There are many, many experts that want to talk about how the world should be in some imagined future but hardly any of them want to start from where we currently are and engage in a thought experiment of how we get from here to there. A few years ago, I took an MA in Transitional Economics and quickly realized that it was also about future imagined economics and wishful economics rather than actually engaging in any real question of the transitional period from the current here to the future there. In this piece I look at some of the factors that will undermine both the rosy scenarios and some of the fast-happening collapse scenarios. Will the end result be Soylent Green, Neo-Feudalism or a Socialist Eco-Paradise? This will be one of a number of posts looking at possible future paths.
The full movie:
https://ww9.0123movie.net/movie/soylent-green-10478.html
The Rich Will Fight Tooth and Nail To Keep Their Wealth And Power
The IEA (International Energy Agency) found that the average North American emits eleven times the amount of greenhouse gases that the average African does. The top 1% of global emitters are responsible for 1,000 times the emissions of the bottom 1%. And that’s not even the multi-hundred-millionaire level of emissions of the likes of climate hypocrite DiCaprio.
DiCaprio’s position as a UN Climate Ambassador while he personally spews out more greenhouse gas emissions than a small American town sums up the liberal elites real position so well. The climate pain will be felt by the “little people” while they keep on with their own massively exorbitant lifestyles.
Those that say that climate change is a population problem are misrepresenting what is really an economic elite problem. Energy usage and therefore GHG emissions are tightly correlated to wealth and income, significant cuts in emissions done in an equitable fashion would require a very significant cut in the relative wealth and income of the rich. In addition, as emissions also represent economic output, any substantive cuts to emissions will mean an end to growth or even a planned economic contraction. Without the incremental extra output each year to provide crumbs to the masses, discussions could rapidly turn to a more equitable sharing of the economic pie; which can only be bad news for the relative position of the rich. This is why the rich push two options (i) outright climate denial, usually by those directly invested in fossil fuel assets and (ii) eco-modernism, both of which are designed to stop any major substantive moves to reduce emissions. As outright climate denial became less acceptable (although there was a resurgence with President Trump) even the oil companies moved onto the eco-modernism message. Here is a story covering the absolute failure of fossil fuel companies to meet their own climate net-zero “commitments”; it was all just marketing to keep the wolf of real action away from their profits and share prices.
So society will keep moving along until a real climate emergency happens, during which the rich will use the resulting state of emergency (with a general population immobilized through fear and desperately wanting “something” to be done) to force through policies which will protect their wealth and push the losses onto the Rest within their own nations, and within other nations. Very much a repeat performance of what happened after 9/11 (the imposition of the surveillance state and the invasion of Iraq), the 2008 GFC (the rescue of the banks and big corporations at the cost of the general populace), and the 2020 COVID pandemic (another rescue of the banks and big corporations, plus more surveillance, state control and pharmaceutical industry profiteering). The biggest solution put forward will be Solar Radiation Management technologies to block part of the Sun’s energy from reaching the Earth’s surface; technologies that are relatively low cost vs. global GDP. There may be significant localized side effects, such as less rainfall in Africa and India, but those will affect the “little” people not the rich.
Other solutions put forward may also include pure extractive bullshit technologies which serve simply to give false hope and pile money into capitalists’ pockets, such as Carbon Capture and Storage:
These policies may stabilize things for a while until the next “unforeseen” emergency and the next rich-serving set of policies. With each new emergency will most probably come more authoritarian government, as the" “little people” start to rebel against their immiseration. The end result may be cities in the developed world coming to resemble cities in Latin America and even Africa, with a rich core surrounded by a city of slums. This is exactly the future foretold in the 1970s movie Soylent Green.
The Current Reality Can Be Maintained For Longer Than You Think
In 1985 I went to work at an IBM facility that manufactured magnetic disk drives, where on the first day my manager explained to me that these would soon be replaced by optical disk drives. Instead, incremental improvements in magnetic disk drives kept pushing back their “inevitable” replacement date until the replacement became memory chips rather than optical drives. In 2023 computers use a mixture of magnetic disk drives and solid-state memory drives. Even optical disks for music didn’t last that long before being overtaken by solid-state memory and streaming services. In 2005 a renowned oil analyst wrote a book predicting the collapse of Saudi Arabian oil production, eighteen years later that country is still the top global producer of conventional oil at very low wellhead prices. In 2011 I attended a peak oil conference in Brussels where a French oil company executive tried to explain a technology called “fracking” to a disbelieving audience. Within a few years, US oil and gas production had massively increased. In the US the operating life of nuclear power stations keeps getting extended for many decades after what was foreseen when they were built.
