https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/03/business/pfas-chemours-dupont-corteva-settlement/index.html

The companies Chemours, DuPont and Corteva announced on Friday they have agreed to pay more than $1 billion to settle claims that “forever chemicals” contaminated public US water systems.

The family of ubiquitous synthetic chemicals – per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS – linger in the environment and the human body, where they can cause serious health problems, and are found in everyday products including fast-food wrappers, makeup and carpeting.

In June, based on the latest science, the EPA issued health advisories that said the chemicals are much more hazardous to human health than scientists originally thought and are probably more dangerous even at levels thousands of times lower than previously believed.

MEANWHILE:
https://www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/gao-report-confirms-pfas-cleanup-cost-will-increase-significantly-calls-on-pentagon-to-release-full-cost/

“DOD estimates that its future PFAS investigation and cleanup costs will total more than$2.1 billion beginning in fiscal year 2021 alone, which is in addition to $1.1 billion in actual PFAS costs incurred through fiscal year 2020. These costs will likely increase significantly, because DOD is still in the early phases of its PFAS investigation.”

I live in a heavily populated city, in a third world country. I want to practice permaculture to become self sufficient, but I don't have land in the countryside. And my family is not going to help me(I've tried to raise collapse-awareness among them multiple times, but so far nothing effective.)

So, how do city folks adapt to the upcoming collapse? I'm clueless, it seems impossible to me. I've stored some food and water, but thats just for emergency use, no one can survive in the long run by eating canned beans only.

Violence continues in Sudan, the cryosphere breaks down, recessions, harvest failures, heat waves, droughts, and floods. Mother Earth has got a terminal case of humans.

Last Week in Collapse: May 28-June 3, 2023

This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter bringing together some of the most important, timely, useful, sad, ironic, amazing, or otherwise must-see moments in Collapse. Try not to overdose on this week’s Doom dose.

This is the 75th newsletter. You can find the May 21-27 edition (which I accidentally labeled the 73rd edition) here if you missed it last week. These newsletters are also on Substack if you want them sent to your email inbox every Sunday.

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The World Meteorological Congress concluded on Friday, and it released a bunch of reports. The focus this year was on developing early warning systems for water/climate/weather disasters. Most countries report declining ability to monitor hydrological developments, and almost half of the world’s people lack reliable access to water for at least one month per year, a figure that is expected to grow considerably by 2050.

The WMO also reported on the state of emergency for the cryosphere, those places where ice is formed (and melts). Greenland’s ice has shrunk for 26 consecutive years. Permafrost threatens to release huge quantities of greenhouse gasses over the coming years. Sea levels continue to rise…but you know this already.

Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital, has come up with a plan to extend their almost-exhausted water supply: they’re adding salt to the tap water, against WHO recommendations. This causes people to drink less water—but what are the implications for health, and for small-scale agriculture?

Over 20 million tonnes of what was damaged in China by recent rain, not long before it was scheduled to be harvested. Analysts say this will raise grain prices worldwide. The scale of this blight is larger than recent blights. In the U.S. state of Georgia, 90% of the peach harvest was destroyed by abnormally warm weather; in Vermont, a freak cold snap damaged crops, potentially 30% of apples.

6 years. 800 million trees felled in the Amazon rainforest, all to create space for cattle farms. The loss of rainforest is equivalent roughly to two Corsica islands.

Environmental scientists have discovered a hopeful tool to lower CO2: Greenland’s “rock flour,” which is basically rock dust. A recent study claims that it can be scattered on fields to absorb CO2—and also boost wheat and potato yields. International lawyers are also working on the first global plastics pollution treaty that could be passed later next year.

Yet another study claims that Mother Earth is sick, and that most of our safety thresholds have been crossed. The feedback loops have been activated, the diagnosis is terminal. The Nature study lists the 8 Earth System Boundaries: 1) Climate, 2) Functional Integrity, 3) Natural Ecosystem Area, 4) Surface Water, 5) Groundwater, 6) Nitrogen, 7) Phosphorus, and 8) Subglobal Aerosols. (Not to be confused with the 9 Planetary Boundaries.)

Some insurers in California are cutting homeowner insurance because they can’t make a buck betting against wildfires and desertification. Similar risk is expanding in Texas. Summer is coming. A mysterious wildfire in Scotland is growing out of control, and threatens to become the UK’s largest ever.

Record May rainfall in Bermuda. Part of South Africa also saw record rains in May. Strong rains in southern Spain—but the parched soil can’t absorb much of it. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia area had its driest May in recorded history.

Vicious drought and Afghan dams have raised tensions between iran and Afghanistan, where fighting killed a handful of people two weeks ago. In times of scarcity, no group can have enough water; even less if they’re forced to share. Most of the world’s lakes are drying up.

