The beach at the entrance of the Panama Canal.

That stuff’s never going away. It’s amazing: in the future there’s going to be an entire geological layer on earth made of plastic. Up to the present era all the strata have been rock colored, more or less shades of brown. Now there’s going to be a layer of pink, blue and red plastic bits. We’re even going to look ridiculous after being crushed by tectonic forces for a 100 million years. What’s worse is some of it at least is going to be the fault of all those eco activists in fleeces. Oh, no! Yep, it turns out washing all those fleeces is putting plastic fibers on beaches on 6 continents. It’s so bad that Patagonia is running an anti-consume ad:

That was bad, but while I was out on the ocean the first stages of serious collapse began. On February 17th, the day I left on the Australia sailing trip, I wrote, “The corporate pathology has impoverished 99% of the world’s population, squandered the majority of its resources on private luxury, and spoiled or poisoned most of the land and ocean”. I thought at the time people would be in the streets by the end of the year. I should have put a bet on at Ladbrokes, but it’s the sort of thing any self respecting peak oil eco catastrophist blogger could have seen coming a mile off. Little did I know that they’d pick 99% as a name. The question was whether the Arab Spring, Occupy/99%, and the protests in Russia, China and everywhere else are related. Richard Heinberg thinks so, and since I met him in 2003 he’s been more right than damn near anyone else.

I talked to Richard at the launch of his new book, The End of Growth, out at RCA Field in West Marin County. It was good to see him again after a few years. RCA Field was commissioned by Marconi in 1913 to be the radio transmission station for the Pacific. It’s lovely out there on the edge of the continent with the fog blowing in over the Douglas firs. Richard is a man of impeccable scholarship and manners. He is still trying to talk to people in a polite, rational tone of voice about understanding industrial civilization ecologically.  Richard’s idea in The End of Growth is pretty straightforward: None of the economic ideas from the 20th century are going to work now. Because all of them rely on constant growth to work, and we appear to have reached the limits of our ability to expand energy and resource production. Oil production has been on a plateau for 6 years. It’s sad but true: infinite exponential growth on a finite planet is a fairy story. We have a choice. We either expand our habitat by colonizing other planets (Richard doesn’t think so, I’m on the fence), or we adjust to available resources.

Someone asked Richard to think of a growth industry in a post growth world. He said, “ civil disobedience and the suppression of civil disobedience.”  Right after that the Occupy Wall Street/99% movement took off.  Are we really looking at the first of the “End of Growth” riots as he told me? It looks like that to me. I happened to have just re-read the 1972 Limits to Growth. I found a copy when we were doing boat repairs in Gibraltar. I hadn’t read it in years, so as I sailed across the Atlantic I went over it carefully. Given the primitive computers even MIT had at its disposal in 1972 they did an incredible job of producing what’s become known as the world3 model. World3 predicted the collapse of industrial civilization sometime in the early 21st century. I couldn’t find a thing that was in any way extravagant in their calculations. On the contrary, they went out of their way to test the robustness of the model by doubling earth’s resources and so forth. No matter what they did the model collapsed more or less at the same time: about now. Richard’s argument in The End of Growth makes sense in terms of  world3. When the states and social organizations of a given culture, in this case global, run into insurmountable resource or environmental exhaustion they collapse.

I thought all that looked bad, but this week was the cherry on the cake. The one thing, the one thing that absolutely must not happen is the methane clathrate in the arctic melts and releases 50 Gigatons of methane into the atmosphere. That would effectively double the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. All our models give us catastrophic temperature rises at those concentrations.

In the Independent on Tuesday Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, gave an exclusive interview regarding his shocking findings on a recent field trip. He said, “Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we’ve found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It’s amazing.” Well done everyone. We’ve actually pushed the system into positive feedback. It’s just as well I’ve been getting up to speed on those little household skills people have to have in times of severe disruption: Cooking, gardening, tool mending, that sort of thing.

I’m the first to admit that the general bias of my writing is towards the immanent collapse of Industrial civilization due to stupidity. I’ve tried blaming oil, environmental exploitation by corporate planet assassins, and the inability of anyone to resist sex.  After all, 7 billion people don’t just come in a box from Amazon, that’s a lot of hanky panky. But when you get down to it, unlike any previous civilization, we have good sensing and predictive ability. Which means that the only excuse we have for not re-designing our infrastructure in time is stupidity. Up till now that is. As I’ve been reading and settling into my redoubt on the edge of the lost coast, I’ve re-evaluated the situation. I’m not saying for a moment that this transition will be anything but godawful hellacious, but the kids might get it done. 99% of us no longer have any incentive to continue supporting a system which has failed so spectacularly. They are going to make something new. Is it possible that what comes after Industrial civilization isn’t collapse, but Intelligent civilization?

We’re heading out into the Pacific this morning. I should be in California in June, looking for work – my new bad idea is to boat hitchhike/work/whatever – round the world. But you never know. Life gets in the way.

Thank you.

