23 Comments

1. 

   jupiviv on August 11, 2026 at 9:30 am

   “Abu Dhabi Bateen Airport, EMIRATES has broken both its highest Maximum (48.3C / 118.9F) and Highest Minimum (36.4C). temperature records. Even hotter night in Abu Dhabi Cornice: Min 38.2C!”

   Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
   In a strange city lying alone
   Far down within the dim West,
   Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
   Have gone to their eternal rest.
   There shrines and palaces and towers
   (Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
   Resemble nothing that is ours.
   Around, by lifting winds forgot,
   Resignedly beneath the sky
   The melancholy waters lie.

   – ‘The City in the Sea’, Edgar Allan Poe

   • 

     Cassandra on August 11, 2026 at 12:06 pm

     APPLAUSE!

     • 

       Panopticon on August 11, 2026 at 12:31 pm

       Some say the world will end in fire,
       Some say in ice.
       From what I’ve tasted of desire.
       I hold with those who favor fire…

       [Robert Frost]

2. 

   astro_ape on August 11, 2026 at 12:08 pm

   Re: the last article

   Michael Ash and I propose a policy to advance energy security both in the short run and the long run. The key to long-run energy security is to move to clean and renewable energy sources that do not have to pass through chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz and are not vulnerable to price manipulations by corporate cartels and petrostates. In the short run, the key is to make higher fossil fuel prices family-friendly by recycling the money straight back to the public.
   Here’s how it works:

   (1) Set a timetable for the fossil fuel phasedown. We propose a 90 percent reduction over 25 years, with the remaining 10 percent needed to achieve a net-zero economy to be met by improved carbon sequestration.

   (2) Require corporations that bring fossil fuels into the economy via extraction or imports to surrender one permit for each ton of carbon dioxide that will be released when that fuel is burned, with the total number of permits declining each year in accordance with the timetable.

   (3) Distribute non-tradable permits via quarterly auctions, where their price is set by supply and demand. These become part of the cost of supplying fossil fuels, and most or all of this cost is passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices.

   (4) Return 75 percent of the auction revenue to the public as equal per person payments called energy security cashbacks. These will protect the purchasing power of working families during the phasedown, more than offsetting the impact of higher fossil fuel prices.

   (5) Recycle 25 percent of the revenue to state and local governments in a Resilient Communities Fund. This will protect their own purchasing power and strengthen their ability to invest in climate resilience.

   so they just propose degrowth – do you think they actually believe it achievable? like – oh I know lets just reduce 60-70% of primary energy in 25 years – see what happens….

   • 

     Survivalist on August 11, 2026 at 12:41 pm

     It’s hard to believe those people get paid to think. They should be remustered to a Central African cobalt mine.I’m not gonna lose much sleep when these idiots starve out.

   • 

     Panopticon on August 11, 2026 at 12:48 pm

     This is what academics produce when they are too narrowly confined to their silos, Astro_Ape.

     They may as well advocate solving our financial problems by transmuting base metals to gold.

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkZFuKHXa7w

     • 

       astro_ape on August 11, 2026 at 1:13 pm

       it really takes 2 days of research into degrowth vs green growth debates to completely abandon this proposal… I bet you these people are making a couple of hundred thousand dollars per year at their jobs 😐

       • 

         Truth Wizard on August 11, 2026 at 1:54 pm

         Yeah absolutely.
         Smiling in the stupid nightmare.

   • 

     Robert S. on August 11, 2026 at 5:28 pm

     I’m not sure what the guy was smoking when he wrote the article you refer to, but I would not count de-growth as “out-of-hand.” Them neo-commies with their anti-capitalist rhetoric are just not making a good case for it. Over here in the States the state of glutton is through the roof. Americans in the collective can easily reduce their primary energy consumption by over fifty percent without drastically changing their lifestyles. As to economic de-growth, looking at the world politics and the state of many economies, “de-growth” may just happen all on its own. Many economists and wall street investors are already predicting that. It’s just a matter for us little fish to get used to the idea.

