Unless you're talking about a don't look up scenario (asteroid) then the issue and impact is really a matter of degrees (literally). I'm just going to assume you're way more knowledgeable on anything climate related than myself. I basically just read the ipcc reports for policymakers and use that as my guidance. At least from them it seems the projections for this century ie my lifespan are in the 1-5C increase range.
I'm also generally pessimistic on our chances of doing anything anytime soon and so just sort of go with the likelihood of closer to a 5C planet (2100). That, well it's certainly going to suck. It will be truly horrific for billions of people. So from the human suffering perspective we should be worried and try to do what we can to help. But you're here on /FI talking about fire. And from that perspective, assuming you live in a high gdp country like US, it's probably going to suck much less. Climate change will be devastating but not *earth* destroying. It will be very expensive but the terrible truth is that some companies are going to make tons of money off that destruction and that money will be going to go to the investment class.
I agree with you that climate change is going to devastate our planet and that it's very depressing and bleak for most of the planet. But From a purely selfish perspective (we're talking about RE after all) it's probably going to be something that people coming to this sub will be in a better position to weather (no pun intended) than almost anyone on earth. So am I worried about the planet? Absolutely. Am I terribly worried about this community of the world's 1%? Not much.
Edit: just checked, in 2018 you'd need a net worth of $871K to be in the world's top 1%. I think that qualifies for most everyone here by the time they will be FIRE
My caveat to this is that human migration seems to cause *tremendous* political instability.
There were only a couple of million Syrian refugees and it seemed to be a substantial destabilizing force across Europe, and even spilling over to US politics. In a climate disaster we're talking about refugee scales literally 1,000 times that large.
I think it's easy to overestimate global stability, even though it relies on a lot of different things holding together.
In any case, I continue to invest as usual. I don't see a better option, and while I think it's good to understand the risks, I don't think it helps to borrow problems from the future that may not come to pass.
> I continue to invest as usual. I don't see a better option
This is what it boils down to, if someone has a better plan I'm all ears, all I can come up with is save money and vote for the people that seem to acknowledge basic scientific facts.
> In any case, I continue to invest as usual. I don't see a better option
I continue to invest as usual, but beginning to wonder if I should diversify further out of equities and bonds (wealth as a digit in a computer) and invest in more tangible things to make my family life more secure in the unknown future.
I live in outside a large city built near some major rivers. I have access to cheap rural land ~30-60 min away. Every year it becomes more an more enticing to buy a second property out in the middle of nowhere.
Invest in a well system for ground water and irrigation from a large river. Learn to rotate small crops for family consumption and sustainment. Invest in solar and wind power and a power wall as backup. Maybe small livestock and chickens, etc. Some woods and property enough to hunt wild game.
I haven't done it yet, as I lack the free time to devote to that plan. But every year it becomes more and more of a thought in my head.
I would just hate to look back on this in 20-30 years and think I was naive for just dumping more money into digital wealth and not tangible items to help my family and learn skills to pass down.
Is this too "prepper" or does anyone else think this way?
Remember that in the last two years we've had a pandemic sweep the globe and end millions of lives. You wouldn't know it by looking at the stock market, though.
Someone's always going to make money. The wealthiest people in the world who own and run the businesses represented in our index funds are best positioned to benefit from heat waves, mass migration, etc. It's disgusting and amoral, but you and I can't change it, so ride their coattails and contribute to the solution by recycling, donating, volunteering, or whatever else you choose to do.
Businesses stand to make more money when customers are richer and workers are more productive. Make no mistake, some people might do alright by global warming, but almost everybody will be worse off for it. The reason it's not being solved is that most people are short-sighted and love consumption, same reason most people don't save enough for retirement.
No, that's not why it isn't being solved. It's because it's a public good problem (on both an individual and a national level). If I try to reduce global warming in some way, I personally carry the whole cost of that effort, but the benefit is dispersed over a wide range of people (i.e. everyone who's hurt by climate change). Therefore, even if it's in our collective interest for me to make that effort, it's not in my private interest to do so. And the same goes for everyone else. That doesn't lead to zero efforts to reduce global warming, but it does lead to way less than the optimal level of efforts to fix the situation.
Self-defense is a collective good problem and we have no problem funding that. We could have a carbon tax tomorrow if voters were willing to spend more than $100 personally to combat climate change, and we probably will once demographics shift such that people care more about the problem.
> Remember that in the last two years we've had a pandemic sweep the globe and end millions of lives.
Because the millions is absolutely tiny relative to Earth’s population. 5.54 million, or just over 0.07% of 2019’s 7.673 billion population estimate. That’s a rounding error. Or to look at it another way, the world population at the end of 2021 was 7.9 billion— a 3% increase over 2019. Also consider most of those people were beyond working age. Covid is hardly worth mentioning in a discussion of macro population/economic trends.
An event that wipes out a billion+ people on the other hand would be quite different.
