Where are fossil fuels most useful? Here’s a hint: it’s one of the dumbest reasons you could possibly think of.

One of the big differences between World War I and WWII is the scope of motorized operations. If you study the strategic application of naval power you’ll realize quickly that when and where ships were able to take the downtime to load coal was one of the big problems in naval strategy. Once you were done coaling, your crew was degraded physically for at least a week, and some men died outright. A ship that was coaling usually had their boiler heat down for safety, and had to scramble to get fighting steam up if a hostile force appeared on the horizon.

After WWI, the winners divided up the imperial prizes, but – now – with an eye toward oil. When Winston Churchill was first lord (head of the admiralty) he and Jacky Fisher pushed hard to switch the fleet to oil power instead of coal. Everything was switching to oil – air forces, navies, motorized armies, tanks, etc. I don’t need to belabor the obvious but can you imagine flying a 4-engined bomber to the Ruhr, shovelling coal frantically into the boilers the whole way? Imagine the black streaks from the smokestacks on the bombers, visible 15 miles away? Or, as if being in a Russian T-34 wasn’t already a bad day, the loader had to double as coal-shoveler before an engagement? Now, think about todays’ militaries – electric F-35s? They’d need hours to recharge and their fighting range would be a standup comedy routine. Electric tanks? Tee hee. Imagine standing by your long-range stealth bomber waiting for the batteries to re-charge while a strike is inbound?

Sorry but “green warfare” is a non-starter and always will be. Fossil fuels smell like victory.

So, if humanity wants to survive the climate crisis, we’re best off getting over wars for the next 150,000 years or so. There, what was simple, wasn’t it? Also, everyone spinning down their military capacity frees up a lot of money (in some places) for renewing the power grid and fully funding fusion research? The US, right now, is in the middle of a “refresh” of its nuclear arsenal – which means buying a new arsenal and scrapping the old one – tada! Look it’s renewed! [The US, being a democracy, does not even consider bothering the people to see if they want to spend their money that way] Anyhow, the world’s greatest experts on nuclear fusion are devoted to producing mostly uncontrolled air-bursts. Obama said it would cost $1tn over the course of a decade but maybe we could save that money for something slightly less stupid?

Because this subject interests me and always has [I had an early vasectomy because I didn’t want kids to have to protect during a nuclear war. Ha ha joke’s on me!] I decided to get ChatGPT to help me with some rough models. I sort of expected this, but I asked it if cancelling nuclear weapons might be enough. The know-it-all replied that it might get us 2% of the way there. Uh-oh. What if everyone stood down their militaries? 20%. Around then I started feeling a bit queasy in the pit of my stomach. And, yes, since that evening I have been a “doomer” – sure that humanity is heading toward +3.5C to +4C. I started running a few of my favorite options into the scenario. One of those involved releasing all the pigs and cows and chickens and allowing them for hunting until the populations were gone. That was impressive – chopping a chunk of the agricultural revolution got of 35% of the way there. Cutting out air travel and replacing it with sail boats (Imagine a first class cabin on the Cutty Sark II blasting across the Atlantic to Europe). Basically, it sounded a lot like Badgeria [stderr] I agree – it sounds like the paths to human survival are not powerful means like recycling plastic bags at grocery stores; they are more substantive and involve discarding capitalism and nationalism, along with war, recreational travel, and frequent fancy foods. If I ate pork spare ribs only once a year, I’d be more slender and comely, but I’d probably obssess over them for the 6 months before, and reminisce for the 6 months after.

But, oh yeah, I forgot a big piece of the model. Here’s the problem: most of the CO2 release is per-capita. One obvious “solution” to that is to reduce the population. It’s a “solution” that kicks in slowly but basically solves the problem, except for the climate damage that has already been caused. That damage is going to last for hundreds of thousands of years if humanity keeps on doing humanity stuff, but if we change course dramatically, that’s not strictly required. I have floated this idea before, but briefly: I am not talking about lining people up and shooting them (except for the republican congress and all political donors who have more than 10bn in disposable wealth) I am talking about allowing population to die back less immediately. Just 200 years would do it.

