[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s sometimes further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

(The wood-burning stove we installed this year.)

Positive Things

COP28 has created a loss and damage fund. Climate cookbooks are now a thing. A Nature Restoration Law is making its way through the European Parliament (opposed by right-wingers for no good reason other than Being Evil). And there’s a Solar Canal being built in Arizona.

Correspondence

“So I had a bit of a shock during the recent cold mornings when I came down and found no lights or kettle working - power cut? I thought instantly of you, and was kicking myself for not taking whatever advice you’d given for this situation. It turned out that an electric heater had tripped a switch overnight, so it was easily fixed, but I’d like to have a brief summary of what can be done to cope with power outages in cold weather.”

I’ve written a full issue on this before: coping with winter blackouts. The briefest summary is: make sure you have a way to generate heat that doesn’t depend on electricity. Gas heating usually depends on having electrical power of some kind, so it’s not a way around it. Either have a generator that you can plug into your house’s power supply, or have a solid-fuel fireplace or stove - the latter being better. We installed a wood-burning stove during this year (see picture above), and it is wonderful.

“How confident are you in either of the climate change outcomes - cold weather if the Gulf Stream stops working, or hot weather if things continue on trend?”

Well. I’m not confident of hot weather here; that scenario is mostly mild, damp and windy in Ireland, and the major concerns will be storms, flooding, and sea-level rise. I am getting a bit concerned that sea-level rise will happen faster and/or more suddenly than we’re expecting; there are a lot of ice shelves falling, glaciers melting and so forth which could feed to very fast feedback loops. The idea of a lot of the ice on Greenland and Antarctica melting quickly is becoming more and more of a possibility, and even if it takes centuries to melt all of it, 10% or so would still be devastating worldwide.

In terms of sticking a finger in the air, as it were, my current guess is about 65% in the direction of ocean currents shutting down, and cooling Ireland to be like the Norwegian coast, and 35% to a continued trend of warmer, wetter, stormier weather. And I think we’ll see one of those within the next 15-20 years - probably some warmer-wetter-stormier first anyway, and then the cooling. And even with that cooling, of course, we’ll still have more storms, flooding (if it doesn’t fall as snow) and sea-level rise.

My confidence that climate will change is 100%; it’s already, perfectly evidently, doing so.

“COP28 is in session as I write, and there were some very positive-sounding bits of news as it started. What do you think?”

I am not impressed. I mean, basically, look at this gobshite. Or take a look at the number of fossil fuel lobbyists there. It’s not really surprising that the Climate Change Conference has been overtaken by people who benefit from delaying action as long as possible, but I wish it was more generally recognised. There can be as many optimistic statements as they want to put out, but the reality is that very little at all is being done to slow climate change; we’re pretty much already at the 1.5C increase they previously hoped to be below, 3.5C is more realistic at this stage, and we could be looking at 5C.

Recycling

Cee recently visited a recycling plant, talked extensively to the people running it, and has some advice for the actual process of putting stuff in recycling bins:

If you want to know if you're doing the right thing with your recycling bin, the people in the know suggest "If we were to come to your house and tip the green bin out onto your kitchen floor, would it be a serious issue for you?"  So:

Does your bin have pools of wet in it? Having the dregs of liquids from cans or bottles or even water from washing them and pitching them straight into the bin can ruin cardboard or paper recyclables.

Are there food traces, blood splatter or pet food residue?  Gross; people have to handle these things and they're really not paid enough to risk infections.  They don't need to be washed like dishes but they do need to be rinsed out. 

Are there bags containing other things inside? Even if those things are recyclable, the machines and belts that sort materials cannot deal with bags of things. So don't put recyclables in bags; they'll potentially just cause issues in the system, or be lost as useful recycling.  Empty your bags of collected recycling out directly into the recycling bin.

Cardboard will be handled most efficiently if it’s flattened. 

Packaging like cardboard with glued on or built in plastic "windows" and plastic shiny films to make them look better are the most difficult to recycle because they are composites and can't easily be separated by a mechanical, efficient process.  Tetra Paks are made of card, foil and film and need to be handled separately in a recycle stream - they are more sustainable to make but a bit of a pain to recycle. Right now it's not a clear choice as to whether they or plastic bottles are better. 

The mantra goes reduce, reuse, recycle - It's meant to mean that you should reduce your waste in the first place by choosing sensibly or even foregoing some purchases; reuse where you can't; and recycle only as a last resort. But most people treat recycle as the primary pillar. Regarding packaging, try to choose products with the least actual packaging, then the most reusable type (glass jars for yogurt and milk if you can afford it)  and last the type that can recycle the best.   

Also do not put cloth or clothes for recycling into your domestic bin, it just gets contaminated in the process and is worthless for recycling. 

News Items & Media

The unreliability of seasonal weather is having effects on agriculture in general, but it’s worse for seed growers. ‘No normal seasons anymore’ details some of these effects. Most food producers no longer have their own seeds - even grain growers tend to ship out everything that’s harvested and buy in new seed to plant. Seed production mostly just runs in the background - when not controlled by entities like Monsanto - but that looks like it’s now changing. Monsanto (and what competitors still exist) are saying nothing, but presumably the same issues affect them.

One of the major objections brought up against wind turbines is that they kill birds. This has never seemed particularly realistic to me - especially compared to what fossil-fuel burning power generation does to wildlife - but it’s now been demonstrated that wind turbines do not kill birds in any significant numbers. Annoyingly, this is one of the claims that are touted on signs all over rural Ireland by idiots opposing them, along with claims that they’ll harm water sources. It’s particularly grating when they appear next to “Protect Our Native Bogs” signs, wherein the protection is so they can be cut as turf.

Not only are wildfire burning down houses and other buildings all across North America, but the systems that should help wildfire victims don’t. Banks and insurance are mostly to blame.

Closing

The Positive Things listing is back above. If you’ve more for it - and I’m particularly interested in stories about local or community success in dealing with or taking steps toward preventing climate change - let me know! I might be able to roll out an issue over the holidays, but it’s more likely that I’ll next be writing in January. We’ll see what’s come up by then. Keep warm!

[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) on Patreon or Ko-fi. Merchandise is also available. Major research contributions in this and all issues (and writing in this one!) by Cee.]

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s sometimes further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

(Flooded Boathouse, Charleville, Co. Offaly. Arguably, flooded is the proper nature of a boathouse.)

Floods & History

Ireland has a lot of floods. That’s always been the case; some of our coastal towns have a number per year, and that’s just how they are. Cork is the major example here; the city has had floods on average twice a year since the 1840s. However, the flooding in places already prone to it is getting worse, and places that have never really had to cope with flooding before are experiencing it for the first time.

This situation has been building for about two decades now. 2008 saw major flooding all across the country in August, 2009 had it in November. There was massive and indeed dramatic flooding in Dublin and other parts of Leinster in October 2011. 2012 had flooding right through the autumn and winter, with intermittent dry-ish periods. 2015 into 2016 had a “storm train” in December and January, which had flooding and high winds, including Storm Desmond. Storm Ciara in 2020 brought more floods and high winds, and now we have her 2023 counterpart Storm Ciarán which looks to wreak some havoc on the south coast this week, in the wake of heavy rain over the last ten days. That included Storm Babet, although it hit mainland Europe harder than Ireland.

Even before Ciarán’s arrival, Newry has been flooded, and a pretty solid looking old bridge in Louth has been taken out. The rail line (which is part of the route from Dublin to Belfast) is “closed until further notice” there. There’s been unprecedented flooding in Rosslare in Wexford (a coastal area with Ireland’s major port after Dublin). Cork, of course, has had floods three evenings in a row. There are a whole parcel of weather warnings around, amidst complaints that the warnings for Babet weren’t enough.

Personal & Housing Changes

In dealing with flooding, there are a few things people can do at an individual level.

The first question is whether your house has flooded before. If it has, it’s almost certainly going to do so again. The absolute best thing to do is move out, headed inland to places that have not flooded. If you stay put, the best you’ll ever manage is to mitigate the effects. Any place that has flooded before will flood again (I don’t know if this is true outside Ireland, to be fair, but it’s not a chance I’d take). The second best thing to do is to follow the other steps below.

First up, you need to assess how your immediate area is for floods. This isn’t easy. Look at maps (Google maps are pretty decent for this), and see if there are any watercourses nearby - even small streams. Canals are not so bad, because they’re built to let water out through locks; it takes a lot of rain for a canal to flood, assuming it’s in good repair. If there’s a stream, try to work out what will happen if it overflows its banks. In hilly areas, or places where the courses of rivers have been altered, it’s possible to be downhill from one quite a long way away, and if the slope is gradual, that may not be immediately evident. Otherwise, you need to look at the ground between your house (and if you’re in a housing estate, apartment block or even a rural house with a long driveway or access road, the approach to it from major traffic routes) and the watercourse. Basically, will the water come to your house, or cut you off? If it’s likely to reach the house, as above, move if you can. If it’ll just cut you off, you can make sure you have a few days of food and a heat source, and you’ll be ok.

If you can’t move, build some of your own flood defences. Flood barriers can be bought from a number of companies in Ireland, and certainly abroad. Amazon sell them, too. They’re essentially alumium planks that you drop into slots on posts fitted on either side of doors and windows, which form flood walls. Once water pressure comes on them, they more or less lock into place, and they’re waterproofed with sealants of various kinds. You can put in drainage ditches or channels to guide water away, or re-arrange so there are steps up to your outside doors, even if there have to be steps back down again inside. You can even do this with ramps if mobility is an issue, although I’d be even more keen on your moving to somewhere safer if that’s the case. At the very least, keep valuable items off the ground-level floors if there’s even the slightest chance of flooding, and have some sandbags you can place if need be. If you’re renting, try to persuade the landlord to install some of these for you - since it’s their property that’ll be damaged, it shouldn’t take too much persuasion.

Systemic Changes

More broadly, though, there’s a need for flood mitigation at a systemic level. County councils and the OPW need to be looking at building flood barriers, allowing for flood plains, un-straightening watercourses where that particular madness has been carried out, and planting trees by watercourses. The Netherlands has already done a lot of this work (that link is in Dutch; Google Translate renders it pretty well). The basic principles are to give rivers room to flood, and to have houses and infrastructure on mounds that do not block water flow. This does involve a good deal of capital investment, and honestly, I cannot see the Irish authorities taking this seriously enough in the short or even medium term. But we can hope.

The Irish Times discusses river management in the context of the Liffey. In particular, there’s this choice quote:

“Sea level rise and storm surges are a risk to Dublin city, but not the only risk. Heavy rainfall is also a significant risk. If there was significant downpours of rain over an extended period of time and this combined with very high tides, would create a flooding risk to the city along the Liffey,” a DCC spokeswoman said.

I’ve seen rainfall and high tide causing issues myself; The Liffey came very close to overtopping its walls in October 2011, and there were a number of flooded streets, leading to two deaths, as storm drains backed up. That was from 85mm of rain in 3 hours, which is certainly a lot, but is also very likely to re-occur in the next decade or so. Indeed, it’s extremely likely that this will be overtopped, and that 85mm was falling onto soil that could still absorb some of it, unlike the current situation where it’ll essentially run straight off the saturated de-forested mountains and into the watershed.

“Flood meadows” - the same idea as the Dutch giving the river room - are mentioned in that article, and in another, talking about water supplies for the city, there’s this quote:

“One of the tragedies is the uplands – where the water comes from – is destroyed,” says ecologist Pádraic Fogarty. It has been burned, overgrazed by sheep and covered in conifer plantations. “The fact that it supplies the water for the city and yet has been allowed to degrade to such a point is atrocious.”

Conversely, he adds, restoring the uplands would be an amazing thing to do, “because it would hit so many boxes. It would improve the water quality; it would help to mitigate the flooding and regulate water flow. It would improve the biodiversity... and be a fantastic amenity.”

The restoration here would be replanting with trees, which is a drum I’ve been banging for a few years now. It would be fantastic if it actually happened, and turned our accursed bald mountains back into tree-covered ones. That would prevent a huge amount of flooding downstream, not to mention all the other environmental and biodiversity benefits.

Population and Urban Changes

The major thing that needs to change, though - and which will have to over the next 40-50 years - is that people, businesses, and infrastructure need to be moved out of flood-vulnerable areas. Dublin’s city centre, in places well under the 1.7m-above-sea-level mark (a figure determined by climate intelligence company Cervest) still has major building investment going on.

That needs to stop, realistically, and those areas of the city need to be closed out, buildings demolished, and the area given over to Dutch-style room-for-the-river. Parkland, say, with running tracks and playing fields than can be used when it’s dry, and which nobody needs to use when it’s under a metre of brackish water. It can be a gradual process, certainly. But anyone committing to long-term leases or building ownership in those areas (or their equivalents in any other coastal city with a river, which is most of them) is acting stupidly.

Infrastructure also needs to be moved, and this can’t happen quickly, so it needs to start soon. Dublin Port will need to make changes. In the short term, just building the port upward will work, as long as there are bridges that go to the higher and drier areas. The port tunnel - which was a huge and expensive project - will need to be protected, because if water ever gets in there, pumping it back out will be difficult. Rail lines will need to be rebuilt further inland or at least higher up; there are already problems in stormy weather with the parts of the line closest to the coast. And buildings in the commercial centres of Dublin - O’Connell Street and the shopping streets off it, Westmoreland Street and the areas north of Trinity College, and anywhere along the quays right up to Heuston Station - will need to have flood defences that can be deployed at short notice.

Weather Warnings

Meantime, there’s the concern with weather warnings. From the article above,

“Senior meteorologist with Met Éireann, Eoin Sherlock has acknowledged that the methods by which they categorise extreme weather situations will have to change because of climate change. Future weather warnings will be about what the weather will do rather than what the weather will be.”

Better weather warnings are good, for sure. But people also have to understand what they’re looking at. If you have county-level warnings - as we currently do in Ireland - then some parts of the county are going to experience different conditions. Cork is a huge county, for instance. Some parts of Galway are coastal, but the inland side of the county is 60km or more from the sea. So a county-wide warning has be actually looked at and some judgement used.

In particular, if there’s an orange warning county-wide, then it has to be understood that that’s an average. There will be parts of the county where a red warning would have been merited, and parts where it barely rated a yellow. Weather is localised, and flooding is extremely localised. And at the same time, we can’t have a forecast that lists off 83 townslands as red warnings, several hundred as orange, and a few more as yellow or none for each county; it’s too much information and too confusing. People are going to have to understand forecasts.

Closing

In the interests of getting this out while it’s still current, I’ve left out the Positive Things component I’ve been otherwise trying to include. If you have things that could be included in this section in future, please do send them to me! I’ll try to head back towards my current broader line of thinking in the next issue, although given how the weather is looking, it might yet turn into a flooding retrospective.

[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) on Patreon or Ko-fi. Merchandise is also available. Major research contributions in this and all issues by Cee; material on the Netherlands by the good offices of Yda.]

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s sometimes further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

(AI-generated idea of an environmental protest involving public transport)

Positive Things

There’s a good bit of evidence coming in that something as simple as scattering rock dust on crop fields could reduce carbon dioxide in the air by some pretty notable amounts. Here’s an explanation with powdered basalt, and here’s a study which pins down the benefits fairly solidly. A floating solar farm in the Netherlands can track the sun through the day to maximise energy generation. The EU has finally approved a €1.3 billion forestry project for Ireland. And a team in UMass Amherst has come up with a way to generate electricity from humid air.

Feedback

There was a lot of feedback from the section on Anarchist Futures in the last issue, and it went in a lot of different directions. A good few were from other anarchists, open or otherwise, along the lines of “hell yeah”. A few more were from anarchists going “how on earth is this a new idea to you?”, which is a fair question. I am capable of connecting wildly disparate dots, but I need to think of doing so first, and the initial inspiration can take a while to hit. All the agreement is nice, of course, but the interesting stuff came from people who weren’t agreeing, or had concerns.

There were three major areas within that. The first was “how would groups without government prevent crime?”. The second was “what would prevent government from simply asserting power over you?”. And the third was “the existence of government provides me with benefits that I wouldn’t get in other circumstances, please don’t overthrow it”.

All of these are concerned, really, with the last step of the nine proposed: become ungovernable. That one is the least important, in my climate-survival view, even as it is the most fundamental in the broader anarchist sense. I’m going to try to answer these in the climate context, and verge into the broader anarchist context only when absolutely necessary.

How would groups without government prevent crime? I’m trying to avoid the approach of “the Oxford dictionary defines ‘group’ as…”, but to answer this, we do need to look at “crime”. It isn’t as cut and dried a definition as people would like, for a start. Crimes are actions which are illegal. The distinction of legal or illegal comes down to what’s written down in law, and has very little to do with what is moral, or right, or justified. Being a landlord, for instance, isn’t notably moral (and derives directly from feudal concepts of land ownership, hence “lord”), but it’s defended to the hilt by law. So in the circumstance that you’re in a place which doesn’t have laws, you’d have no criminals. And sure, that’s a stupid technicality where we’re playing around with language, but law is made of language. Take a trivial (and daft) crime like jaywalking. This wasn’t a crime anywhere before the 20th century, because roads weren’t dominated by fast-moving metal boxes before that. Jaywalking as a “crime” was invented by the car industry in the 1920s. Similarly, selling opium wasn’t controlled in England at all until 1868, and wasn’t really illegal until 1920. Before that, it was available to anyone who wanted it, pretty much. Cannabis was only controlled there from 1928, and control of it was only really stepped up in 1971. That control was only in place in Ireland from 1934. And it may become pretty ordinarily legal again in the next decade, because it’s less harmful than alcohol, nicotine, and possibly caffeine.

But what about real crimes, theft and murder? Well, government and corporations engage in those pretty regularly, and don’t come to any huge difficulties. Governments engage in murder (not an abstract, actual “that person has to die” and then they do) all the time. Banks take our money and call it “fees” and “interest” and so on. And these are not abstract concepts outside of their control; it is perfectly possible for banks to waive fees (they frequently do so on student accounts, for example) and they are in no way compelled to follow central bank interest rates - and even those are controlled by a person or small number of people making a decision. But our society has decided that those particular methods of taking money away from someone are legal, while at the other end, sitting on the street with a paper cup and asking for it is often not.