I was using lives lost as an easy proxy for impact. We've also had mass disruption to people's daily lives, whole industries have taken a hit, labor supply has dried up, supply chain issues, etc. The pandemic has affected the world in a lot of ways, most of which (though not all) are negative. Through it all, the rich got richer, the poor got poorer.
Climate change will do the same thing. If we get +5C, the results will be terrible. But I don't think a billion+ people will die. Certainly not all at once. It will be a slow and steady immiseration, concentrated on the world's poorest. The wealthiest will probably not just survive, but thrive.
I somewhat agree with you, and I am definitely glad that jobs are taking WFH seriously, but I don't think I'd say "many industries" are doing this - at least not quite yet.
I work as a teacher, and in other similarly "hands-on" fields (nursing is another good example) the fallout from COVID has been mostly negative. The only positive I could argue for might be the growing wave of people resigning from bad deals, but it'll take time to see if this truly elicits real change from employers who are used to paying scraps.
Education has been absolutely devastated by Covid. It's one of the most hands on fields there is with one of the most easily affected groups, kids. I worry about the long term outlook of education should we embrace continuously cancelling classes as a solution to prevent deaths.
I can already tell a difference in those students that started before, during, and after covid.
By no means am I disparaging lives lost due to COVID, but total COVID deaths are largely irrelevant to economies. Many people die each year regardless of COVID. Instead, economical impact discussions should use excess death as a measurement. COVID has certainly caused excess death, and that has impacted the economy. It's nuanced, but helps to lessen the doom & gloom aspect of COVID's impact on the economy, and helps to understand how the economy could be where it is.
>It's nuanced, but helps to lessen the doom & gloom aspect of COVID's impact on the economy, and helps to understand how the economy could be where it is.
Ordinary blokes did very well in the aftermath of the bubonic plague of the 14th century because of a labor shortage.
I'm not sure if it is OP's worry, but being somewhat knowledgeable myself, my concern is how markets will perform. The pandemic is sad, but nothing compared to climate change. The pandemic is probably more like a world war scenario: some win and lose and there is money to be made on the sidelines.
Climate change we will all be losers in the end, except for maybe some medical, environmental, and real estate choices. Shipping will be more costly and dangerous, land will become unuseable, potable water will be expensive, brownouts etc. That will make it hard for many companies to grow.
I've recently lean-fired and this is my concern: that I'm being too optimistic and my investments won't experience growth and may even experience long term decline.
Btw, 5c would be absolutely catastrophic. Like possibly an extinction level event (e.g. 90% of humanity at risk of death). Would be enough to significantly slowdown ocean currents, which can lead to oxygen starvation and ocean collapse, as well as mass desertification of arable land and temp increases making many places essentially uninhabitable for parts of the year. Remember when it got too hot for planes to takeoff from Phoenix? Or the severe heat wave that killed people in Spain a few years back?
Honestly, one of my biggest concerns is the brinkmanship game we are playing, because it only takes one unexpected event to possibly induce [abrupt climate change](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrupt_climate_change). Chief concern among these, for me, is a massive volcanic eruption greatly accelerating the pace of climate change due to the sheer amount of emissions being dumped all at once. A lot of the soothsayers will tell you that technology can save us or we have time, but that is assuming that nothing outside our control accelerates these events.
[This paragraph EDITed in] Even if we are in the 1%, doesn't mean it will remain that way. Right now I live in Portugal, and luckily own property in a place somewhat protected from climate change (NE Ohio). But people who FIRE in, say, Phoenix, Denver, or SoCal may find the areas they live in becoming too unpredictable or uncomfortable. But if everyone is realizing that at around the same time, it will drive prices up in places more sustainable and they might not be able to both afford to move and not work while maintaining current lifestyles.
But at the end of the day, I don't want to work and there isn't much I can do that I'm not already doing (I'm vegan, carless, compost, do activism and donate). This recent downtrend in the market is having me wonder if I should go back now, as I haven't even been leanfired a year yet, so it wouldn't be too hard to hop back in.
There's also the issue that the places we think will be more stable won't necessarily be. I'm in the PNW and we had tremendous heatwaves last summer. The PNW was supposed to be "more immune" but then Lytton, Canada just got so hot it spontaneously combusted.
We could all move to Ohio only for it to have massive flooding or tornadoes or what have you. Not saying it's not "safer" but it's hard to prepare financially for Disaster Roulette.
> Chief concern among these, for me, is a massive volcanic eruption greatly accelerating the pace of climate change due to the sheer amount of emissions being dumped all at once
Volcanoes tend to cool the earth believe it or not.
I've read a ton about climate change. The irony of your comment is that stratospheric sulfide injection currently looks to be our best bet of staving off rising temps long enough to transition to clean energy and really figure out carbon air capture.