     • 

       Panopticon on August 11, 2026 at 6:04 pm

       Robert S, we can make a case that some parts of the world, like UK, much of EU and Japan, are already in de facto contraction, with this reality obscured by rampant debt accrual.

       Global crude oil and condensate almost certainly peaked in 2018, with the brief 2026 exceedance caused by a surge of compensatory Saudi production just before war broke out. Production of Vaclav Smil’s four material pillars of civilisation – steel, cement, ammonia, and plastics – is flat or declining.

       In other words, we are already entering de-growth. As you suggest, it will never be orchestrated.

3. 

   Bob Shaw on August 11, 2026 at 1:42 pm

   Pic above of Puerto Rican drought with people using 2 liter, half-gallon, and one gallon jugs.

   How many trips do they make back and forth to get sufficient minimal water? Just barely flushing a toilet with used water poured into the bowl takes a gallon.

   Maybe it is already too late to buy 5 gallon jugs anywhere on the island. Remember 10 gallons weighs 82 lbs. Got a wheelbarrow, wagon, or 2 wheel dolly to move water home? Or go you have a strong back?

   Bob Shaw Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

   • 

     Panopticon on August 11, 2026 at 3:24 pm

     Bob, a lot of Puerto Ricans have large, rain-fed cisterns as back-up, but obviously that isn’t much help if Atlantic windshear from the burgeoning El Nino is shredding your tropical waves and storms before they can get going.

     • 

       Bob Shaw on August 11, 2026 at 4:35 pm

       Pan, from google:
       ——-
       There is no official island-wide census or exact statistical percentage tracking how many households in Puerto Rico own water cisterns or backup storage tanks. However, reports highlighting the island’s frequent water crises and poverty rates (where over 40% of the population lives below the poverty line) note that owning a private cistern or backup tank is a costly investment out of reach for a substantial portion of the population.
       Most residents rely primarily on the centralized Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA) system, supplemented by individual coping measures during outages.

       Context of Water Storage in Puerto Rico Centralized Reliance:
       The vast majority of urban and suburban households connect directly to the public water grid managed by PRASA.

       Vulnerable Demographics: Many low-income families and apartment dwellers lack the space or funds for private cisterns, forcing them to manually haul buckets or rely on emergency water distributions during dry spells and rationing.
       —–
       Me: So, roughly 40 to 50 % with buckets and jugs, rising ever higher if the drought and heat continues.

4. 

   leaf on August 11, 2026 at 3:21 pm

   Shared on my regular C&E plug on substack:

   Macro-plastic gets to see a new part of the world now that the first China-UK arctic shipping route has opened (micro-plastic has already taken up residence)!

   Car propagandist-turned-farmer is forced to put two and two together!

   All this, and more of what makes you mumble silently to yourself “when will technological-industrial civilization finally burn itself out before it’s too late,” over at the Climate and Economy Newsletter!

   • 

     Panopticon on August 11, 2026 at 3:27 pm

     Leaf, pithy. 😂

     I must admit I like Jeremy Clarkson, but that is fair comment.

   • 

     Panopticon on August 11, 2026 at 3:29 pm

     And thank you for the plug. I tried posting on Substack for a while, but I was/am too time-constrained to keep it going.

5. 

   Bob Shaw on August 11, 2026 at 4:22 pm

   ME: I wonder if the Columbian quake has wrecked the water infrastructure? Seems very likely.

   That would help explain some of the looting. My guess is any bottled water and 5 gallon water jugs are high priority when the wet bulb heat index is sky high.
   ——-
   From Google:

   Authorities ‌in Cali, Armenia and Manizales announced curfews, with Cali’s mayor saying threats of looting had forced him to deploy police and military personnel to the streets. De La Espriella promised 1,000 additional security personnel for the city.
   ——-
   If the electric grid is mostly down too, then we could see more people die from heat stroke and dehydration than the numbers buried in the rubble.

