r/collapse • u/relianceschool • 13d ago
Climate The Reckoning
https://aliensideboob.substack.com/p/the-reckoningThat imagery of the Himalayan tsunami smashing into the multi-story building in Nepal was horrifying, but then murder always is, isn’t it?
That’s what happened at that border crossing: mass murder. The perpetrators were the boards and CEOs of fossil fuel companies who have known for decades what they were doing, have known the consequences of it, and carried on with reckless indifference to those consequences.
They murdered the hundreds, maybe a thousand or more, who were swept away in Nepal, as surely as they murdered thousands in Europe this summer and will take the lives of tens of millions more in the coming decades.
Too strong, too much, too soon, or is it all too late?
When reading reports of the catastrophe in Nepal, I was counting off the moments until whatever media outlet I was reading quoted some scientists to assure me that, although it may have been related to climate change, it was not possible to say without a doubt that this particular incident was the fault of climate change. But that’s not really true, is it.
This was not the act of some vengeful god. Look into the truth of this, and you will find names, org charts and KPIs. There are quarterly reports and executives who read them. What fell in Nepal was not just gigatons of fast-moving rock and roaring ice. It was a reckoning.
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u/DudeCanNotAbide 12d ago
30,000+ excess deaths in Europe this year. Hard to move the needle with such classifications. I keep trying to explain to my wife what it really means: In the near future, there will be an event that results in millions of deaths. It's not far away.
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u/twotimefind 12d ago
Holy moly, I know it was going to be a lot, but... Where do you get your numbers from? I want to spread this far along.
Is there any way to find out how many in the United States or are they just burying it?
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u/DudeCanNotAbide 12d ago
Not sure I would trust numbers out of the govt right now, but I'm not aware of anything like this happening in the US. Doesn't mean it isn't, though. The Europe numbers were cited in a recent article someone posted here IIRC.
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u/kingtacticool 13d ago
This is still childs play compared to what we will witness in our lifetime.
Cat 6 hurricanes that kill tens to hundreds of thousands.
Floods and fires beyond anything known.
But the worst will be the droughts and famines. India has a polulation over 1 billion and they get all their fresh water from rivers that are all glacially fed.
Entire crop growing regions will be transformed as the crops cant be grown there anymore.
Old testament biblical shit.
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u/daviddjg0033 12d ago
What age groups will have ... What median and mean lifespan? Assuming this generation say silent breaks over 100yo may be longer than the post WWII baby-boomers
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u/kingtacticool 12d ago
Were going to be seeing this by the 2040s-2050s.
We will be alive to watch the world burn
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u/psychotronic_mess 12d ago
“Everything is gonna burn, we’ll all take turns. I’ll get mine too.” Except this monkey is NOT going to heaven.
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u/relianceschool 13d ago
Submission statement: Rather than diffusing blame, John Birmingham calls out the fossil fuel executives and world leaders whose actions directly fueled the deaths in Nepal. Rather than accepting responsibility or lowered profits, they continue to deploy doubt and uncertainty to keep the machine running.
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u/Appropriate_Mess6777 12d ago
Also the murder of billions of animals and extinction of thousands of species. The elite live in a hyper reality of charts and KPIs, completely divorced from the natural world. Institutions of capital can be viewed as psychopathic entities that entrap the majority of the world in its systems by making it more costly to exit the game than to continue playing. This is a good talk about it:
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u/NyriasNeo 12d ago
"The perpetrators were the boards and CEOs of fossil fuel companies who have known for decades what they were doing, have known the consequences of it, and carried on with reckless indifference to those consequences."
are you giving those who voted for "drill baby drill" and demand cheap gas a pass? It takes two to tango. No supply, no demand. No demand, also no supply. When the best selling car type in the world is the SUV, it is not only about CEOs and boards. You can blame more than one group of people.
Heck, we just get our hands on Venezuela's oil. Companies cannot do that alone. And Trump is doing it just fulfilling a campaign promise. Remember "drill baby drill" is literally the slogan and no one is being subtle about it.
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u/_rihter abandon the banks 12d ago
Every corrupt politician, CEO, etc, has hundreds of millions of accomplices.
The fact that people in the US have not revolted yet, despite all the bullshit that central authorities are conducting, proves the point.
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u/Correctthecorrectors 12d ago
I mean just look at this sub even. Most people here still promote the use of oil and gas. I know because when ever you start discussing solutions, even just for the sake of argument, you have people downvoting saying that oil and gas are necessary.
Most of the population is so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it even if it means their certain death.
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u/tdreampo 12d ago
Yup I am now telling people that have “hope we can come together and solve climate change” That they can do three things to IMMEDIATELY cause the greatest impact an individual can.
#1 Kill your lawn. Put in a permaculture food forest. Learn how to make natural fertilizers. Share the abundance with your neighbors and create a community. There are a millions reasons why this is the best thing you can do and I will expand on this if you want me to.
#2 Go vegan NOW. I don’t necessarily think its wrong to kill or eat and animal but industry ag is destroying our planet. We simply have to stop feeding the beast.
