NEWSFLASH! Predicaments are NOT Problems!

September 17, 2025

Two views of the summit of Whiteface Veterans Memorial Highway

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**We interrupt our normally scheduled article for this important newsflash. Predicaments do not equal problems. Yes, this wasn’t my original plan for today, but this message really stands on top of all other messages and I’d like to drive this point home a bit further (if that is even possible). Now, onto our regularly scheduled program.**

While I took a trip to several forests and an arboretum in Kentucky and Indiana last week, which I was thrilled to do (visiting an old-growth forest was one of the highlights), I am also highly aware that not only are these forests threatened, but pretty much everything that grows in soil and then eats what is grown is likewise threatened. A new study discusses this in detail describing how forest soils accumulate microplastics through atmospheric deposition. More studies here show how microplastics are literally everywhere - in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. It also explains how 3 million metric tons of microplastics enter the environment. That’s over 8,000 metric tons per day!

The reason I prefaced this article with those stories is because recently I have had discussions with folks going on about “the energy transition” and how so-called “RE” (”renewable” energy) now makes up 33% of all energy (a false claim). Art Berman destroys the popular narrative of the energy transition in this new article.

So many people are still focused exclusively on just one symptom predicament of overshoot - climate change - and don’t appear to realize that emissions themselves are yet another symptom predicament of ecological overshoot. They don’t appear to understand that climate change is NOT the biggest issue we face, OVERSHOOT is! Better yet, most people still don’t comprehend the difference between a problem (which by definition has an answer or solution) and a predicament (which by definition has an outcome).

In an effort to bring about more awareness of predicaments, I wrote The Dilemma and Conundrum of Predicaments. By focusing on only one issue, people aren’t seeing the other predicaments we face and realizing that they are just as dangerous as climate change (or name your favorite symptom predicament [of overshoot] here). For instance, another article I wrote is titled, How Bad is Pollution Loading? In that article I detail how we are losing our ability to reproduce, meaning that in about 15 years or so we will be functionally extinct. If you’ve been paying attention to Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Boundaries, then you know that we’ve passed 7 out of the 9 planetary boundaries already (more have been passed since my article was written and I have posted updates at the bottom of the article).

One of the questions that was asked after I pointed out that the entire electrical grid is unsustainable and will become fragmented and finally sacrificed this century was, “What we could replace fossil fuels with if not renewables?” This article answers that question quite reliably, although the person I replied to obviously believes something other than the facts. From what I viewed with my conversation with him, he is lost in a fantasy world. Most of the claims he made are known and provable as false and I finally ended up just blocking him as life is too short to deal with numbskulls like that.

There are unfortunately many people just like him out there who aren’t enlightened enough to realize that these predicaments are NOT under our control. People who think we can control these predicaments are bargaining to maintain civilization, which can not and will not be maintained. Of course, someone as uninformed as he is cannot be reasoned with. They don’t bother to look up sources or read material that disagrees with their beliefs/worldview, so they stay stuck in an echo chamber which reverberates with nonsense and garbage. I actually checked out several of his sources, and the very title of one of them talks about “renewable electricity,” something I already know doesn’t even exist. Many folks like him are in total denial of reality, sadly. More about our lack of control and why is in this article about hyperobjects.

This article is more or less a repeat of many of my other articles, simply because once one has stated the facts, explained them as thoroughly as one can, provided thousands of sources to explain even further, and gone through as many related items as possible, what else is there to talk about? I wrote this over 3 years ago and I still think it (and the provided links) covers most of the material I have been going over for the past 5 years rather well. For those who would like to discover more about how we got here, this article is for you.

I often hear many different stories about so-called “solutions” and practically every single one of those ideas doesn’t actually solve anything; they might mitigate circumstances in one symptom predicament but they do so at the expense of another symptom predicament (or predicaments). In other words, they focus on reductionism by working only on symptom predicaments rather than holistically on the overall master predicament of ecological overshoot. If something doesn’t reduce overshoot, it can not and will not help the situation, the absolute best that can be achieved.

I understand that there is a large amount of ignorance, hubris, and stupidity to go around in all of this, and I take my own ignorance seriously, as I certainly don’t know it all either. However, I am well aware of what doesn’t reduce overshoot or otherwise work towards actually mitigating the predicaments we face, and I have tried to explain many of these rather thoroughly over the years, demonstrating why they don’t work. Conservation, Saving Species, Fighting Climate Change, and Rebelling Against Extinction was an effort to point some of this out. With regard to climate change, Carbon Sinks Are Becoming Carbon Sources was an attempt to highlight the fact that tipping points have been breached and the systems we depend on are changing how they work.

Most important in my attempts at shouting into the wilderness has been the discovery of our intractable lack of agency with regard to all of this. Many people find this truth difficult or impossible to accept, but the deck is stacked against us. William E. Rees tackled this in his latest article, Twenty-four reasons why we are hooped, showing how our biological and psychological imperatives work against any ability we might have to work together as a species to reduce overshoot. Most all our attempts to “solve” these predicaments (which cannot be solved anyway) end up being totally counterproductive and simply wind up increasing overshoot instead of reducing it.

I’ve mentioned many times how reducing technology use (which is a behavior of ours) is really the only way to accomplish reducing overshoot voluntarily but how our species collectively would most likely never set itself on such a course. Degrowth gets a lot of attention, but it too has some inherent issues culturally which have so far made it more of a narrative rather than a reality. Degrowth is still a good idea, but the systems of civilization that surround us are unsustainable, meaning that degrowth in and of itself won’t be enough as long as the systems themselves aren’t dealt with. I’m afraid that degrowth is really just more bargaining to maintain civilization in the end. Degrowth WILL happen, but it will do so involuntarily due to energy and resource decline.

So, of course, one of the questions which has stymied me for so long was Why is Society Still Mired in Mainstream Thinking? To be honest, there are those who have paid attention to the ongoing predicaments we face and are actually staying up on new developments. But unfortunately, most people are woefully unaware of a vast majority of these predicaments as they are busy with real life. Even many of those who do comprehend the predicaments we face, many still don’t understand the cultural programming that prevent us from changing direction. Some folks are aware of the colonialism known by Indigenous tribes as wetiko but forget how it colors the overall situation.

Once one pulls apart the predicaments we face, begins to understand how we operate within the biological imperatives and indoctrination and cultural programming we’re brought up with, combines all that with the psychological underpinnings (quite often bringing denial of reality into the mix) of our species (including some inconvenient traits we have always had), one can clearly see how we simply aren’t capable of accomplishing what would be required to make much of a difference over the long haul to mitigate our circumstances voluntarily as a species (collectively). I have had conversations with many people who feel that this equates to “giving up” or “nihilism” or a considerable number of other labels and addressed this quite some time ago with my article, The Cycle of Life.

We’re about to enter the next step of collapse and the decomplexifying of society as several different analyzations point out, but one that Peter Zeihan recently did gives us a fairly accurate representation of what is coming down the pike.

One last comment I have is about recent reports of vast hydrogen reserves located underground. Just because the title of an article claims that something is sustainable does not make it so. This entry goes into more detail about the hydrogen economy, but suffice it to say, powering civilization differently doesn’t actually change anything about the irredeemable unsustainability of civilization. The same reason so-called “renewables” and “EVs” cannot change how civilization actually operates dooms hydrogen to the same category of accomplishing no reduction of overshoot, making it every bit as useless as most all other ideas simply because it does not achieve sustainability. That which is not sustainable can not be sustained.

On to my favorite part of these articles...the part where I can share joy rather than depressing news. Fort Recovery and Pike Lake State Park and the Port of Ashland are the gems this week; enjoy!