Which leads into why crime exists, and hopefully back toward climate-related stuff, because I’m not awfully interested in explaining why laws are mutable things. Most people (not corporations or governments) commit crimes because they need something. Usually it’s money. If you make sure that people are provided for, in terms of basic needs like food, shelter, education, and so on, crime drops. This has been demonstrated over and over. Just housing homeless people makes crime rate drop, insofar as “crime rate” is a trustable metric at all. And within small groups, communities, and so on, we can take care of other people. We have to take care of other people. This is the “be generous” of my 3 Rules.

I’m not saying, however, that the groups and communities we form to cope with climate chaos should exist outside the the law, or outside of the polities and nations that we live in. Those polities and nations will respond pretty forcefully to that. We can, however, provide for people, be self-policing to some degree, and only need the full force of the law when local and internal measures will clearly fail.

This is already working for every hobby association, festival, re-enactment group, scout group, and cycling club out there, in limited contexts. It’s not hard to extend it a little further.

So, what would stop government from asserting control over you? Nothing. Governments thrive on control, specifically that of violence. “A group that has a monopoly on violence” is the closest I’ve ever come to a definition of government (with thanks to Anna, who outlined that one for me). The main trick here will be to not engage with government, and to make it too awkward and costly for them to engage with you. Need a licence to plant more than an hectare of trees? Well, plant two 0.8 hectare plantations separated by a field. For good measure, let that field go wild. If the state is going to hold land ownership as a holy thing in which they can’t intervene (and look at their reluctance to take over vacant, abandoned and even derelict properties in towns and cities to illustrate that), then that can be turned to environmental benefit. Governments can’t (easily) stop you from giving people food, or a bed for the night, or even low levels of employment for cash. And it costs them more than they benefit to stop that even when it’s “illegal”. And so forth.

Finally, “the existence of government provides me with benefits that I wouldn’t get in other circumstances, please don’t overthrow it”. I mean, that’s nice. But that’s a position of considerable privilege, on a global basis, even though it’s what governments are supposed to do. Most people, globally, are prevented, by governments and corporations acting under the auspices of government, from doing what would be best for the planet and for themselves. But I’m mostly not talking about overthrowing governments here (which tends to require violence, and injury or death for a large number of the overthrowers); I’m aiming at the idea of working around them, and getting to a state where them asserting control over the things that matter is more costly to them than not.

For instance, in a very simple example: we need better public transport, since climate chaos will increase the running costs of cars and require more road maintenance. If, hypothetically, we engage in the mild civil disobedience of only using public transport, and of complaining to our representatives every time it fails (due to overcrowding, in this case, rather than understaffing or incompetence as it currently does) then the government will have little choice but to provide more of it.

Isn’t this working within the system? Not really. Working within the system would mean allocating votes to the representatives who promise to prioritise public transport - that is the only actual within-the-system that representative democracy allows for. Honestly, even as simple a thing as writing to the representatives to express how you’d like to be represented isn’t really in there - they don’t have to pay any attention to you (and they frequently don’t); the only thing that actually matters is their chance of being re-elected the next time that’s possible. Any form of protest, even one as mild as using buses and trains when you could use a car is outside the system, and inconvenient to the state.

That said, I think protest marches and the like less effective in terms of actually motivating governments to make changes. They serve to demonstrate some level of the will of the electorate, and that may, eventually, sway actions. The reactions in media give the elected people some idea of how the protestors are received more widely. Pride in Ireland, for example, is now as much a civil celebration as it is a protest, and no Irish government in this era would dare move against gay marriage or the rights of gay people to adopt, no matter what else was out there. But protests for tenants’ rights, actual ability of abortion, or any environmental concern are still widely ignored. More overt forms of civil disobedience are necessary, and these can fit in perfectly well with environmental and climate-related activities. Guerrilla tree-planting, taking over empty lots with community gardens, undoing the “work” of straightening watercourses, and so on are all things you can do in this line.

Closing

More responses are welcome, although I don’t intend to spend a whole lot more space dealing with abstract questions. If you want to read about anarchism, you can find a lot about it on the internet. Read sceptically, remember that a room with three anarchists has a minimum of four ideas of how things should be, and make up your own mind after you’ve read different viewpoints. My intention for the next issue is to concentrate on practical things you can do which are in the line of civil disobedience or circumventing government restriction. The gods only know what will actually emerge when I start typing.

[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) on Patreon or Ko-fi. Merchandise is also available. Major research contributions in this and all issues by Cee, and the rock-powder stuff and floating solar farm in Positive Things came from Yda.]

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s sometimes further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

Positive Things

The EU has passed a wildlife restoration law. Technology intended for fracking can be re-purposed for geothermal energy. And incandescent light-bulbs are almost gone in the US, as well as in the rest of the world.

Wildfires

There are several bits of the Mediterranean that are on fire at the moment. Portugal, Spain, Greece, Italy, Croatia, France, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, and Turkey all have major wildfires. These are connected to high temperatures and a “heat dome” across the area, but also to longer-term high temperatures that lead to drier conditions. Tourists are being evacuated from many of these areas, but the locals don’t have anywhere to go. Death tolls are already over 40 at the time of writing, and there’s every chance they’ll climb higher. Here’s a first-hand account from someone visiting Rhodes in Greece (where about 10% of the island’s land area has already been burnt). The BBC has some coverage with maps and photography.

At the same time, Canada is also suffering from the worst wildfire year on record, with smoke spreading across much of North America.

Flooding

Meanwhile, though, Nova Scotia has had incredible flooding, with a high level of infrastructural damage. The local government advised people to stay off the roads:

Flooding: Residents are advised to stay off the roads. There is significant damage to roads and infrastructure. Conditions are not safe for vehicles and pedestrians at this time.

There’s more detail at the link, assuming you’re still using Twitter/”X”.

Salient point here: Twitter is no longer useful for dispersal of information in an emergency; you now need to be logged in to view tweets, and having to remember login information (or have an account in the first place) in an emergency is a major barrier.

Anyway. The floods in Halifax took out the main train line:

(Image from Reuters via trains.com; link above)

Infrastructure

That’s not just passenger rail but also freight into the Port of Halifax, so there’re going to be more supply line issues in Canada - this is after the rail line to Vancouver was taken out by flooding in 2021. Canada is, as far as I can make out, pretty good about maintaining infrastructure, but there’s only so much you can do in the face of 20cm of rain in a day. Obviously, this is going to keep happening, not just in Canada but everywhere. And it’s equally obvious that investment in infrastructure in many western countries is not up to dealing with this; there are reasonably major bridges in the UK to which I’ve given some side-eye in the last year, and I know there are worse ones in the US. A bridge in Pittsburgh famously collapsed in 2022, but there are other collapses every few weeks. One in Philadelphia and a rail bridge in Montana in just the last month, for instance.

There’s talk in Ireland of infrastructural investment. There’s even a plan for Irish Railway Expansions, although various politicians are already doing their level best to undermine it. Apart from the reduction of emissions, there isn’t much of a climate-coping side to this, but it’s worth noting that many of the train lines in which there would be investment are inland. The Wexford line is one major exception to this; parts of that line are practically at sea level, and the train literally runs along the waterfront in Wexford town. There’s work being done on this, although most of it deals with increased erosion, rather than sea-level rise.

Ocean Surface Temperatures

Florida has recorded ocean surface temperatures that are more or less the same as you’d experience in a hot tub. Honestly, I’ve read a lot of climate disaster stuff in the last five years, and this one is the first to give me physical shudders. There is no way water outside of thermal springs should be at that temperature anywhere in nature.

Deep Adaptation

Speaking of shudders and other reactions, here’s an interview with the guy who came up with Deep Adaptation, Jem Bendell. For those unfamiliar with him, he published a paper in 2018 with the general thesis that it’s too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today, and that we need to consider what we do in the face of that. Obviously, he’s in many of the same lines of thinking as I am, although I reckon his timetable is a little steeper than mine.

Speed of Change

However, I’ve been forced to rethink some of my own expectations with regard to the speed of climate change in recent years, with the heatwaves that have been hitting Europe. I even know a few people who have had to move out of places that are now hotter than they can handle in summer. These people are climate refugees - not the desperate kind whose homes have disappeared into fire, flood, or rising seas, but the kind who can get out ahead of that.

One of the things that’s also possibly closer than expected is the Gulf Stream shutting down. Here’s an article from the Guardian about a new study, which attempts to pin down when that might happen. The prediction has a “central estimate” of 2050 (I do not know if “central estimate” is a real term, or one the Guardian writer threw in, and I don’t have the stats background to read the paper in enough detail to verify it, so caveat lector). However, I do understand the concept of an error bar, and the one on this estimate runs from 2025 to 2095. I do not expect to make it to 2095, although I’ve plenty of relatives from previous generations who got close to or past the century, but I do expect to see 2050, and 2025 is very close. Like build-up-the-woodpile close.

Anarchist Futures

So all of that is pretty grim, to be honest. But I came across some stuff on Tumblr recently which is interesting. This is not in direct response to climate, but to the growing economic and social world-is-fucked worldview. It proposes this nine-step anarchist solution.

Many of you are aware that I’m an anarchist at heart. Anarchism will only work with people who are willing to engage with it, though, and most humans are not willing to do that. I’ve mostly stopped saying “too stupid to do that”, because I can see that people have their reasons, or traumas, or other things blocking that. But at the same time, I don’t see routes out of climate crisis that involve the current set of corporate-driven nation-states remaining in charge. I think that the pace of change is slow enough that I’m not going to experience it here in Ireland until I’m quite old, although there are probably error bars on that too. But in the US or the UK or other places where corporate interests have been allowed to pillage resources, both natural and human, I think things will change sooner. So I’ve been reading a lot about anarchist networks, and anarchist understandings of the future (that link is a detailed expansion of the points above; it’s very much worth reading). And it’s really interesting to me how much that parallels my own thinking.

I have my 3 Rules for the future. Move Inland, Develop Practical Skills, Be Generous. Those are basically a condensed subset of the nine above. “Find Each Other”, “Share a Future”, and “Expand the Network” more or less fall into my “Be Generous”. “Become Resilient”, “Bring the Fight”, “Build Autonomy”, and “Destitute Infrastructure” fall into “Develop Practical Skills”. “Establish Hubs” comes under “Move Inland” (and a bit under the community aspects of “Be Generous”). And the one that stands out is “Become Ungovernable”, because that’s very much an anarchist ethic, and one I’ve not really considered in detail in terms of coping with climate change. It depends, I suppose, on whether I think that an ungovernable - and ungoverned - people have a better chance of survival than one with government in place, and how much ungovernability will benefit people.

To date, I’ve included some of what might be called activism in these newsletters - encouraging people to participate in democracy, to vote for green (not necessarily Green) politicians, and to contact representatives with messages about the handling of climate crisis. Honestly, I’ve not seen any of that being particularly effective. The prposed rail changes are as good as the Irish Green Party have got, and they’re pretty likely to be watered down by the coalition parties. It may be time to start considering that governments as they are are not a useful route to thriving in an era of climate crisis. I’m not advocating for revolution here, mind; my current feeling is more like moving on without governance, and without looking to governments for help. So I’ve some reading and thinking to do about that.

Closing

This issue has been weightier than most, and I’d appreciate your thoughts and feedback. Just hit reply, and tell me what you think. I’m about to be away for two weeks, but I’ll be reading and thinking during that time, and I’ll probably have more to say - and some responses to discuss, I expect - by late August.

[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) on Patreon or Ko-fi. Merchandise is also available. Major research contributions in this and all issues by Cee.]

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s sometimes further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

Positive Things

A new climate law in the US could have global benefits. There’s a way to generate electricity from nothing but humid air.

Ice Ages

The main changes in climate this planet has seen have been from either cataclysmic events - the Cretaceous-Paleogene meteorite impact being the prime example - or from shifts between the Earth’s two steady states. The cataclysmic events include meteorites, volcanic eruptions, possibly some other tectonic plate movements, so forth. As far as we can make out, they result in short-term changes from stuff thrown into the atmosphere, which reduce the level of sunlight reaching the surface, and make for a few years of winter - maybe even as long as a century. Obviously, that’s bad for everything that lives on the surface, but it’s not completely lethal - some light still gets through, there are probably even sunny days sometimes, but the overall energy level is diminished. Usually, this effect fades out.

The flips between steady states are probably, in a natural state, slower. The planet has in the long term two very different steady states, one called “Snowball Earth”, where there is permanent ice over a good part of the surface, and glaciers that reach or almost reach the equator. There’s still some room for life in that equatorial zone, but not much. And the reflective effect of the ice keeps the planet from actually warming up, so it can stay in this state for a very long time. There’s an argument that this is the “natural” state of the planet; what it would be like if there were no life here.

But there is life, and there are also tectonic effects, which can release a lot of heat from the planet’s interior. Life - plants, specifically - produce carbon dioxide, and decaying life produces methane. Both of these are greenhouse gases, which will warm the planet up even in a very cold state. And once the planet gets some momentum in that heating, there are feedback loops, and a pretty fast process - in geological terms - toward the other steady state, an ice-free planet. Once that state is achieved, the planet absorbs more heat, rather than reflecting it, and plant life thrives, so there’s more carbon dioxide and eventually methane. It takes a winterising effect like a volcano or meteorite to provide a chance for this to flip back.

In the most technical of terms, we live in the gap between these states. The planet is neither covered in ice nor ice-free, and at a crude level, this is what has allowed for humans to develop things like agriculture and thereby civilisation. There have been slight wobbles in this state within the lifetime of the human species - much of Eurasia and North America were covered in ice up to about 11,700 years ago. The last time the planet was ice-free, though, was at least 30 million years ago. Seeing as modern humans have only been around for about 200 thousand years, that’s well before our time.

Here in Ireland, the last ice cover melted in that 11-12 thousand years ago range (the end of the “Younger Dryas” period). So our landscape is only that old, effectively, and sea levels have been rising since as the ice melts. Sea levels at the end of the Younger Dryas seem to have been about 60m below our current (slightly out of date) marker for them. Doggerland - an area in what’s now the North Sea - was probably above water until about 7000 years ago. This is within the period of human habitation there; various evidence of tools and other markers of people have been dredged up by fishing vessels since the 1930s or so.

So we know that people coped with rising sea-levels in at least that era. We don’t have any idea how they did so, though; writing wouldn’t happen for another two thousand years or so in Sumer, so there’s no record beyond the archaeological.

Medieval and Renaissance Climate Blips

There were a few more climate oddities during actual recorded history. I want to look at two of these: the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

The Medieval Warm Period happened between about 950 and 1250CE. It wasn’t a single event globally; there are different start and end points in different regions. It included such effects as better crop yields and increased flooding (meltwater from snowpacks and glaciers), and allowed the settlement of Iceland and Greenland. It was, in short, a period when the warming effects were noticeable, and had effects on culture, agriculture, and trade that are absolutely visible in the historical record.

That period was followed almost immediately by the Little Ice Age, from 1250 to about 1850CE. It’s notable that our idea of “what winter should be like” in Western Europe was pretty much set during this period, when there more frequent and deeper cold snaps, when snow could be expected pretty much every year, and when rivers and lakes fairly routinely froze over. The whole of the Baltic froze over twice in the early 1300s. The Thames froze over often enough between 1600 and 1800 that there were Frost Fairs on its surface. The Victorians in particular produced a lot of imagery and writing with these assumptions - which, to be fair, were normal and true for them - and we’ve never really updated our concepts, despite 170 years of mostly damp chilly and rain-filled winters since.

Is what we’re facing different?

It’s not entirely easy to put numbers on either of the medieval climatic periods. But it’s broadly true to say that temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period were about 0.5C to 1C higher on average, with much of that in winter, so that you might more accurately call it the Medieval Not As Cold Period. And then during the Little Ice Age, temperatures were perhaps 1.5C below the long-term average.

We are already about 1.1C above the pre-Industrial average, and we’re certain to hit 1.8C in the next few years. Most projections agree that a rise of 2.7C by 2050 is pretty likely. So if you look at what happened during the two historical eras, we can expect a lot of effects in the next twenty years, which will probably not ease off anytime soon after that. It is different. It’s unprecedented in human history, and you’ve got to go back to about 5 million years ago to find similar temperatures.

The Medieval Warm Period is also called the Medieval Climate Optimum. It allowed for a lot of things to happen that wouldn’t otherwise - viticulture in northern Europe, including England and possibly even Ireland, the aforementioned settlement of Iceland and Greenland, and better crops in lots of places. In North America, the same period - more or less - included a number of severe droughts, and may have contributed to the abandonment of Cahokia.

We’re already looking at a greater increase in temperature, and we’re seeing consequences of this in terms of drought, forest fire, and extreme weather. There probably will be some changes that are beneficial to people in the short or medium term - and there definitely will be in the longer term - but these will come at a cost. Viticulture gain in northern Europe will be matched by places in the south that can no longer grow grapes at all, for instance.

The Little Ice Age can serve as a kind of preview of what will happen if the Gulf Stream shuts down. I wrote about that recently in Issue 2/24 and in more detail back in Issue 1/23, and there are measurements this year of a very anomalous high temperature in the Northern Atlantic, which is not helpful in terms of increasing glacier and icecap melt.

To be honest, we’re better equipped culturally to handle that than an increase in local temperature - as I said above, our idea of what winter is like was set by the Victorians, and that has been continued with American TV and its depictions of the New England winter.

