William Rees is an ultra-distinguished ecological scientist, and an original researcher on human impacts on biosphere life. Eric Lee has cleaned up, and published a formatted transcript with slides, taken from Prof. Rees recent webinar presentation titled - "Will Modern Civilization be the Death of Us? Have Humans Become Obsolete?". It is presented here, because of the disinterest of mainstream media and conventional political narrative.

The idea of a renewable-energy powered future that allows for economic growth is a ... delusion — a death sentence for Earth’s ecosystems and posterity’s well-being. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of reality. ...

The real problem lies in the way we think — that’s the true dark matter operating beneath the surface, shaping how we perceive and engage with the world.

Eric Lee works hard to understand, organize and quote from people who actually have a clue as to what is going on.

I present the text of the "Climate Emergency Forum" this week, the video is published on YouTube, State of the Climate 2024 - Earth in Crisis.  Discussion centered around the publication in the BioScience journal, available online -  "The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth".  This was published on 08th October 2024, by an author list of Climate Scientists in prestigious institutional paid positions, who are not known to be given to alarmist predictions without strong evidence. A number of factors suggest the earth's climate system warming resistance is collapsing. Terrestrial carbon sinks are not working as well as before. Well known climate tipping point processes are getting bigger. And of course human civilization continues to pump out more greenhouse gases every year.

Ugo Bardi offers a flash of insight into reasons for differences in strategy of Nation-State majorities, versus the ideology of  elites in charge of Empires.

... Nation-States persecute minorities, while Empires try to protect the rights of its minority groups, something that an independent power can often do. A nation-state, instead, is a natural born killer of minorities. Simply, it has no mechanisms to protect them from the whims of the majority.

... In Western democracies, you can vote for any candidate as long as he/she obeys the orders of the US elites. Once people lose their trust in democracy, the American Empire cannot last for long.

The Climate Analytics (CA) report published this week confirms that Australia has one of the world’s highest total per capita emissions for all greenhouse gases, double that of China and nine times bigger than India. . . .

According to the CA report, Close to 80% of Australia’s total fossil fuel CO2 footprint in 2022 was due to exported carbon. Australia is the third largest fossil fuel exporter in the world, after Russia and the US. In terms of total greenhouse gas footprint, Australia ranks second, however, due to our love of emission-intensive coal.

When EPA made DDT illegal, in 1972, pesticide merchants used DDT in the making of new compounds. They dubbed the DDT parts of these new chemicals “inert” in order to mislead the government and the user, telling them those inert chemicals were harmless. Indeed, all pesticides include toxic and untested ingredients branded inert. - Evaggelos Vallianatos -   https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/08/05/pesticides-existential-danger/

Evaggelos Vallianatos worked as an Analyst inside the USA EPA, and is author of the book "Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA". Yes, global poisoning is still going on. No, you cannot buy the E-Book version from outside the USA.  A printed version can be ordered from Abbey's books.

Since coming to power, the Albanese Labor government has been working hard not to talk about climate warming impacts, not to lead the nation in a public conversation about how to face the greatest threat to our future, and it shows in recent public opinion research.

...The government does not want to talk about future climate risks because it is conspiring with the fossil fuel industry to make the problem worse.

This is no longer the same planet Earth we once knew, that loved us.

It doesn’t matter if climate scientists cannot accurately say if this is code red, or code purple. They should be labeling it as code “extinction” or “collapse”, and communicating it accordingly.

According to conventional econometrics, GDP per capita has never been better.

The global middle class are living in Maximum Human Supremacy.

Meanwhile, our biosphere has never been more at risk.

Our denial is in the comforting lies of statistics - The Unbearable Anthropocentrism of Our World in Data

...While Australia debates the merits of going nuclear and frustration grows over the slower-than-needed rollout of solar and wind power, China is going all in on renewables.

New figures show the pace of its clean energy transition is roughly the equivalent of installing five large-scale nuclear power plants worth of renewables every week.

The China Energy Council estimated renewables generation would overtake coal by the end of this year.

….[modern] humanity is a cancer, and that’s neither hyperbole, metaphor nor analogy…

Eric Lee published in Medium.com this review of the book "Homo Ecophagus" authored by doctor Warren M. Hern

Unfortunately there still remains a lot of fossil fuels, especially oil,  to feed this global civilization cancer until it kills its host.
For this global cancer to die it needs to be starved, or selectively poisoned.