Assumptions that human society will run out of some resource relatively soon ignores the ability to extend the “inevitable” for many years or even decades. This is the mistake that the peak oilers made and continue to make, while also confusing peak oil for peak fossil fuels (we are nowhere near the peak of the possible extraction of relatively cheap coal with Energy Returns on Investment above 30, and the same seems to be true for natural gas). Electric vehicles allow for a replacement of one fossil fuel (oil) with others (coal and natural gas-powered electricity generating stations) plus nuclear, hydro and new renewables; at much higher levels of energy efficiency.
An noted by Micheal Barnard here, and mentioned in the video below, society does not need to replace primary energy consumption but the actual energy consumed as energy services. Currently the processes required to get from primary energy (coal, oil, gas, hydro, wind, solar etc.) to energy services (space heating, moving a vehicle) is extremely inefficient, wasting up to two thirds of the primary energy. An excellent example is the burning of oil in internal combustion engines (ICE) to move vehicles forward, with the majority of the energy lost as waste heat and friction; the most efficient ICE transforms 40% of the energy into movement vs. more than 90% for an electric engine. With high efficiency electricity generating plants, and power lines with very low losses (much lower losses than the energy needed to transport gasoline to filling stations), electric vehicles transform a much greater share of primary energy into usable energy services. With the rapid growth of sales of electric vehicles in China, its is being forecast that Chinese gasoline demand will peak in 2024 and then decline; the primary energy in oil used to move vehicles being replaced by a significantly smaller amount of primary energy from coal, natural gas, hydro and new renewables. China is currently the largest oil consumer and importer of oil in the world. Now some will point to the limits of available lithium for batteries, but battery technology is already moving on to other metals and materials.
The Chinese government is also continuously replacing lower-efficiency coal-fired electricity generating stations with more efficient ones, with ongoing research to make coal-fired electricity generation so efficient that its carbon dioxide emissions will be close to those of natural gas fired electricity generation. The same amount of coal, primary energy, will produce more electricity to be used for energy services. At the same time, the drive to reduce local air pollution has led to a huge drive to replace inefficient coal-fired industrial boilers and heating systems with much more efficient natural gas powered, and electricity based, systems. China has historically been extremely successful at increasing energy efficiency (reducing energy usage per unit of GDP), and the current 5-year plan has more reductions built into it. Such things greatly reduce the levels of waste of primary energy, meaning that the amount of primary energy required in the future may be much less than the current level of primary energy used. The same goes for heat pumps that utilize electricity and energy directly from the environment. At the same time, China has also more than doubled its domestic production of natural gas since 2010 and is set to increase that production further, while also increasing imports from new Russian and Central Asian production. Oh, and of course China is leading the world in implementing massive amounts of new wind, solar and nuclear energy installations; while at the same time working on making such installations more energy and materials efficient.
The “energy descent” will be dragged out over many, many decades, aided by the squeezing out of such inefficiency; especially in nations with highly competent and lesser-corrupted governments focused on such things. I don’t fully buy into the panglossian assumptions in the video below, but it does make a lot of very good points.
A lengthy energy descent involving the squeezing out of as much energy and materials waste as possible will make sure that once it becomes impossible to kick the energy, fossil fuel and materials extraction can any further into the future, there will be little if any easy to extract resources available for the much-simplified resulting societies; as Ugo Bardi has detailed. As the recent flights of fancy about mining the deep seas and asteroids show, societal elites will stop at nothing to keep the status quo in place; especially if such “solutions” offer juicy profits.