One of the things to note here is that the settlement of Greenland eventually failed. It wasn’t a complete collapse (thanks, Jared Diamond, you hack), but it was definitely a withdrawal as the Little Ice Age cut in. Iceland hung on to people, but it’s never been a populous place. Some of the short-term benefits of climate change will be subsumed into climate chaos - you can’t grow grapes easily in a place that has frequent hailstorms, for instance. Ireland has already had more thunderstorms this summer than in years before. Here’s a germane quote from Met Éireann research meteorologist Dr. Pádraig Flattery:

“As climate change continues, we can expect further records to be broken and more frequent and extreme weather events. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture (about 7% for every 1°C of warming) and warmer waters, in turn, provide more energy for storms and can contribute to extreme rainfall events.”

It’s interesting to see a figure for moisture attached to the warming trend - the 2.7C increase expected by 2050 would translate to about 18.9% more moisture, which given that this is already frequently a pretty soggy island, would be a lot. And, of course, more storms. Further, because atmospheric movements can cover a good part of the globe in a few days, even if we get the cooling effect of the Gulf Stream failing, we might also get more storms anyway - drenching thunderstorms in summer, and snowstorms in autumn and winter.

Usefully, we’ve already got a pretty strong pandemic-driven cultural movement under way towards remote work. That will stand us in good stead in a period of more extreme weather. And Ireland’s roads - particularly our major motorways - are in genuinely good condition to hold together against poor conditions, which is more than can be said for the UK, US, or Canada.

Closing

Alright, that’s enough doom-mongering for now. I’m going to attempt to do a little more digging on how European communities dealt with - and took advantage of - the Medieval Warm Period, although I don’t expect that to be fast research. The next issue will, ideally, look at climate fiction in the last couple of years, and what we’re seeing there that might help with preparations for the next few decades.

[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) on Patreon or Ko-fi. Merchandise is also available. Major research contributions in this and all issues by Cee.]

In the meantime, this issue covers my own current situation as regards climate change preparation, with the idea in mind of developing some sort of checklist. Some of the checklist is short-term, and some is long-term, and it doesn’t really make sense to separate them out, although I’ve tried to distinguish at least a bit.

(Front of house vegetable plantings)

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s sometimes further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

Positive Things

A “bike library” for school commutes in Harold’s Cross, Dublin. Ireland is finally getting a Deposit Return Scheme. And more for interest than short-term practicality, a man who’s made a shirt in its entirety from foraged and locally grown materials.

Current Situation

I feel like not a huge amount has changed in my own levels of preparedness; a lot of the skill acquisition stuff is either done or in progress, and a lot of the material stuff is waiting until there is money.

We recently installed a wood-burning stove. This was considerably eased by my father having a suitable stove stashed away in his workshop, so rather than having to buy one, we got it for free. We then paid a general handyman (the sort who shows up at the door offering to clean your drive, re-point your roof, etc.) to actually fit it. This wasn’t purely on spec; the guy in question has done some work for us before, and apart from his penchant for actually phoning me, and/or turning up at the door because he’s in the area and we might want something done, he’s decent. It’s a very fine little stove; it burns wood at about one-third the rate of the open fireplace it’s installed into, and seems to give out at least three times as much heat (approximation, not actually measured in any way). The dog adores it, and when it’s lit, sits with his nose as close to it as possible, or sprawled in front of it. The cats seem indifferent as yet.

Quite apart from being a heat source independent of any infrastructure, it’s also going to save some money in the short term. Energy bills shot up last year, and not having to shell out approximately €1/hour of heating for the gas will be a lot of help. Firewood per se isn’t cheap (although I’m fairly sure it’ll be cheaper per hour than gas), but the stove can burn pretty much anything, so scrap lumber, odd logs collected on woodland walks, and the like are all viable.

The next thing we should do is work on the house’s overall insulation. We bought it just before BER ratings came in, so I don’t know how it rates - not terrible for an 80s house, but not great by modern standards, would be my guess. The other thing would be to fit solar panels, and I did get as far as looking at the cost of those recently - they’re not hideously expensive, and there are grants available, albeit they only pay out after you’ve installed the things. Both of those, however, are going to have to wait until mortgage interest rates fall back a bit again. At the moment, we’re paying just short of 40% more per month than we were in early 2022.

Heat pumps and other such beasts are also on my mind, but again, there’s money involved, so they’ll have to wait.

I’m doing some container planting this year - I got kale plugs, which are doing very nicely on the front doorstep, and I’ve sowed dill and courgettes as well. Those are all out front where the chickens can’t reach them, and I’ll plant some more stuff in the back yard when I have time and energy to chicken-proof them. We also have the apple tree (and last year’s cider, to which it was a contributor, came out well), a blackcurrant bush, some excellent raspberry canes, and some alpine strawberries, all of which are thriving. The chickens will probably start laying again once the weather is warmer, and I’ll plant potatoes now that the frost has mostly passed.

I’ve maintained a week-or-two of food in the house for years now; I’ve pushed that out a little as a matter of caution with the shortages of some fairly obvious goods in the UK (as per last issue). At any given time, there’s some meat and vegetables in the freezer, and a decent amount of pasta, rice, canned tomatoes, a few kinds of beans, and some canned fruit and rice pudding. I don’t keep strict track of what’s there, but I reckon we could eat reasonably well for three weeks if there was nothing in the shops. I’ve also a decent stash of herbs and spices at any given time; that’s more a feature of being a historical cook than any aspect of caution.

With three cats and a dog in the house, I should be keeping a slightly sharper eye on their food supplies; we occasionally have an empty food bag before a new one is got. I don’t currently stash water; while Ireland’s water supply infrastructure isn’t great, we’re in a far better position than most of the US and a lot of the UK. If there are problems, they’ll be visible weeks in advance, which gives plenty of time to lay in stocks.

The new stove is not ideal for cooking on (“free” beat out “ideal” very easily), but you could certainly heat water on it. And if it comes to it, I have a firebox that can be set up outside to cook on; that’s technically SCA gear, but the border between SCA gear and apocalyptic-change-proofing gear is mostly a matter of perspective. I am reasonably confident of not needing the armour or the bows, but they’re there.

We have plenty of candles, and several power packs for phones, which I keep charged. I haven’t yet bought a large power-storage device, but it’s on the list for when the interest rate drops back enough. Something that would keep the fridge and freezer going for a bit would be ideal.

Medicine is a bit of an issue. At present there are a few meds we depend on to a greater or lesser degree (my main one is an anti-sinusitis decongestant), and both Nina and I wear glasses. At the moment, there’s little provision for stocking up on prescription medications. I do think that if I asked my doctor nicely, I could get him to let me get a few bottles of the decongestant to stock, but I’m not certain of that, and I don’t know that having that depend on the quality of your relationship with your GP is a great thing either. We do have most of a decent first aid kit in the house, albeit a bit distributed among bathroom cabinets and medicine bags.

Obviously, the house hasn’t moved, so we remain pretty good as regards flooding, etc. It’s not impossible that we’d be affected by flooding; there’s a stream about 150m west of us. However, it’s in a deep channel, and the culvert through which it flows under the M4 is of limited size, so I think any flooding from it will mostly stay on the other side of the motorway. There’s also a gradual uphill from the banks of the stream to here, probably about a meter and a half of it. Basically, the people in the estate through which it flows will have trouble with it long before us. And we remain at the 50m+ mark above sea-level, which will more than suffice for sea-level rise for our lifetimes.

Most stuff above is short-term, “what if the power is out for three days” or “what if supply lines break down for a few weeks?” material. My longer-term predictions are in a lot of ways more gentle and slow, and revolve around shorter supply lines and localised skill networks. Community will be important - not necessarily immediate local community, because I remain convinced that geography is a poor basis for any commonality - but over relatively short distances; a day or two of travel by not-very-high-tech means. One of the things the SCA has provided us with is a capable community, so I feel we’re better sorted there than many people.

Having useful skills - cooking, woodworking, electrical work, whatever - will be essential, and so will the ability to learn more as you go. I have a few of these; I’m working on gardening and food growing skills now. They’re slow to develop, and you kind-of only get one shot at them every year.

One of the things sort-of embedded in that skills idea, though, is access to information. I don’t think that the internet is going to go away, by any manner of means, but people’s moment to moment access to it may change. Power cuts and other infrastructural issues may prevent you from being able to look up Youtube videos or read how-tos or whatever your preferred way of getting at information is. So it may be useful to have a few hardcopy books around dealing with whatever topics you think you’ll need. I have many cookbooks, an essential first aid book (although I am not 100% certain where that is), a few books on DIY and house maintenance, a number of gardening books focused on food plants, a few books about foraging and wild food, and a bunch of books about self-sufficiency and general getting-on-with-stuff.

Checklist

Here’s a sort of first draft checklist from the discussion above. I’ll eventually work up a better (longer, and/or more detailed) version of this as a PDF, and make it available.

[ ] Housing Location (floods, etc, and more than 50m above sea level)
[ ] Heat Source (not dependent on electricity or gas)
[ ] Insulation
[ ] Solar Panels
[ ] Food Growing Facilities (and skills)
[ ] Food Supply (including pets)
[ ] Water Supply
[ ] Cooking Facilities
[ ] Lighting (candles, torches)
[ ] Power banks for phones
[ ] Power storage device
[ ] Medicines, first aid kit

[ ] Relevant books in hardcopy
[ ] Learning new skills
[ ] Developing community

Closing

We’re coming through spring right now, and for the first time in years, the brighter evenings are not hitting my mood. I have very mild Reverse SAD (summer affects my state of mind negatively, not winter), but it’s just not showing up this year, which is a great feeling. Work has been pretty busy over the last couple of months, but some of that is starting to ease into routine. Hopefully, this will allow me to get more research and writing done in the next few weeks and months, but I’m avoiding making any solid predictions.

If you’ve questions or comments, hit reply!

Share Gentle Decline

[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) on Patreon or Ko-fi. Merchandise is also available. Major research contributions in this and all issues by Cee.]

(Tesco Maynooth, where the hothouse vegetables should be.)

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s sometimes further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

Positive Things

First, some good things, because it can’t be all nightshade doom and gloom:

• Norway has approved the use of vertical axis turbines.

• A Swedish study found that single-garden work increases the number of pollinators.

• Dublin adds better rain handling (and mentions the upper areas of the Dodder watershed as preventative measures as well, something I’ve been writing about for years).

The UK Tomato Shortage

I noted before in Commonplace that there are weird gaps on the shelves in UK supermarkets. They’re still there, and they’re getting worse. The new one is tomatoes (but there are also issues with some medicines). Read about it in the Guardian, for the baseline information. Some choice quotes:

The wholesale price of tomatoes, peppers and aubergines has quadrupled

and

Pharmacists, who rely on drugs from China and India, report that some patients are now forced to go from chemist to chemist to try to find one that can fill their prescriptions. There have been shortages of cold and flu medicines, from Lemsip to Night Nurse, over the winter.

Supply lines are having issues worldwide, of course. But Brexit paperwork means that suppliers will sell to other markets - pretty much any other market - before the UK. And fresh produce prices are up everywhere, because the energy costs to heat greenhouses are up. In April or so, the British suppliers reckon, they’ll be able to grow tomatoes in the UK. Assuming, of course, they can get anyone to pick them. The UK is also still running short on eggs, and I’ve seen pictures of empty shelves from supermarkets there.

In Ireland, there have been shortages of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers in Tesco (a UK chain). Lidl and Aldi (German), Supervalu, Dunnes and Centra (Irish) and local greengrocers appear not to have any particular issues.

So there are a whole load of different causes here. Aside from Brexit, we’re looking at climate issues (unseasonal cold weather, and also unseasonal hot weather last year, and expected this year), at supply lines that are still snarled up by the COVID-19 pandemic, at high energy costs, at a lack of workers to pick produce, at avian flu outbreaks, and to top it off, there’s a particularly idiotic government in the UK (“Thérèse Coffey, the environment secretary, suggested last week that consumers might eat more turnips”).

I cannot say anything useful about the government or Brexit, except that the root cause is the Tory party, and the sooner they’re all voted out of office the better. There’s little else to be done about stupidity and greed. The way UK voters continue to dig down is amazing; I am relatively sure it’s due to the Tories systematically gutting education over the last couple of decades, but it’s hard to know where to start.

Climate issues are going to continue, of course, and will almost certainly get worse. Nobody can predict what the weather a season ahead will be like, but I’m willing to have a go and say there’ll be another record-breaking hot summer in Europe within the next 5 years, and that other records will be broken worldwide every year from now on. The heat might be handleable, if it was predictable, but the likelihood of random cold snaps, hail storms, tornadoes, and hurricane-force storms at odd times of year is also increasing. This means that even if supply lines are working - and not impeded by politics - there may not be as many goods to supply.

The supply lines might get fixed this year. I’ve been tracking things fairly closely, and there are signs that things might unsnarl by autumn or early winter of 2023, assuming that there are no more storms (hurricanes, typhoons, etc) than usual, that there are not further lockdowns for pandemics, and that Russia doesn’t decide to invade anywhere else. Etc.

The energy costs are on the way down. This may take some time to reach consumers, and they’re unlikely to drop back to 2021 levels, but they should be a bit less than the current madness. Unless a lot more wind farms come online soon, though, the wider market will remain volatile, and also still somewhat subject to the whim of Russian oligarchs.

The lack of workers to pick crops is a uniqely Brexit-caused issue, and seems to have been intentional (inasmuch as anything was) on the part of the Leave campaign - most of the workers were EU nationals who came to the UK to do manual labour on relatively low wages. Now that they’re not in the country anymore, the British public are not rushing to pick up the low wage work. It’s unclear in the long term what will happen there - it’s possible that farmers will raise wages to the point where UK nationals will take the jobs, but that would push the price of the produce up as well. Or the farmers might take a look at the prospect of high wages, high energy costs, and so forth, and just get out of that business. They might sell up entirely, or go over to livestock, cereal or dairy, all of which are much more automatable.

The avian flu outbreaks are, to some degree, also driven by climate change. They’re also caused by having large flocks of poultry in conditions conducive to disease. So improvement of conditions, and a move toward more, smaller, healthier poultry farms is pretty necessary. I’m told that the point at which a small poultry flock breaks even in terms of equipment and food is around 36 birds; that’s not an unreasonable number if you have some space. However, if the other option is no eggs, then 2 or 4 birds will go some way toward solving the issue, and they can be kept in quite small spaces. That assumes they lay well, which ours are currently not, although that’s much more likely to be a seasonal issue than anything else.

Broadly, though, shorter supply lines are where it’s at, and there’s nothing shorter than you own back yard. But you are unlikely - without a heated, lit greenhouse, which is expensive - to be able to produce tomatoes in February (although I do have one tomato curently growing on a planet overwintered on a windowsill, so it’s not impossible). Within the EU, we’ll probably be able to import stuff from Spain and Morocco, so there’ll be produce out of season, albeit at high prices, and within the US, California will probably continue to produce, as long as random weather doesn’t destroy crops. But seasonal food, produced fairly locally, and preserved tomatoes (and peppers and aubergines, etc) are going to have to see more of a return. Usefully enough, if people are following advice on stocking up against Brexit (written in 2018), it… works.

White Western Conditions

One of the things that I’ve not talked about a whole lot is that most of the people reading this - who are in the West, in the first world, are generally white, and generally moderately well-off in comparison to the remainder of the planet - are going to be the last to be affected by almost any problem. There are already climate refugees; there are people who are being hit hard by wheat and egg shortages. Most of them do not have the ability to subscribe to newsletters.

This is arising from conversations I’ve had recently - and read, between other people, on forums and social media - where people in the West are saying that because they’re not experiencing any particular difficulty, the problems must not be that bad.

In Ireland, in particular, we’re in a place of pretty massive privilege, even in the longer term. The island can feed all the people on it - possibly not optimally, but still feed them. We’re unlikely to suffer much from even the strangest of weather, because our position between oceanic and continental climates means that one is constantly pushed back by the other. Sea level rise will certainly have effects on our coasts, but a good bit of the country will still be well above sea level in 2100. In the longer term - and probably beyond the lifespan of anyone reading this - we’ll have an archipelago of closely placed islands, rather than being completely underwater. We’ve enough wind to power everything we need, and tidal generators can provide more. If the Gulf Stream fails, we’ll have a colder climate, but nothing we can’t handle.

But all of that is something to keep in mind if you feel that you’re not affected by climate change. Other people are already affected, and it will have effects on more and more people as time passes. Just because it’ll happen to us later doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

This Stuff Was Also In My Open Tabs

A few side notes, before I close out: Here’s an excellent article on winterising, even for renters. I realise this is the wrong end of winter in which to be providing this, but it’s worth getting a start on it for next year. It may even help keep some of your energy costs down over the last few weeks of cold weather. And if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, and you get a cold winter, it’ll be of use a whole lot sooner.

An essay on Social Ecology & Solarpunk: The aesthetics of radical change.

The US is starting to recognise that floods are damaging. Well, the article says they damaging to property prices, but that’s the closest that a hyper-capitalist society can come to recognising it, I think. The Snap Forward also has an excellent article about how you, too, can be a climate refugee.

And the IFA madness is getting worse. I know I give out about them a lot, but they keep producing bullshit like this. This is, in fact, full-on conspiracy theory, with the usual detail that the people peddling the story don’t believe it, but are in it for profit. Honestly, the sooner the IFA is closed down and replaced with something sane, the better. Oil companies are also engaging in serious propaganda.

And so as not to finish out on an entirely negative note, here’s an excellent explanation of how heat pumps work. I had only the vaguest idea of how, it turns out.

Closing

I’m not going to try to predict when I’ll have the next issue out. I think work will ease off into March, but there’s essentially no knowing, and I can’t complain about being busy. Send me your questions, your suggestions, and any commentary you have, and I’ll write again as soon as I can.

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[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) on Patreon or Ko-fi. Merchandise is also available. Major research contributions in this and all issues by Cee.]

Photo by Aleksandr Kadykov on Unsplash

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s sometimes further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

Positive Things

There are bison in England again; the Kunming-Montreal Global biodiversity framework has been agreed on by most of the world; renewable power is accelerating fast. There’s thinking on non-private infrastructure & city planning. And Toyota is working on upgrading older cars to be more eco-friendly.

