Brilliant summary!

IMO, we got to this point thinking that “when things really get bad, humans will find and implement a fix”. Well, things really are bad now and this is NOT what is happening.

Australia is the perfect example: the continent is on fire, but they’re steadfastly the largest coal exporter on the planet. I’ll have some hope if/when they ditch those leaders — and that leads to a change in national behavior.

The last civilizational collapse was at the end of the Bronze Age (often shorthanded as “sea peoples”) around 1170–80 BC. Post Sea Peoples, there was a dark age of nearly a millennium. And the world was still livable through that period. Agriculture continued to work. There were still green fields and animals to hunt, fish in the ocean. That collapse was only the civilization around the Mediterranean. Now it’s the entire planet. I’m still hoping that we might get it together. There’s still a temptation to think like a survivalist: where can I go to be personally safe? But if everyone does that, we all die. On a larger scale, if nations all do that, yep, we all die.