The fatuous history of the most stupid Ape
From Çatalhöyük to Luštica Bay
I was thinking about writing this as a book, but then I thought to myself that there might not be enough time left. This goes to show where my head is. I decided to write two longish articles, this one about how things are, and the following one about what you and your friends can do about it. Then I’ll be signing off.
Be warned, this article contains a lot of reality-based bleak stuff. It paints a very sombre picture about the state of our world and about the way things are going. In this context, a little knowledge is worrying, a lot is very, very depressing. I don’t present any solutions, that is what the second article will be about, so cheer up :-)
It was on the radio this morning, that song
‘Don't worry about a thing, 'Cause every little thing gonna be alright.’
No, it’s not.
At the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, we find ourselves surrounded:
by falling water tables,
rising oceans,
collapsing glaciers,
global heating,
raging wildfires,
resource depletion,
biodiversity collapse
ocean acidification and darkening
agricultural soil degradation and loss
pollution on all sides
a free AI insult generator and 4 forthcoming films about the Beatles. Why?
I know, it sounds a bit bleak, probably because it is. Unfortunately, it gets worse.
After a few gains, environmental concerns are being put aside for the sake of economic growth and defence. Everyone seems to be buying into the industry propaganda that environmental measures hammer economic growth. Pressure to water down or abandon such measures comes from farmers pushed on by the agro-industry. From Unions that repeat the numerous industry lobbies claiming these measures cost jobs. From the right-wing for their own reasons. Pressure is also coming from consumers in general, who have come to believe the hype that environmental measures increase retail prices and hurt the ‘poor’. This backlash was, in many ways, both inevitable and predictable. It was, after all, preceded by a forward-lash from the above lobbies when our esteemed leaders gathered to put things like the EU New Green Deal into place.
Things could have been so different.
In 1972, over half a century ago, the UN convened the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, and they came up with the Stockholm Declaration that listed lots of really good goals. For example 3. Wildlife must be safeguarded, and 4. Non-renewable resources must be shared and not exhausted. 14. Human settlements must be planned to eliminate environmental problems, which sounds good, too.
50 years later, the International Institute for Sustainable Development produced an analysis: The Legacies of the Stockholm Conference. Still Only One Earth: Lessons from 50 years of UN sustainable development policy
‘Fifty years after the Stockholm Conference ushered in modern environmental diplomacy, we still face a triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution.’
In 1987, 38 years ago, the World Commission on Environment and Development (created in 1983) produced the so-called Brundtland Report, Our Common Future
Sustainable development is a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
This sounds pretty good, too. So why do we find ourselves in the current mess we are in?
I, and many others, have been accused of being environmental catastrophists. My riposte is that we are environmental realists and we base our analyses on data. One thing we do is link research together to get a wider picture of what is going on and where things are headed. Some of the negative consequences of the changes that are occurring have become increasingly visible.
Those pesky insects
Grandad, in the back of the car, pointed out that when he was younger, he’d have already stopped several times to wipe dead insects off the windscreen, (A UK-wide study revealed a 63% decline in flying insects found stuck to vehicle number plates since 2021). Linking this to data and to a wider picture reveals, first, that global insect numbers have dropped by approximately 45% in the last 40 years, second, that insects play vital roles in pollination, pest control and soil health. .
Linking stuff like the above enables us to have some idea what will happen. Pollinator-dependent crop yields have already declined by up to 30% in some regions due to reduced insect populations. Crop-damaging pests are thriving , which leads to increased pesticide use. Increased pesticide use causes more decline in insect populations, and around and around we go. But of course, it doesn’t end there. Pesticides disrupt soil microbial activity, leading to increased nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions, a potent greenhouse gas. Some commonly used pesticides generate over 40 kg of CO₂ equivalent per kilogram during production. Increasing demand for pesticides accelerates global warming, which is a driver of insect decline, affecting populations through temperature shifts, habitat loss, and extreme weather events.
Something that is particularly shocking is that insect populations have crashed in places little, or not at all, impacted by human activities and pesticides. This is due to global warming; insects have little capacity to stay hydrated, this means that a drought decimates their population. Birds, lizards, snakes etc feed on insects so a crash in insect population provokes a wider ecosystemic collapse.
So don’t call me an environmental catastrophist before you’ve gone and had a look at your windscreen!
I can hear someone in the back shouting. ‘What if all this data is flawed and the figures wrong?’ Of course that happens, and they usually get corrected. Some things are simply very difficult to count, for example, the global human population is very probably millions or even billions of people more than the UN figures. National census data tends to underestimate the number of people living in the countryside.