A gigantic sunrise this morning, the sun out of a clear sky in the east turned a floating city of cumulus livid red and orange. Sailing due west on the auto wind vane, 50 miles west of Essaouira. Yesterday we got into a very unfriendly waving match with some Moroccan fishermen, who didn’t seem to realize that we had at least as much to lose from a prop wrap as they did from a busted line. Beating down the coast for three days into wind, if we don’t get a wind shift soon I’ll be reduced to prayer. We have a persistent high over Madeira ruining our entrance to the tradewinds. But now we’re heading into the squalls and lightning under the city of cumulus, so something’s going on.

Tuesday 8^th March 2011

How does that old blues tune go? Rolling and tumbling all night long? The wind at 34 knots over a ragged sea, so sleeping in the forward bunk felt like being in a tumble dryer. We’re trying to make Las Palmas but the wind’s stuck on the nose still.

Back to MIT:

As I was saying, we didn’t do the MIT Equilibrium state. Whether or not it would have been possible, we actually made a decision to do the exact opposite. Or was it us?

As Abdul Ghani, the old Indian Mafioso in Shantaram, says: The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards… The evil men are the power–the rich men, and the politicians, and the fanatics of religion–whose decisions rule the world, and set it on its course of greed and destruction. There are only one million of them, the truly evil men, in the whole world. The very rich and the very powerful, whose decisions really count–they only number one million. The stupid men, who number ten million, are the soldiers and policemen who enforce the rule of the evil men. They are the standing armies of twelve key countries, and the police forces of those and twenty more. In total, there are only ten million of them with any real power or consequence. They are often brave, I’m sure, but they are stupid, too, because they give their lives for governments and causes that use their flesh and blood as mere chess pieces. Those governments always betray them or let them down or abandon them, in the long run. Nations neglect no men more shamefully than the heroes of their wars… And the hundred million cowards… they are the bureaucrats and paper shufflers and pen-pushers who permit the rule of the evil men, and look the other way. They are the head of this department, and the secretary of that committee, and the president of the other association. They are managers, and officials, and mayors, and officers of the court. They always defend themselves by saying that they are just following orders, or just doing their job, and it’s nothing personal, and if they don’t do it, someone else surely will. They are the hundred million cowards who know what is going on, but say nothing, while they sign the paper that puts one man before a firing squad, or condemns one million men to the slower death of a famine… This formula–the one million, the ten million, the hundred million–this is the real truth of all politics’

Perhaps Abdul Ghani is right, it certainly seems so. The one million make the decisions and the 6 billion livestocked rest follow… well, like livestock.

But it was a decision. And Abdul Ghani’s ideas are certainly close to the SuperClass. I don’t know whether it’s evil, but it’s certainly primitive thinking. It does seem likely that one million is a good approximation of the number of people making the decisions that affect us all and control most of the resources. Abdul thought it had always been so, since the beginning of civilization. There I think we part company, because we have a way of measuring inequality in wealth and it is at extremes now, especially in the US and the rest of the developed world. It is the Gini Coefficient. Corrado Gini was an Italian Mathematician who developed a way of understanding income or wealth inequality in a given society: The Gini Coefficient. It works like this. If all the wealth in a society is divided equally amongst the population, the GC is 0, if one person has everything and the rest nothing, then the GC is 1. Naturally no actual society has a situation like that, but in real countries you end up with a number between zero and one. For example Sweden has a GC of 0.23, while the US is above 0.4 and extremely unequal countries like Nigeria are at 0.70. What the Gini Coefficient shows is that since the late sixties inequality has been growing across the developed world (with the notable exception of Scandinavia) so that it is now at extremes.

The question is: how do these extremes of inequality and the existence of the SuperClass affect our  posture, in the military sense of readiness, as we meet an environment unique in human history? We decided to do the exciting version where we see how many species we can force into extinction before it’s us. And we’re not doing badly, hell 40% of the plankton’s gone already. Is Abdul Ghani right when he says ‘This [formula] put the world at war, and this formula has the power to impose the peace’? It’s hard to see how the recent decisions of the SuperClass are leading us away from climate catastrophe.

Wednesday 9^th March 2011

I’ve started to read Generation Kill by Evan Wright. It’s the story of First Recon – the special forces of the US Marines, as they enter Iraq at the beginning of the war. What is striking about these young men (19-35) is their complete disconnect from the patriotism of WWII. They are there for a variety of reasons, but very few have anything to do with patriotism. Most are from poor or dysfunctional backgrounds. Their lives are dominated by the language and vision of video game and music culture.

There is a moment when Sgt Espera sums up the excesses of the US way of life which puts it perfectly:

‘Fifty percent of Americans are obese dog. You know what obese means, right? Fat as a motherfucker. All these other countries nobody’s fat. Think about this shit, dog? How does a motherfucker get fat? You gotta sit on the couch and do nothing but eat and watch TV all day. White trash, poor Mexicans and Blacks, all obese as motherfuckers. See, the white man has created a system with so much excess that even poor motherfuckers are fat.’

But what strikes me most about them is a kind of ‘New Asceticism’ – they live with nothing but their gear. It makes the 80s disco luxury of Abramovich  look like what it is. For example, this is his new boat. I mean, it’s so special forces. Excess is obsolete, dog.