   Just terrible, horrific conditions…

6. 

   Heather B on August 11, 2026 at 4:49 pm

   Is it really a loss of the arctic ice report when we know where this is going. We already know our fate and we know the ending. We know the colorado river is collapsing so if they stop reporting how many feet to dead pool does it even matter now. The last report was 10 feet to dead pool. The fact that they stopped putting it in the news tells me they know its coming and they can’t stop it. Just like arctic ice collapse has been happening for years. If you stop reporting it its the final death blow is close. I am not even going to bother reading the latest eis report. They have also stated they can’t release more water into Colorado for the wildlife or fish why. They don’t have any extra water to go down stream. Welcome to the horror show of extinction.

   • 

     Robert S. on August 11, 2026 at 5:34 pm

     Hah, yeh. It is like the old story; If a bomb is dropped in Gaza killing lots of children, and the Times of Israel was not there to report it, was a bomb really dropped in Gaza that killed a lot of children?

7. 

   rob on August 11, 2026 at 6:47 pm

   AI melts AI: as in Arctic ice, destroying its reflectivity. as AI algos are built for profit maximization, they will continue to evolve towards energy-intensive, ie fossil-fuel-based solutions, to shed workers, as the tariff regimes fund governments so as to enable continued tax relief to corporations and to make up for the falling tax receipts from a workforce with falling wages and gig-type-constrained work hours.

   While the Furor is mocked for raising tariffs on every trading partner, citing their use of slave labor, no one has bothered to mention the flood of fdi into those same countries to enable prices low enuf (the I-phone being the prime example) to create a mass-market for what would otherwise have been a niche market for luxury goods affordable only to the well-heeled.

   The shipping costs are now eating into those profits, hence the Arctic route which breaks up sea ice, and deposits black residue on the remaining ice, diminishing its reflectivity and thereby increasing the planet’s energy imbalance at the exact point in time when it has more CO2 and methane in its atmosphere than at any time in human history.

   The dynamic operating in front of our noses that has accelerated since the turn of the century has been the family joules necessary to generate to get each human through a normal day. The only corollary to this dynamic to balance the equation is less humans. As the energy consumption per person doubles, the number of humans must of necessity halve.

   Starting with Covid, that equation has also been exhibited on an ongoing, planetary basis, and AI is set, and in fact already is, accelerating both processes: energy consumption continues to climb while greater swathes of the population are decimated. AI is like War and Capital: it exists only for itself, as evidenced by the nonlinear nature of its energy consumption, putting its own needs, again, like War &Capital, who it is designed to serve, above even the planet’s, which appear nowhere in its formulations.

   There is no “cloud”, there are only machines. Interconnected vast arrays of machines programming themselves to sustain their exponential growth with human drones programmed to serve their needs while simultaneously, like USAid, starving millions of their fellow humans to death in order to keep feeding the burgeoning Death Machine Cult of Effortless “Existence”, which is translating sooner than we ever imagined, into extinction.

   • 

     Panopticon on August 12, 2026 at 4:02 pm

     Rob, thank you for the stylish rant… “family joules.” 😂

8. 

   Lyndie Malan on August 12, 2026 at 9:28 pm

   Hello Justin, I am retiring in two months. No more listening to idiot guests on ‘the future’ – I can take no more. I stopped interacting with FB when I refused to join in the hatred of Jews and Israel (the ONLY country in the world that has increased their tree cover every year for decades, despite the incendiary balloons being launched from Gaza at their forests in S. Israel – oh, don’t even let me get started!!!) I have also resigned from the Fire Brigade – I will just fight alone at our property – no longer have any sympathy for the jetsetters who want old, fat me to put on my uniform and go and fight to save their mansions while they jet set around the world! Don’t even get me started!!!)

   Thank you for your work, as always. And regards to your island and family.

   • 

     Panopticon on August 13, 2026 at 5:57 am

     You are welcome, Lyndie. I hope retirement proves a tonic!