Another point about data-based analyses is that they frequently underestimate the problems. This is for two main reasons, firstly, there was some stuff we hadn’t taken into consideration. Observations, for example, have shown that marine clouds have gotten darker since 2020 because shipping regulations cut sulfate emissions. Climatologists then had to measure the effect and add it to climate models. Another example is ocean darkening (a reduction in the depth of ocean photic zones), satellite data was only analysed and the effect quantified in 2025. Again, all this has to be added to climate models. Secondly, there are feedback loops and cascade effects that we simply haven’t discovered yet. For example, in 2023, the Earth warmed around 0.2 °C more than climate models predicted. We don’t yet know why and whether or not global warming will continue to accelerate faster than predicted.
Human beings and what they get up to is another mess that has to be calculated into climate models.
For example, temperatures are rising, so people invest in air-conditioning. The number of units is projected to triple by 2050, but this will certainly happen sooner. Today, these A/C units consume around 7% of global electricity and 3% of total GEG emissions. They leak, and the hydrofluorocarbons waft out into the atmosphere. These molecules are hundreds and thousands of times more potent as greenhouse gases than CO2. Residential AC units leak 2-10% of refrigerant per year. Commercial AC systems leak 10-30% per year. Vehicle air conditioning leaks 5-20% per year.
Tomorrows world?
Heatwaves, crop failures, famines, river floods, tropical cyclones, wildfires and droughts of increasing frequency and severity, biodiversity collapse. Warlords, dictators and populist leaders will seize power, extend the misery and fall.
Over the next decade or so vast areas will become uninhabitable, and some, like the Maldives, will disappear.
Agricultural productivity will decline (Total factor productivity, which measures the overall efficiency with which inputs are combined to produce output, grew at a global annual rate of 1.31% in the 2010s, down from 1.96% per year in the 2000s.) In some areas, it will collapse.
Glaciers will continue to disappear, threatening coastal communities and disrupting water supplies for over 2 billion people who rely on glacier-fed rivers.
There will be a collapse in ocean fisheries because of shrinking photic zones.
Disease will continue to increase, driven by the spread of fungal infections, drug-resistant pathogens, and deadly bacterial outbreaks following flooding. Antibiotic resistant bugs will spread, current treatments will be increasingly useless.
Global, regional and local conflicts will increase, as will poverty and iniquity. Governments are already committing themselves to increasing defense spending which will further drive global warming.
Global supply chains will collapse. Today, a billion-dollar extreme weather event occurs every three weeks. Four decades ago, one occurred every four months. Freight ports will be closed due to sea-level rise, and freight routes, such as the Panama Canal, will fail due to drought. Major flooding will force the closure of manufacturing plants. Internal supply chains will become more and more precarious; weather is already the cause of 23% of all road delays in the US and costs trucking companies annually between US$2bn and $3.5bn.
Over the last 11,000 plus years the climate has been relatively stable. We got on with spreading around the world and getting busy with changing it. We have altered landscapes through agriculture, deforestation, and urbanization, leading to shifts in ecosystems and climate patterns. It’s a bit like that wooden brick game Jenga, you build a tower which is relatively stable and then start pulling bricks out until it collapses. The fallen bricks then find another stable state, lying quietly across the floor. The climate is much more complex, with many, many more bricks and they are connected together in known and unknown ways. Pull one out and it pulls others out at the same time. Eventually the climate will switch over to another state, one which is much less adapted to us and all of our activities. At best the planetary zones where humans can survive and thrive will be reduced, at worst we’ll push the planet into a runaway greenhouse effect and there will be no place for us at all.
Too little, too late, and too long-term.
I sometimes wonder if our elected leaders believe that sayings like ‘you can't have your cake and eat it too’ only apply to ‘ordinary’ people. They seem to believe that you can ‘save the climate’ and have economic growth. The New Green Deal was promoted as a way to do this. There appear to be some fundamental facts that our leaders either don’t understand or choose to ignore, (read more in the annexe).
In 1939, the UK transitioned its economy to a war-based one; by 1940, it was fully transitioned. This shows that rapidly transforming an economy is possible. Climate scientists have been warning about what was to come for decades. Over these decades we’ve had conferences, COP after COP, some things got decided and little got done. Even today, when the consequences of inaction are right in front of our faces, no government has had the foresight and courage to transform their country’s economy. They have given themselves some longterm targets that are much too longterm, the targets themselves are woefully inadequate.
Back in the 1990’s only the pessimistic climate scientists foresaw today’s world and its lack of progress in addressing the problems. Only the most maniacally depressive ones would have dreamed that, confronted by a fundamentally existential crisis, 2025 would see countries gearing up for war. Warfare is profoundly anti-ecological; current military operations contribute to 6% of global GHG emissions. Worse, as our political leaders move billions of public money to defence spending, they compensate by reducing investment in climate goals. They most definitely will not redirect the $2.6 trillion that is given away as subsidies that harm the planet, destroy biodiversity and drive global heating and send the money to sectors that do the opposite.