In thinking about how we’re doing on the way to Kardashev Type 1 I realized that what I was really  looking at is a species intelligence test. I’ve just made up the Kardashev Test: Is your species intelligent enough to develop and maintain a civilization capable of successfully mastering the energy resources of your planet, solar system or galaxy? Which means you’re going to be smart enough to avoid  blowing  yourselves up through war or experimenting with dangerous fuels, avoid exhausting  all one fuel before you’ve developed a more advanced one, avoid polluting your environment catastrophically and avoid destroying your climate. Because if you do any of these things your nascent civilization will fail.

The caveat here is the famous “one shot” quote by Sir Fred Hoyle:

“It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.”

Roz Savage, the Ocean Rower and Environmental Campaigner, (good luck on the Indian Ocean Roz) asked me if there’s anything left to play for. Yes Roz, there’s everything to play for. It’s all or nothing. We are either going to wake up and get smart enough to achieve Kardashev Type 1, or we will fail. There are a lot of environmentalists out there who think it’s game over and there’s no doubt we’re on the edge.

So the Type 1 Kardashev test is, if you’re too dumb to manage your planetary resources, population and environment, you weren’t an intelligent species to begin with.

This is the Kardashev Imperative: To devise a global system based on the scientifically rational use of resources and technology to sustain and advance our civilization until we reach Type 1.

Which means we won’t be able to indulge in religious mumbo jumbo, idiot wars, corporate capitalism and its artificial externalities, exponential population growth, and all the rest of the primitive nonsense we’re up to at present.

So far it looks like we’ve turned down the rational MIT approach in favour of the Hollywood action film version with Somali pirates, Russian Mafia, billion person famines, super yacht driving banker villains, mad max infrastructure, and internet porn to keep us entertained when we’re bored with Halo Reach and Lady GaGa. I mean, really, is that the best we can do?

It was a frustrating night of fluky and contrary winds. We should be in Gibraltar by 4pm nonetheless. Yesterday we sailed past one of the most bizarre expression of modern industrial farming: the greenhouses on the southern Spanish coast near Almeria. An entire coastal plain into the foothills of the mountains in one pane of glass. Inhabited by indentured Ecuadorians no doubt. This glass covers an area of Murcia so extensive you can see it from space, should you happen to be in space. And for what? So that the lardy English, abandoned to sloth, X factor and obesity, can get their fresh strawberries in February. But soon the rivers of southern Spain irrigating this monster will run dry. Then what?

Luxury:

There is a theory of Utility in which there are useful items and useless items. For example, buying a normal car to get to work is useful. Buying a Bentley transports no more people and therefore all the money and resources used on the difference is a loss to the useful economy. It’s reached a scale where it’s having a profound effect. All the luxury items, the super yachts, the cars, the planes, the 10 million dollar parties. Not to mention all the Kitchen and bathroom refits in all the mac mansions. Useless and really uninteresting.

But in SuperWorld this is the standard of the infrastructure. Everything must be perfect – all the time. Legions of chauffeurs, executive security agents, deckhands, concierges, cleaners, stewards, PA’s, you name it, scuffling around the ‘family’ and the guests, and God forbid there should be a hair, a napkin, a screw, anything, out of place. While we’re happy to send First Recon Marines into Iraq in clapped out hummers with no armour, it is absolutely imperative that Mr and Mrs SuperClass be cocooned in perfection at all times.

Super Residence:

The hubs of SuperWorld consist of parts of major cities like London, New York and Paris. Then there are the tax residences like Monaco, Islands in the Caribbean, Isle of Man, The Channel Islands.  And the resorts like Gstaddt, Davos, and Aspen. Naturally there are parts of the Middle East, and Asia (especially on the edges of China) where a new section of the SuperClass is gathering. America is probably still home to the majority of it, although the European countries have their fair share. These residences are either physically or financially separate communities, and many of the locations are out of the spotlight. These are not celebrities in the newspaper sense of the term. While they may hire Beyonce or any of a host of other celebrities to entertain them for a birthday party, they generally prefer a quieter life, out of the media glare.

Super Education:

Education is handled by private schools , tutors and private universities – much the same as it always has been, but on a larger scale.

Super Medicine:

It’s in the area of Medicine where the SuperClass really are becoming a separate species.  Medical technology is advancing rapidly, but in most of the developed world access is either becoming prohibitively expensive (US) or the National Health Systems are coming apart at the seams (UK, EU). In SuperWorld there exists a range of services, both cosmetic and otherwise, and in luxurious surroundings in private clinics, unimaginable to anyone on an NHS waiting list.

But the frightening part is in the near future. The gap is about to widen appreciably, extending useful lifespans, and…abilities. It’s anyone’s guess how far we are from real enhancement BioAI, but it’s not more than 10/15 years. If DARPA gets in first it’ll be the military, but a hop skip and a jump behind it’ll be the SuperClass who will be enhanced.  It’s very possible China gets to functional AI first, then  it’s hard to tell how it will play out. But any physical or IQ enhancement available only to the SuperClass will be a major change in the way our species operates and evolves.

Thursday 24^th February 2011

We got too close to running out of fuel just before Gibraltar, and spent the night in Duquesa, just up the coast. I love Duquesa, the fuel dock is open 9-9 and there’s a real little town half a mile from the fish and chips and thai cafes in the marina. We walked along the beach and sat next to the church of Stella Maris, drinking beer in a bar called The Refuge. A perfect hidden gem.