News/Closing Tabs

In vindication of my long-held ideas about such things, Bloomberg reports “There’s […] longer-term need for UK supply chains to become more resilient, through onshoring and climate-change mitigation”. And at the same time, they’re reporting that there’s not enough of that shortening happening, which isn’t surprising. As far as I can see from both news coverage and direct experience with clients, a lot of business owners are really hoping that supply chain management is going to go back to the reasonably easy and straightforward way it was in 2019, and avoiding thinking about any other possibilities.

I’ve a pile of thinking backed up - for years, in some cases - around the concept of private ownership of land, and the effects of enclosure in the Isles. It’s not really a concern with regard to climate changes (well, it is, but short of a global revolution and/or the arrival of a worldwide non-capitalist economic system, nothing’s going to change it), so it’s rarely come up here. One of the essays often quoted in support of globalisation (and thereby privatisation, and the supply lines I spend so much time thinking about) is “The Tragedy of the Commons”, which basically holds that resources not in private ownership will inevitably be overused and destroyed. However, I discovered recently that the guy who wrote it (who was also a fairly enthusiastic eugenicist) later retracted it, having been shown considerable evidence against it. I want to go back in time a couple of decades and provide my younger self with that particular datum; it would have made a satisfying difference in a good few online arguments. I suspect now that commons lands would be a lot more resistant to environmental degradation.

One of the principal measurements of economic difficulty - ignoring nonsense like GDP and average income and so on, which are skewed by financial instruments and wealthy people - is the price of food. There’s an argument to be made that the availability of food was a strong factor in almost every revolution and rebellion in history; well fed people mostly don’t rebel. Well, worldwide food prices have hit an all-time high. Some of that is down to effects of COVID and the war in Ukraine, but a lot of it has climate chaos as a root cause.

Ireland has about 300 wind farms, so more turbines than anyone can easily total up - but well more than two thousand, by a very conservative count. 189 of those are offshore, near Arklow. Would you like to know how many offhsore wind turbines the US has? Seven. Numbers like that absolutely astonish me, still.

Questions

There’ve been a good few questions in various media over the last few weeks. Thank you! Some I’m getting to here, others will take some more research to answer. Some are just out of scope for this newsletter: while I am massively in favour of biodiversity efforts, I don’t know enough about them to contribute anything useful, and I really can’t say much about the preservation of particular species. Mostly my attitude there comes down to: plant more trees, let some areas go wild, and nature will provide its own bio-diversity. More questions are always welcome, though, from the most basic to the most finicky, and I’m usually happy to respond to challenges of my thinking, too.

Anton asks: Will we ever get to a stage where people (slash legislators/consumers/even manufacturers) say "enough is enough. We don't have a perfect mousetrap, but the one we have is kinda good enough."  Question prompted by this (which is a link to somebody’s account of buying a wifi enabled kettle to see if it returns a HTTP status 418, which is about the nerdiest thing I’ve typed in months and that’s saying something).  

Ok, so. Evidence suggests that the gadgetiest gadget on Gadgetday in the Land of Gadgets will still have a market, because people love intricacy and complexity and so forth. Check out Gothic Boxwood Miniatures, for instance, for a historical example. So consumers are not going to stop this. Manufacturers sell to consumers, so they’re not going to stop it. And legislators respond only to votes (somewhat), which come from consumers, and money (mostly) which comes from manufacturers. So, in essence, no.

It is possible that the right to repair movement will be part of a change from the current culture of cheaply produced buy-replacement-instead-of-repair goods. And once you need to repair this nonsense, you’ll find you didn’t much need it in the first place. But that will require a fairly major change, and the reappearance of people who can repair stuff.

Also, it’s worth considering that many (not all) of these weird internet-enabled or wifi-connecting devices do make sense if you’re disabled. Voice activated lights are an absolute boon for anyone who has movement issues, or who hasn’t the dexterity to work a light switch. A lot of wifi devices fall into that category, really, although I don’t think the wifi kettle does.

But mostly I think that changes in this come down to Anton’s second question:

What happens when we pass peak oil production and plastics start to become more expensive or have more limited availability? I'm thinking particularly in terms of food wrapping and preservation, where they're ubiquitous.  Are there alternatives in development (I'm aware of plant starch drinking cups and the like) that will be able to scale? Because the problem with growing plant alternatives is they take up land used for food production...

Eventually, we’ll need use something else. Less packaging is one solution. Re-usable packaging (glass and very recycleable cans) is a second string. But anything that’s not glass or metal is going to have to be plant or animal-based (or both: waxed cloth), and yes, those do take up agricultural room. Re-usable packaging will probably make an appearance for the first time in a few decades. But when it comes down to it, we managed to sell food to each other for a few thousand years without plastic (including shipping over considerable distances), and we can do it again.

For hard plastics, we can replace them with other materials. Wood, glass, and metal are the foremost, and it’s worth noting that very high-end goods are still (or again) in these materials. I haven’t a lot of plastic in the kitchen anymore, and I’m gradually elimiating what’s there. Honestly, putting plastic utensils in contact with cast iron pans makes me uncomfortable anyway. Wooden laptops and desktops are already a thing. Early radios and televisions had wooden cases; there’s very little stopping that from happening again. I guarantee you some hipster out there has replaced the plastic casing on their TV with pallet wood.

Many of these things are inherently re-usable. Timber that goes into a table now could make the casing on a computer of some kind in 60 years’ time (indeed, there’s a useful business model for someone in buying up badly damaged antique furniture for that right now), which could become the casing for whatever a phone then is 20 years later, and eventually be used as kindling. Most metals can be melted down and re-used. Glass certainly can; it’s one of the most recyclable materials out there.

And glass (and other) containers can just be straight up re-used, which is honestly the most useful approach. There are zero-waste shops already in existence, like this one in Rathmines.

Gretchen asks: what’s currently in your emergency food store?

I’ve established a decent habit of having the emergency food store as just the normal day-to-day supply of food, only a bit “deeper”. This means that first, the emergency stuff is the same stuff as we normally use, and second, it doesn’t go out of date. Apparently there have been issues with some prepper types buying up loads of protein bars and canned meat, only to find they can’t stand them. And obviously food going out of date is a problem. So my current approach is essentially to have a pantry (virtually; the current layout of the house doesn’t allow for a single storage place, although I have plans for that) which has more of some stuff in it than average. And I’ve just replenished some bits of it which had run a bit lower over the holidays.

Things that more-than-average currently includes: pasta, in a few forms (about twenty assorted-size packs). Rice (Tilda basmati, a few kilos). Tinned tomatoes, beans, lentils, chickpeas, anchovies, tuna, and an assortment of other stuff. Some jams and chutneys and such. A selection of the herbs and spices I actively use (my stash of Middle Eastern and medieval herbs and spices probably counts here too, but many of them are things you wouldn’t often use, like mustard seeds or betel leaf). Flour and sugar (currently in need of some replenishment), and some other baking goods. Tea. Coffee.

Basically, there’s enough there to provide adequate food for about two weeks. We’ll probably be a bit bored by the end of it, but won’t be reduced to fried Spam.

Closing

That’s probably enough for one issue. As discussed on Patreon (link is visible to everyone, not just subscribers), I’m looking to publish a bit more regularly this year, so expect to hear from me again in about two weeks’ time, day-job allowing.

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[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) on Patreon or Ko-fi. Merchandise is also available. Major research contributions in this and all issues by Cee.]

If you’re interested in how Gentle Decline (and my other newsletter, Commonplace) are doing, there’s an annual report on Patreon, which is open to everyone to read.

(December’s cold snap was unusual; there were still leaves on the oaks even as they got a dusting of snow.)

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s often some further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

Some positive things: from Alex, there’s a steel plant in Sweden that’s not using fossil fuels and new records were set for clean power (I like that term) in the UK at the end of 2022. 80% of cars sold in Norway are now electric. New York Harbour is cleaner than it’s been in decades. These are all useful bits of progress, and I’m happy to see them.

Honestly, I’d like to write - and read! - more about these things, but that’s not where the work needs to be done. If I were a believer in medieval humour theory, I would describe myself as phlegmatic, and part of that is because I have a strong tendency to accept things as they are, and get on with the next thing. But in aid of making this newsletter somewhat less doom-and-gloom, I’m going to try to include a few success stories in each issue, as above. If something comes to your attention, hit reply and let me know.

Someone asked me during the year if the Gulf Stream was still slowing down. At the time, the best I could say was that I hadn’t checked in a while, but it didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would just stop. I’ve since gone and done some looking around (here’s an article that outlines the whole problem with the Gulf Stream, and here’s some writing I’ve done about it before in Issue 1/23). The basic gist is that yes, it’s continuing to slow down. It’s hard to say when that’s going to become critical, beyond “not yet”, but some of the increased strength of hurricanes in the North Atlantic is due to there being more warm water in the tropics, because the currents aren’t carrying as much of it north as they used to. I reckon anyone who has faced down a hurricane in the last few years feels that it’s already critical. It’s also hard to pin down how sudden that change will be, but the measurements available seem to indicate it’s not very far out.

We just don’t, as far as I can tell, have a good scale for the speed of that change. When the time on the graph is labelled “ka BP” (thousand years before the present), it’s difficult to tell whether the change happened over 1, 10, or 50 years. My guess - and this is a guess, back only by some very simple reasoning - is that it will actually be pretty quick. The Gulf Stream (or whatever label you give the current system) is pretty much the only thing rendering Western Europe warmer than other places at its latitude - Dublin sits at 55.35°N, which is not very far south of Moscow, at 55.75°. For comparison, Minneapolis (fairly notoriously chilly in winter) is at 44.98°. Once it’s no longer carrying warm air and water north, I think we’ll have about 2-3 years before we’re experiencing far colder winters, and - due to the warm water staying in the tropics and providing more energy - worse storms. But when that will happen is not clear to anyone - it could be within a decade, or it might not happen for a century.

Nevertheless, it’s a thing to keep in mind when you’re making long term plans - if Ireland suddenly becomes more like Northern Norway is now, will your living situation cope? It’ll be colder (so heating and insulation are affected), stormier (so utilities will be less reliable, and travel could sometimes be dangerous), and agriculture and forestry will have to undergo rapid changes.

A question from a reader (thank you, Charles!), slightly rephrased: do you think internet access will remain as it is through climate chaos?

Broadly, yes. Internet access isn’t badly affected by supply lines, which means that apart from possible issues in replacing equipment over time, it’s pretty stable. However, there are a couple of dependencies that could get interesting. First, and most obvious, is power. Just plain access takes power for the device you’re using, the various devices that connect you to the internet (router, telecoms provider, internet backbone) and the server you’re connecting to for any given purpose. If anything in that chain doesn’t have electricity, you don’t get your connection. Mostly this is fairly straightforward to handle; data centres and other such hosting places tend to have well-supplied power with backup generators and so on. But data centres do use a lot of power - it’s estimated at the moment that about 14% of Ireland’s electricity goes into them. Some of that is for the machines themselves, and some is for cooling. So if there are issues generating sufficient power, then access to some bits of the internet might go down.

Second, there’s the actual physical infrastructure, some of which is at sea level, and thereby vulnerable to flooding and eventually to sea level rise. Undersea cables are how the internet (mostly) connects across oceans, so the places where those cables come up tend to be on seashores, or relatively nearby, and those facilities are going to have to move (or become completely waterproof). Lightning strikes can also do serious damage to anything electrical, and heatwaves can put the air-conditioning data centres use for cooling under serious pressure. These issues - and sea-level rise in particular - have been studied, so sensible companies and organisations will be doing something about them. Whether any given organisation is sensible will remain to be seen, and there’s not a whole lot you can do as an individual about this.

For the most part, satellite internet is a bit harder for climate to affect, so if you’re completely dependent on internet access, it’s something to look into. At the moment, though, it’s slow, expensive, and often comes with a cap.

One of the problems I hadn’t really foreseen here in the Isles is wildfire outbreaks. There were a lot of them in the UK in 2022, and while Ireland has managed to reduce the number by hitting the farmers setting illegal fires in the wallet (withdrawal of grants), some of those that are still happening are pretty huge. A lot of the areas where wildfire is a problem in Ireland could be addressed by reforestation, or even just fencing out sheep and deer. Both animals eat young green plants, and leave bracken and briars - which dry out and become a fire risk - where they are. There are a number of programs underway for reforestation, but so far they don’t seem to be having much impact on our unpleasantly bald mountain landscapes. I’m not aware of any firebreaks being dug or constructed, either.

I haven’t recommended any newsletters in a while. So you might be interested in Rewilding Europe, Heated, or Field Notes, all of which are excellent. If you’re interested in newsletters in general, you might try The Sample, which is basically one issue of a newsletter for you to try, every day. You can subscribe to it or not, and there’ll be another one tomorrow. I’ve found some good stuff this way.

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[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) on Patreon or Ko-fi. Merchandise is also available. Major research contributions in this and all issues by Cee.]

(How MidJourney thinks a market will look in 2070. I am more optimistic.)

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s often some further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

I don’t think we can use the definite article with regard to the future. There are lots of things that could happen to change the likely course of events. There will be both improvements and disimprovements, and anyone trying to tell you there’s one way things will go undoubtedly has something to sell to you. But I do have a sort of broad track I expect events to follow.

And I don’t know that there’s necessarily going to be an end to it, either. Sea-level is going to continue to rise for a long time, and even if we started to do something serious about it right now, would still happen for a century or more to come. I think that we’ll be feeling the effects of fossil fuel use as a species for a long time.

Saint William of Gibson’s concept of The Jackpot should be invoked here; this is the set of events in The Peripheral which include climate breakdown, war, disease, and other events - and he says he’s never listed them all off, because it’ll just depress him - which have already started in our own time.

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.

In one way, Gibson is more pessimistic than I am; his future is a severely depopulated one, wherein it’s clear that billions of people did not make it. He does have it right, though, in expecting it to be gradual and varied, and in saying that it’s already here. In another, he’s more optimistic than I am; his post-Jackpot future has better tech than we do, and I’m not hugely convinced on that. Maybe in very small areas.

Some of my thinking here I’ve outlined before. Issue 2/16 deals with why I think climate change can’t be stopped. 2/6 looks at the very basics of what I think people need to do to cope. And 2/13 looks at predictions I made some years back, and how they’re shaping up. But as far as I can see, and even though writing this feels like I’m repeating something, I’ve never really outlined my full expectations of the next few decades (or at least not in one place). I can’t put a strict timeline on this; nobody can. But you can expect more of it to be visible every year, and within - I think - 15-20 years, so 2030-2035-ish, it will be pretty evident. And all of interrelates, as I’ll expand on below; it is a “wicked problem”.

It’s important to note that - as far as I know - pretty much everyone reading this lives in the West, and has money enough for a net connection and a device to read on, and time enough to be reading me rambling on. That puts you in a very high percentile of people worldwide in terms of wealth, comfort, and insulation from the effects of any change in the world. So a lot of what is already happening in the world is not happening to us, yet. And much like the Renaissance didn’t really happen for anyone except rich white men for some time after the history books claim, the Gentle Decline will happen sooner to everyone except rich (in global terms) Westerners (but eventually, it will). So for everything I’m saying here, you can look elsewhere in the world and see it happening already.

I believe that the most fundamental element of our comfortable Western 21st-century world is supply lines. Whenever something messes with supply lines (weather, disease, industrial action), we feel it a little. Mostly it’s a very minor inconvenience - you can’t get the particular type of a product you like, and have to settle for the next brand over, or the shops don’t have something for a day or two. Sometimes it’s a little more, as I observed in the UK recently and wrote about in Commonplace (short version: every menu has things not available, and eggs were hard to get for a few weeks). And sometimes (not often, yet), we see empty shelves for a bit, or the price of something rockets. Timber for DIY (or any) purposes, for instance, costs mad money right now.

Our supply lines are not resilient. For decades, they’ve run on a just-in-time model, where there’s minimal storage, and everything is in transit until it’s on a shelf, and then it’s taken off the shelf again (by purchase or disposal) within days. Just-in-time can also be understood as just-barely-sufficient, and the phenomenon of a particular toy or electronic device being sold out in days or hours at Christmas or just after release is almost a cultural fixture for us now. Some companies capitalise on it; more would really prefer to sell more instead.

Many of our supply lines are quite long. A good few of the vegetables in the supermarkets at this time of year have come from Morocco or the Greenhouse City in Almeria, Spain. Apples and lamb have come from New Zealand. Asparagus from, yeah, I know I repeat it all the time, Peru.

Supply lines are what will mess up the 21st century. We’ve already seen some of this with shipping issues in the last two years, which still haven’t completely settled back to a pre-pandemic level of speed or predictability. Supply lines are affected by disease, either because people in ports and on ships can’t work due to being ill, or because lockdowns prevent them from being able to do so efficiently or at all. We’re very likely to have more pandemics. They’re affected by weather, in that storms, snow, extreme heat, and extreme cold can prevent the ports from functioning, keep ships away from coasts, or even sink them. We’re going to have more extreme weather. They will be massively affected by sea-level rise, because the ports will become unusable, and indeed hazardous, and sea-level rise is utterly inexorable. And supply lines will also be affected by rising fuel costs, increased border and customs charges and effects, changes in trade treaties, and very probably wars (wars are a frequent response to tight economic situations, nonsensical as that is).

The longer a supply line is, the more fragile it is. And even a small reduction in volume causes the cost of using it to rise quickly - I’ve seen this in action with clients over the last two years, where shipping that was not a major cost is suddenly the same price - or more than! - the product being shipped. There will, of course, be efforts to keep supply lines in action, but just by themselves, those efforts will cost more. Eventually, long supply lines will be used mostly (never “only”, because only a Sith deals in absolutes, and historians are clearly Jedi) for high-value, low-weight/low-volume, non-perishable items. So much like the pre-19th century trade routes: spices, fabric, jewels, precious metals, tea, coffee, and artwork. And electronics (note, though, that there’s already a shortage in semiconductor chips).

