is now, though I don’t know exactly what that means. One of the complicated things about living through the end of the world as we know it is that the end doesn’t come about because of a single event. It’s actually just a day-to-day occurrence that’s going to take a long time. We’ll see transformation and degradation, an increase in violence and insanity, the breakdown of social order in neighborhood by neighborhood, then city by city. We’re watching it happen now. Roy Scranton

How Human Collapse Could Really Happen (8/21/2019)

The Planet Has Seen Sudden Warming Before. It Wiped Out Almost Everything. (12/7/2018)

Act Urgently Now, David Attenborough Declares, Because 'Collapse of Our Civilizations and Extinction of Much of the Natural World on the Horizon' (12/3/2018)

Resilience To Global Catastrophe (11/28/2018)

The Insect Apocalypse Is Here (11/27/2018)

Losing Earth (8/2018)

In 1973, an MIT computer predicted the end of civilization. So far, it's on target. (8/23/2018)

Thirty Years Ago We could have saved the planet (8/1/2018)

Finding Alarm and Consolation About the Apocalypse in Two New Books (8/1/2018)

Environmental Collapse and the Pending Death of Civilization

An increasingly dysfunctional, Dangerous, and Dark Future (3/28/2015)

Scientists to Earth: Prepare to Abandon Planet (1/16/2015)

Spectating at the End of the World (1/2/2015)

10 of the Biggest Threats to Human Existence (7/26/2014)

What About the Future (Noam Chomsky) 2013 video

Arundhati Roy - Come September (video)

Republicans seem determined to make their vision of apocalypse for the planet a reality. They have a number of strategies for accomplishing it:

The trickle-up economy has been propelled by oligarchs gaming the system, forcing wages and benefits down, but also by tax cuts, union busting, corruption, corporate friendly legislation, and deregulation. Deregulation, as Republicans fashioned it, caused a sharp decline of democracy, a surge to plutocracy, a carnival of corporate corruption, takeover of the economy by the financial sector, individualism inciting the wilding of America, and there is no end in sight for it.

We need to relearn the lessons of the great depression. Massive speculation, extreme income inequality, and inadequate social programs guarantee a poor economy and withering democracy.

Corporate governance has structural problems. That explains why CEO compensation is so extreme, why they can game the political process, why they can block labor organizing, why workers are not represented in decisions, why they can ignore the cost of externalities, why they can ignore their stakeholders (like the communities in which they operate, the democratic voices of their investors, and the public), and, thanks to a Corporate supremacist Supreme Court decision they need only concern themselves with their own profit. A (corporate) person only concerned with profit is a sociopath. Such persons run our political process and our government. We have, according to studies, an oligarchy. Rule by corporations is the dictionary definition of Fascism.

Corporate greed and fast-track trade policy result in American workers competing with third-world wage rates. Automation may have some benefits, but it also has the effect of eliminating jobs, depressing wages, most likely bring us massive unemployment, universal surveillance and extreme income inequality.

Corporate entities own our media and they have successfully kept climate change out of public discussion. But CO2 is at record levels and will persist for centuries, ice caps will melt, glaciers and mountain top snow will disappear. sea level rise will cause huge populations to lose fresh water. Crops will fail. There will be mass migration, and resource wars (probably nuclear).

Although there is no mention of it in the history textbooks, the US military is a security force for multi-national corporations and has taken action on their behalf many times.

There are limits to growth and we have already exceeded them. Population is already beyond the carrying capacity of the planet,
but traditional religions continue to advocate for 'pro-life' policy. There is no discussion of population control.

Salman Rushdie points out that there is great truth in fiction. I'm reminded of the movie series, 'The Planet of the Apes'. We will not get a second chance in space and probably will soon go extinct.

“After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it has generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, I believe is a passing nightmare ; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return. ” Bertrand Russell

Energy - The Republican approach to energy is characterized by maximum pumping. The world has probably reached peak oil production as predicted.