Tuesday 1^st March 2011

I haven’t had a moment to write while we’ve been in Gibraltar. We’ve been working on the mast, the sat phone and half a dozen other things. Spending  time in some of these little islands of ennui in the old empire is educational.  The old guys with their roll ups and beer guts, first beer at 10am.  A cross section of women with inch think foundation and goldie chains, sundresses and slippers. Forever young living out their pensions in these marinas, catching the soccer on the flat screen in the waterfront  bar. Shoot me.

I’ve got my books from the marina free library (give one, take one). I’m reading Generation Kill, by Evan Wright, and it’s a ripper. How we really went into Iraq, as told by the members of First Recon Marines.  Some of the best war reporting I’ve ever read. I also got a mint copy from 1974 of The Limits to Growth from the Club of Rome. I haven’t read it in years and it’ll be interesting to read it again to see how the numbers stack up.

Back to SuperClass:

So now we have a small (< 1% ?) class of incredibly wealthy individuals who, through corporate boardrooms and private equity organizations like Carlyle, effectively own a significant percentage of the world’s capital and more importantly its resources. The rate of privatization in the developed world has been heavily criticized for a long time, but continues apace. The effect of this is privatization has been to turn Earth into a virtual farm system. You’ve been livestocked. You are a domesticated consumer animal on a giant farm. They own everything you need to survive, so in effect, they own you.

Friday 3^rd March 2011

After a ridiculous week in Gibraltar we finally got underway.  We picked up 750 litres of diesel and got out of the harbour past the assorted tankers and cargo boats and motored down by Tarifa at sunset and out into the Traffic Separation Scheme. We listened to the Tarifa multilingual epithet fest on VHF as the tanker crews cursed each other in broken English: You stupid, move to starboard! Where did you get your license you idiot? And the sun went down and fell into the sea.

The Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS) was as busy as usual and so the night’s watches were nerve wracking as we made our way across to the south side until we could turn to our course of 240 ° and head for Gran Canaria. I woke at 0600 for my watch, the sun coming up through cumulus anvils piling up like mad sculptures at 25000 ft and it looked like squalls and thunder on the way.

I talked to my old friend Jed Riffe on FB, and he’s researching this whole issue of the SuperRich as well, and maybe there’s a film in there somewhere.

I’ve been reading a piece by John Mauldin, a finance newsletter guy, for the last day or two. It’s by Dr Michael West, called “New Cardiovascular Systems”. Dr West is CEO  of Biotime Inc., and has launched a subsidiary called ReCyte Therapeutics, to commercialize endothelial stem cell therapies to reverse senescence in the cardiovascular and immune systems. For some reason this has been largely ignored by the press, which I think is incredible. This is a huge deal.  He can reset the telomere clock, and do it from adult cells. Whoah! Assume that this technique works and is available in 3 years. Will it be available on the NHS, or on the health plans offered by most American HMOs, or the Tunisian Health Service? I doubt it. Hell, the NHS is balking at knee replacements for the boomers, much less cardiovascular replacements. So who will be the first to have access to ReCyte’s Telomeric reset? The SuperClass, in a private clinic in Switzerland – or maybe the black clinics of Chiba.

Never mind the wrinkle creams darling, this technology will reverse aging. The one consolation for the poor has always been that at least in the end the rich were mortal like them. You know, the whole “you can’t take it with you” thing. Suppose the ubiquity of mortality is obsolete. Not only will the rich live better and a little longer or enjoy better health, they’ll become a different kind of being altogether. Let’s assume that the technology gets more sophisticated, what’s the limit? How long can you extend life? The SuperClass will not only be separated by comfort and luxury, they will become a super species. The rich really will be different: yearly full body MRI, cell repair, cellular nutrients, cloned organs…Are these the first immortals?

Recyte is typical of a range of accelerating medical advances, which will be taken advantage of by the SuperClass, and they will begin to leave the rest behind. The average lifespan in India or Africa will stumble along at around 40, and the lifespan of the SuperClass will be 150. That’s an unbridgeable gap. The SuperClass will be able to keep their money for decades longer. What this does to families is anyone’s guess. What if Rupert Murdoch lives to 150? He’ll own planet Earth and call it EarthCorp.

Saturday 4^th March 2011

Running down the Moroccan coast on a sunny afternoon, about to cross the 35 deg N latitude. Thinking about being a little south of San Francisco and the life there in contrast to the life a little east of me. The southern Mediterranean is on the boil and Europe is going to be swamped. And as any survivor of the Titanic will tell you, desperate people will sink a full lifeboat trying to climb on board, and then everyone dies. The history books are rife with stories of ancient states being inundated by refugees from famine and collapse.