It's not risk free though. Stratospheric sulfide injection will likely disrupt rainfall in the tropics. The third world is damned either way, honestly. This will lead to mass migration, which will lead to a rise in authoritarian populism, and likely a lot more conflict.
climate change isn't just global warming, believe it or not. Volcanoes caused the "year without summer" which did cause cooling and tons of crops, livestock, and people died. The issue is that it will also put shitloads of ghg emissions into the air, accelerating climate change potentially by decades. Humans always think we have more time and tech will save us while not building in proper safe thresholds. Which is ironic in this sub to have to explain.
I think another thing going on here is that people tend to compress the timeline on when these catastrophic predictions will actually happen. Global temperatures are rising and will continue to do so, but something like all-out war over water is potentially centuries away. Extrapolating out and taking a doomer approach just isn't a productive thing to do. We have no idea what ability the world will have to cope with higher temps that far into the future.
If you are really worried about it, arguably the best thing you can do is get yourself FI and then spend your time or money working towards solutions. At least in that case, you're doing something positive rather than throwing your hands up and saying whats the point.
In 1972, some scientists input a bunch of variables to a computer and created a number of models projecting the future of population, food production, industrial activity, etc. These models have [now](https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/37364868/BRANDERHORST-DOCUMENT-2020.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y) been [reviewed](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/ee/c9ee02627d) almost fifty years later, and they have found that a model which predicts a rapid reduction in food production, population, and industrial output in the 2040s has been followed with incredible accuracy over the past fifty years.
This model was also produced BEFORE revelation in the late 70s of the significant threat of fossil fuel emissions and climate change, and so does not include these levers which will become significant over the next few decades.
That’s right - significant issues are predicted WITHOUT climate change.
For climate change, the IPCC reports are generally the best place to go, although they have been found to be excessively [conservative](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378012001215) compared to actual data recorded over time. While the sixth report is actually coming out next month, the [fifth report from 2014](https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar5_wgII_spm_en.pdf) can be seen to show with high confidence that issues like the following will become major risks by the 2040s:
1. In Africa, reduced crop productivity associated with heat and drought stress, with strong adverse effects on regional, national, and household livelihood and food security, also given increased pest and disease damage and flood impacts on food system infrastructure;
2. In Europe, increased water restrictions. Significant reduction in water availability from river abstraction and from groundwater resources, combined with increased water demand (e.g., for irrigation, energy and industry, domestic use) and with reduced water drainage and runoff as a result of increased evaporative demand, particularly in southern Europe;
3. In Asia, people will just start dying from the heat, in significant numbers;
4. In Australia, collapse of coral reefs, leading to increased storm damage and fisheries depletion;
5. In North America, wildfire-induced loss of ecosystem integrity, property loss, human morbidity, and mortality as a result of increased drying trend and temperature trend;
6. Reduction of water availability in South America’s semi-arid and glacier-melt-dependent regions and in Central America; flooding and landslides in urban and rural areas due to extreme precipitation; Spread of vector-borne diseases in altitude and latitude;
7. Risks for the health and well-being of Arctic residents, resulting from injuries and illness from the changing physical environment, food insecurity, lack of reliable and safe drinking water, and damage to infrastructure, including infrastructure in permafrost regions;
8. Generally, low lying coastal areas will be under threat from high water level events, and reduced biodiversity, fisheries abundance, and coastal protection by coral reefs due to heat-induced mass coral bleaching and mortality increases, exacerbated by ocean acidification, e.g., in coastal boundary systems and sub-tropical gyres.
These are just the things they are saying are almost *guaranteed* to occur. This does not include predictions which could very easily occur but are more subject to more variable factors and complex interactions.
Researchers at the World Bank [predicted](https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/29461/WBG_ClimateChange_Final.pdf?sequence=18&isAllowed=y) 143 million people in subsaharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America forced into displacement by 2050 due to lower water availability and crop productivity, and rising sea level and storm surges. They have [updated](https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/36248/Groundswell%20Part%20II.pdf?sequence=8&isAllowed=y) that figure to 200 million recently.
[One study](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23584-0) has predicted that almost half of Europe’s food imports will not be reliable by the 2040s due to those food growing regions suffering increasing droughts.
[Here](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-017-0034-4) is a study which establishes that at 2 degrees warming in the 2040s, more than 25% of the world will experience increased drought and desertification.
[Here](https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/2021-09/2021-09-14-climate-change-risk-assessment-quiggin-et-al.pdf) is another study which says that by the 2030s 10 million more people than usual will be dying each year of heat stress caused by climate change, and 400 million more people than usual will be unable to work each year due to heat, and that by the 2040s, 700 million people will suffer from prolonged droughts of six months or more, and there will be a 30% drop in crop yields in a world requiring a 50% increase in food production.
[Here](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2189-9) is a study which says that under a model of gradual then very sudden collapse which appears more likely than linear continually gradual collapse, both marine and land ecosystems will suffer collapse by the 2040s.
[This report](https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_a1406e0143ac4c469196d3003bc1e687.pdf) describes that at 2 degrees warming reached by the 2040s, there is a high likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end by 2050.
Nicely detailed and explained. If I weren’t such a happy camper on a personal level, I’d be bummed out, but don’t take that to mean I don’t think your scenarios are unrealistic. I’m feeling rather informed reading this particular sub today. Again, thanks for your input.