So, long supply lines will not go away, but they will change. Low-value, high-weight/high-volume, perishable items will not be provided as much from distant places (hence, already, my muttering about the cost of timber). There are lots of things that fall under these descriptors, but the main one is staple foods: potatoes, wheat and other field grains, rice, soy beans, and what are still seasonal foods in most of the global north: legumes, salad leaves, tomatoes, soft fruit. There are two options for this: we pay (quite a lot) more to have them imported still, or we grow them more locally. Now, as it happens, Ireland grows a lot of potatoes and grain already, so that’s not a major change right here. Next door in the UK, on the other hand, and across much of the rest of the West, that’s not the case. For an example of how this is happening in some places already, see Northern Canada’s eye-watering food prices.

So there will be a need for more local food production. I’ll come back to more implications of this later on.

Next up, we have energy supplies. I think most people in Europe are already aware that energy prices have gone up due to the Russian war in Ukraine. The prices are never going to come back down to where they were in 2021, and there will be a load of different reasons why they’ll go up more: other wars, supply line issues again, rising costs of extraction of fossil fuels, and increased use in local food production (see interrelation of issues, wicked problem, etc.). This can - and will - be mitigated by a move toward wind, water and solar power, and by better insulation, better batteries, and a reduction in the use of energy just for the sake of it. We’re already seeing smaller displays of Christmas lights this year, for example. And eventually, people will shift to wearing more layers in winter. But all of that will still be a change.

There will be more pandemics. As travel costs (due to the same issues as supply lines, and also energy) rise, this will have a direct effect in slowing them down, but just the number of humans on the planet right now means we’re inevitably going to have some. Even as we treat the current pandemic as being “over”, there have been 6.65 million deaths directly attributed to COVID-19 worldwide to date. Allowing for the places that fudged the numbers (almost everywhere, really), that’s not a small impact. And COVID has long-term effects in survivors, too, which reduce productivity and make us more vulnerable to other conditions and diseases, including extreme weather. There’s going to be a point in the future where Long COVID is the “underlying condition” that makes some SARS variant more lethal. These future pandemics will have knock-on effects because of public health per se and also because of the effects of lockdowns, travel restrictions, and so on.

And then there are the direct, immediate effects of climate chaos: sea level rise making coastal settlements and infrastructure unusable; extreme weather becoming more frequent and damaging infrastructure and crops; climate refugees arriving in various places, both expected and otherwise. I’ve talked a lot about those in other issues; I won’t re-hash them too much here.

So: we have an interrelated complex of supply line issues, a need for local food production, rising energy prices, further pandemics, and direct climate change effects. We cannot prevent this. We can move toward accommodating it, and much of Gentle Decline is a combination of preparation for that and frustration at the lack of preparation actually happening. But prepared or not, there will be changes caused by this complex of issues.

The main one is going to be a step down in consumerism. This is often depicted as a fall in quality of life, but I’m not convinced by that. I am in fact unconvinced that cheap clothes, cheap processed food, bright lights and so on are “quality” in any way. My expectation is that we’re going to buy fewer things, and that the fewer things we buy will, of necessity, be of higher quality. Food will no longer have long supply chains, and more of it will be bought from local producers (probably at higher prices). We’ll pay more for energy, and consequently use less. More of us will work locally to where we live, and more of us will be involved in agriculture, food production, textiles, and skilled manual work than at the moment.

Travel will become less frequent. I don’t mean that people will travel less for holidays or to see family - indeed, I think that longer-duration trips will become more normal, with remote work happening alongside - but the possibility of disappearing to another country for a weekend will reduce, and work travel will drop a lot.

Public transport use will increase, where that’s possible, and sensible governments (from which I specifically exclude the USA) will provide more public transport (this is slowly happening in Ireland, although rural public transport is still light-years behind other European countries). We’ll also see a rise in what can only be termed privately-provided public transport, like the stagecoaches of early modern Europe (and, admittedly, the US). This will be impacted from time to time by pandemic conditions, so remote work really is going to be a major aspect of employment.

Some aspects of technology will change. In particular, anything involved in food production that needs long supply lines for maintenance will gradually disappear. If you’re dependent on local production of food, and you haven’t complex supply lines to fall back on, the idea of waiting for a new chip from Korea to replace the one that blew out in the tractor is just not going to float, so either we have local stockpiles of such components, or we step back to tractors without them. We’ll see more electric vehicles on farms, though (assuming battery tech continues to improve), and possibly more use of things like drones (which are not, it turns out, hugely complex technology) to monitor crops and livestock. We’ll see more industrial greenhouses locally.

The technology we can reliably produce and maintain at a local scale in the West is that of the early 20th century, maybe up as far as the 1940s. I don’t think we’re going to have to fall back that far in most cases, but it’s a baseline to keep in mind.

It’s not necessarily the case that shorter supply lines, more local production, etc, will lead to lower technology. Indeed, the absolute epitome of these ideas is the self-sufficent space station or colony spaceship, and those are about as high-tech as humans can reach right now. But they’re also incredibly expensive, and depend for their initial creation on very complex supply lines. I expect we’re going to see a mix of relatively low-tech stuff (bike deliveries, backyard farming, local repair shops) and higher-tech stuff (very high-quality broadband, complex solar power, highly efficient batteries, 3D printing). The emphases will be on “local” and “reliable”. This is in some ways a solarpunk future.

Different aspects of this will proceed at different rates, and I think anyone trying to predict those is onto a losing track; there’s just too much chaos out there, and there’s going to be more. I also don’t think it’s going to end in any meaningful timeframe; the retreat from the rising sea is going to continue for centuries. Eventually, the fossil fuels will run out, and then we’ll have to adapt from using plastics to something else - but honestly, that’s probably past my horizon. Overall, I think the thing that is going to decline most, if gently, is energy use. I don’t think we’ve hit the peak yet, even, but it has to come soon. The further out that peak is, the steeper the decline on the other side.

I’m not making predictions here about new economic systems, either. I don’t like capitalism, and unregulated capitalism is largely the cause of the situation in which we find ourselves. But at the moment, it’s going to continue to be the frame in which we operate for a while.

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I am very interested in other people’s take on this - predictions and guesses alike. The one thing I’m not interested in is “technology will be invented” without showing me someone who’s currently working on that technology and is making progress. We can’t rely on it otherwise.

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(Midjourney’s idea of a post-apocalyptic celebration. I think it looks more like a staging of Les Miserables, myself)

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s often some further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

Alright, then. On with the show. Most questions here have been asked by more than one person, or came up in unrecorded conversation, so I’m paraphrasing rather than using direct quotes.

One thing I didn’t think of, and was reminded of by an entirely different conversation, is that most prescriptions (at least in Ireland) are now recorded on computer systems of some kind in the pharmacies, rather than being a sheet of paper you can carry around. So if you’re expecting a blackout to last for more than a couple of days, make sure you have enough of any medications you need; it may be quite difficult to get hold of them while the power is out.

You didn’t mention hot water bottles in when you were talking about dealing with blackouts!

I did not. This is because they don’t really occur to me as being out of the ordinary; they’re a regular piece of technology in use in this house. For those unfamiliar - and for me, the hot water bottle is such a homely, ordinary thing that it seems a little weird for anyone not to be familiar with it - these are flat-ish rubber containers with threaded stoppers, which hold about 2 litres of water. You fill them up with just-off-the-boil water. Most modern ones have a cloth cover; you can wrap them in a towel if not. They will stay hot for about 2-3 hours (4-5 under a blanket, and at least pleasantly warm out to about 12 hours). You can stick them in a bed at your feet, hug them to you like an unusually cooperative cat, keep one on your lap while you’re sitting up, or basically put them wherever you need some heat. They’re also good for period pains and other cramps. Low Tech Magazine has an excellent article about the history and use of the hot water bottle, and the comments there contain a vast number of folk solutions on related topics.

The blackout stuff looks like it’d come in handy when there are hurricanes or other bad weather driven power cuts.

Absolutely. I mean, a power cut is a power cut, the actual cause doesn’t matter much. The difference there is that you probably won’t want to be outside at all, and that it’s really unpredictable when the power will be back. The recent storm that hit Nova Scotia was expected, planned for, people had been told to prepare, and there were still quite a few people without power 5 days after.

Power cuts are associated with heavy snow in Ireland. This seems to be because snow builds up on overhead power lines and breaks them, or because ice forming on them does the same thing (or perhaps as with cold anywhere, more people turn on electrical heating and the supply suffers). As more power lines are put underground, this becomes less likely, but there are still a plenitude of overhead ones. It’s useful to know what kind of supply lines there are in your area - the house in Maynooth has underground lines, and we haven’t had a more-than-a-few-seconds power cut in more than 14 years.

Obviously, heavy winds, ice storms, flooding, and in some cases extremely hot weather can have impacts on electrical infrastructure, too.

What do you think of carbon offset via tree planting?

I pay for it it, when I get the option, for flights and so on. Not that I have taken many flights in the last few years. But I have very definite doubts about it. First, I have no idea if the money actually ends up funding tree planting, and no real way to check. Second, planting trees, while extremely important, doesn’t actually suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere there and then. It’ll do so over a number of years, but in the meantime the CO2 from the flight is going straight into the atmosphere, and increasing the heat effects. Similarly, planting to replace established woodland that has been destroyed leaves a gap in the carbon absorption available (not to mention biodiversity of mature woodland is far greater) for a few years, so it’s not the same as emitting no carbon dioxide (or whatever else).

This is true of any carbon offset scheme, of course. Planting trees or working any other form of carbon sequestration does not compensate immediately; the emissions still happen and still do damage. Ideally, what we need to be doing is carbon sequestration now for emissions we’ll cause in ten years’ time.

Do the canals have a part to play in an era of climate change?

It’s certainly possible. They were essential infrastructure in their time. Ireland has two major east-west canals, the Grand Canal and the Royal Canal, and the UK has a whole network of them. It’s cheaper, per weight of goods you’re moving, to put stuff on a boat than on a lorry - boats are slower, but take a lot less fuel. So for routine movement of stuff that doesn’t decay (raw materials, timber, most non-food consumer goods) or stuff with a long shelf life (preserved food, alcohol), it would work out better in a time of very expensive fuel. As is, the logistics of getting stuff on to and off of canal boats, coupled with the fact that the canals have a very limited set of destinations, mean that they’re of limited use. Also, in Ireland at least, the idea of Irish Waterways doing something more than bare maintenance of the canals before it’s completely necessary is unlikely.

But I think it is possible for some enterprising person or company to provide “slow freight” from Dublin to Athlone, Limerick and Waterford, and make a decent living from it. And it’s worth noting that the canals are almost by definition one of the most resilient pieces of infrastructure in terms of flooding, sea-level rise, and so on. They were built to be used by boats towed by horses on the canal path, so almost any method of making the boats move is viable. They also pass through the most inland areas of the country, and thereby the ones that are mostly safest - in the medium term, at least - from sea level rise.

Do you know of any community electricity projects in Ireland?

I don’t. But here’s a French one (Google Translate makes a decent go of it if you don’t read French). And there’s a company in Ireland which appears to be doing something in this space, although I haven’t looked into them in detail yet.

Speaking of community projects, though, urban farming is raising its head again in various contexts. One of the frequent objections to urban farming is that it can’t support the populations who live in urban areas. Dublin is about 29,000 acres, and generally speaking, it takes one acres to feed one person. Dublin’s population is well over a million now, so it’s absolutely self-evidently true that urban farming will not feed the urban population. But I feel that people with this objection are missing the point, sometimes by such a margin I think it’s deliberate. First and foremost, the point is not to feed the entire population of an urban area - it’s to diversify a little bit in terms of supply. Every bit of diversification lends a bit more resilience. Second, urban farming (and to be fair, almost anything that’s not tarmac, concrete, and other impermeable surfaces) contributes massively to preventing flooding. And third, it does a lot more for local community (as referenced in the Wired article linked above). There are plenty of effects from having more plants growing in urban environments, too; cleaner air, lower temperatures, and so forth.

What do you think of the idea that higher energy bills will drive people who are currently working remotely back to offices?

Well, let me state my opposition to the idea that offices are necessary anymore at all. It’s been pretty clearly demonstrated over the pandemic that beyond having a postal address, there isn’t much need for offices to get work done. Extroverts may like them for social purposes, but that’s not a great reason to pay urban rents for desk space, not to mention energy bills. Middle management being terrified that people will notice they don’t really do much in remote work (and thereby don’t really do much at all) is definitely not a great reason. That polemic delivered, let me continue.

Offices are a lot more expensive to heat than homes. There’s more wasted space, more doors opened and closed, and a considerably higher chance that Drew in Marketing has the window near his desk open a crack so he doesn’t die of overheating from the thermostat setting. There are rules being brought in in many parts of Europe as to how warm offices can be kept - at least one of my clients, who’s in Berlin, says that her office thermostat is now not allowed be set higher than 19C, and there’s talk of some places limiting it to 15C. With energy bills looking to be pretty mad this winter, many businesses are not going to want to - or in some cases, not going to be able to afford to - have the office at a comfortable temperature.

Offices also necessitate commuting. For most people, that’s between half an hour and an hour of sitting in a car (and in winter, sitting in a car in the dark) each way, every day. Or a similar time sitting or standing on a bus, having been waiting in cold and very likely wet conditions, surrounded by people who have colds or worse. Or on a bike or on foot in the aforementioned weather. So the desire on the part of individuals who have a choice to go through that and then sit in a cold office all day doesn’t really look likely.

That’s not to say that keeping your home office warm is going to be easy. But if it’s a small-ish space, or it’s the kitchen or living room, it’s not going to add a lot to your already existing costs. So overall, I don’t think people are going to be driven back to the office.

Finally, Venkatesh Rao is pointing out a state of mind he’s observing and calling “Ark Head”.

We’ve concluded the flood cannot be stopped, and we’re building arks to retreat to. The specifics of the arks don’t matter: utopian city-states, tech sectors (like AI, crypto, or metaverse) that seem capable of weathering the flood, narrow altruistic ventures, or artistic subcultures. With or without DAOs and Discord servers. If you can retreat within it, and either tune out or delusionally recode the rest of reality, it works as an ark. The point of an ark is to survive a cataclysmic flood while preserving as much of everything you care about as possible. Not to make sense of the world past the hull. Ark-head is a survivalist mindset, not a sensemaking mindset. If there are portholes in the hull of your ark, all you see out there is stormy flooding, and you don’t care to make sense of it.

Rao is being snarky about it, which is his usual mode of communication, but even he concludes:

That’s perhaps the way out — keep trying to tell stories beyond ark-scale until one succeeds in expanding your horizons again. But until such narrative traction returns, we’ll have to make do with ark head.

I don’t disagree. And this newsletter is, more than anything else, about constructing arks that will float, mostly metaphorically, in a time of flooding.

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(Midjourney thinks winter is a lot more about snow than it is. The Victorian Winter Image continues to reign supreme!)

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s often some further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

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However, if there is serious winter weather, be it deeper cold or snow, the blackout issues get worse. Give more consideration to the solution of being somewhere there are plenty of other people, as discussed below.

So, first, there are three different kinds of blackout, maybe four. The first is where, due to weather effects on the electrical infrastructure, the power goes out for an hour or two, or maybe overnight. In remote places, it might be out for a few days. We’re broadly familiar with these, and I think the people who live in remote (or remote-ish) places are usually fairly well-prepared for them. It comes down to “have your phone charged, have a power bank or two handy, have a non-powered source of heat, you’ll be grand”.

The second is where there’s a power cut for reasons of limited supply. We’re not used to these, really, but they’re the principal concern for this coming winter, because the supply of energy in Europe is limited when we don’t have it coming from Russia, and here in the Isles, we’re not set up to provide our own power at short notice. In most cases, where the UK or Ireland have shortages of energy, they buy it in from abroad - France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark are the usual suppliers, in one form or another - but in this case, those places will also have shortages. These blackouts will be predictable, controlled, imposed deliberately, and scheduled. This makes them easier to deal with, generally, than the short-term infrastructural cuts described above. They’ll be set to last no longer than 4-6 hours in most cases, and places that need constant power will be allowed to make arrangements to have it (hospitals, cold storage facilities, etc). The main issue with these is that they’ll keep on happening, and that will get old very quickly.

The third is the same as the second, but longer - 24 hour scheduled cuts. These honestly don’t seem very likely to me, since cycling 4-6 hour cuts around an area is less disruptive than longer ones every few days. But there are circumstances - a cold snap in Europe driving costs sky-high, for example - where it might make sense to just turn off the power entirely (modulo essential services and maybe community centres) for a day.

The fourth is where the power goes off, for whatever reason, scheduled or not, and doesn’t come back on for some days. To be clear, I think this is very unlikely. I also think that not having some thinking done about it while we’re here would be stupid, so let’s do that thinking.

Here are the very basics, then. Keep your phone and laptop charged as much as you can. Keep a decent-sized powerbank on hand. You are slightly more likely to need to contact emergency services during a power cut than otherwise, so while the devices can be used for work and entertainment, make sure there’s enough charge for that. They’ll also be reliable timepieces. Keep a few candles (or other light sources, see below) in each room (the fat pillar candles will stand on their own; the taller “dinner candles” will not; acquire according to your supply of candle-standing objects). Also keep a way to light the candles in each room. A box of matches serves me pretty well, but people with mobility issues or who are prone to very cold hands in winter may be safer with a cigarette lighter or one of those things for lighting gas stoves. For short term power cuts, make sure you have some warm clothing and an extra blanket or two for the bed. Generally speaking, if there’s no heat in the house, go to bed; this works a lot better for the shorter-term cuts than the longer ones. And keep some food in the house that doesn’t need heat to prepare - bread and cheese and such works perfectly well for this. If you’re completely addicted to tea or coffee, a small gas camping stove is not a bad idea. Supply your own books, boardgames, etc; the chances that you can get much work-from-home done in these things are low.

