Loss of public transportation systems
Loss of fuel distribution systems and fuel pipelines
Loss of all electrical systems that do not have back-up power
Then will come the militarization of the impoverished communities most impacted by these collapses, or rather of what will be left of these communities. As columnist Michael T. Klare wrote in 2017, the intensifying hurricanes have already been greatly accelerating the militarization of our society:
Think of this as the new face of homeland security: containing the damage to America's seacoasts, forests, and other vulnerable areas caused by extreme weather events made all the more frequent and destructive thanks to climate change. This is a "war" that won't have a name... not yet, not in the Trump era, but it will be no less real for that. "The firepower of the federal government" was being trained on Harvey, as William Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), put it in a blunt expression of this warlike approach.
These dual threats--natural disasters and the state's reactive drive towards bringing the wars home--will engulf ever greater swaths of the country. Already, we're seeing an effort to expand the paradigm of quasi-military occupation that much of the country exists in, with the overflow of military equipment to police accelerating under Biden. And the spattering of mass shootings and right-wing terrorists attacks we've experienced during this last year is adding onto the process; as columnist John Soehr observed last month:
How is a free republic supposed to react in good faith to bloody massacres like the one last week in Atlanta and the one this week in Boulder, Colorado,1 if the conflict between diametric rights is forever deadlocked? Well, the answer is obvious. It does not. It is paralyzed. It has been for two decades now. A problem of democracy cannot be solved democratically even as the problem continues killing wholesale. It's no wonder many Americans have turned to military solutions to democratic problems, which, of course, make nearly everything worse.
The final step: "How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?"
It's estimated that over the next fifty years, around a fifth of the world's currently habitable land is going to be rendered uninhabitable by global warming. In the United States, the parts that undergo this process will largely consist of the low-lying areas of the coasts, the localities that will be made unlivable due to the heat (for perspective on what this means, eventually Las Vegas will be so hot that no one living there can safely go outside), and the places that will be rendered unlivable due to fires and other disasters (like Southern California). As almost everyone in these places either dies or becomes a refugee, only the rich will have a guarantee of escape. At least in the immediate sense.
As media theorist and futurist Douglas Rushkoff has written about an experience from several years ago where he spoke to investment bankers at a private conference on "the future of technology," the wealthy are anxious about how well they'll fare after collapse gets so bad that they'll have to permanently relocate to their remote luxury bunkers:
After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own--Which region will be less affected by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska?--Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked: 'How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?'
The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot hack that takes everything down... They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for survival.
Is this what a plutocrat is reduced to when his own system falls apart and he no longer has capital? A makeshift feudal lord that's afraid of being eaten by his own guards and hopes a button will protect him? Morbidly funny as this potential comeuppance for the super-rich will be, what we'll face when the collapse gets this dire is a horror similar to the kind that the Central American refugees are experiencing. The record number of refugees who've recently appeared at the southern border represent the first part in an ever-multiplying mass of people forced to flee the perils of late-stage capitalism. And if you're in the United States, it's more likely than not that you'll be one of these fleers.
I don't even need to describe the conditions we'll be facing at this stage of our collapse in great detail, because we can already see these conditions in the places U.S. imperialism has so far damaged the very worst. After a dozen years under a U.S.-installed dictatorial regime, Honduras has become too rife with violence and poverty for much of its population to be able to remain. Libya has been torn apart by civil war following the 2011 NATO invasion, leading to slave trades and a failed state. Yemen has been experiencing the world's largest humanitarian crisis due to the U.S.-backed Saudi resource blockade, with millions of its children being malnourished. These horrors are just the start of what the U.S. empire is about to do to the global poor; in the next fifty years alone, rising temperatures and sea levels will make the current homes of around a third of the global population unlivable.
I name the U.S. empire as the predominant guilty actor behind this situation both because the bloated U.S. military remains the world's largest polluter, and because U.S. imperialism's propping up of global capital perpetuates the functionings of the 100 corporations that create over two-thirds of carbon emissions. This is a crisis that has a clear primary perpetrator: our government. And it's our government that will ultimately subject us to the same fate that it's created for imperialism's global victims.
As Professor Jem Bendell warned in his 2018 paper on the prospect of a climate-created civilizational collapse: "when I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you wouldn't have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won't know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death."
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