Ciao, Baby!! (Yet Another Exercise In Righteousness*)

As swingingly evidenced in the item below, I have had my fun if I never get well no more†, and I had my kicks before the whole shit-house went up in flames; if industrial pig civilization & the pigs that industrialized it disappear tomorrow I'll only wonder why it took so damn long.

Who will rid us of this alleged civilization? Heh in-fucking-deed. I tried to keep things going w/ my low-impact, no-income life-style, but the majority of you cretinous idiots & subhuman mongrels wouldn't stop grabbing everything that wasn't nailed down & throwing it in Moloch's furnace to burn w/ your offspring as if there were no tomorrow. And now there isn't. There are no words ...

N.A.S.A.-funded study: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

Natural and social scientists develop new model of how 'perfect storm' of crises could unravel global system

Let's circle the drain a further paragraph or two. (Does rubbing the world's face in it qualify as schadenfreude, or do the Krauts have a word-phrase for that too?)

Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with "Elites" based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both:

"... accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels."

The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges by increasing efficiency:

"Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use."

Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two centuries has come from "increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput," despite dramatic efficiency gains over the same period.

By the way, white English-speaking loon who is mosta vast majority of the Just Another Blog yada™ viewership: I hope I needn't remind you the term "Elites" is not limited here to that 1% of the First World we all despise. Having electricity available to you 24/7 qualifies you as a greedy pig rooting the planet to death. Own a refrigerator? Air conditioning? Gonna be hotter than hell here pretty soon, & no juice to cool things down.

Juicy indeed:

Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharri and his colleagues conclude that under conditions "closely reflecting the reality of the world today... we find that collapse is difficult to avoid." In the first of these scenarios, civilisation:

".... appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature."

Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that "with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites."

In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most "detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners", allowing them to "continue 'business as usual' despite the impending catastrophe." The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how "historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases)."

Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that:

"While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing."

Also there are five fair & balanced objective paragraphs at the end in which these alleged scientists sound as if they have never observed the behavior of others of their species & bromide it up w/ platitudinous crap. Why, if

the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion

everything will again be peachy keen. (No mechanism or means of achieving this fantastic goal is offered, but wouldn't it be swell if it happened?)

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*Not that being righteous is especially difficult in a world of moronic imbeciles.
†.