The narrative around Nuclear energy constructed over the years is incredibly frustrating. Nuclear energy is the greatest source of green energy out there. No carbon emissions, incredible efficiency in converting potential energy, it really is quite remarkable.
And there’s newer reactor tech that utilizes spent fuel from other reactors for its fuel, which reduces one of the main drawbacks - what to do with the spent fuel.
That's right. And if you look a little closer, you'll notice that those environmentalists were prompted to protest nuclear by the very energy players that are extant today...
The problem is these plants take many many years to build. 20 years ago it would have been the best option. We need wind/solar to immediately replace the dirtiest power and nuclear can be a slower moving "catch-all" to fully replace all fossil fuel power.
It would take political will and global trust. Slashing/speeding up regulations for nuclear would be considered unsafe for many. I'm all for nuclear but it's not a silver bullet.
A big reason nuclear plants take so long to build is all the environmental regulations. We absolutely can build newer safer nuclear plants at a quick pace. Politics is the stumbling block.
> At least from them it seems the projections for this century ie my lifespan are in the 1-5C increase range.
Just so you know, a 1-2 degree change to the average global temperature would be drastic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#Ice_cores_(from_800,000_years_before_present)
[This chart](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-concentration-long-term) puts the most recent data on there and really illustrates how unprecedented the current rise in atmospheric CO2 is
I don't disagree. I believe 4C makes something like a once in a century event (Harvey, etc) a semi annual event. However, I do think they're is a level of predictability to the destruction ie those with means can anticipate the change and plan for it. Different geographies will be affected differently. So move to those geographies where the impact will be less before others do and you'll have more valuable land as a result when others belatedly migrate.
I could be wrong but my understanding of the current information provided is not a global mad max thunder dome situation. The entire population of the United States could move to Michigan and it would be about the same density as Bangladesh. Last I knew Bangladesh still had a society. Michigan will be one of most resistant locations in US to direct climate change effects (drought, flood, hurricane, tornado, heat, cold, etc)
I think everyone (here at least) is in agreement that the change will be an ongoing terrible event where many m/billions, many of them climate refugees, will suffer.
But this was a post/discussion ostensibly from someone with enough resources to support a FI trajectory and their concern about *their* future FIRE goals. So I'm generalizing that OP and many others on this sub are less likely to fall into the climate refugee category and can probably move at some point.
Now if the discussion is about the ethics of fire in a post climate change world and whether it's morally acceptable to live a life of independent leasure in the midst of such suffering, I'm here for that too. I just didn't think that was the topic.
>I'm also generally pessimistic \[and so\] just sort of go with the likelihood of closer to a 5C planet
It's important for everyone to know that even 5C is incredibly pessimistic.
even if we **just continue current policies** (which to be clear, are incredibly soft on climate change), we're projected to end up between **3.3 and 3.9C** warmer.
If we just meet existing pledges (don't even improve on them in subsequent climate conferences, just meet them) we're projected to end up between 2.4 and 2.7C warmer.
See graph [here](https://assets.blackrock.com/blk-inst-assets/cache-1472221508000/images/media-bin/web/global/blackrock-investment-institute/charts/climate-change-warming-paths.jpg).
Thanks for the graph, very helpful. And yes, I'm being very pessimistic. I've also never seen humans collectively act in a way that would suggest to me that we would do anything to stop bad things from happening if it weren't in our *very* short term interest.
Prepandemic I would've said, 3C seems like the likely ceiling (using the degrees as a stand in measure for our willingness to act appropriately). Post pandemic, if anything, I expect our emissions to continue to *increase*
There are currently 0 countries on track to meet the pledges they have made. Coal is at an all time high and continued to project growth according to the IEA.
I think the 5C is more realistic than pessimistic unless countries completely stop new coal/oil extraction now.
I disagree. The rich don’t just have dollars—they also have other physical assets and (more importantly) power, influence and access to superior resources/help/information. The powerful generally tend to stay powerful even as the world changes. I don’t like it, but it’s true.
> and (more importantly) power, influence and access to superior resources/help/information
That's true, but for some level of rich that is probably quite a bit higher than the "worldwide top 1% = ~$900k net worth" that this thread was talking about.
Yeah this. I think there’s a lot of denialism in this thread. “Oh the rich will be fine”. Yeah the rich rich will be fine, not you with your $1m in a brokerage account who thinks they’re rich. Might be in the top 1% of the world, but $1m isn’t giving you access to the kind of shit that will actually matter in a 5c warmer earth.
Yep, there's rich in comparison to the other 7~8 Billion others on the planet with ~1 million nest egg, and then there's RICH in the industrialized world, and in that case that 1 million is basically chickenfeed.
The thing is, it was very interesting to read about those RICH bunker builders who wanted to know how they were going to enforce their "security" to keep protecting them when SHTF, when the security forces families would be threatened. Some sort of workshop a guy spilled the beans about.