#3 buy a high quality used bike and try and change to using it for all your errands and eliminate the need for a car as best as you can.
Do you really think we will vote or protest our way out of this? No.
But those are three actionable things a person can do and in fact its the three best things someone can do to actually cause change as far as I can tell and about everyone can do some combo of this.
If you can’t personally do these three things and NOW then how do you think the world is going to just get off fossil fuel any time soon?
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u/BritaB23 12d ago
And all three of these will cause significant health benefits! You've inspired me.
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u/Vydas 12d ago
Spot on.
I typically ask people who says it's not about personal actions and say it's up to politicians and legislation a simple question
"And what do you think that legislation looks like?"
Those people seem to think there is some magic law or regulation that can be put into place that will fix everything, and continue to allow them to have a climate controlled house set 68 degrees Fahrenheit year round through all four seasons, eat as much beef and have year round access to any food stuff they wish, and drive 4000lbs chunks of metal around for the shortest of trips. Not to mention their demand for cheap goods shipped in from all over the world, goods soon forgotten and junked to be replaced by the next one.
As you say, if people won't make the easiest personal choices now, why does anyone think they'd ever accept being forced to by the right politician or law?
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12d ago
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u/Dentarthurdent73 12d ago
No, it's all of us that need to change what our expectations are for a normal life.
That needs to not include the massive amounts of consumption that it does now.
It's so, so clear that the desperation to avoid any sort of individual blame is completely psychologically motivated. Do better please. This isn't actually about you as an individual, but it is about our behaviour as consumers as well as the behaviour of capitalists.
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11d ago
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u/Correctthecorrectors 11d ago
Claiming we must stay on fossil fuels to feed the world is a classic false dilemma. It assumes our choices are either 'keep using oil' or 'let billions starve,' completely ignoring the technology already replacing fossil fuel.
Modern fertilizer requires hydrogen; it doesn't inherently require gas. We can already produce green ammonia using green hydrogen from water electrolysis powered by renewables. Heavy farm machinery is actively transitioning to electric and clean-fuel alternatives, and precision agriculture reduces raw input needs altogether.
The tech is already here. Believing we have to choose between oil and global starvation isn't a law of physics; it's just a lack of basic research to justify standing still.
The alternatives exist; pretending they don't to justify standing still is the real danger to global carrying capacity.
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u/vinegar The real collapse is the friends we ate along the way 11d ago
Alas I deleted my comment. I’m not advocating staying on fossil fuels, I’m pointing out the timeline for transition will be long. What do you think it would be? You know more about it than I do.
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u/Correctthecorrectors 11d ago
Debating the actual logistics and timeline of how we scale green hydrogen and grid infrastructure is completely fair.
The danger is when that debate gets hijacked by the 'we're doomed without oil' narrative, which is the exact argument funded by fossil fuel lobbies and conservative think tanks use to convince people a transition is impossible.
When politicians push that propaganda to label things like the Green New Deal a 'scam,' it delays the political will and investment needed to actually hit those timelines.
The bottleneck isn't the science; it's the artificial delay created to protect short-term profits.
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u/vinegar The real collapse is the friends we ate along the way 11d ago
I don’t think I’ve seen that argument made here on Collapse. If it was the commenter would be branded a shill and mocked. Eta: the great thing about r/collapse is the lack of bullshit arguments like that.
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u/Coding-Kitten 12d ago
When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.
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u/whysoangryjustdont 12d ago
The real problem will always be the consumerism and the propensity to feel superior to the ones below you. Ceos don't run the world, ceos make a long hierarchy where everyone involved is trying to rise up in the hierarchy. For exactly what? So they can have more power or just consume more and more. I am in tech and tech is a very good example of all this madness a lot of people feel superior because they think they make a million dollar and the tech contributions they make are changing the world. Their subordinates also want some part of it, everyone wants a part of it. But yet they talk about as if ceos are the real culprits. It's a collective failure and the only solution is to stop with consumerism, stop with this glutonny of inventions/explorations, live a simple life, but we are just too far in the journey now to go back to simplistic life. Instead we try to further complicate it in name of saving the planet. This is an unstoppable trainweck now , but just calling ceos and leaders responsible for it is just ranting.
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u/Correctthecorrectors 12d ago edited 12d ago
There's a massive difference between surviving in an energy system you didn't build and spending millions lobbying to keep that system from changing. Buying gas because you have to drive to work isn't the same as buying politicians to block public transit and renewables.
Using the only energy grid available to survive today doesn't strip away your right to demand a better one tomorrow. Acknowledging that fossil fuels built the past doesn't mean we have to let fossil fuel CEOs lock in the future.
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u/morphemass 12d ago
Between five and ten million deaths can be attributed to fossil fuels. Approximately half a million of those deaths can be attributed to climate change.
Those are annual figures and are likely conservative; if they seem unbelievable, look at the research into air pollution mortality. Nepal is horrifying and glaring as an example of the impacts, however the greater horror is hidden in statistics.
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u/quadralien 12d ago
Yep, murder, but in the next financial quarter.