Global Warming - Although oil companies and their paid minions still argue that global warming is not an issue, massive forest fires, disastrous storms, melting ice caps, collapsing fisheries, drought, pollution, extinctions and other environmental threats are persuasive. There is little doubt in the science community.

Massive health problems are likely as seen in the pandemic. Public health agencies have been undermined even as a large part of the population goes without coverage. Republicans worked strenuously to break (privatize) Social Security. Your children will have virtually no social supports except the "faith based" ones so well described in Angela’s Ashes.

Disease - militarization of biological agents has taken precedence over public health. Simple techniques to monitor public health go unfunded.

Education is an important part of media, and must be controlled to make sure that theocracy can not trump science. Don't complain about sub-standard education, Republican ideologues assured that real science will not be taught in U.S. schools. Neither is history (See Lies My Teacher Told Me: James W. Loewen)
Lack of civics education is certain schools is yet another technique for voter suppression.

Elections have been rigged without causing public outcry. The CIA has experience rigging elections worldwide, we should have expected it sooner or later here. Control of the media is an essential part of election rigging and it is necessary to sell war. A large, well-funded part of our government operates in secret, without effective oversight, acts on its own in ways the public would never approve, and it supports undemocratic government world-wide including here in the U.S.

Environmental safeguards are not being heeded. The mendacious Bush administration massively attacked environmental legislation. Increasingly concentrated media assures people that they are destroying the earth for good moral reasons. There is a fire sale on the earth. Trump is accelerating it.

Religion can motivate people to destroy themselves for the promise of the afterlife and with the promise of great reward can lead to terrorism and self-destruction. The message to dominate the earth, be fruitful and multiply, disregarding the responsibility to the environment can lead to destruction. An apocalypse will validate Republicans religious views, so they are willing for it to happen. Religion, like media, can deny science and make it appear that business as usual is fine.

We have, by far, the world's largest military ...but Republicans could not keep our infrastructure in repair. Democrats and Biden did.

Nuclear War - We withdrew from the ABM treaty, embarked on a breathtakingly stupid Ballistic Missile Defense program, and provoked a new arms race that threatens us from a proliferation of nuclear countries. The US is building a trillion dollar new round of nuclear weapons, even though the UN made them illegal in international law.

Over Population - Republicans don't believe in family planning, birth control, gay marriage, or other population limiting options. They are quite willing to impose their religious beliefs on the rest of us. Even if it means apocalypse. After all, they are expecting it and it validates their deepest beliefs. Being climate change deniers , they are like Jim Jones, only on a planetary scale.

Biodiversity is collapsing.

Good government would be helpful if it decided to reform. Republicans will not let it happen.

Either mass mobilization or a responsive government might address some of these problems, but neither looks likely, so most likely...we are headed for destruction.

See the forecast and consequences of election 2016.

Video

Why Do Societies Collapse ? Jared Diamond

Links

Existential Risks, Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards Nick Bostrom

Global Catastrophic Risk Institute

Future of Humanity Institute

Forecast

Limits to Growth

Systemic Disorder

Daily Impact

Ugo Bardi

Desdemona Despair

Earth Policy Institute

Requiem by Jay Hanson

Nafeez Ahmed

Signs of the End Times

Bibliography

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

FALTER, Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Bill McKibben

This is the Way the World Ends, How Droughts and Die-Offs, Heat Waves and Hurricanes are converging on America by Jeff Nesbit.

The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future: David Wallace-Wells (available 2/19/2019)

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch, Louis Dartnell

Every Nation For Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-ZERO World , Ian Bremmer

We’re Doomed. Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change: Roy Scranton

The Great Derangement: Climate Change: Amitav Ghosh

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Roy Scranton

The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction,John Leslie (free download)

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway

Brace For Impact: Thomas Lewis

Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change: Clive Hamilton

Dodging Extinction, power, food, money, and the future of life on earth: Anthony Barnosky, a paleobiologist. (2014)

Ignoring the Apocalypse: David Howard Davis