I’m about half way through The Limits to Growth. In case you don’t know it, it’s the seminal ecological analysis circa 1972 written by MIT faculty for the Club of Rome, and derided by conservatives ever since for its inaccuracies and flawed predictions.  There are no predictions in the book, and it was meticulously researched. All I’ve come across so far is some carefully worded analysis, that looks, with 40  years hindsight, incredibly good. Ferchrissake, they were doing this stuff on computers in 1971! Do you know (or remember) what computers looked like in 1971? It was before monitors! They must have done this stuff on keypunch machines, and a lot of the numbers still look very good. That’s good, but in a bad way. They were right on about population, CO2, pollution – not in an exact quantitative way, which they weren’t aiming for, but as a human behaviour pattern. And the general drift is that for the first time in human history we’re hitting hard limits. I wonder what would have happened if we’d taken them seriously.

Saturday 5^th March 2011

We’re about 40 miles or so off Casablanca, doing 5 knots under a dull grey sky on a dark flat sea.

Limits to Growth: It’s when you get to Chapter 3, Growth in the World System that the most important ideas in the book are laid out. The “standard” world model and its feedback loops have been explained and to my eyes it seems sensible and scientifically prudent.  They include energy, resources, capital, population, and food. All this is put together and it’s clear that, exact details aside, the general behaviour of the model leads to the end of growth and the collapse of industrial civilization before 2070. They run a series of alternatives, some of them patently nuts, such as limitless resources, perfect birth control, zero population growth etc., and the behaviour of the model is more or less the same: collapse.  As they say about the graph of it all (figure 35), “let us begin by assuming that there will be no great changes in human values nor in the functioning of the global population – capital system as it has operated for the last one hundred years”.  It’s 40 years later and no, we didn’t change how we operate. Looking at figure 35 it’s clear that by the early 21^st century resources are declining exponentially and after a while population crashes. And that’s exactly what’s happening.

Afternoon watch, 1430.

We’re going in towards the coast at 140 deg, trying to pick up some coastal wind. We just saw the yacht Velsheda, on the bow about 2 miles off. It looks like she’s on the way to Las Palmas to fuel up on her way to the St Bart’s Bucket regatta on 24^th March. The Bucket is a tremendous gathering of the SuperClass for a 3 day race round the island. The world’s largest sailing yachts, millions of dollars worth of some of the most advanced materials and design available. If only NASA could still afford technology like that, we’d be colonizing Mars.

It’s ironic that at this moment I’m reading “the basic behaviour mode of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse”. I wonder if the authors foresaw what the peak would look like and whether they imagined the degree of excess. Back in 1971 the Super Yacht industry was in its infancy. Oh baby, look at ‘em now.

Sunday 6^th March 2011

I finished Limits this morning. The last chapter is called The State of Global Equilibrium: they foresaw that the way out of our predicament was to initiate a world culture of stable equilibrium. Boy, it’s lucky that’s what we did, huh? Oh no, wait, that’s not what we did. It’s as if the politicians, business titans, et al, who read this book in 1972, if they read it, plainly decided that just because some folks from MIT with IQs twice their own thought they knew what they were talking about, they knew better. Yeah.

We might have had a shot if we’d listened. In 1950 the population of Africa was around 221 million and India was around 330 million. Even by the 1970s it would have been manageable. But it would have required a fundamental and rapid shift in 5000 years of religion, superstition, cultural beliefs and assorted mumbo jumbo.  Maybe it would have taken a kind of cognition of which humans aren’t capable -yet. Even harder, we would have had to persuade the Corporations, who were just getting their teeth into the idea of “global” (read the advantages of authoritarian labour management), and for whom growth is a religion on a par with anything the deserts of the Middle East have inflicted on us, to understand that infinite growth inside a closed system is unrealistic. Or to put it another way, silly.

So we ignored everything the good MIT folks who wrote The Limits to Growth told us. And nothing bad happened. No population problems, no resource shortages, no pollution issues or climate disturbances. Ha! Stupid MIT people.

I’m sitting next to Matilda in the citizen’s service bureau of the US Embassy on this cold grey morning, 0900 sharp. Emergency appointment. Matilda, who looks to be about 3 months old, is getting ready to nurse because she’s been a bit cranky. I didn’t like to ask mum what Matilda is doing at this hour in line here, but it’s probably the same thing as me: Matilda’s mum and I have forgotten to renew our passports. I travel a good deal so this sort of idiocy is unforgivable, but here I am waiting for my Emergency Passport, the last thing before I become an Ocean Vagrant. Good luck little Matilda, your generation’s going to need it. As soon as you can walk, run. It’s what I’m doing. I’m running.

Luckily, since I’ve been sick these last 3 months with one of those chest infections only the English climate can induce, there hasn’t been much to add on the climate Armageddon front at nickblack.com. I’ve decided to take a break and write a log – with a pencil no less. Hence this journal.

Yes of course I keep up with the daily news on ClimateProgress.org and all other channels through which scientists, activists and writers try, with patience that would humble the Dalai Lama, to point out we are right on the edge. I notice even Lester Brown has given up on his Plan B format. His new book is World on the Edge. Get it?

But  no one’s listening. Radio Doom never made the big time. What we forgot was that the general consumer is not pleased to be told their global mall is in danger of running out of cheap plastic stuff made from Oil in the slave farms of China and her satellites. Oil’s back over $100 and the Saudis said they had more than they really had. Food, generally understood to be fossil fuel turned into processed nutrients for the masses, is getting up there. Now finally the Arab world is taking notice.