I come at last to the title ‘From Çatalhöyük to Luštica Bay.’ The former, Çatalhöyük, dates back to when we were starting to settle down and experimenting with growing grains. It was a proto-city and hit it’s peak around 9000 years ago. All the evidence point to it housing an egalitarian society, with little social distinction between genders. They cultivated peas, wheat and barley, harvested almonds, pistachios and fruits. They hunted and started to domesticate cattle.
Luštica Bay, is a new ongoing development that ‘is setting new standards for high-end coastal real estate. Residents and guests enjoy a Mediterranean lifestyle enriched by culture, community and outdoor adventure.’ Keywords used to describe this development are luxury, exclusivity, environmental consideration, etc. Prices for an apartment or small house? Size range: from 39 to 148 m2, Price range: from 324,000 € up to 1,293,000 €. Difficult to see how it’s going to be egalitarian.
At some point between the two we really messed up. Perhaps it started in the latter years of Çatalhöyük? There is some evidence that seems to point to it becoming less egalitarian with advantages being passed on through inheritance to decendants. This is a very robust way to create inegalitarian societies.
The next article
There is something that you and your friends can do to help us all avoid the worst of what I’ve described. It’s coming out soon.
Annexe
Business as usual
Let’s take cars as an example.
We were encouraged to switch from petrol to diesel, and now to electric. Keeping the automotive industry going is seen being crucial because it provides over 7% of the EU’s GDP, and 13 million jobs. The logic for our leaders is that diesel and petrol cars emit greenhouse gases, and electric cars don’t. So let’s switch over. The logic for the automotive industry is that they’ve got a new marketing opportunity, crush up the petrol/diesel cars, and replace a nation’s entire fleet with electric ones. You can just imagine them rubbing their hands with glee, until they realised that the Chinese have got the upper hand.
All of these people, deliberately or not, ignore the quantities of oil used in the automotive ecosystem that can’t be replaced by electricity. They also refuse to acknowledge the huge quantities of oil used in the production of electric cars. So to give them a hand, here’s a breakdown:
Road Maintenance & Construction
Asphalt Production: 14-28 litres of diesel per tonne.
Concrete Production: 42-56 litres of diesel per tonne.
Machinery Use: 10-30 litres of diesel per hour per machine.
Tyre Production
Raw Material Processing: 2.8-5.6 litres of diesel per kg.
Manufacturing & Transport: 140-280 litres of diesel per tonne.
Then, of course, we have the actual production of the electric car itself:
Manufacturing
Battery Production: Producing a lithium-ion battery requires 50-100 GJ of energy, translating to 1,400-2,800 litres of diesel.
Vehicle Assembly: Manufacturing the car body, electronics, and drivetrain requires 20-40 GJ, or 560-1,120 litres of diesel.
Total Manufacturing: 70-140 GJ per car, equivalent to 1,960-3,920 litres of diesel.
Transport to Point of Sale
Shipping & Logistics: Transporting an electric car from the factory to dealerships requires 5-10 GJ, or 140-280 litres of diesel.
Total Lifecycle Fossil Fuel Use: 2,100-4,200 litres of diesel per car.
What about all the non-energy uses of petroleum?
Fertilisers, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, plastics/polymers, chemicals and solvents, cosmetics, food packaging etc etc. About 10-15% of global oil is used to make these products, but that’s not all; these industries need energy, which comes from oil. They use between 1.6-2.4 billion litres per day. In total, the oil required for energy and production amounts to between 584-876 billion litres a year.
As the political and industry polemic is about economic growth, any savings in oil use from switching to electric cars will be used by the above industries.
Energy density.
We cannot, despite what industries say and what politicians hope, maintain our current industry/consumer-based systems and ‘save the planet’. We can do a breakdown of recent human history based on energy resources. We went from our muscle power, through draught animals, wood, charcoal, coal, anthracite and onto oil and nuclear. Today, our industries, economies, and societies are founded and function because of the high energy density of oil. Bradley E. Layton at Drexel University converted energy density to cubic metres so we can compare them.
Oil: Around 35-45 gigajoules (GJ) per cubic meter.
Solar Energy: The energy density of sunlight reaching Earth's surface is about 1.5 microjoules per cubic metre, which is over 20 quadrillion times less than oil.
Other renewables, such as wind and tidal have energy densities of 0.5 to 50 J/m3
To replace oil energy with solar panels will require about 290 billion solar panels. Manufacturing a solar panel requires between 14-28 litres of oil, and this doesn’t include raw material processing or transportation. The production and transportation of the 290 billion solar panels we need would use between 4.14-8.18 trillion litres of oil.