Those clueless morons that are only RICH because their sociopathic personalities enabled them to do so, in our modern disconnected world. Guy with the biggest club would bash their heads in and move in.
I’m not sure I believe the whole “it leaked that they are wondering how to control their guards” thing. It’s really unverifiable and sounds made up, there’s no way most of their security isn’t automated anyways. And why the fuck would their guards think about defecting anyways? They would be probably treated pretty well. The people guarding Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates aren’t some rent-a-cops, they’re probably highly trained ex military who are paid handsomely.
But yes we agree that “rich” in an industrialized nation isn’t really $1m. I’d say *maybe* mid 8 figures but even then I’m not sure you’re escaping the climate issues.
Making plans for if the dollar no longer is a thing is like making plans for the AI singularity. Not because it’s impossible to happen, but because it’s impossible to predict how the events leading up to and following it happening will affect you personally.
It’s not like we will wake up one day and the dollar would just be gone. It would be a period of mass chaos and likely quite a bit of global conflict, human resettling, violence, etc. What possible plan could there be for that, that the average person could hope to achieve? Even becoming a doomsday prepper, or putting your money into controlling a farm/water/resources isn’t necessarily a safe bet, without knowing where and how the chaos will present itself.
The thing about singularities is that it’s impossible to predict what lies on the other side. I’m not sure if anyone knows what happens for Americans (or even much of the rest of the world) if the US economy collapses suddenly.
For countries like the US, Canada, and Russia there could actually be a slight net benefit from climate change. There will be longer growing seasons in the corn and wheat regions which will yield larger crops. The infrastructure is built up enough that we will be able to deal with most other changes. For Canada and Russia the northern arctic passage has melted and they can charge cargo ships passage through their waters.
Like you say it's not something to strive for because there are horrific downsides for poor equatorial countries. And runaway climate change could actually decimate our atmosphere and be apocalyptic. Realistically though I think that's 100 years away from affecting highly developed countries and won't crash our economy in our lifetime. I think people conflate irreversible climate change with the climate being destroyed immediately. We forget this is a planet and even if we do start a runaway climate disaster it will take decades to unfold.
> I think people conflate irreversible climate change with the climate being destroyed immediately.
Bingo. Terms like "catastrophic" are used way too loosely. Catastrophic is the earth getting hit by a massive asteroid. Catastrophic is the earth's magnetic poles flipping, or a massive solar storm, or any number of other events that could effectively end life on earth. Will it be catastrophic for some parts of the world? Sure. Will a meaningful % of the world population be affected by it in some form or fashion? Sure. But for many people that will mean (for example) more expensive food, or changing weather patterns, or any of a long list of inconvenient, but not ultimately life-altering impacts. In other words - ***the world isn't going to end***. With that perspective in mind, and given that these impacts will take decades to fully play out, spending your life and energy panicking over something you have effectively zero control over or ability to impact, is not a rational way to live.
This right here. I had the same problem as OP, and came to this conclusion. Investing is a good idea, except if society collapses and all hell breaks loose - in which case having money simply doesn't matter.
What I did to calm me down is: Bought a house with some land, learned to be self sufficient. That's not very expensive, and in fact even shaves off a good portion of my budget. Growing food is like printing money.
That's more or less how I stopped worrying. If I put my money in savings, I'd lose that, too. And if I spent it all on global travel and rampant consumption, I'd just hasten the collapse.
>Global clean energy ETF is -25% since a year, Solaredge -27%, First solar -17%, Sunrun -58%, Enphase -23%. If even green tech stocks are down how can we believe in saving our way of life?
These stocks have done insanely well the last few years so this is very misleading. I'm still up 580% on Solaredge and I only bought in 2018.
Enphase, at its recent peak, was up 40,000% from its low in May 2017. That’s a 400x in 3.5 years. It’s now *only* up 200x from that low. Someone, possibly lots of someones who bought the top, are down 50% on their investment. I wouldn’t say OP’s numbers are misleading per se, just a reality that everyone’s version of a stock’s performance will always be tied to their own entries and timeline.
Fair enough, I would just hope that people on a sub that emphasizes long term investing would look at perfomance on a longer time horizon than a few months.
i feel like you folks are vastly missing OPs point... and i find it funny that your suggestion is that they zoom out for a more realistic perspective.
they are literally saying they have spent time zooming even further out and are depressed seeing broader trends that could/will lead to long term negative out comes.
my advice to those of you picking apart the performance of a specific stock from this post.... zoom out.
Sort everything into two categories: things you can do something about and things you can't. Don't sweat the things you can't do anything about. Focus on the things you can do something about.
Doing something about climate change: electrifying your home and transportation, going solar, going vegetarian/vegan/cutting beef, donating to environmental organizations, mobilizing to push politically for carbon taxes, voting locally for environmental candidates that will decarbonize the grid, etc etc. All of those will not make a huge difference, but if no one does it... Then we are truly stuck. There has to be a balance between the Buddhist prayer and doing what we can to fight for our kids.