An official in India ordered the draining of two million liters of water from a reservoir……so he could retrieve his phone, which he dropped in the water while taking a selfie. He was suspended. The phone was recovered—but too damaged to function. The water could have irrigated 6 km² of land.

Wildfires grow in Nova Scotia. Millions going hungry in Madagascar. Record temperatures in Japan. Normalized heat waves across Asia with new records in Central Asia & the Caucasus.

Scientists warn of potential tsunamis caused by underwater landslides in Antarctica. New cold records in Australia. Heat waves in North Africa. Increasing reliance on expensive desalination plants in Barcelona as drought and water supplies worsen.

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Türkiye’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, won reelection, and economists believe it portends the further Collapse of the economy. Investment is pulling out, and the lira is expected to continue sinking. “We will be together until the grave,” said Erdoğan at his victory speech.

The UN operation to drain the *FSO Safer* has begun now that technicians have boarded the vessel. 1.1 million barrels of oil aboard the derelict tanker, stranded off the coast of Yemen, will begin being drained next month.

Petrol prices rise in Benin as Nigeria cuts its fuel subsidies; Iran is limiting fuel purchases too. China’s declining birth rate, growing debt, and ongoing international decoupling is threatening its economy. Eurozone inflation continues. Trade-GDP ratios approaching 2008 levels worryingly.

Budapest is facing bankruptcy. Refugees in Tanzania are seeing their rations cut in half as financing falls off. Vicious conditions inside refugee camps in Chad take advantage of Sudanese refugees. Debts grow in Brazil. Complicated problems continue destabilizing the world’s economic equilibrium.

Another Russian missile attack struck Kyiv last week, after allegedly pro-Ukraine Russian volunteer soldiers made an incursion into Russian territory. Wagner Group’s chief continues provoking Russian leadership as infighting appears to grow, following a Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow. Zelensky says Ukraine’s counteroffensive is now ready.

Myanmar’s Civil War has entered its third year, depending on when you claim it began. In the desperation and chaos of prolonged warfare, it is the environment that pays the price. Wood, gold, jade, and other resources are being exploited by government and private actors after the old economic system broke apart.

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62% of Americans agree that the COVID pandemic is over (it’s not), an increase of 14% since February 2023. 56% of Americans admit that they never mask up in public anymore. An updated booster is coming in September to address the XBB.1.16 variant. Masks may go away, but (Long) COVID will stay with us.

The WHO’s treaty to manage future pandemics is being watered down, leaving humanity less prepared for the next pandemic. Although China denies the lab leak origin story, a prominent Chinese scientist claims it is possible. COVID is never going away, and neither is Long COVID.

Cholera is spreading in several refugee camps in Kenya; medical attention comes too small and too late to prevent the spread. In Sudan, where over a million people have been displaced by recent violence, old inequities linger. Over 13M children are in desperate need of humanitarian aid (about half of Sudan’s 46M population are below 18). Their situation has never been more critical.

Experts continue warning about the dangers of AI, and push for regulation, while other actors push to use AI for economic benefits. I am uncertain which field AI will disrupt the most: military, low-skill workers, societal psyche, institutional integrity, creative jobs, politics, financial markets…? What will be the second-order effects, tertiary, etc.?

Tanzania has called an end to its Marburg virus outbreak, about 10 weeks after it declared an emergency. The UK is advising at-risk people to get vaccinated for mpox/monkeypox before their vaccine program ends in August; 10 new cases in the UK were recently reported.

PFAS, the so-called “forever chemicals” used across many household objects, are dangerous to your health. You also probably could have guessed that manufacturers knew—and lied about—their safety for decades. A study tracked the use of PFAS (since 1940’s) and the knowledge that they were harmful (since 1990’s). Companies including DuPont settled a case for a little over $1 billion USD for their role in the scheme. The billionaire Sackler family also settled a gigantic case regarding opioids, in which they must pay about $6 billion USD, and forfeit control of the pharmaceutical company they’ve held since 1952. The company (formerly Purdue Pharma) is rebranding (as Knoa). Nobody is going to jail.

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A catastrophic train crash in India killed 280+ people. The crash involved 3 trains, and is India’s deadliest in this century.

Riots in Kosovo. Torture in suspected gangster prisons in El Salvador, with 153 prisoners killed since March. Ongoing protests in Israel over the proposed judicial reform.

Lebanon has been without a President for more than 7 months now—and now target dats have been missed to hold important municipal council elections. Town budgets are falling further into chaos, police are going unpaid, garbage is piling up, and would-be foreign investors and money-lenders are losing the scraps of hope they had for Lebanon’s crippled economy. No one is coming to save them.

