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Our future with Nut Zero : TCW looks at our 2050 eugenic nightmare

Environment
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#1

"IT IS the year 2050 and Britain, relentlessly driven by the governing Labour-Green coalition, has achieved Net Zero. The nation is quite unrecognisable from the comfortable, well-fed country it was in the early part of the 21st century…

Just outside Newcastle upon Tyne is a low-rise building where hundreds of technicians work in shifts on computer banks 24/7 allocating and distributing wind and solar electricity from where it is being generated at that moment to where it is needed but is cloudy or windless, and rationing households and businesses unilaterally by controlling their smart meters. This centre is named the Distributing Electricity At The Hub Centre (the DEATH Centre).

The RAF has been disbanded because none of its aircraft could fly. Likewise the Royal Navy after its last remaining nuclear submarines reached the end of their lives. The Army is reduced to a number of small infantry units scattered around Britain, mainly used to quell civil unrest.

Winter is harsh. Even those who were able to afford the cost of heat pumps found that below about 4 degrees C they are virtually useless. It has been estimated by the (unreformed) NHS that up to 100,000 people have frozen to death in their homes during each of the last six winters. Most of the victims are elderly, so this has solved the aged care problem and bed blocking in hospitals.

Hunger stalks the land: domestic food production has fallen by 90 per cent since the 2020s because there is no fertiliser, which was a product of oil and gas, and tractors cannot operate on batteries. Milk and all dairy products have long since disappeared as no farmer could risk even one day without electricity for his milking machines.

Crime is rampant, mostly robbery and theft at night of food and clothing, but shops and households don’t report them to the police because the crime divisions, now much smaller than the thought police divisions, cannot attend while their cars are on charge…

Last year some brave person in parliament stood up and said: ‘Let’s build a coal-fired power station.’ But it was too late."

We’ve been warned! These climate nutters need to realise that there is no man-made carbon dioxide climate change, nor is there any environmental emergency beyond cleaning up our waste and so there is certainly no point in a net zero policy that solves nothing and creates widespread havoc and death in its wake.

cheers

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#2

Fond memories of earlier generations of hacks, also crystal-balling.

But for them, it was the brilliant startrekkytechietechie future which was just “twenty years in the future” - as usual. And which - as usual - never materialised. Instead we have now the hararoid nightmare - which also, fortunately, will never materialise. Peak Everything (particularly Peak Energy), along with the consequent Long Descent from hitech industrialism, will see to that.

There’s no doubt that times will become very different. But what detailed character they will have is clearly beyond the predictive talents of the standard hack.

Real human societies are always much more complex and unpredictable. And standard-issue hacks can never plumb their true depths. They always seem to produce little heaps of disconnected vignettes, as this piece does, all very little thought out.

I’d give you good odds that the death of industagri - which is certainly on the cards - will lead to much better ways of doing agri; mainly, for Britain, organic, self-fertilising temperate-forest permaculture (with a proper, necessary balance of domestic livestock, of course); something which this TCW writer clearly knows nothing about; as if the insane way we do agri just now is our only option, and can’t be replaced with something better - and actually MORE productive.

Electricity, which came into our lives slowly from the experimental-science discoveries of the Eighteenth Century, will likely become a much less certain and universal constant in our future. And - as we’ve done for many millennia previously - we’ll develop ways to get by without it again, mostly.

As for transportation: Sure, severe reductions of private car ownership and use are in the offing; ditto mass air travel; reductions already started, in fact.

But a return to how things were in the early 1940s - which is what we’re really looking at for the 2050s - would scarcely be the desperate wasteland sketched in this piece. It wasn’t too bad then, despite acute wartime strictures. I remember it personally. And it won’t be as bad as painted in this piece, in the 2050s.

People adapt, improvise and cooperate more when the screws tighten down slowly. And there are many other ways beside the ones we indulge now, to keep basics going. I expect that by 2050, our current population-overshoot episode will be unmistakably into its second half, with human numbers very clearly coming down again - spontaneously. Life in Britain becomes much more feasible with this prospect.

And as a really big plus, if I’m reincarnated here by mid-century, I will look forward to celebrating the demise of the damned, hyper-destructive, useless HS2. That will be a potent vindication…

Let’s remember too that by 2050, the two currently-rising regional colossi will still be thriving, because - regionally - they will still have lots of what it takes, in the way of raw materials, to continue along with current ways of life, for a while longer than the dying Western empire. Patchy, fundamentally unpredictable consequences flow from that reality.

PS: If David Wright is still alive then, he may regret relocating to what became, in the interim between now an 2050, the new antipodean version of the 1930s Third Reich: Nazism, but with lots of sunshine…

#3

Hmmm: that’s all very well but where’s the Jet Pack I was promised?

Horribly plausible though I think some of those scenarios are more or less reality already.

#4

eggs

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#5

Oh the jet-packs are around; there’s even one that uses water - salt or fresh - as the working fluid. But they are, and will remain, marginally oddities, of no use to anyone except as unusual toys; and only that whilst they can still be kept working in the time of the Long Descent…