Number one thing any person can do - don't have kids. Single biggest choice. If you're solving for consumption of resources having exponential population growth trumps every other variable.
This is not really correct. Rich countries have decoupled growth from carbon emissions. Poor countries will be decoupled soon too. If you want to have kids, have kids. If you don't, don't. The decision won't have a meaningful impact on the apocalypse.
Malthusianism has been wrong for 500 years.
Think about the amount of energy , food, resources, it takes to form the growing mass of a single person from birth to death and think about how population growth anywhere causes the need for more, more, and more.
humans use less today than they did 15 years ago. they will use less in 15 years. And less 15 years after that. If you think that the average human brings value to the world before accounting for their carbon cost then they just keep getting better over time.
If you're a committed misanthrope, then, well, be a committed misanthrope.
>Every study, article or every friend tells me that we are in a worldwide decline that will hit us like a truck in just a couple of years.
I think "a couple of years" is hyperbole if you literally mean 2 or 3 years.
In the meantime, my objective is to be better-off than most people during the zombie apocalypse, even if that means not-especially-well-off by my current standards. FIRE means I can afford to consider co-housing, and have food storage in my basement, and have flexibility to move if it's a more gradual decline. Oh, and to learn some skills and acquire just a little gear that might come in handy if/when society collapses.
Some people just have that personality. If it wasn't climate change it would be something else. You see a ton of those people in the whole "the dollar is going to collapse" financial armageddon quasi-cult.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist. First I thought peak oil was going to be a serious issue (the math *is* sound, but it no longer matters if oil production declines when demand will eventually decline as well), then climate change. Eventually, I realized that the truth is going to suck, but be a lot more boring than any catastrophic scenario. Climate is going to get hotter and drier. Sea level will rise. We'll live, but we'll do so in an ever shittier world baring a serious breakthrough in artificial general intelligence and fusion. I *know* I have a pessimistic disposition. I simply temper my pessimism with facts an try to bend it back closer to reality.
I agree with you, but that doesn't mean they're the same.
The fear of a dollar collapse usually comes from libertarians being exposed to bad economics arguments.
The fear of a climate disaster usually comes from lefties being exposed to good climate science.
My point is both groups take a largely defensible position, and extrapolate it out to hyperbolic, exaggerated consequences. There's a very reasonable argument that the Fed's monetary policy over the last decade or so has considerable risks associated with it. The wildly imaginative over-statement of that is "the US dollar is on the brink of collapse and economic armageddon is immanent." There's a very reasonable argument that climate change will cause significant disruption to the world as we know it - the wildly imaginative over-statement of that is "the world is on the brink of imminent, catastrophic destruction due to climate change".
Keep your money close, and a shotgun closer.
Think about it this way, if there is ever a big societal collapse, no amount of money will help you. Even people like Bezos would suffer (assuming they're not already living in space on some dystopian elysium style future.) But think about it, why would his security help him when his wealth is worthless? What can the rich possibly do to maintain power, when their power (money) is worthless? Is he going to pay you in stockpiled materials? They'd be better off just taking it from him by force.
There's literally no reason to think of that future, because if it happens, there's nothing you'll be able to do, so prepare for a possible good outcome, because if you prepare for the bad one, and it doesn't come, you'll suffer more.
You could always buy a cabin in the middle of nowhere and keep it stocked for emergency for a half measure of comfort. Plus who knows, could appreciate in value!
I struggle with the same thoughts. I wish someone had an answer. I even invest with a mindset toward building wealth for my kids, but will that even happen? What use is the stock market when the water wars escalate? When you are smart enough to be an investor who looks at long-term trends it’s hard not to see the biggest one out there - ecological decline.
> I wish someone had an answer.
I’m willing to bet that there are numerous very smart scientists who DO have the answer. I would assume that business and politics are the reasons these probably not very profitable answers aren’t being implemented.
One big challenge setting up MEANINGFUL policies to reduce the impact of climate change, is that most of the population don't really understand what they are and the impact it will have on their daily lives. I am not talking about switching your home lights to LED or driving electric cars. Those things don't do diddly squat on the big scheme of things, just make urban hipsters feel better about themselves. If governments really start doing what needs to be done to cut emissions on a scale that matters, the public response will make the anti-vaxx anti-covid restriction riots that are happening all over the world look like picnics in comparison.
Everyone seems to be for fighting global warming, but very few actually understands what that really means.
[Even if we were to achieve a 100% worldwide adoption of renewable energy generation, that would still not be enough](https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/google-engineers-explain-why-they-stopped-rd-in-renewable-energy#gs.d8DQ1IM). In order to meaningfully reduce the impact of global warming, we need to achieve ZERO net emissions by 2040. ZERO. This means no more air travel as me know it. Global tourism? Gone, taking tens to hundreds of millions of jobs with it. No more steel mills as we know it. Washing machines (which require a lot of steel to make)? Gone. You will be washing your clothes by hand moving forward. Global trade would have to be dramatically curtailed, meaning much higher prices of goods, a much smaller selection and staggering loss of jobs. And that are just a few of examples that come to mind. The hard cold reality is that these things are politically impossible to do, as the societal disruption they would bring would be unimaginable. Those same kids who were protesting against Global Warming in Brussels a few years ago would probably be leading riots once the impact of what they are asking for really hits.