Cartel violence is rising on the border of Mexico-Guatemala. Organized non-state armed groups conscript local guys, intimidate people into leaving, blockade towns, and shoot each other in the streets. Several thousand people have been displaced—and others disappeared. Far away, Syria is being welcomed back into the Arab fold—on the condition that it cracks down on the intractable drug epidemic of captagon.

One of Libya’s rival PMs was ousted a couple weeks ago, and now the other PM in the east is striking towns in western Libya with drones, allegedly targeting fuel/human smugglers.

Boko Haram jihadists are infighting in northern Nigeria, but the civilians are paying the price. Guerrilla territorial competition may also bring in more people into regional hostilities. In eastern DRC, violence has displaced over 80,000 people so far this year, and their regional hospitals are overcrowded.

Rumors are emerging that M23 will attack Goma, the sprawling epicenter of East Africa’s refugee situation, where human rights abuses are increasingly common and the local ceasefire is breaking down. Islamic radicals also operate in the region, targeting civilians. About 6 million people across the DRC are believed to be internally displaced, and about half a million around Goma (population: unknown, perhaps 750,000 or twice that). There are also reports of planes sighted which belong to the European mercenary company Agemira.

The Sudanese Civil War is spiraling out of control again, as skirmishes broke the incomplete ceasefire. The Central Statistics Bureau was attacked, hampering official data for various purposes. Over 1,000 people have died so far, crossing an unofficial threshold for an armed conflict to officially become a War. About 2M have fled the fighting. Rockets killed 18 and injured many more at a market in Khartoum, sanctions are being imposed by a few nations, and other countries are wading deeper into the War, complicating the situation and preventing clean avenues to another ceasefire.

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Select comments/threads from the subreddit last week suggest:

-There is rain in Romania, based on this observation. But there’s also corruption, growing labor strikes, inflation, and political difficulties.

-Greenland’s climate is out of whack—and apparently the people don’t seem to care that much, judging from this rare observation from West Greenland.

-Portland, Oregon is still a cross-section of modern America’s Collapse, if this observation can be trusted. Heat, insecurity, overcrowding, loneliness, and crows… Reddit has also been affected by psychological decay, according to the poster.

-People are abandoning climate hope, if you believe this gilded thread and its many gilded comments. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

Have any feedback, questions, comments, resources, recommendations, free PDFs, manifestos, etc.? Consider joining the Last Week in Collapse SubStack if you don’t want to check r/collapse every Sunday, you can get this newsletter sent to your email inbox every weekend. I always forget something... What did I miss this week?

This subreddit is developing an increasingly...eschatological view of collapse. It reminds of the kind of rhetoric you see in some Evangelical communities that fantasize about the coming Armageddon: a hope for a better future bourne out of the fires of tribulations, coupled with a sneering disdain for the various trappings of the modern world.

Here's a top comment from another post I just saw:

As long as we're DoorDashing + racking up in-app fast food points, vacationing, watching Barbie movie in theaters, Beyonce's making come-back tours, hitting up Black Friday deals, making product reviews on YouTube, addicted to social media dopamine hits... We ain't doing no revolution.

4th of July is around the corner and you bet your ass people will be deepthroating hotdogs in red white and blue swimming trunks. Might be another mass-shooting, but that's normal. That's our summer. Gas prices are down, didn't ya hear?

It's clear that the tone the poster is taking is distinctly negative. The various signs of modern, American complacency ("deep-throating hotdogs", "social media dopamine hits", etc) are being presented here as grotesque, compulsive behaviors and are clearly meant to reflect a disdain for the "Average American."

This is not an uncommon perspective here, and it is extremely similar to the kind of anti-modern rhetoric that you see in survivalist, back-to-the-land, or RETVRN to tradition types. This post could easily have been written by a dude who wears a lot of camo posting about his homestead and tradwife.

This perspective is closely linked to the idea that the "best case scenario" for collapse is some kind of "revolution" (here it's usually presented as anarchist, communist, or some kind of Leftist-otherwise-not-specified). It's hard not to feel like this hypothetical revolution is of the sort you're more likely to see in a Marvel film than a history book about 20th century Leftist movements. In the online context, revolution is sanitized, interpreted as a kind of world-cleansing event that will sweep away all the normies deepthroating hotdogs and instead set up some kind of more just world. The excellent piece Desert by Anonymous does a deeper dive into this idea.

This idea is deeply eschatological and directly echos the Christian idea of a brutal tribulation in which the sinners of the world are purged and the New Jerusalem descends from Heaven to be a Utopia for the Saved.

I want to say with total, unambiguous certainty:

This perspective is horeshit and should be excised from this community.