The stuff above should cover most people for the first and second kind of blackout, and might suffice for some people for the third. However, in the case of 24-hour blackouts, you’ll probably want a source of heat that doesn’t depend on electricity (or piped gas, which frequently requires power to actually work, as do oil heating systems). Storage heaters, handled carefully, will do this for scheduled cuts, although I can’t remember the last time I saw a storage heater. A gas heater (the kind that uses the spaniel-sized yellow-orange cylinders) is another possibility. A fireplace or a solid-fuel stove is a better option, because you can also cook on it in a pinch. If you have such a facility, just make sure you have fuel for it, and you’re sorted. If you don’t, either go for a good supply of blankets, or maybe go stay with someone who has.

You may also want to look into larger battery packs. There are a lot of these, under different names, but the one that I’ve seen in person belongs to Anna, and is one of these; the River Max. It’s a solid piece of kit, it stores a good bit of power, and you can connect solar panels or other power input to it. These things are not cheap, but if it’s important to you to have power at a low level for indeterminate lengths of time, then it’s a good thing to have. You can, of course, also take it camping.

A good few people reading this are - I think - still largely working from home. Obviously, during power cuts, that’s not an easy thing to do. There are a few solutions to this. First, you can go to the office, which puts the burden of power provision, heat, etc, on your employer. This is something offices are good for, really (although new rules in Germany, at least, say that offices can’t be warmed past 19°C, and that may come in elsewhere too). Going to the office is not of particular use if you have other people in the house who can’t do so, of course. If your employer can’t provide the actual machineries of commerce either, you can reasonably not work, and while there are probably consequences down the line for it, there’s not much to be done about it during the power cut. This is closely related to what used, in times of yore, to be called “snow days”. You can also shift your hours of work so that you work when the power is on, and sleep when it’s off - this is a remarkably good solution as long as your biorhythms will let you sleep at odd hours.

There is a small concern with a rush on candles. There are plenty of shops that sell candles, but none of them have many. I could probably buy out Tesco and other supermarkets’ supply on my own, and places like The Range and Flying Tiger have more, but not infinitely many. My advice is to buy some now, some next month, and so on, so that the shops get the hint and stock up. Obviously, you can also get battery-powered flashlights (even with rechargable batteries), crank-powered lamps, oil lamps, solar lights (not so great in winter, though) and half a hundred other not-plugged-in light sources. None of these are held in stock in large quanities, and supplies of batteries in particular can become a problem. I strongly prefer candles; suit yourself as to which you like!

(Midjourney has no idea what size candles are. This is the least comical version.)

It’s also a good idea to make some arrangements in advance with someone who lives on a different bit of the electrical grid. If they have no power for longer than a few hours, they can come and stay with you, and vice versa. This is particularly relevant in the cases of the longer power cuts or the possible-but-not-very-likely more wintry weather. In the worst of cases, where both houses have no power, go for the one that still has heat, via whatever means. Having more people in the building will also make it warmer, assuming relatively normal room sizes. This does assume that there is working transport - power cuts will affect electrical train and tram systems. Buses, cars and diesel trains remain functioning, although weather can cause issues. Plan accordingly - keep an eye on weather forecasts.

There is, of course, a knock-on effect in the case of deeper cold. There will be more of a draw on the already-under-pressure power grid, and there are more likely to be outages. And some winter conditions (ice on power lines being the main culprit) can also bring about outages on their own. In ideal circumstances, there would be a community centre, school, or parish hall with a generator where people can go until power is restored, but I don’t really trust the British authorities, in particular, to do anything about providing this. So if there’s a forecast for severe cold - which, in terms of Isles housing is anything past -7°C overnight, or days that don’t get above 0°C - and your power is scheduled to be out, and you haven’t got another heat source, then go somewhere where there’s heat, if you can at all. Even if there isn’t a community centre, there are shopping centres, train stations and other semi-public spaces, and libraries. There’s no point in sitting shivering at home, and there are examples from the Texas cold snap in early 2021 of people lighting fires in bathtubs and other madness. Don’t do that.

Which brings me to another point: there is some weird belief in the Isles (and further afield, too), that the conditions in which we should use heating (or cooling, or aerating, or whatever else) should be dependent on the calendar. You’ll hear people stating in almost prideful tones that they’re not going to turn on the heat until November, and that’s that. This is stupid. If it’s cold enough that you need to do something to be warm, do it regardless of the calendar. We can’t rely on the time of year to predict the weather anymore; I’m looking at a forecast for the next ten days where the lowest temperatures are 14°C and the highs run to 21°C. September’s average temperature in Ireland is supposedly 13°C, and it used not be unknown to have early frosts around now. Climate change is here; acting accordingly is part of the adaptation we need to do.

However, there’s also the cost issue. Across the Isles - and Europe in general, I think, with a few exceptions due more to government policy and price caps than supply - heating is going to be expensive this winter even when the power is on. It’s probably not very practical to do things like installing double-glazing where you haven’t already got it, but it might be possible to put in insulation in attic or wall spaces. In immediate terms, though, there are some things you can do to reduce the amount of time you spent with the heating on.

The first - and I know my Scandinavian subscribers don’t want to read this - is to put on another layer or two of clothing. A wooly jumper over two layers of cotton is warm enough that I usually have to take it off again after a while, and a decent hoodie is also very effective. Anything with a hood is good; anything a bit longer than waist length is also excellent (there’s a reason medieval monks had hooded habits). Thick socks will also go a long way toward making you feel warm; you can wear them over lighter ones as sort of slippers. Slippers or other house shoes will also help.

Hot drinks don’t actually do a lot to raise body temperature, but they make us feel warmer, which is not nothing. Having the makings of tea, coffee, hot chocolate, or your herbal tisane of choice in the house is definitely useful.

Most modern housing doesn’t need draft excluders, but then many of us in the Isles don’t actually live in modern housing. So a roll of something to put along the bottom of a door (or in some cases a window) can be valuable, and heavy curtains over windows and doors can prevent what heat there is from escaping. You can get away without heating bedrooms in all but the coldest of weather, and closing internal doors keeps the heat in the rooms you put it in.

If you’re on an electrical plan where it’s cheaper at some times than others, take advantage. Boil the kettle and fill some flasks with hot water (or even just tea or coffee) in order not to do so when it’s expensive - kettles are vicious things in terms of power consumption. Equally, cook when it’s cheap and use the microwave to reheat; the microwave uses a lot less power. Switch off lights, unplug appliances that are not in use, and so on.

Finally, in cold weather, spend some time outside. The contrast coming back in makes you feel like your living space is warmer than it may actually be, and it’s good for your circulation and general health to get some actual cold for short periods.

In the longer term, there are two considerations. First, Europe is already working on re-orienting energy generation so as to have less dependence on Russian fossil fuels. This is good, and means that energy supplies will come back up and prices will fall again. It provides some insulation against fossil fuels running out, too; most of the re-orientation is toward climate-friendly forms. Second, with more chaotic weather in general, there will be more deep cold snaps, even as the overall temperature rises. So making changes to our living arrangements to be able to handle that will be very useful.

Usefully, climate change means that - on average - the chances of prolonged cold periods are lower than they’ve been for centuries. Less usefully, the chances of short but unprecedented cold snaps - as in Texas - have gone up. So make some sensible preparations for blackouts, for cold snaps, and for extending some hospitality to others who can’t do so.

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Look, what I’m also kind of saying is this: you can’t get people to change until and unless they want to change. If people see nothing wrong with a particular situation, if they’re not experiencing for example sufficient pain, or if they don’t see a sufficient reward, then they’re not going to do anything differently.

I want to think about this a bit in the context of climate chaos - both in trying to push it back by reducing emissions and in setting up to cope with the consequences of having not done so for some time. And by looking at it in the context of other situations where people did want to change.

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. You can support the newsletter via Patreon, Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise.]

Hon is writing in the context of user interface design, at the corporate level, where users don’t have much choice. The same reasoning can be applied to taking environmentally positive actions in a corporate context; if there’s no benefit and no easing of difficulty, companies and similar organisations simply won’t do a thing. They may say they’ll do things, or put some money into tree-planting or whatever, but that’s just publicity and marketing.

Meanwhile, I had a conversation with Gav, long-time correspondent and occasional contributor to Gentle Decline, at a barbecue last weekend (which is becoming like some sort of annual ritual by now), in which I was talking about lack of preparation for climate and other disasters, and he was being optimistic. Broadly, his point that was after some sort of local catastrophe happens, government will invest in preventing that particular event from happening again. His example for this is the flooding on the Dodder, and the anti-flood measures that have been put in the place there, for which he sent me pictures last year. Let me quote myself from that issue, though:

First is that Ballsbridge is a moderately wealthy area of Dublin, and it’s interesting to see that it has solid flood defences installed while other parts don’t, and the second is that these defences will only work against a flood slightly worse than that of 2011.

My broad position on this, though, is that there are more and different local-or-national disasters coming, that there are almost no preparations being made, and that even when there is an event, the preparations for the next one are usually barely adequate. Further, there will be points in time where there are too many such things happening to put in measures against all of them then.

My immediate go-to on this was COVID-19. We know as a society, more or less, how to handle a respiratory pandemic. What preparations are in place in Ireland to handle such an epidemic if (or when) a different one arrives? Have we organisational preparations for a strict lockdown for a couple of weeks? How about maintained stocks of masks, or plans to distribute vaccines? There is actually a document called a “Framework for Future COVID-19 Pandemic Response”, put together by NPHET in July 2020. It sets out a few core ideas, including that countermeasures should continue until such time as there are no more cases, and that “Rapid identification and contact tracing of new cases is central”. Of course, the pandemic is still under way and there’s a steady background of cases, but NPHET has been disbanded, there’re essentially zero ongoing countermeasures, and we gave up on contact tracing ages ago. So not only are we ignoring the preparations for a future outbreak, we’re fairly solidly ignoring the best ways to handle the current one.

Meanwhile, here’s a listing of the climate-related things that are already happening in Ireland: river flooding, coastal flooding, just-plain-downpour-flooding, rising sea level, wildfires, drought, larger-and-more-frequent storms, pollinator die-off, agricultural climate zone shifts, new disease prevalence, and good old basic air pollution (plus energy generation, although since that’s a direct economic problem, there’s been some movement on that). There are plenty of non-climate or only-peripherally-climate-related things going on too: a cost of living crisis, rising energy costs, massive housing issues, the arrival of refugees, knock-on effects from Brexit, attempts to spread TERF nonsense from the UK to here, and so forth.

Some of these are already fairly major issues, and there’s little enough being done about them. There was, for example, a flood in New Ross in Wexford recently. It’s clear what the causes are, and what we need to do to make towns and villages better able to handle these events - there’s a Social Democrats TD detailing it in that article. It’s not happening, though.

As noted above, there actually was something done about the Dodder flooding. That’s good! But at present, as far as I can see, it’s only enough to deal with a flood a little bigger than the one that happened before, and it’s pretty clear that bigger floods are very possible; heavy localised downpours are a feature of the Isles’ new weather patterns, and the Dodder catchment area is larger than most people think.

(Map taken from Streamscapes: The Dodder River Catchment)

Ideally, there would be a tree-planting program in the upstream parts of the catchment area, which runs up into the hills in South Dublin - hills which are currently bare of trees in many areas due to sheep and deer. Even fencing off some areas - which don’t even need to be in direct contact with the river - would allow some natural regeneration of tree cover. Areas with trees absorb water vastly better than places without, so even with heavy rainfall, less water would make it into the river, taking pressure off the flood defenses downstream. There is a plan underway to do some of this work with “raingardens”, but as far as I can see, it’s (again) only in the wealthy downstream areas.

How about Cork City, which floods with amazing regularity? Turns out that Cork City Council removed the Flood Management page from their website (you can still see a blank page if you use the right search terms), and have instead a “River Basin Management” page, which punts responsibility to the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government’s River Basin Management Plan for 2018-2021 without adding anything. Indeed, the best I can find on the website is an October 2019 article entitled “Statement in relation to the Dockland flood defences”, which contains the rather defensive sub-header “Consideration of flood risk is a key part of Cork City Council’s plan for the successful delivery of Docklands, and assertions to the contrary are entirely without basis.” Further, “Given that Save Cork City objected to the plan to include flood protection as part of this project, it is incredible that they would now assert that there is no flood protection.” So as far as I can make out, there is very little happening, and when it does happen, local residents and businesses try to stop it (see also Clontarf’s amazing protest which resulted in a sea wall being reduced in height).

We’re not planting trees for flood management, or even constructing meaningful flood defences in vulnerable places. We’re not digging firebreaks for wildfire control, engaging in controlled burns, or removing invasive and flammable rhododendron. We’re not doing anything about large-scale irrigation plans for drought. We’re doing absolutely nothing about sea-level rise, and enthusiastically building new developments near sea level. We have just barely addressed pollinator die-off by not cutting motorway verges as much, but there are still plenty of farmers and local councils cutting back hedges and mowing green spaces “to tidy them up” and the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan is being pushed back on in various places (though to be fair, it’s having some solid success where it’s allowed to go ahead). Agricultural climate zone shifts are being ignored. We’re not handling the current pandemic as we know we should, let alone looking at new diseases (malaria will probably arrive in Europe again fairly soon), and measures against air pollution are still being opposed.

Any and all of these issues can be addressed now, in advance of them becoming problematic. And in the circumstances where one of them arises at a time, it’s entirely viable to fix them as they arise (assuming that people stop opposing the fixes). The trouble is going to come when we’re dealing with two, three, or more of them at once, they’re worse than they were at the time of planning, and possibly when we’re operating in the context of energy shortages (whether due to the war in Ukraine or a future lack of fossil fuels or just very increased energy use). That’s the point at which budgets and headcount run out, and something is left un-dealt-with.

Obviously, making preparations for these issues now will be cheaper, safer, and more efficient than dealing with them after disasters have already happened. But that’s not happening. This seems to be because the public (to some degree) and the authorities (very much so) seem to think that climate change and preparation for it are still very abstract. And you can’t expect people to get behind an abstract idea with actual money and effort.

Except… you absolutely can. Take the concept of nationalism. It’s an abstract - countries have no real existence beyond a concept of lines on a map. They don’t line up with language use, with religion, with anything except historical accident. Yet there are plenty of people who are fanatically devoted to their country, to the point of violence when it’s slighted, let alone threatened. People invest thoroughly unreasonable amounts of money and effort in nationalism, to no particular effect - what effect could there be? I could also point to religion, which has caused a truly ludicrous number of wars, and where people voluntarily gave up one-tenth of their income every year to the Catholic church for centuries. Religion, admittedly, has more justification than nationalism, since at least its believers think there is an outcome of saving their souls. But in either case, it’s an abstract behind which people have historically put incredible amounts of thought and expenditure.

In particular, people fight hard for change in both of these contexts. Revolutions and rebellions (at least since the 18th century) have very often been on nationalist lines, and religious wars - between sects of one religion, for the most part - ripped Europe apart for centuries.

I’m still working up a theory on why environmentalism or, in the case of my own specific interests here, forward planning for climate chaos, don’t get the same kind of backing. My current target is the media, where environmental concerns are still presented with a vague air of “look at these hippies”, except where the actual disaster hits. Even then it was very rare up to quite recently for climate to be mentioned in the context of flooding or wildfires. In terms of making plans, American style bunker-and-gun preppers do us no favours, of course. And some of the more right-wing press will hit both sides of an event from the wrong angle. When this is how people encounter the concepts, over and over again, it’s not surprising that they’re apathetic about doing anything about the problems - they’re either trivial or inevitable, and sometimes a kind of quantum superposition of both.

More thinking on this stuff as I get a bit more to grips with it, and maybe even some practical outcomes.

In entirely other news, I’m restructuring my Patreon. Previously, Patreon patrons got some occasional extra information about my newsletters, and at a certain level a sonnet every month (usually sent out in batches of four or six). However, not everyone likes sonnets, and I’d much rather channel the extra information into the newsletters. There’ve also been a few remarks from people that I don’t write about myself much in social media, and they don’t know what’s going on in my life. Several people pointed to other writers’ Patreons and newsletters, where they basically give such updates. So I’m going to change things up a bit. Hereafter, the base level of the Patreon will get updates about what’s happening, what things I’m working on, and a general life update, at what I hope will be a steady frequency. The higher tiers will get some (more) pictures, of gardens, wild things, AI-generated images, or cats. Your patronage will be very welcome, and suggestions of other benefits will be at least considered!

[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) on Patreon or Ko-fi. Merchandise is also available. Major research contributions in this and all issues by Cee.]

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. You can support the newsletter via Patreon, Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise.]

(MidJourney’s interpretation of what my book collection looks like)

One of the not-quite-news items that’s come to light recently is how already-changed climates are making it possible to grow foodstuffs in places where it wasn’t a going concern before. This does in some sense come close to the “climate change isn’t all bad” position that some conservatives are trying to flog, but I’m seeing it more as making the best of the inevitable, and coping with change. It does point up that as some crops become viable, others will become more difficult, or entirely impossible. And almost all such projects rely on available irrigation, which is going to be an issue in many parts of the world. In related news, there are trees appearing in the Arctic, which wasn’t expected for another century or so, and the same tree populations are dying off at the southern edge - the forest is literally moving north to get away from the heat.

In keeping with the crops, though, the first book I want to recommend - which I’m sure I’ve mentioned before - is John Seymour’s The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, which has rarely been out of print since it was first published in 1976. It does pretty much what it says, and sets up outline plans for various sizes of farm, from one acre to at least five. It’s for a British Isles climate, mostly (see below about vegetable gardening for the limits of that). It absolutely presupposes you have a broad range of skills, or can develop them, and I am completely certain that people have spent ten or a hundred times as many hours looking at the pictures and dreaming than they have following the instructions. It’s an excellent book to have - but it’s worth noting that Seymour, who I met once when I was very small, did have some income from his books as well as his farm. Most small farms are not at present financially viable, and I’ve written a bit more about this over in Commonplace.