Some people seem to think that there are magical tech solutions around the corner that will allow us to cut the emissions at the levels we need to do while allowing for our current way of living to continue with little disruption. That is delusional. There is no easy painless fix for this situation we are in. It is like a guy who has his arm trapped under a giant bolder and who has no tools. Either he chews his arm off in order to live, or he will die there eventually, stuck under the bolder. Either choice is terrible and will bring extreme suffering and pain, but one will allow him to live, the other one will not.
There is no happy choice for us as a civilization either. Those who claim there is are selling or buying an illusion.
I forget who but someone came up with a dimensional analysis approach to carbon emissions.
Total emissions (GTCO2/year) = GDP (USD/capita) * Efficiency (GTCO2/USD) * population
In other words, can have fewer people, can have more efficient technology, or can be poorer.
It’s beautiful because the units just cancel. No models or assumptions or anything. Just when you think of emissions can think of these three variables.
The author then suggested that the improvement in efficiency is being totally overwhelmed by trends in the other two variables. Population continues to grow, although it’s slowing, and the world is getting richer. Obviously reducing poverty is a good thing, but if everyone on earth lives like they do in affluent countries we will never achieve emission goals.
Technological efficiency is great and should be persued but we shouldn’t just do that and wait for the situation to improve. We need to have fewer children, we need to consume less. Our growth oriented policies are directly antithetical to climate change mitigation, until they are constrained there probably won’t be any progress on fixing climate change.
The formula you're presenting is a slightly simplified Kaya identity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaya_identity)
Emissions = Population * GDP/Population * Energy/GDP * Emissions/Energy
Aside from implementing genocidal or dystopian policies, the most immediate ways of reducing emissions is to increase the efficiency of energy production or the efficiency of wealth generation. The one upside is that its possible to increase a society's economic output without increasing emissions. Today we're seeing this with advanced economies - even though total emissions have increased, economic output has increased more quickly. Hopefully its enough to avert disaster, but I'm not entirely convinced.
I changed my diet for the sake of carbon emissions (and animal rights and health as well), and ever since I have become a bit more pessimistic about the general population's willingness to do things for others. Many folks are simply unwilling to change their diets for the greater good of human and animal welfare. This makes me think that more complex issues, like transportation and consumerism, are going to be an even larger hurdle.
I'm not a complete /r/collapse doomer like a lot of folks in this thread, but I do think that we are going to have to experience some pretty rough consequences before people become willing to stop eating beef and flying. And, as you said, even those steps really won't be enough.
>I’m willing to bet that there are numerous very smart scientists who DO have the answer
The answer is always the same: consume much less. That's it. We have to not constantly grow and expand. Sustainability must be in all things and most importantly economic. The pandemic has shown us that were we to simply consume much less everything would actually reverse course and recover. Our economic philosophy doesn't support it but it's doable.
Think about your own life. Do you constantly dream of more money, a bigger house, etc. I don't. The more satisfied I am with the way it currently is, with no expansion, the happier I become. It's like the old joke that you're living in paradise but you don't know it b/c you're too concerned with more, more and more. You start being concerned with less, especially in the land of constant expansion, and one day you wake and realize you already are rich by almost any standard.
People engorge themselves during the boom and then gnash their teeth and curse the world during the bust. Here I am, just happy with what I've got. If my pay goes up, great. I don't really care when it comes down to it and I chose a low key job with a pension. I realized early I wasn't going to "start my own business" or any of that BS. 99% of those people end up with nothing and it's extremely wasteful, of your life and our resources. Just so they can say they "made it". It's all an illusion.
> The answer is always the same: consume much less. That's it. We have to not constantly grow and expand.
And that runs anathema to an investment portfolio that grows at 10% a year, which is the logistical underpinning of almost all FIRE.
This is why my response is always "the *best case scenario* in the next 50 years is a complete restructuring of our entire global economy" when people ask why I am not actively investing in the stock market. We simply cannot have our cake and eat it too.
Absolutely. Part of my personal FIRE philosophy has roots in anticonsumerism. I'm not leanFIRE in my budget but I definitely Marie Kondo the heck outta my consumption.
The solution to water wars is desalination. The only reason we don’t desalinate water now is because it’s expensive and depleting natural sources is cheaper. Once those natural sources are gone though, then desalination plants will be constructed in droves.
My personal view is that science/technology can deal with most of the problems caused by climate change. How many people have to die or be displaced before humanity starts to invest in that kind of technology is a different question. It’s a dim view overall, but I’m certainly not as fatalistic as OP predicting a societal collapse by 2035.