In global terms the Arab world is the second billion, living on about $2 a day (with the obvious exception of all those Arab oligarchs who aren’t). The second billion are starting to get hungry. The first billion, in Africa and parts of India, would like to be demonstrating too, but they’re tired. You know how it is: the constant diarrhoea, the stomach cramps, the flies, watching your youngest child drop from your shrunken breast, unable to even suckle anymore. It makes demonstrating seem like too much effort. They would but it’s hard to get the energy up.

So it’s time for the 2^nd billion to make a fuss. Life got that bit too hard in Tunisia, Egypt and the rest of the Middle Eastern kleptocracies.  The kleptocracies that have been supported all this time by the good governments of the West.  The West seems strangely less enthusiastic about democracy in those “other” countries. Bugger democracy: too unstable, let’s go for stability and if a few troublemakers are tortured to death in nameless dungeons for speaking out against the regime far from the prying eyes of the media, well…it’s all for the greater good isn’t it? No.

As I lay in bed this bleak English winter, nursing my lungs through the plague, reading the reports of ecological and financial horror I didn’t see anything surprising in the sense of a breakthrough. Now the 2^nd billion is on the edge, the 3^rd won’t be far behind. Next year’s Foreign Affairs’ map of failed states is going to be a killer. Now that the Republicans are back in charge of Congress climate’s off the menu. Burn it up! We’re not going to quit until we’ve burned every last fossil in every last fuel. Grab that passport and run.

Tuesday, 15^th February

These last few days of packing and worrying are over. Well, except for waking up at 7 not 6, but still managed to get the train on its way to Stansted Airport, beloved of low budget travellers. There’s always a feeling I get when I’m escaping from the consumer zoo, looking out on the grey wasteland of north London redevelopment – like it must feel to escape from the gulag, only with billboards on the escape route. There’s desperation in the air. Buy you bastards, how much more advertising can you stand before your nervous system implodes?  Join us for tonight’s Style Awards on channel NewsCorp. All your favourite celebrities will be there. Cheryl Cole will be there, and Emma! They’re your friends. Who are we when there’s nothing left to buy?

On the way to Sardinia, as I watch Europe slide by beneath me, I start to feel like Dmitri Orlov. It’s a strange feeling watching your civilization go crazy. One of the commentariat in Doom World noticed how more and more ecologists and resource geeks are quitting. We’ve failed, miserably. All the oil conferences, ocean conferences, climate conferences: nothing.

Yes, there’s some wind farms and some consultants making a living selling businesses clever light bulbs, but it’s the context that’s missing. We didn’t understand it wasn’t about what was really happening to their planet. It was about changing the religion of corporate consumerism, the colossus bestride the globe. It wasn’t a resource problem, it was a psychological problem: our version of the future doesn’t look like a shampoo ad. So no one wanted to know, because it didn’t look like as much fun as what was happening on TV – which is after all the arbiter of reality. So we left it a bit late, and now the effects of our “lifestyle”, if you can use the word “style” in reference to what we’ve built, is catching up with us, or running us over. Millions of square miles of little boxes each with 3 TVs. It’s not exactly Minas Tirith is it?

I’m going to the ocean, our shattered ocean. I’ve seen the ads for life in the new empty mega cities of China. Something about how much fun it is to live in close proximity to 40 million. No thanks.

We pick up the car at Alghero Airport and start the drive across Sardinia. We both sense it at the same time: the mood shift to Mediterranean. Olive trees, vineyards, old farmhouses and ancient churches. And that blue sky. It feels like home for humans. The road winds its way through valleys I’ll never know the name of, but I want the life there. I want to sit in one of those old farmhouses, in the kitchen, eating dinner with an old lady as the evening comes on. It’s as close to eternity as we’re going to get.

By evening we arrive at Porto Rotondo marina to find the boat. Porto Rotondo must be bikini heaven in the summer, but now it’s deserted, not a superyacht in sight. The boat is a Lagoon 440 which we’re taking across the Atlantic. My purpose is to disappear onto the ocean, to make my way as best as I can back to the wild. I despair of my civilization and there are some levels of despair that can only be treated with thousands of square miles of empty ocean. Albert Camus said the only interesting philosophical question was suicide, but Albert’s been dead for a while bless him. Individual suicide is nothing, what’s the response to species suicide?

Hey, what if it’s not part of Jesus’ plan, or Mohammed’s plan, or the Fairy Queen’s or whatever supernatural psychopath is your favourite? What if it’s just us? Just us and our mistakes and 3 billion people living on nothing and the ocean dying? Which is the purpose of this voyage: what exactly is the appropriate response when you’ve tried filmmaking and writing and yelling on the sidewalk doesn’t seem realistic?