However, for a look at someone who’s giving self-sufficiency a go, see the appropriately named Ben Green in Germany. He seems to be doing pretty well, although I don’t think veganism is viable in the long term (without certain vitamins, veganism can literally give you permanent brain damage, and producing them from non-animal sources is essentially impossible without major industrial processes). If, however, he had one cow or goat and a few chickens - and didn’t have the pigs - he’d be onto a reasonably solid thing.

The next book is possibly a very odd one. It’s called Household Management for Men, it’s by a guy called Nigel Browning, and it was first printed in 1980. It’s a small book, easy to read, and gives good solid instructions on how to, well, manage the house you’re living in. It’s an encapsulation of the stuff that “women were taught by their mothers”, and while there’s an inherent set of assumptions around gender and knowledge in there, the book acknowledges that. It is good and valuable knowledge, and I know a number of adults who could benefit from reading it. I could probably benefit from re-reading it myself; I’ll have to find my own copy or buy a new one. Much of what’s in there is not particularly relevant to an era of climate chaos, but all of it is relevant to being an independent, capable human, and that’s an excellent first step toward acquiring other skills.

Two more, which are more in the vein of thinking about things than engaging in practical knowhow, are Workbenches, Revised Edition: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use by Christopher Schwarz and Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B Crawford. The Workbenches one is also practical, but it’s still the model of careful thinking it contains for which I’m recommending it. They’re both good approaches to how to think about skills and working.

I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t recommend a cookbook. There are plenty of claiming-to-be-post-apocalyptic cookbooks out there, but they’re mostly nonsense - cooking as a skill and practice has remained pretty similar through history, and conditions of climate chaos (or whatever other apocalypse you’re having) won’t change that. So what you want instead is a broad-based general cookery book. You can get All In The Cooking by Josephine B. Marnell, Nora M. Breathnach, Ann A. Martin, & Mor Murnaghan if you’re on this side of the Atlantic. It was published in the 1940s in Ireland as a school text for Home Economics, and it remains one of the best basic cookbooks I’ve ever met. In the US, the somewhat older Fannie Farmer Cookbook, published in 1896 as The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Farmer will serve you very well. There have been numerous reprints over the last 130 years or so, and it’s notable that it was also intended for educational use.

Next up, vegetable gardening. My personal recommendation is The Irish Gardener’s Handbook by Michael Brenock, but you should get one which is local to your area. There are enough foibles of soil types and suitable (and available) varietals that a generic gardening book is only of vague use, and one specific to another area may be useless. That said, climates are changing, so it may be worth trying to work out which way that’s going. Generally speaking, if you can look at an area south of you, that’ll help for futureproofing, but it’s not an ironclad solution. Almost any possible outcome for Ireland leaves it being damp and rainy, so looking at Spanish gardening advice isn’t as useful. Northern Portugal or the South of France might be more in the right line.

There’s another book I want to recommend, but with some caution. Worldchanging, edited by Alex Steffen Abrams was published in 2006, and claims to be “a user’s guide to the 21st century”. That’s a bold claim that far into the century, but it was generally pretty well received, and as with many of the books I’m including here, it’s more for the process of thinking than the actual information in it. It has sections about consumption, shelter, cities, community, business, politics and the planet, each with a large number of subheadings. It has a short foreword by Al Gore, and a longer introduction by Bruce Sterling, which should give you some idea of its placement in thinking and politics. 17 of the 63 contributors (my counts, hot day, may not be 100% accurate) are women, which isn’t great, but is better than many other collected works. The book was an outcrop of a website, worldchanging.com, which no longer exists, or rather has been taken over by a commercial enterprise offering “Flexible Mobile Off-Grid Habitats”. So in some ways it’s an artefact of the mid-00s.

Obviously, the older books I’m talking about here are all by men, except the cookery books (Fannie Farmer was also disabled). Part of this is because I’ve had them for a while, before I started to look actively for books that are not by white guys. Part is because there are very few such books out there yet by women. As I acquire more books - which is absolutely inevitable - I’m going to be trying to prioritise those by women, and books by people from different minorities. Those different voices know more about operating from a position of disadvantage, which is going to be extremely important.

I also have some books on woodworking, blacksmithing, basic building skills, and so forth. I haven’t used them enough to recommend them, so they’re not included here. I can, if people are interested, do a later issue on aspirational books, rather than recommendations per se.

People have been asking, on and off, since I started this newsletter, whether I’d write a book on the topic. That’s something I’m interested in, but which I can’t currently afford - if I take the time to organise my information, update the stuff from when I started, compile it into an actual coherent work, and get it published, that’s going to take a lot of work. It would either cut into my paid working time, or stop me from writing the newsletter itself (and a lot of other writing), and that’s not something I’m very interested in. Also, I am yet another white guy, and I’d prefer to support someone from a different demographic in doing so. I am vaguely considering something like a Gentle Decline Almanac - an annual publication with things like calendar, moon phases, tides, planting dates, and some climate-relevant stuff like record temperatures, all specialised for Ireland - so if that’s something you’d be interested in, please let me know.

As a final thing, here’s a post which considers the world’s economy as a physics system, and concludes that it’s going to be a rough ride over the next while. I don’t have either the maths or the time to check the numbers, but it’s interesting reading.

[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) and allow me to keep on eating while I hammer on the keyboard and stare at the sky. Patreon is here, and for those thinking more of the one-time coin in the hat, Ko-fi is available. And the merchandise shop is here. Major research contributions in all issues by Cee.]

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. You can support the newsletter via Patreon, Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise. The spotlighted product for this issue is the shortly-to-be-discontinued old-3-rules t-shirt, which (like the enamel mug to which this text originally applied) is hard-wearing and solidly thematic for your neighbourhood revolution meetings.]

There were a few corollaries to this as well. Paraphrasing, several people said “I live in a small apartment with no garden, and I’ve no access to a workshop.” Several more said “I don’t know where to start with acquiring any of these skills”. And one person said “I’m over sixty years old. What can I start to learn that will remain useful?”

(And speaking of, another reader asked “Can you recommend a blog or website where older folks are discussing the practical skills they can acquire now to not only provide personal income but also support an emerging more realistic paradigm?”. I’ve been looking into this, and the best I can find is the Deep Adaptation forum - it’s not particularly cognisant of anyone’s age, and I’m not always convinced of its practicality but it does focus on, well, adaptation. If anyone is aware of such a website, do let me know and I’ll pass it on!)

But let’s start in to looking at skill acquisition. First - and I know a few people who are going to read this and laugh, because my dislike of the medium is well known - YouTube is useful here. Video is a good medium for teaching practical skills. You can skip back a few seconds, and replay something over and over until you get it, which is both time-consuming and awkward if you’re getting a real person to show you, so in that context, it can work better than a class.

There may, if you live in an urban area, be local classes in basic carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, knitting or clothes-making. There might be a local maker space of some kind. Some enlightened countries have libraries that support this kind of learning and skill acquisition (I know the big new library in Helsinki does, for instance), and indeed, any public library is a good place to start looking for information. Almost any such class will take place somewhere with access to the relevant tools, and it will put you in touch with at least one person who already has the skill and a few more people interested in acquiring it.

There are also groups in many areas that will, more or less as a side effect, teach you relevant skills. Historical re-enactment and re-creation groups are the foremost among these. The one that I know best is the SCA, the Society for Creative Anachronism, but there are many more as well. LARP groups, while the emphasis is different, will teach you some craft and outdoor skills. And local hiking and foraging groups will give you a different, but also useful set of skills (and improve physical fitness in what is to me a much more enjoyable way than a gym).

It is, of course, entirely possible to be involved with these kinds of groups and acquire no practical skills at all; you do need to put in some work yourself, and ask people who evidently know things to teach you, even if it’s just “hey, you can light a fire in the rain, can you show me how?”. It’s important to ask, because a lot of people who have such skills kind of assume that they’re everyday things that anyone could do. I ran a class in camp cooking a few years back at a medieval camping event in Wales, starting with how to light a fire. Part of this was finding suitable kindling, and I started in with “ash twigs will burn even if they’re green, straight off the tree”, only to have someone ask “what’s an ash tree?”. Now, she was Australian, so she had a good reason not to know what an ash looked like, but it turns out there are plenty of people even in Ireland - where it’s practically a weed - that can’t pick it out from a hedgerow. So don’t be afraid to ask questions like that, as everyone’s assumptions about basic knowledge are different.

So let’s have a look at some specific skills. First, textiles. This is not my area, but it’s one that is more practical than most for limited space, access to the outdoors, and even for reduced mobility. You have knitting, crocheting, naalbinding, and sewing. All of these result in fabrics, more or less, which can be anything from hats and gloves through blankets, clothes, curtains, and wall-hangings. The traditional objection to these as practical skills is that you can buy all those things for less than you can make them, and that even if supply lines seize up, there’s a plentiful stock of them in the country. However, that’s not really true. If you’ve ever gone looking for a suit at short notice (and you are not smack in the middle of average-sized in every dimension), you’ll have realised pretty quickly that they are not all that available. Likewise, buying woollens in summer or swimwear in winter is difficult, and if you have any allergies to particular fibres, it can be extremely hard to work around. Wall-hangings are one of the best historical forms of insulation, but good luck in finding any of those without ordering from a specialist. Shortened supply lines and even slightly specialised needs are not a good combination.

So here’s an introduction to knitting, one for crochet, one for naalbinding, one for basic sewing, and one specifically about repairing clothing, all from YouTube. YouTube itself will show you many more once you starting viewing these, of course.

Woodwork requires a bit more space, but you can do some basic stuff in a kitchen or a small back yard. One of the things that stops people from doing any woodwork at all is that the finished products look very rough compared to commercial furniture. That’s ok! You can make garden furniture, boxes for shoe polish, or scratching posts for your cat to start out - all things where the look of the thing is unimportant as long as it works - and bear in mind that function is a lot more important than form in the context of stuff you’re making yourself. If what you need is a short ladder to get to a high cupboard, and it works, then it’s good.

Here’s a basic primer in woodworking (which is essentially a recording of a class given at a local level, including tools), one in box-making, and one in wood-turning.

Gardening (food growing, specifically) and foraging are two things that I firmly believe are going to be more important in the next few decades. Growing food is going to become more difficult as we experience greater extremes of weather, so this is one where I’m working on developing skills myself. Right now, a lot of my questions come down to “why did that not grow?” and “how the hell do I deal with these slugs eating half my plants?”, but I am learning. There’s lots more on this topic in my food-and-food-history newsletter, Commonplace.

(The MidJourney AI’s idea of “post-apocalyptic allotment gardening”, which actually looks rather pleasing.)

Here’s a video on the basics of vegetable gardening (and a very local one for Ireland). And here’s a video on starting out in foraging. Locale is important for these, so look for videos for your country, state, or region - there are plenty out there. It’s also an area in which hyper-local learning is useful, so if you can hang around at your local allotments, community gardens, or the like, it’ll help. And for those in limited space, here’s a video about gardening on a balcony (weirdly, videos on this specific topic seem to tend toward having subtitles and music, but no voice).

Metalwork is also mostly a closed book to me, although it’s on my list for future attention. We’re surrounded by metal or partially metal objects, but making or repairing them is beyond most people’s capability. Here are videos getting started in blacksmithing, casting, and welding.

Building encompasses many skills, and it’s an area that’s hard to get going in without someone to teach you (and possibly employ you). There’s very little amateur work in it, either; nobody wants to live in a house built by someone who’s still working out what they’re doing. You can start out on sheds and lean-tos, though. So here’s one on building a garden shed, and one on building a lean-to structure. I have to admit that both of these videos are making me think about what I could do here, particularly on the west side of the house where the bins and firewood are - a lean-to out there could provide a lot of storage.

Plumbing is something that only occurs to most people in emergencies - when there’s water coming into the house from a broken or blocked pipe, or it’s just coming out of the ceiling and you’ve no idea why. The very basics of plumbing - installing a dishwasher or washing machine - is something I can and have done, but I’m working on remembering that the basics are not necessarily clear to anyone else. Here’s the start of a series of videos about water supply and plumbing, and one about fixing common leaks. Terminology in plumbing can be pretty localised, which is relevant when you go looking to buy supplies, but the actual work seems to be fairly universal.

Finally, electrical stuff is not for messing with, and it’s one of the areas where - in Ireland, at least - amateur work is actively discouraged. So I’m not going to provide links for that - if you want to learn how to do electrical work, go look for classes from qualified electricians. I do think this is going to be one of the big areas of necessary work in the decades to come, so if a complete career change sounds good to you - or you’re just starting out - this is definitely one to look into.

All of these are learnable things, and while I’ve gone about linking to YouTube for the basics, there will also be websites with plenty of information, local classes, and books. I do feel that books have particular value, because they can be referred to even if your power is out - and that’s the time you’re going to really need the information.

Speaking of power outages, I’m seeing more and more coverage of energy issues in the news. Supplies of gas, in particular, are problematic with the war in Ukraine, and it’s entirely possible that much of Western Europe will have shortages this winter. And some of our electrical grid is powered by gas and other fossil fuels which used to come from Russia. We’re also just off the back of a brief but savage period of extreme heat in the Isles and Europe. Records were broken all over the place; a number of places in the southern half of England got to over 40C, and power outages in London were only just averted by buying in electricity at enormous prices from abroad.

It might therefore be a good time to look into solar panels, wood-burning stoves, and checking whether your water supply is dependent on electricity. Also, if your work situation depends on having power, as is true for most of us who work from home, then it’s useful to look into alternate places nearby - an arrangement with a friend or neighbour who’s on a different electrical circuit might suffice for this. If there are wider blackouts, there’s not a lot to be done about it. Obviously, if your actual place of work has no power, that’s more your employer’s problem than yours, at least in the short term.

My intended next issue is a listing of books, as mentioned above, which I think will be useful in terms of reference and learning for practical skills in our era of climate chaos. Let me know if there are other things you’d like me to dig into!

[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) and allow me to keep on eating while I hammer on the keyboard and stare at the sky. Patreon is here, and for those thinking more of the one-time coin in the hat, Ko-fi is available. And the merchandise shop is here. Major research contributions in all issues by Cee.]

And in true l'esprit d'escalier, I eventually arrived, weeks later, at “What you can do is what the whole newsletter is about.” But I accept that I need to be a bit clearer about that, and perhaps put some more emphasis on the you than the do.

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. You can support the newsletter via Patreon, Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise. The spotlighted product for this issue is again the Gentle Decline enamel mug, which is hard-wearing and solidly thematic for your neighbourhood revolution meetings.]

As a sort of thing-zero, this is not what can be done to prevent the climate changing, or reduce the change. There’s lots of material on that elsewhere; we’ve known most of it for decades. This is about what you can do to get through the changes, yourself, in good order.

Part of the problem is that out of my 3 Rules, the first two (Move Inland and Grow Food) are difficult to do, and the third (Be Generous) rather depends on having been successful in the first two. Some of that is because I’ve compressed things too far, mind, so let me drop “Grow Food” in a glass and rehydrate it so we can have a better look. I might need to rephrase it.

What I’m really talking about here is “develop skills that will work for you in a world where climate change has had slow but large effects”. The growing of food is more about developing the skills to grow food than it is to grow food in the short term. At present, unless you have preternaturally green fingers, it’s far more economic in terms of the value of an hour’s work for most people to buy vegetables than to grow them. Notably, this is not true for potatoes and other very-low-effort crops, and it’s not true for soft fruits and other expensive crops. But I digress; never mind that right now.

(Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash)

A lot of the people who are subscribed to this are knowledge workers, one way or another. The early subscribers I know in person; some of those who have come later I’ve corresponded with a bit, and I’m making a guess for some of the rest of you. By knowledge workers, I mean programmers, network engineers, marketers, writers, support people, sysadmins, and so forth. Your output, on a day to day basis, is information. I am one of you.

In a world where supply chains are shortened, fossil fuels are harder to come by, there are pressures of people moving from coastal regions, and infrastructure is damaged, knowledge work will be less valuable, and there will be fewer jobs in it.

I’ve had some argument on this point, so let me poke it a bit, and see if it still stands up. At the moment, in the West, or at least in the civilised parts of the West, it’s fairly easy to get hold of food. It’s not necessarily easy enough, and it’s not necessarily cheap; there are a hell of a lot more people going hungry in developed economies liek the US and UK than there should be. There should be none, being blunt about it. But still: relatively easy.

Where supply chains are shortened, food has to come from closer by. Asparagus from Peru, grain from India, apples and lamb from New Zealand, and so forth (from the Irish point of view, at least) - all those are going to have to go. The demand for those goods may increase locally, which will mean there’s more work in the relevant areas of agriculture, or those foods may become very hard to get, and there’ll be more demand for other foods, so there’ll be… more work in relevant areas of agriculture.

When fossil fuels are hard to come by, this will reduce mobility. I’ve written about the battery problem before, but basically: electric vehicles, which are the only practical way to travel long distances in the absence of fossil fuels, still don’t have efficient enough batteries for goods haulage or longer commutes. This will further shorten supply chains, so the effects I’ve described above will be accentuated, but it will also concentrate people more into the areas they live in. Less commuting, less travel in general. This will increase demand for local services, where people previously took advantage of specialists near where they worked. Local non-food shops will have greater footfall, greater demand for their goods. Luxury food shops will also have more demand - wine, chocolate, good coffee, etc (assuming these goods can be got at semi-reasonable prices). Certainly, some of this will be supplied by internet shopping and delivery, but many people like to see their luxury goods as they’re buying them. So demand will increase for local bookshops, laundries, key cutting, clothing shops, sports shops, hobby suppliers, and so on. And also for local delivery services, of course.

When there are pressures of people moving from coastal locations inland, there will be demand for new housing, roads, schools, and so on. Much of the service and education industries will be covered by the people who are moving, but they’ll need places to live and work. And where infrastructure is damaged, it will need to be rebuilt, and there’s demand for that, too.

None of that is knowledge work. Greater demand - in a situation where that demand can’t be served from elsewhere - means increased wages. Increased wages means people will move to that work, and the fundamentals of knowledge work depend upon network effects; there is less work for sysadmins if more people are growing food and building houses than sitting in front of computers. And the pressures of capitalism, and its “optimal” 4-6% unemployment rate, means that people who are in knowledge work will be pushed hard toward the higher-demand jobs. If they don’t have the skills for them, well, some of them will be that 4-6%.