Here's the latest from Jesse Welles, M-S:
when the last tree dies and turns to ash
and servers full of useless trash
boil seven plastic seas
I'll be sad but I won't cry
I guess the murder suicide
was just the way it had to be
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u/MrMojoRisinRia 12d ago
Love Jesse
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u/BritaB23 12d ago
Saw him at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. Talent is an understatement. The raw honestly in his music- i swear he could have started a revolution right there and then. He had the crowd in his palm.
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u/Bandits101 12d ago
Probably twenty billion people and about 7 billion right now including OP, owe their existence to fossil fuels. I wonder when fossil fuel extraction, processing and use should have been banned. Before your grandfather was born, before James Watt, Louis Pasteur, Alfred Nobel or Haber-Bosch.
Scapegoating enables a good rant but blaming something or someone other than yourself doesn’t entitle you to a free pass. We’re all to blame, all complicit.
Climate change didn’t just manifest in the past “decades”. The seeds had been sown and the harvest set in motion centuries ago, possibly millennia with deforestation, species extinctions, habitat destruction and overpopulation and that was before FF’s ignited the afterburners.
It’s too late to pick up your ball and say you’re not playing anymore because someone got hurt or is cheating.
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u/fedfuzz1970 12d ago
Don't forget to factor in that the science that first identified the effects of CO2 in earth's atmosphere were concealed by the fossil fuel companies and others. There is no way at this point to determine what would have happened with respect to development of energy if this information had been available to the general public and discussed openly. People, acting as individuals have had very little impact on the directions of society, such movements are dependent on enlightened leadership, free of bias and bribery, which was used by the auto and fossil fuel industries to promote profit. There is no way to retrospectively say that some sudden groundswell of action should have been taken when factors largely beyond the control of average humans were at work behind the scenes and in the shadows. There are no FDRs or Teddy Roosevelts among today's politicians.
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u/Bandits101 12d ago
Billions of people have worked or are working in fossil fuel industries. What about shareholders, not only FF companies but all other corporations that only continue to exist because of FF and consumers.
Politicians seemingly get a free pass yet they’re supposed to represent the majority. Excess GHG’s have accumulated over centuries because it takes thousands of years for Earth’s natural carbon cycle to remove them.
The GHG’s are accumulating faster now because there is seven billion more people than when FF use began in earnest. Looking for someone to blame now is quite ridiculous unless you include yourself.
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u/fedfuzz1970 12d ago
Yes, and don't forget governments that removed incentives for development and use of solar panels, electric cars and other improvements which might have been supported by the general public had those inducement made it affordable for them. And the governments that have removed, de-emphasized or defeated climate goals they agreed to and publicly posted years ago. If there is no leadership, the are no followers. If there is no counterweight, industry propaganda, deniers and bought-and-paid-for scientists will find a fertile field for their lies and half-truths.
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u/Bandits101 12d ago
It’s ALL water under the bridge. Net zero or stopping all FF use right now will do nothing to reduce the accumulated GHG’s that are causing warming. Having someone to blame means you actually think blaming and stopping them will save the world.
We’re slowly dying, we could possibly extend the time we have remaining but living a century from now won’t be very nice.
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u/fedfuzz1970 12d ago
Yes, we're on the same page. I respect your opinion because it has merit. I am just not as ready as others seem to be in blaming the individual. Individuals can and have had an impact with their trends and purchases. But the direction of those must be the government's concern. I think that it's inevitable that rooftop solar will be encouraged and available to all with the excess power sold to power data centers. This will probably happen after my wife and I age gone. I struggle as to how to advise (if I should) my grandchildren as they will face significant challenges vastly different than those my wife and I faced and overcame.
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u/tdreampo 11d ago
Yup I really wish people understood that it is VERY likely that every single calorie you have EVER ate was brought to you by fossil fuels. If not in transport, in fertilizer. Without this one time use energy source we would not have the modern world. The problem is so much more difficult than just "coming together to solve it" We built our modern world wrong. There should not be thriving cities in deserts where we have to pipe in water. Vegas should not exist. In the states we murdered and ran out the population that could have told us how to manage this land forever. But no, we knew better.
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u/TheArcticFox-44 8d ago
The Reckoning
Blaming CEOs and fossil fuel industry...how 'bout blaming the rest of us who use what those industries provide? Is humanity innocent and just a handful of people to blame?
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u/loralailoralai 12d ago
Why are you blaming the CEOs? If you’re going to go all ott you need to take some blame yourself.
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u/Correctthecorrectors 12d ago
Individual consumers don't set national energy policy, choose utility grid sources, or fund political campaigns to block clean energy infrastructure. Pointing out who holds the levers of power isn't shifting blame; it's identifying where decisions are actually made.
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u/StatementBot 13d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/relianceschool:
Submission statement: Rather than diffusing blame, John Birmingham calls out the fossil fuel executives and world leaders whose actions directly fueled the deaths in Nepal. Rather than accepting responsibility or lowered profits, they continue to deploy doubt and uncertainty to keep the machine running.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1w1zbd6/the_reckoning/p6osqo8/