Wednesday 16^th February, 2011

Evening. After a day spent fixing this and that on the boat, we’re fuelling up and getting ready to go in the morning. I’m still amazed at the ghostliness of Porto Rotondo. We managed to find the one restaurant in town open all year. The La Pinta is one of those places you always dream of coming back to one day. A tiny corner of civilization hiding away, the inside is like a homely galleon, all wood beams and old photos and wine bottles everywhere. We were the only people in the place and as I sat eating my superb Ravioli and drinking good wine I thought how easy it would be to refuse to see it. Surely it’s a matter of perspective, a matter of scale. But I don’t really believe it. As we walked back to the boat the deserted weirdness of the place crept back, and it seemed an eerie backdrop to the numbers running through my mind. I imagined places like this, dedicated to fun, deserted and trashed, the good times gone. This is what the end of growth looks like? Sovereign defaults, population crashes, food shortages, civil wars, diasporas…The decline of global capitalism will leave ruin in its wake. After 10 years of living and breathing the ideas of how it would look, here it is and it’s stranger than any of us imagined. Are we really going to settle down into quiet “transition towns”, the corporate lawyers becoming carpenters in a post industrial idyll? All these superyacht harbours recycled into quaint fishing ports. No, it’s going to be much wilder than that. Every dream of excess exceeded and the crash will bring people to their knees.

We have believed in growth for so long, it’s part of the grand old religion of classic economics. And a religion it is, in that it relies on supernatural agency to balance the book. The “invisible hand of the market”  is the same as inshallah or the lord moves in mysterious ways. But the real demon is the externality. Artificial externality is the shorthand for all the things that Corporations don’t have to deal with, or pay for. All the ruined land, people, dispersed resources and waste – not our problem, it’s the public’s problem. Now apparently corporate debt is an externality.

It’s taken a while but I’m now certain that we are faced with a stark choice: The end of the corporation or the end of our species. The artificial externality is the last and most extreme example of magical thinking this species can afford. There is no such thing as externality in a closed system. The corporation as form of social organization cannot exist in a system governed by ecological laws.

Thursday 17^th February, 2011

We left Porto Rotondo at first light and made our way through the La Maddalena archipelago in the rain. By the time we’re at the Bonifacio Strait it’s getting sunny and we relax into the first day, keeping an eye out for the commercial shipping. This is one of those ancient waterways and sitting on the fly bridge I think about the vessels that have come this way before me: Minoan, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Carthaginian, who knows how many men have looked out at these islands and watched in the night.

Friday 18^th February 2011

The night passed, lights of cargo ships going by and then the dawn came up quiet. My watch ended at 3am. Sitting out there my mind goes back and forth. What am I doing out here? On watch there

are no distractions. No books, no music, just you. Not far from me, a few hundred miles down there on the North African coast, people’s lives are in turmoil, just like mine. It’s easy to think that all the mistakes are yours alone, how it’s all about what went wrong and the mistakes you’ve made, but it looks like there’s a lot of it about. The rage in the Arab world is the rage we should all feel. Theirs is the last colonial war, ours is the first war against the corporate colonialism.

The problem with having the Corporation as the dominant social and political organization is that it forces on us the psychology of the psychopath and legitimizes it: no empathy, no concern for others, no relationships not built on mutual exploitation, and money the only measurement of worth.  Would you have people like that in your life? At your dinner table? Then why do we put up with it from the businesses we buy things from? Montaigne’s friend La Boetie asked the same question: why do we tolerate tyranny?

Saturday 19^th February 2011 No wind, motoring between Menorca and Mallorca looking for a breath of wind. Or current. Something to make the boat move. The night passed as we motored just half a mile from the cliffs of northern Mallorca, the millionaires safe in their beds in Deia and all the other little towns nestled in the cliffs. I was off watch at 0600 and stayed up to watch the dawn. We’re on our way into Ibiza for fuel. I was young in Ibiza a lifetime ago.

The corporate pathology has impoverished 99% of the world’s population, squandered the majority of its resources on private luxury, and spoiled or poisoned most of the land and ocean. There is a religious assumption amongst “economists”- whoever they are – that if communism was a failure, then capitalism must be the only answer. As if only these two systems were viable choices. What about a system that attempts to use resources of both people and the earth with as much intelligence as we can muster? A system with no throw away, no convenience, no “one time” use, no extremes of inequality.

But there, I’ve fallen into the “we” thing. We aren’t making any rational decisions. It’s not so simple. What do the fundamentalist dominion Christian capitalists have in common with Northern European secular rationalists, or Islamic fundamentalists. Not much. All these belief systems are competing for power and our attention, and are in most instances contradictory. But they share one thing: they are completely at odds with the laws of ecology (possible exception N. European rationalist). Because all of them were born in an era when the earth seemed infinite, and its resources inexhaustible. Even in the 1600s at the beginning of the corporation as an arm of Royal hegemony, the world population was perhaps ½ billion and the atmospheric carbon was stable at 280ppm. Not only are the superstitions of these religions hopelessly obsolete as a way of organizing ourselves, they are now threatening our survival.

Monday 20^th February 2011

If our current clearly unsustainable economic system seems to be destroying itself (and us with it), what might replace it? What sort of path might get us from here to there? Given the current parlous state of the world economy, with the west flirting with bankruptcy, the Middle East and Africa increasingly unstable, it’s looking as if we are choosing our historical favourites: War, (faux) Colonialism, Tribalism and Famine.