David Suzuki stated in a 2017 blog post,  that "Environmentalism has failed.", and summarized major reasons for why.  Environmentalism is known to have been failing for a very long time, and you can search online for numerous opinions on this, including admissions of defeat.  This is asked particularly in the USA, where the political duopoly system excludes alternatives. Today, in 2023, their is still in every fossil-fuel powered national government an emphasis of economy over environment. State governments are officially styled as the principle law makers and regulation enforcers. But the political parties running them, regardless of election methods, and means of sustaining power, are subject to the powerful influence of the most pervasive and successful monetary-economic forces, namely the fossil fuel extraction and energy industries that make this Techno-Industrial Civilization - TIC,  possible. TIC is also failing, because our environment and resources are failing. Failing environmentalism appears to be built-in attribute of our TIC, and by extension our species.

In his You-tube explanatory series "How to enjoy the end of the world" ( HTETEOTW ) Dr. Sidney Smith continues to describe the bare-bones of what he thinks everyone ought to know, in order to understand, accept,  and maybe start preparing for some of the big changes that are happening now.

"... Nothing lives that doesn't also die, an outcome guaranteed by the fundamental laws of nature that govern both energy and complexity. Civilizations, including our own, are no exception. ... " - B. Sidney Smith

His Ph.D is in Mathematics, and a summary of his outlook includes this essay in 2012, entitled "All the bunnies in the meadow die". Some of this essay material is re-used in this latest video on Ecological Overshoot. The basic definitions are very clear.

The International Energy Agency forcefully states that the pathway to net zero by 2050 is a very narrow one and requires that no new oil and gas fields get approved.

And yet, despite the Australian public voting for Labor’s pledge to aggressively reduce emissions, on the day after he was sworn in as Australia’s 31st Prime Minister, Albanese was at Kantei in Tokyo making a contrary pledge of “better energy security” for Japan.

Recent Freedom of Information (FOI) releases, and close examination of a mosaic of evidence, have shed new light on who’s been convincing the Government to back away from turning off the gas tap.

The Barossa project is key to the future profits of Santos. The project involves piping gas from the Barossa field north of Darwin for onshore processing. Its output is intended for export to Asia.

In terms of carbon emissions, Barossa is the dirtiest of projects. Some experts have described it as a carbon emission project with LNG as a by-product. To deal with this, the company intends to bury the unwanted CO2 output in the now commercially depleted Bayu-Udan gas field in Timor-Leste waters.

Energy cannibalism, or energy self-use, is the necessity to spend energy in order to extract additional energy from the environment. This publication estimates that by 2020 the production of oil liquids, including Diesel fuel, costs 15.5% of the energy from this high energy quality resource. This fraction is growing at an exponential rate. By 2050, the net-energy fraction will be around half. Unconventional oil liquids are reported as continuously replacing higher quality conventional ones. A review of energy analysis literature and history highlights industry predictions about future supply, and evaluates several models to conservatively predict long term decline of net energy. Global heating by emissions is accelerated by the rise in gross production of oil liquids, peaking maybe in 2035, if no other dynamic factors intervene. There are a lot of caveats and assumptions listed.

For biosphere and climate integrity, and survival of other species, we cannot run out of low cost, net energy fast enough. For economies, declining net energy is the fast disappearance of the temporary carrying capacity of fossil fuels to power all the requirements of sustaining our industrial civilization, and must end our enormous population overshoot of over-consuming humans.

The "Honest Sorcerer", B on substack, presents irrefutable logic that this age of mining must reach an end, as mining ability requires energy and mineral supply, and this declines with depletion. The fully dependent renewable energy transition cannot prevent a global energy and minerals supply crunch.  The end of mining brings our all-consuming, destructive industrial civilization, to its natural biosphere-breaking end.

Big overshoot of our extinction cliff edge. Our planet's cooling system has broken. . . . Lest we forget, humanity’s conundrum is an overshoot of nearly every safe environmental boundary that allowed humans to survive and thrive in the last 10,000 years. . . . The absurdity of our response, or lack thereof, is becoming ever more apparent as conditions continue to deteriorate around us. . . . We have already lost more than half, two thirds even, of all life on the planet.

Now calibrated with current datasets, an updated Limits to Growth model shows collapse in global industrial output is already happening just about now. Collapse is from resources depletion, particularly oil. Human population reduction will follow later. Persistent pollution is indexed to accumulated industrial CO2 emissions, which will continue grow to badly plague us later. 

Global climate models have been underestimating the rates of polar warming. What is missing? This paper says that thin, high polar clouds may be responsible. They form in the stratosphere, with water vapor created from methane breakdown. This amplifies the greenhouse effect of the methane itself.