Or the planned massive expansion of fracking for natural gas in the Montney Play in Western Canada, which will produce more GHG emissions than the Alberta Tar Sands and require the trampling of the rights of an indigenous nation by public and private security services using tactics utilized in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The same “quick crash” assumption is made about climate change when it is assumed that societal elites will not go all-out eco-modernist Earth system modification to keep kicking the proverbial can down the road. There may be even great building projects, like in a new climate New Deal, to build dams and barriers to protect major coastal conurbations such as New York, London, and Greater Shanghai against sea level rise. Thankfully, the lunatic idea of putting massive dams across the San Francisco Bay was proven to be crazy decades ago. There are even those that believe that the North Sea could be protected from sea level rise by massive dams! Miami will most definitely not be saveable though given its geography (sitting atop porous limestone) and localized climate change effects (e.g. faster than average sea level rise).
As more and more resources need to be reassigned to provide the services previously provided for free by the Earth system, or to counteract changes to the Earth system, the rich will try to make as much money as possible out of those new services while shoving the costs downwards. The only Carbon Capture and Storage proposal that may prove useful is that of digging up and crushing absolutely massive amounts of igneous rock, found in India and Brazil, and spreading it over wetlands and rain forests (and even croplands) to massively speed up the process of rock weathering. A major side benefit would be the flushing of the alkaline rock-weathering end products into the oceans, countering the acidifying effects of increased CO2 in the oceans. This would require an industry equal in size to the whole current global mining industry, a massive profit-producing boon for the mining sector!
Note, the usage of mine tailings as proposed in the above video is most probably not viable due to the high levels of heavy metals in such tailings. The use of virgin basalt will be required, requiring a massive basalt-mining, crushing and transportation industry.
The many will be immiserated as the few strive to keep their incredibly comfortable lifestyles. This is the reality of Soylent Green, with widespread poverty, corruption, and the rich desperately trying to keep their relative wealth. But getting from here to Soylent Green may take many, many decades if not a century with the future citizens having little memory or knowledge of our current reality. The denouement provided in the movie is that the efforts to stave off an inevitable final collapse are coming to an end, after many, many decades of kicking the can down the road. Decades which will make the final collapse so much worse.
Climate Change Is Global, But Impacts Are Local
Looking at the paleo-climatological record it’s pretty obvious that the best place to be long term will be in parts of the Southern Hemisphere. In previous “Hot Earth” outcomes, the Southern Hemisphere lagged well behind the North in temperature increases. That’s because the Southern Hemisphere has much more temperature-moderating ocean and much less land with respect to the North. In addition, any melting of the Antarctic Ice Sheet will reduce its gravitational pull on nearby ocean waters – leading to the resulting sea level rise affecting the North much more than the South.
On the smaller scale, there will be areas that are significantly less affected by climate change and areas (e.g. the Mediterranean, the US South West and Mid-West, Florida) that will be much more greatly affected. If you are living let’s say in Uruguay or Paraguay, you may spend many decades hearing and reading about the impacts of climate change on other nations before any real impact upon your own surroundings becomes apparent; there may even be relatively little impact from climate refugees given the distances involved. The same may be true for Quebec and Maine. The biggest question may become the ability of the area you live in to feed itself, and the ability of the local/regional/national government to make sure that the food produced is directed toward the local population.
Some forecasters utterly ignorant of the reality of thin or none existent topsoil, shorter growing seasons (no, climate change will not alter the seasonal tilt changes of the Earth!), and the effects of a continent scale thawing of permafrost put forward ridiculous claims that the Far North will become the future safe place for humanity in the Northern Hemisphere. It will take many, many decades for the permafrost to stabilize from its inevitable thawing; during which it will be an unstable wasteland spewing out huge amounts of flammable methane. And don’t forget the myriad of extremely large biting insects of those parts, the horse flies and mosquitoes are huge and vicious! The area will also be surrounded with iceberg clogged waterways and being the farthest away from Antarctica (although the area around the melting glaciers of Greenland may be spared) those waterways will be most affected by sea level rise due to any melting of the Antarctic ice sheet.
There was a time at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) 56 million years ago, between the boundary of the Paleocene and Eocence geological epochs, that rainforests existed in the North; this was after a period of about 6oC of warming that took tens of thousands of years. It was also before the great ice sheets served to scour the lands of much of its topsoil, a reality that I experienced while visiting Somerset Island in the Arctic; the island’s surface is carpeted with broken rocks below which the permafrost resides. There is also a limit at the rate at which plants and animals can migrate northwards, with the PETM allowing such time (i.e. tens of thousands of years). Humanity is driving climate change at a much, much faster rate providing little time for plants and animals to adapt and migrate. The video below provides a good coverage of the PETM, and the related crash in ocean productivity due to ocean acidity made worse at the equator by hot-tub level ocean temperatures. For those that use the “carbon dioxide is plant food” trope, the PETM is a direct rebuttal as it was caused by massive increases in atmospheric carbon; probably from a combination of massive wildfires, the incineration of coal deposits by volcanic flows, and methane hydrate decomposition. The PETM also shows the geographic-specific and even species-specific impact of extreme climate warming.