Despite the outpouring of sanctimonious joy by the democratic marketing department, I remain deeply sceptical about the prospect of Middle Eastern democracy. Older and fouler forces are at work. The Muslim world is in turmoil because of population overshoot and resource depletion, not because of twitter. When a be-burkaed student tells the earnest BBC 12 year old blonde correspondent that she wants freedom I have no idea what she’s talking about: freedom from a 30 year old regime or a 1500 year old one? Does she want the freedom to date anyone she likes? Or the freedom to enjoy a standard of living her culture has done nothing to develop? Hard to say.

Monday 21^st February 2011

10am: Quite a night. The portside genoa car exploded off the track, ripping up the deck and the jammer. Since the mainsail track is broken we can’t lower the main. We really need to get this rig into a harbour soon. We’re tacking and heading up toward the Spanish coast so the fetch on the waves is less. The wind is still west 6. And now I’m calling MV Sichem Palace on the vhf to ask them not to run us down, since I can’t slow down or tack.

1.15pm: So, what path might we choose if we were  a rational species? It looks like it’s now all but impossible to avoid a period of chaotic readjustment as the US loses its ascendency (or does it?), and China keeps up its move into world hegemon. Perhaps this is not the way it works out. Perhaps China collapses at George Friedman at Stratfor thinks. And of course there’s the problem of China’s drought, so perhaps SE Asia is more delicate than we think.

William Gibson may have been closer than anyone guessed at the time. If the US public affairs continue to decline, and it’s difficult to see why they won’t, it will inevitably lose influence and leave the field open, if not to China then to the failed states and mafias now gaining influence and military might across the world. The same goes for most of Europe, with the possible exception of Germany. We know from studying the collapse of older cultures that when the state loses influence, it is the shadow economy and its violence that takes over.

In the midst of all this it’s good to ask what the SuperClass is up to.

Let’s begin by defining the SuperClass. Because of the huge returns to Capital and the declining returns to Labour over the last 3 decades and because of the timorous tax regimes of the developed world (oooh, we better not tax them or they’ll go elsewhere – like where? Rwanda? ) we have the most extreme inequalities since feudal times.

One of the primary reasons for this is with the advent of computing and the economies of writing and selling programming. Once written, it costs virtually nothing to produce another copy. Likewise with the advent of electronic trading, it became trivial to make an order for a million shares as it was for 10. This is called scalability – or a scale for short.

SCALE IS THE CRACK OF CAPITALISM.

Back in the old days before capitalism discovered scale we had the rich. Obnoxious, smug and with more than a hint of amour propre, but bearable, just.

Now we have something else. Wealth so extreme it’s pharaonic. This is not some “kill the rich and eat their young” polemic. We’ve created a class of individual beyond the normal meaning of oligarchy – it’s virtually speciation. It’s the SuperClass.

The first thing to talk about is SuperWorld

The infrastructure of the developed world, with a few notable exceptions like Germany, is in dire shape. Take a look at reports like the UK’s ICE or the US reports on the state of freeways and bridges. The new cities of Asia will end up looking either looking like ghost towns or half finished ruins (Stratfor’s prediction of China collapse), like Kangbashir, Erenhot, Dantu, and Zhengzhow New District. In the developing world it would be interesting to know what percentage of the population lives under plastic sheeting or corrugated tin.

But there is a new Hyper infrastructure in place. It forms a virtual Super state consisting of privatized pieces of various nations, linked by discreet corridors: private planes and airports, superyachts, luxury trains and cars. It has its own banking system and is largely protected from the tax regimes of the world most people inhabit. It is SuperWorld.

I spend quite a bit of time on the ocean and in marinas so I’m well acquainted with the super yacht business. 2 days ago for instance I had to pull into Ibiza for fuel. Now, I was there as one of those 20 year old hipsters who colonised the place in the 60s, but the place is unrecognizable. My mouth hung open as we pulled into the old harbour.

Yes, 40 years is a long time, but this was like Invasion of the Developers, George Romero doing night of the zombie architecture.  The old town completely themeparked and the other side looked like Monaco, which is no coincidence. We pulled into a new German marina development called Marina Botufoch (no, really) to get our diesel. Opposite was line upon line of James Bond boats, all with that giant suppository design like the Sunseeker Predator. They’re almost a pastiche of themselves. The point is that this entire “luxury” industry uses vast resources for essentially no utility.

Note: Apologies for the spelling on the previous version of this. I uploaded it in a rush as we left St Martin. My bad.

“I attended court today to offer my support for Julian Assange of Wikileaks on a point of principle. “In the face of a concerted attempt to shut him down and after a decade since 9/11 that has been characterised by manipulation of the media by the authorities, the information released by Wikileaks is a refreshing glimpse into an increasingly opaque world.” The Frontline Club was founded seven years ago to stand for independence and transparency. Recent informal canvassing of many of our more than 1,500 members at the Frontline Club suggests almost all are supportive of our position. I am suspicious of the personal charges that have been made against Mr Assange and hope that this will be properly resolved by the courts. Certainly no credible charges have been brought regarding the leaking of the information itself. I can confirm that Mr Assange has spent much of the last several months working from our facilities at the Frontline Club. Earlier today I offered him an address for bail. 7pm. Tuesday 7 December. —

Everyone stop laughing now. We tried laughing Bush off and that wasn’t a roaring success.