(This has happened the other way around in Western economies in the last 80 years or so, as outsourcing to other parts of the world and the concentration of people in cities has reduced demand for these practical jobs.)

And it’s worth noting that this will happen in a relatively gentle version of climate change, where everything happens slowly and smoothly. So the very first thing you can do to make yourself climate-proof is develop some skills that are not knowledge work. I do not mean music or story-telling or community-building or game-running or other entertainment roles; these are still essentially knowledge work, and they are a direction that all the knowledge workers that want to keep doing non-physical work will try to go.

I mean food production, or cooking, or clothes making, or building, or carpentry, or engine maintenance (especially electrics), or wind-vane engineering, or butchery, or bridge-building, or any of a million other necessary practical skills.

In the event of a more catastrophic and sudden effect of climate - which is going to happen in some places - then those practical skills become even more relevant. There is next to no knowledge work without the internet, for instance, or without electricity, and it is virtually certain that there will be issues with both in some places. These will probably be short-term things, but your possession of practical skills will make you a lot more comfortable in that short term, without having to directly depend on people who do have those skills.

Essentially: if the power goes off tomorrow, and stays off for ten days, can you get by? This isn’t in terms of employment - your job will probably still be there when the power comes back up - but in day to day skills. Can you light a fire, cook on it, wash clothes, or at the absolute minimum, move yourself to to somewhere where there is power, when everyone else is trying to do the same? I would put money on, say, 1 in 3 people in the West needing to do these things at some point in the next few decades. And there’s a non-zero chance of some of that power-and-internet just staying off in some areas.

So, that’s what you can do: learn some practical skills. I may need to replace “grow food” with “learn practical skills” in my Rules - although I’d appreciate people’s thoughts on that. Drop me a line, let me know what you think.

[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) and allow me to keep on eating while I hammer on the keyboard and stare at the sky. Patreon is here, and for those thinking more of the one-time coin in the hat, Ko-fi is available. And the merchandise shop is here. Major research contributions in all issues by Cee.]

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. You can support the newsletter via Patreon, Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise. The spotlighted product for this issue is again the Gentle Decline enamel mug, which is hard-wearing and solidly thematic for your neighbourhood revolution meetings.]

First, I’ve said before that as a historian, I’m a gradualist. I don’t believe that sudden change exists; change happens slowly, bit by bit, unevenly. One of the implications of this is that change usually begins far sooner than we think, and ends far later than we think. And sometimes it didn’t happen when we think it did at all.

Let me talk through an example from my other area of knowledge. The tomato is an essential part of European cooking now. It’s hard to imagine Italian food, in particular, without it. And we can pin down pretty precisely when it arrived, right? Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492, brought back the tomato, and it’s been pizzas and Bolognese ever since.

Except… this is not the case. Sure, there were no tomatoes in Europe before 1492 (although I’ve seen a few discussions centering around things-that-might-have-been-tomatoes in older recipes, and in pre-1492 accounts from East Asia; nobody takes these terribly seriously). But Europeans did not take quickly to tomatoes. They look like nightshade, a poisonous plant, and while nightshade berries are black, they don’t look unlike cherry tomatoes. They’re part of the same plant family. So the Europeans basically went “those look poisonous, no thanks”, and in any case, novelty was not as valued in the late 1400s as it is now. So the very first mention of a tomato in an Italian recipe is in 1692, fully 200 years later; almost seven generations. And they were still seen as exotic and in need of some explanation in England as late as 1820. So what we actually have is a very, very gradual process of arrival, stretching over hundreds of years and multiple generations until we arrive at ubiquity.

The counterpart to gradualism - but really, an inherent part of it - is inertia. In physics, inertia is Newton’s first law, “the natural tendency of an object to remain at rest or in motion at a constant velocity along a straight line”; in other words, things that start moving keep moving, and things that are staying still keep doing that. Similarly (and not entirely metaphorically) once some kind of change or event is “in motion”, it stays that way until something acts on it. And the something that acts on it has to be big enough to make a difference. Physics has a limited application to things that happen in history, and you can get into thorny philosophical ground concerning predetermination, free will, and quantum theory if you try. But let me step around that area and just say: things that are happening have a tendency to keep happening, and things that are not happening need a considerable investment of effort to start happening.

So once the tomato got going, and nothing acted against it, it was pretty much inevitable that it would become a major foodstuff. Not everywhere, not all the time, but noticeably all the same.

So what we have at the moment in climate change is a combination of several things that are in motion, and have been for some time. There’s the use of fossil fuels, primarily. That starts with the use of coal at some nebulous point in history, and just keeps going. This is in the realm of human events and history, but even with all of science, and a lot of public opinion against it, it just… keeps on happening. If I need to get something from a shop in Dublin, my options are to travel in by car or bus (both using fossil fuels), or have it delivered (on a van using fossil fuels). I do, in theory, have the option of walking or cycling in, getting the thing and bringing it home the same way, but there were still fossil fuels involved in getting the object from wherever it was made to the shop. Also, it would take me an entire working day to cycle in and back out (and at least a full day, as in dawn to dusk, to walk), and then I would complain about it for weeks afterwards, so it’s not a great use of time or energy. So unless I forego the thing entirely, fossil fuel is just there, inherent in our systems of living.

As one individual, I can’t change that. Even if I could afford to have a solar-charging super-zippy vehicle to get in and out of the city on, there would be fossil fuels used in its production, and again to supply the shop. And when it comes to changing this on a systemic level, there are people who don’t think it’s a serious problem, and people who are actually opposed to changing it, because they are making money from the fossil fuel usage. And that latter group of people, because they have money, can afford to push money at governments to slow up change, or at “researchers” to gum up the works, or at clever concepts like “personal climate footprint”, which can distract the public for years.

It is extremely difficult to disconnect from the fossil-fuel using systems. It may actually be impossible. You can have a carbon-neutral house, grow all your own food locally, irrigate from local water systems, grow your own fibre plants and keep sheep to make clothes, buy what external foods you need from like-minded people, and so on, but you couldn’t have any communications devices (even the simplest phone is a very long way from neutral), use medicines or medical treatments, or engage in any business with anyone else who’s not similarly disconnected. So essentially: individuals cannot reduce their climate impact to zero. Even if they did, each individual in the world is a tiny, tiny proportion of the whole. Millions of us doing so would still make no measurable difference.

In other words, what we have here at the moment is a system in motion. It will remain in motion until some external force acts on it. The only truly external force available is running out of the physical fuels, and that’s some time away still. We can work up a sort of external force with laws and economic effects - banning the extraction and use of some fossil fuels (with actual jail time as a consequence), taxing the remainder fiercely, and so on. But we have known this, as a species, for more than 40 years, and we have done very, very little toward it. That is not going to change quickly, and I am cynical enough about humans to think that most of us alive today are not going to see a change in it. There have been swathes of places like the US and Australia on fire, there are catastrophic floods, there are slower-moving more-damaging hurricanes, and the response of our culture at a broad level is to shrug and keep doing what we were doing.

The third IPCC report says that overshooting an average temperature change of 1.5C is now essentially inevitable, even if we were able to throw the brakes on all emitting processes right now. It sets out what needs to be done to halt that before it gets to 2C, and to reverse it. Much as I would love for those recommendations to be followed, I know that they will not. We’re going to go past 2C, and honestly, I think we’re going to hit 3C.

At that point in time, enough of the people who have directly profitted from fossil fuel use for their whole lives will have, literally, died off for those remaining to begin to back off. Most of the people now in their teens and twenties - modulo a few who have been carefully non-educated in these areas by conservative parents, etc. - know what needs doing, and are willing to get on with it. These are the people who will be in control of the remnants of fossil fuel extraction and use in thirty years’ time. Many of the people now in their 30s and 40s have a similar understanding, and that will provide some of the groundwork. This is a matter of education and understanding, not age per se, but that education and understanding is only really happening in the youngest generations now.

I do believe that our civilisation will adjust, but gradually. Some of that change is already happening, as with any change. It is not going to be fast enough to make a difference in the short term, and it is probably not going to be fast enough to make a difference in the medium term. It is on that basis that I believe the responsible set of actions is to prepare for inevitable, slow, but catastrophic change.

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For what it’s worth, I feel that Cullinan’s position can be properly summarised as “how very dare the Minister for agriculture say something about farming without consulting me”, and I’m not giving him any more column inches. That out of the way, let’s have a look at the overall situation, where there are some practical issues.

Any upset in Ukraine and Russia - let alone both - has an immediate impact on wheat, among other commodities. Both countries produce a lot of raw materials, but Ukraine produces a truly startling amount of grain for its size: 8% of the global wheat supply. Russia provides another 17%. Ukraine has officially dropped its export quota to zero for a number of goods, and Russia will not be trading much with anyone except China for at least a few months (and quite possibly the rest of the year). Wheat prices were already rising fast due to climate issues, and an even more limited supply is going to make them rocket. Serbia (not a major world exporter) has also said it’s not exporting any wheat this year, and we can expect some other countries to follow suit.

(Wheat futures chart from nasdaq.com)

What should we do about this? I have a list, five points.

One: if you can, buy some flour (if you use it), pasta and maybe some rice, and stick them in a cupboard, this week. On the average, flour will rise in price first, followed by pasta, and then as those prices go up, some segment of the global market will shift to eating rice, and the price of that will rise. At present, retail prices are based on industry and index prices from last year’s harvest; the index prices are already moving fast, and everything else will follow soon enough. If you have a stash now, you won’t be contributing as much to pressure on supplies later.

Two: shorten supply lines. This is what the Minister for Agriculture is doing, or trying to do; we can cushion ourselves from the global market by producing wheat (and other grains; they’ll all be affected) locally. Unless you’re a farmer, you’re not going to have much to do in this. If you are a farmer, tell the IFA to quit being idiots, and see if you can help the rest of the farming community get with the program (I’m not saying there aren’t difficulties, I am saying the reaction of “but we caaaaaaan’t” is only appropriate if you’re under 6). Grains don’t work well as backyard crops, and they’re resource-intensive to process, so growing them for yourself isn’t very viable. But if you have local Irish grain suppliers, go buy stuff from them now so they can afford to plant more.

Three: plant some potatoes. You can grow potatoes successfully in your back yard, in containers, in raised beds, or in a hundred other ways. Every meal in which you have home-grown potatoes rather than pasta, bread, or even shop-bought potatoes takes a little more pressure off the grain supply, and if you’re growing food where none was grown before, you’re affecting the otherwise zero-sum nature of arable land availability. Grow some other stuff while you’re at it, too, but potatoes are almost a guaranteed success (blight, dogs and chickens aside). Obviously, this falls under Grow Food in the Three Rules.

Four: do whatever you can to bring a just end to the war in Ukraine. Write to your government representatives; leave them in no doubt about your opposition. Write to the Russian ambassador in your country (assuming they’re not chucked out in the next few weeks) telling them… honestly, tell them they’re deluded imperialist fascists, really. Contribute what you can to the people of Ukraine in cash and refugee supplies.

Five: be sensible about what you post on social media. I have seen a number of people pushed to panic in the last week over things that might happen, and about 75% of those were due to daft stuff on Facebook and Twitter. I have yet to see stupid stuff on Tumblr or Instagram, but I’m sure it’s coming; Tiktok has been a mire of misleading idiocy since Invasion Day Zero. This doesn’t have a direct bearing on the food supplies, but it does help reduce the level of panicking, and specifically panic-buying. Getting in some extra wheat-based stuff now is sane. Going in with four trolleys and clearing the Tesco shelves of pasta and flour is not.

But Drew, this isn’t climate-related, why are you writing about it? Well, first and foremost, I have people asking me to write about it, and I don’t know of any historian or writer who can resist an opportunity to hold forth about their own stuff. Second, Gentle Decline is about human-created disaster, and war is extremely human-created. The idea that in this case we can point to one human is pretty notable, to be honest; most modern wars arise out of a kind of grim historical and economic “inevitability”. I don’t mean that they were fated to happen, mind, but mostly they’d have happened regardless of specific people being in power. But Putin’s actions are more in the form of a medieval ruler; one with enough power to let his ego drive the kingdom, and nobody to tell him not to. This is perhaps better understood in modern terms as a mafia thing, and that goes some way toward showing this particular war as a systemic output rather than an individual decision. Overall, it is clear that Putin is the human causing the war.

The other question people have been asking me is whether this will lead to food rationing. My current expectation on this is: not in the West. Russia being cut off from external trade networks, and having to devote a good bit of the country’s transport network to supporting a difficult ongoing war will almost certainly lead to shortages there, and might lead to organised rationing, although I doubt it’ll happen quickly - it’s very clear that there were absolutely no contingency plans there. It would take very significant shortages for the West to end up with rationing in any official way, although it’s entirely possible that shops will limit how much of a given item one customer can buy.

What this is going to do is make life very difficult for poorer people, worldwide. Food bank use has been up in the last few years in many places, and particularly in the UK. As the prices of staple foods go up, food poverty is going to increase even more, and there will be more and more people who can’t afford enough food. Ireland doesn’t have food banks in the way the UK does; there’s an enormous cultural bias against letting people go hungry. But with housing and energy (also affected by the war) absorbing an ever-increasing proportion of people’s income, I think it’s going to be an issue here this year. Unfortunately, most of the systems that are in place for alleviating food poverty in Ireland are under religious control (Crosscare and the Capuchin Order). I’ve yet to work out what the most useful thing anyone in Ireland can do for this is, but once I do, I’ll let you know. Be Generous, though.

Alright. Things being as they are, I’m going to hit send on this sooner rather than later.

This issue has been brought to you by an elderly cat with definite attention needs, experiments in medieval chimney management, and the prospect of an extra bank holiday. I'm taking requests and questions. If you hit reply, you can send stuff straight to me.

[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) and allow me to keep on eating while I hammer on the keyboard and stare at the sky. Patreon is here, and for those thinking more of the one-time coin in the hat, Ko-fi is available. And the merchandise shop is here. Major research contributions in all issues by Cee.]

There’s the side question of “Will Russia invade Ukraine?”, and that’s… completely out of my wheelhouse. But I’ve been reading around, and the general opinion of most of the people I respect seems to be that it’s nigh-on inevitable. The preparations Russia has been making are expensive and inconvenient, and there’s little enough to be had for them from bluffing. You don’t gather thousands of soldiers, with all their equipment, from various parts of a very large country, as well as moving in ships and planes and so on, in January and February in a cold part of the world, without having firm intentions. The general idea seems to be that as soon as the Winter Olympics are over - “because Russia”, said one contact - the tanks start to roll. We’ll see how that comes out.

Ukraine is not yet a member of NATO, although it’s somewhere in the process of joining. Russia is very firm on the idea that it should not be, but also doesn’t get any say in it; that’s one of the reasons they’re looking to invade. Indeed, Ukraine is also due to apply to join the EU in 2024; a general movement out of the Russian sphere of influence. So if Russia invades, NATO is not yet obliged to respond. NATO may, however, want to respond, because while Ukraine isn’t a member yet, they need to show support. So it’s complicated.

(This terrible summary of the situation brought to you by someone who has, again, avoided military history as much as possible. But you get the gist.)

For more detail, take a look here:

and also here, an additional commentary on the thread above:

From my side of things, there are two outcomes: NATO chunters and grumbles, but doesn’t do anything, or NATO responds with military force. Since Russia has already annexed Crimea (generally held by the rest of the world to still be a part of Ukraine), and NATO has done nothing but chunter, my guess is currently on the former. Certainly, there’ll be a gap before there’s any response from the alliance.

So in supply lines, and in the short term, the issues are goods coming from Ukraine, and goods coming from Russia. Ukraine supplies a lot of raw materials, and not an awful lot of manufactured goods - some machinery, mostly in the heavier steel end of things. So there’s not a lot of consumer impact there. Goods coming from Russia include gas supplies, though, and that’s a concern. If Russia stops supplying gas to Europe - and that’s a definite possibility - then prices are going to rocket. Japan, for example, is already diverting ships carrying gas from the US to Europe, so it’s pretty clear they think there’s going to be a market.

(Image from Who is the biggest trading partner of Ukraine?, empr.media)

A lot of households in Ireland and the UK depend on gas for heating, and so do a lot of commercial premises. A smaller number use it for cooking as well (and many professional kitchens in restaurants, hotels, and takeaways). It’s unlikely that gas will be completely unavailable; it is moderately to very likely that the price of it will go up a long way. So that’s going to be one of the very first things to look at: do you have a non-gas way to heat your home and/or workplace? If you haven’t got other options (wood-burning stove or fireplace, oil heating, electrical heating), then it’s worthwhile getting an electrical heater or two. You can unplug them when you don’t need them, and you can move them around the house to wherever they’re needed.

If eventually NATO does move in, then we have a hot war the like of which we haven’t had in about three generations. I know two things about 21st century hot wars. One, I know almost nothing and should shut up, and two, supply lines will be affected, because they’re the most delicate bit of our modern civilisation, and they’re already pretty shaky. Usefully, many companies are looking at shortening them, getting goods previously manufactured in China or Korea or Vietnam produced in Europe (for European firms) or the Americas (for American firms). Less than usefully, that’ll take years to spin up fully, and the Ukraine situation is happening now.

But: if supply lines are in trouble, you have to depend on what’s local. For Ireland, that’s broadly ok for a few months; we might not get much in the way of new electronics, but we won’t starve. The UK is less well off. So refer back to my long-ago issue on stockpiling, most of which applies pretty neatly.

My readers are mostly in Ireland, the UK and the US. Ireland is “neutral”, which means we won’t be directly involved in any war in the near future. The UK and US are both very definitely members of NATO. It’s not easy for Russia to reach the US without missiles; the UK is slightly more within reach. In a hot war situation, people in the UK might be advised to move out of the bigger cities, even temporarily, so it’s worth keeping that in mind.

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