GPT and I came up with a model I called “brake and steer” – the idea is if you’re in a car heading toward a cliff at high speed you’re equally stupid if you depend solely on your brakes or your steering. Humanity has to stop doing dumb things at about the same rate as it has to start doing smart things. Let me note that GPT’s model does not show that we’d get out of the situation we are in, smelling like a rose, but we’d be much less likely to come out a smouldering wreck. Let me be clear, in case I haven’t gotten my point across: on our current trajectory we are highly likely to lose about 6 billion humans of our population of 8-9, and in the process of trying to survive that, we’ll do so much catastrophic damage that the remaining 2-3 billion are going to suffer some mass deaths. In the proceeding paragraph I introduced the idea of allowing humanity to die off gently – the alternative is the fact that 2-3 billion people will not go gently. What everyone has to get into their head is that the writing is already on the wall, we’re arguing about how not if.

There is a philosophical question worth going into: do we owe the unborn a good life? Fuck all the stupid abortion debate, a more raw form of the question is: is life so amazingly great that we should offer as many potential people as possible a chance at an enjoyable life? Is it a sin against human nature to decide to keep the population at 1 billion? I picked that number because it’s absurdly big; according to GPT and my figuring, 50-100 million is still pretty huge. If we’re willing to shovel the unborn and nonexistent out the airlock, we can make the number arbitrary. What if the population is 5 million – 10? Again, it gets ugly: GPT and I went back and forth on the model, and 5 million is kind of a sweet spot. I believe I wrote about this in my piece about Badgeria: if our problems are per capita, we could die back to 5 million, localize the population someplace beautiful and safe (Paris, France, comes to mind), and let the rest of the planet lie fallow for 20,000 years. Meanwhile, think what the hunting would be like! First: build a longship, then sail to North America, then kill and salt some pork, then try to get back alive. There are some other things we probably should do in this situation, such as have the Medical College decide what constituted “extreme measures” versus “normal interventions” and stop spending so much time and money and energy on saving the guys who got bashed up hunting tuna with a spear, etc. If you step back and look at what’s going on, virology gives huge benefits at a low cost, so the civilization could produce flu vaccines, COVID-222, etc. Cancer? Yeah, that helps one person at a time, maybe it’s not worth it. Until the population stabilized, children would be special subjects of affection, and a rarity. Eventually, elders might be.

Eating meat every month might be too much – 4 times a year? Whatever.

Of course none of this is going to happen. Capitalism and nationalism are going to combine to prevent anything from actually working. Nationalists will scream “we must keep our population up!” (for war) and capitalists will want a captive workforce from whom they can skim the best work. Destroying nationalism and capitalism, together, would be the greatest fight mankind ever undertook. Remember: feudalism was killed by plagues and the crusades and religious wars, not anything the peasantry did. Monarchism was killed by the rising middle class – of capitalists – who took over government (let’s say during the reigns of Louis XIV, Napoleon, Louis XVIII) Europe’s brief flirtation with empire was ended by the Europeans’ love of inter-family fighting. Anyhow, all of that has to be thrown overboard.

Humans’ love of having children seems to me to be the part that will never work. This has always perplexed me: people are perfectly willing to go drinking at the local watering-hole, have a bit too much tequila, and create a new life with the person at the other end of the bar. It’s such a reverential, almost holy, process. Add some practical delay into the loop, like a lottery (this would only be needed during the 200 years of die-off) and it wouldn’t be too complicated. What do do with the old people? Not much different from what we do with them now: send them out golfing, elect them to congress, let them do whatever they want except breed.

In my piece on Badgeria I proposed some mechanisms I believe are practical for building civilizations that do not have heritable wealth. It’s my opinion that political and economic terraforming is impossible as long as there is heritable wealth. I’m a socialist anarcho-syndicalist. That’s a nice way of smugly saying “I think I have it figured out but all the gomers on earth are going to fight over it anyway, and they can fuck themselves.”