The same localness will apply to other stages of ecological collapse as the productivity of the oceans declines at different rates and other blights such as species collapse will also happen at different rates across continents. The globe will become a patchwork of differing levels of decline, with the “better” areas desperately working to keep out the inhabitants of the “worse” areas and both attempting to use any means necessary to extract resources from the other. For instance, the much-discussed possibility of the US and Canadian Great Lakes Area being forced to provide water resources to the parched US South West.
Those nations or regions that have newer and better maintained infrastructure may find it much easier to keep things going than those that do not and have not. Here, the difference between the US with its ageing and horrifically badly maintained infrastructure and a China whose infrastructure is predominantly from the past couple of decades, is stark. The bill just for making US dams safe is estimated to be US$63 billion and rising. China also has a transport infrastructure that is already heavily weighted toward electrification and has greatly limited the airspace available to domestic civilian aircraft. Those nations that have maintained the domestic ability to produce, and efficiently and effectively maintain, critical infrastructure and pieces of modern-day life will also have a great advantage. The offshoring of manufacturing by Western nations, especially in North America and the UK, not only removed factories but also the knowledge embedded in the minds of skilled craftsmen that had been gained over decades of training and experience. Such knowledge now resides in nations such as China and Vietnam, with Europe on the cusp of a new significant deindustrialization.
Countries run by oligarch-serving, selfish rich incompetents who could probably not organize a piss-up in a brewery may well be the worst equipped to deal with collapse, especially when infrastructure may have been previously shoddily built and maintained to increase profits and reduce taxes. A case in point, the UK:
Nations with much more competent and capable state bureaucracies, which have maintained the control of the economic “commanding heights” and which are not dominated by a bourgeois elite, may manage the process of decline much better. Even a partially managed decline will be much better than an unmanaged chaotic one. The result may not be a socialist utopia, but certainly more pleasant than Soylent Green; especially if the intellectual and technological gifts of modernity can be maintained. The relative success of nations in managing the decline may depend as much on the capabilities and legitimacy of the central state as the specific impacts of climate change. The combination of a capable state apparatus, relatively honest state officials, and a “good” location may provide for a much lengthened and cushioned decline, as well as possibly a much better end point. The Indian state of Kerala (at a GDP per capita of US$2,000) is proof of what is possible with very limited resources with enlightened and competent government.
Collapse Happens in Stages, Not All At Once
Any collapse will tend to happen through periods of sudden change, interspersed with longer periods of stability at a new societal equilibrium. This will provide populations time to habituate to a given level of social welfare, and within decades earlier times may become a distant memory not even seen as “real” by the younger generations that never experienced them. In the early 2000’s I visited the Dominican Republic outside the tourist areas when the country was experiencing an economic crash. For many, there was only running water and electricity during certain hours and there were significant political protests. But life went on, just as it does in Lebanon after their recent economic and financial crash. Humans are extremely good at adapting to and habituating to new realities, as was shown with the COVID lockdowns. The journey from the current reality to Soylent Green may take many, many decades, with many periods of extended stability. Even Soylent Green may prove to be simply a stopping post on the road to complete societal collapse. The next stage being ever increasing societal simplification and localization, most probably a move toward some form of neo-feudalism. But again, such a transformation may play out over many decades, or a century or more.
Nations which are highly financialized may travel faster through the levels of collapse, as financial systems tend to bring the impacts of future events forward in time through the discounting of the future into the present. The increasing realization that many industries may be sacrificed, and that growth overall may not continue could lead to a very rapid crash in stock and bond prices which will cripple heavily financialized nations (e.g. the UK, United States). A good example would be that of Florida real estate, where the insuring and financing of houses may disappear nearly overnight after one bad hurricane that is seen as a harbinger of things to come; the societal fallout would ripple not just through Florida but the whole US financial system. With so much of the economy in private hands, and with state bureaucracies seriously undermined by decades of cuts and outsourcing, the effect in the West may be a slump on the scale of the Great Depression with no recovery. Money printing would then simply create an inflation that would dwarf that of the post-COVID era.