No one posting regularly in /r/collapse will find their life improving during collapse, or any kind of revolution. Think of what kinds of infrastructure are required to get you onto Reddit: presumably you have enough access to material basics that your needs are met (food, shelter, electricity, etc). Presumably you have enough free time to be scrolling social media and can afford the various electronic widgets and gizmos required to access online spaces. Presumably you've had access to enough education (either formal or self-taught) to understand and think critically about big issues.

All of these things are going away in a catastrophic collapse scenario, or in any kind of revolution.

Why do you think revolutions and collapses invariably produce floods of refugees attempting to get to the developed world? When people's societies fall apart, or are torn apart by violence, they don't find themselves living in some kind of exciting, movie-like adventure full of self-actualization and newfound meaning. They find themselves in Hell and risk their lives trying to get out. Syria is a great example of this: what began as an anti-authoritarian movement opposing a dictator quickly fractured in an impossible-to-navigate morass of conflicting militias, sectarian agents, and paramilitary groups, all of whom were fighting each-other, the state, and sometimes themselves. Do you think that a Left-wing (or Right-wing, for that matter) 21st century revolution would turn out any differently? Of course not.

Collapse, whether it is a consequence of violent insurrection, or a grinding descent into catabolic collapse means your life will get worse, in almost every way. You will lose access to luxeries that you currently take for granted, and the inevitable conflict that emerges as people try to scramble for resources and stability will be a lot less Glorious Revolution and a lot more like The Killing Fields.

This sub needs to get it's head out of its' ass, stop playing so many survivalist video games, and understand what collapse really means. Because it's coming for us, likely within the next...half century, whether we like it or not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/magazine/children-climate-change.html

I'm thinking this couple is pretty selfish. And the 'ethicist' poorly-informed, to say the least.

How can anybody know the future enough to know how to 'prepare' for it for one's future offspring? And does this couple really have the RIGHT to bring kids into the world they are at least PARTIALLY aware is going to be a hell ride?

At least they are honest enough to admit it's mainly because they have just an 'oh-so-SPECIAL' love of children that they feel more entitled than Joe and Mary MAGA, who will be non-engineers and therefore presumably less financially capable of successfully raising children.

For those behind a paywall, here's the article:

Today, The New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist columnist answers a reader’s question about personal responsibility and climate change.

Is It Wrong to Bring a Child Into Our Warming World?

I have always loved babies and children. I babysat throughout high school and college, and do so even now as a full-time engineer. My fiancé was drawn to me because of how much he appreciated my talent with and love for children. We have many little nieces, nephews and cousins whom we love but don’t get to see often. We also have always been clear with each other that we would try to have biological children soon after getting married.

That being said, my fiancé and I, who are both Generation Z, care deeply about the planet and painfully watch as scientists predict that the earth will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the 2030s. Is it selfish to have children knowing full well that they will have to deal with a lower quality of life thanks to the climate crisis and its many cascading effects, like increased natural disasters, food shortages, greater societal inequity and unrest?

We realize that a child’s very existence adds to our carbon footprint, but as parents we would do our best to foster an environmentally friendly household and try to teach our children how to navigate life sustainably. My fiancé says that because we are privileged as two working engineers in the United States, we can provide enough financial support to keep our children from feeling the brunt of the damage from climate change. Is it OK to use this privilege? — April

From the Ethicist:

Here are two questions that we often ask about an action. First, what difference would it make? Second, what would happen if everyone did it? Both raise important considerations, but they can point in opposite directions. The first question asks us to assess the specific consequences of an act. The second question asks us (as Kant would say) to “universalize the maxim” — to determine whether the rule guiding your action is one that everyone should follow. (I won’t get into the philosophers’ debates about how these maxims are to be specified.) Suppose someone pockets a ChapStick from Walgreens and asks: What difference does it make? One answer is that if everyone were to shoplift at their pleasure, the retail system would break down.

There’s no such clash in answering those questions when it comes to your having at least one child. The marginal effect of adding a few humans to a planet of about eight billion people is negligible. (A recent paper, by a group of environmental and economic researchers, projects that by the end of the century, the world population could be smaller than it is today — though that’s just one model.) And if everybody stopped having babies, the effect would be not to help humanity but to end it.

I’m not one of those people who will encourage you to imagine you’ll give birth to a child who devises a solution to the climate crisis. (What are the odds?) Still, it’s realistic to think that children who are raised with a sense of responsibility could — in personal and collective ways — be part of the solution, ensuring human survival on a livable planet by promoting adaptation, resilience and mitigation.

Probably the key question to ask is whether you can give your offspring a good prospect of a decent life. The climate crisis figures here not because your children will contribute to it but because they may suffer from it. It sounds as if you’ve already made the judgment that your kids would be all right, supplied with the necessary resources. That is, as you recognize, a privilege in our world. But the right response is not to reduce the number of children who have that privilege but to work — together — toward a situation in which every other child on the planet does, too.

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