The Decline Will Be Covered Up As Much As Is Possible
Since the 1990s Western and especially US, economic statistics have been heavily manipulated to show a much happier reality than actually exists. The first part was the extensive changes in the calculation of the inflation rate away from a “fixed basket” of goods to a “variable basket” that changes to reflect price change effects on consumption. The effect was to significantly hide inflation as reductions in the consumption of more expensive goods lead to those goods having a lesser weight in the “basket” of goods. In this way it could be possible to have consumption move from steak, to chicken, to pork, to dog food due to rising prices, but with the change in the composition of the “basket” greatly reducing the inherent inflation. A second trick was the way in which quality changes were integrated trough a discount to the price of a good – your new p.c. has a micro-processor twice as fast as before for the same price then it was assumed that it had had a 50% price cut! Does it really provide twice as much value, or just more bloated software with features you never use? Reductions in quality, such as the replacement of humans on help-desk lines by an automated labyrinthian maze, and knowledgeable help in retailers with minimum-wage staff, are not taken into account.
As the official inflation statistics drive changes to yearly government benefits increases, this was a backdoor way of cutting the real value of such benefits. The inflation statistics also impact what pay raises employees and unions ask for, so these statistical games help keep labour costs down. Nominal GDP is discounted with the calculated rate of inflation, so games to reduce the inflation number also end up inflating the real (discounted for inflation) GDP growth statistics. Games can also be played with unemployment statistics as an increasing number of people become defined as “disabled” or “not actively looking for work” etc., hiding the real level of unemployment. Any move to part-time and on-demand work and away from full time secure jobs is also not captured in unemployment statistics. In the US especially, there have also been changes to include rentier extractive costs (e.g. financial transaction fees) in the GDP numbers, resulting in a double counting as previously deducted costs are now counted as output to be added to GDP. In Spain they have even utilized statisticians to estimate the value added of prostitution to increase the reported GDP.
The real state of other nations will also be manipulated and covered up if it is embarrassing to the official narrative. For example, at purchasing power parity (PPP) the GDP per capita of Cuba is very close to that of Mexico (and with a better income distribution the median Cuban is better off than the median Mexican), but the US press is full of stories of the “dirt poor” Cubans and the “collapse” of the Cuban economy. The 1990s Special Period in Cuba, just after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, is actually an excellent example of the effective management of the sudden withdrawal of fossil fuel (especially oil) based resources:
The same is true of Russia, with Western visitors being shocked at the splendour of its cities in contrast to the Western media coverage. In 2022 Russian per capita GDP at PPP was US$34,500 (two thirds that of the UK, France and Italy, 85% that of Poland, equal to that of Greece), and its economy was bigger than that of Germany. So much for the “gas station with a country attached” statements of ignorant Western politicians. The removal of Russian media, together with other channels providing balanced reporting of Russia, removes any interference with the official narrative. The same for the banning of flights between Western nations and Russia.
We are also already seeing the same with China, with Western media talking about a Chinese debt-driven economic collapse when China has spent the past four years massively outperforming the West. As Monthly Review Online notes, “China’s economy has grown two-and-a-half times as fast as the U.S., 15 times as fast as France, 23 times as fast as Japan, 45 times as fast as Germany, and 480 times as fast as Britain.” In 2022, Chinese per capita real wages increased at a rate of 4.7%, in “Britain it was 0.1 per cent, for the U.S. it was 0.3 per cent [accepting the utterly manipulated official US inflation figures], in France it was minus 0.4 per cent, in Germany minus 0.7 per cent and in India minus 1.3 per cent.” Even the Western “left” supports this made up “reality”, as MR Online notes that “an article in the New Left Review’s Sidecar called China a ‘zombie economy’” and successfully surmises that “the U.S. systematically lies about the state of China and its own economy because it is crucial for U.S. capitalism to prevent its own citizens, and close allies, from understanding the real economic trends.” Just imagine how much they will lie if other countries handle climate, ecological and resource issues with much greater competency and equity! We saw a dry run of this as the Western nations failed miserably at handling the COVID epidemic while other nations handled it many times better.
Negative events will also be rapidly memory-holed, as we see already with the Maui fires. The building of a “protective” fence surrounding the devastated area, together with bans on drone flyovers and press access are all tools of such memory-holing.
Do you remember that massive ecological disaster from the train crash in Ohio in February? No? Exactly. There is very little reporting of the long-term effects of this, and most certainly not of the corporate greed and state-capture (under both Democrats and Republicans) that led to it.
With respect to the Ukraine crisis, previous news reports and documentaries which conflicted with the new official narrative were quickly “disappeared” mimicking the very job that Winston Smith has in the book 1984. The trick is to keep a population in a very well-manicured version of the present, unable to discern trends over time. The past becomes a vague memory, with even search engines making it hard to find remembered prior facts. The worse things get the more expansive such censorship and manipulation will become. The character of Solomon Roth represents this vaguely remembered past in the film Soylent Green.
The Best Laid Plans Can Be Destroyed By Abrupt Non-Linear Change
Maybe Solar Radiation Management is successful for a while, but what about Antarctica collapse, the Amazon rain forest, ocean acidification, ecological collapse etc.? As long as humanity keeps increasing its footprint upon the Earth, or even maintaining its current footprint, Earth System driven collapse is inevitable – no matter how much the elites work at kicking the can down the road. The further that can is kicked, the more depleted the Earth’s resources will become and therefore the harder it will be for human communities to thrive after the collapse of modern civilization. The limited recycling of the extravagance of modern human civilization may be all that is left to add to the fruits of the denuded Earth System.
Collapse will be in stages, but with the complexity of the Earth System and modern civilizations, the jump to a new lesser societal equilibrium may come as a repeated surprise. The Earth System does not act in smooth predictable curves, as the UN IPCC assumes, when it is strongly pushed out of equilibrium. It is a complex system with tight coupling, which can produce completely unexpected outcomes that are much worse than predicted. The short-term “noise” of medium-term and short-term cycles may also make it harder to understand longer-term realities until the medium term and longer term align, and multiple peaks are added together; as with the current El Nino. At what point will cloud cover flip to a new equilibrium that reflects less energy back into space? At what point will the West Antarctic Ice Sheet start to rapidly disintegrate, as it has done in the past? At what point will the AMOC shut down? At what point will the Arctic become ice free and turn into a maritime climate producing rain that falls on the Greenland Ice Sheet and the permafrost? At what point will the permafrost produce much greater levels of methane? All of these are like icebergs that are “out there” when we have no access to radar and drones, by the time an iceberg is seen it may be too late; especially if we keep travelling at a fast pace.
As the paleoclimatologist below states, such abrupt climate change events have happened before in timeframes of the length of time it takes to complete a bachelor’s degree. One degree centigrade of temperature change per year for five years for example. These are the climate monsters that lurk “out there” which we keep pushing the climate towards.
"Almost four decades have passed since the United States scrapped its last currency ties to precious metals. Our copper and nickel coinage still retains some metallic value, but not nearly enough for the purpose of currency tampering—the historic temptation of inflation-plagued or otherwise wayward governments, including, at times, our own. Instead, since the 1960s, Washington has been forced to gull its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics: the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured. The effect, over the past twenty-five years, has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed. If Washington’s harping on weapons of mass destruction was essential to buoy public support for the invasion of Iraq, the use of deceptive statistics has played its own vital role in convincing many Americans that the U.S. economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it actually is”. Numbers Racket. Kevin Phillips
https://harpers.org/archive/2008/05/numbers-racket/
"On the Beach" comes to mind, mostly for the philosophy of the end times: live while you live.
Long time peak oiler, I've been watching how it plays out. Thinking that the current political and social incoherence is part of the crash. This essay connects a few dots that way, how the rich keep tightening the screws on everyone else. What people don't seem to understand - and maybe it makes no difference - is that the more efficient we humans get, the worse the long term outcome. There won't even be a way to go back to small bands of hominids wandering in the forests... errrr.... deserts.
Fair share is a part of permaculture; leave some unharvested.
Nuland and the neocons, destroy Russia and break it up to plunder the resources, genocide for the slavic people; that too is an expression of this declining resource picture.