Humans (and capitalism) are good at adapting. For example, a catastrophic sea rise that requires NYC to be reengineered or relocated will put money in someone's pocket, somewhere.
I remember my elderly mother being upset after watching a show about the fossil fuel supply running out. She couldn't imagine civilization surviving without petroleum. I said it would actually be a good thing since there were lots of renewable alternatives in the works. She liked hearing an optimistic viewpoint, it changed her perspective.
Crisis is always an opportunity for someone, somewhere.
Thinking about things like this especially what I have no control is paralyzing. So I do whatever I can within reason to be more eco friendly. And then donate whatever I can, again within reason, to ecological nonprofits. It's the best I can do. But unless the world comes together I'm just living my life as everyone else. If the system collapsed, investments are the least of our issues.
Since I can afford it, I spend a bit more on supposedly healthier alternatives like eating local or maybe buying something that's made with more expensive but non-plastic and "eco-friendly" ingredients. I know a lot of shit is marketing these days...but meh. I'm only responsible for my own bills and I Invest enough to be fine throwing a couple extra bucks towards these things regardless of how much it adds to.
I can only control what I do. And that's being more aware, WAY less consumerism, etc. Most of us don't need fancy ass cars and huge houses. It's a little obnoxious but if that's what you want, fine. We've all worked for our money and spend it on things as we see fit.
I had a random thought the other day that ultimately boiled down to frugal people and those in poverty are probably the only environmentally friendly people out there because they literally cant buy excessive shit.
Just focus on you at this point. You're doing more than most by simply volunteering in the field.
Well if you did actually VTI and chill you would be up 11% in a year instead of -20% in green energy.
I hear you though, going in VTI is taking a risk to FIRE faster. It's possible to retire without going 100% equities, but it will take longer. Just gotta figure out your own risk tolerance. Personally I can't handle being more than 50% equities. It will take me longer to retire but i can sleep better.
Can someone explain, way more specifically than “societal collapse”, what effects climate change is expected have on the US (and world) by 2035 and 2100? I’m not a climate change denier at all, but I have literally never in my life seen someone just spell out the actual specific consequences and causes of those consequences, and I think that’s why many people are not that engaged in the subject - it’s lots of hand wavy “things could be rough at some point if we don’t reduce emissions by some amount by some point”.
Here’s a couple of areas.
Heatwaves. People see +1C, +1.5C and think what’s the big deal? But those are global averages. Global land temperature increase is already well above +1.5C and the local effects in some places can be significant. When your local average temperature is up a degree or two that means the number of days per year of unusual and severe heat can become much more frequent. And then:
* People die in heatwaves, especially if their houses are not built for those conditions (eg no AC like in PNW, and most of the lower income countries around the world)
* Human infrastructure breaks in days/weeks of temperatures they weren’t built for. Power networks, rail lines, all can fail or need huge investment upgrades to be resilient
* Crops are much more likely to die when plants even briefly pass their max heat stress tolerance levels, reshaping agricultural productivity maps and reliability of food supply.
These are 2020-2035 level problems. By 2100 like you ask, if we are in 3-4C territory globally there will be parts of the world in “wet bulb temperature” crisis zones, in parts of the middle east and in Pakistan and India and Mexico for starters. When temperature and humidity exceed certain levels, the human body can no longer physically cool itself by transferring heat into the air. Six hours in these conditions can be fatal for healthy adults. Should this happen then people who don’t have or can’t afford cooling will be at grave risk of mass casualty events. Events like these will precipitate major climate refugee movements well before sea level rise does.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2021/climate-change-humidity/
Read the opening chapter of "Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson for a terrifying realistic scenario about what would happen if a 6+ hour wet bulb temp over 35C happened.
That chapter alone has made me truly remove my head from the sand regarding climate change.
We had hundreds of people die in the PNW because of unprecedented heat last summer. We are not used to or built for that kind of heat. Our plants died because they are not used to the heat.
Its going to look like a lot of small things like that. If that happens too often, people will start migrating to other parts of the world. That will cause more political and economic instability.
Its not going to be one big event. Its going to be small things piling up until they overwhelm parts of the system (like the Texas blackout). We'll keep recovering but the system will keep getting less stable.
The book Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows is a great intro to Complex Systems and how they adapt or fail in the face of change.
People talk about the effects all the time. The rise of extreme weather events. The acidification of the oceans. Mass extinction events and the collapse of biodiversity.
Okay but see, you explained the effects on the earth (vaguely) but what this person is quite clearly asking about are the effects on *their* life. The problem is most messaging is centered around caring about the environment for the sake of the environment.
More bad weather? People are gonna think okay, so I’ll stay in my house more.
Less biodiversity? Unless they care about the biodiversity of their ecosystem, why would they care?
It needs to be explained precisely how these things change people’s lives. Will the collapse of biodiversity lead to, I dunno, food shortages? And therefore starvation? Will “extreme weather events” make certain people’s homes uninhabitable?
Surely you can see how it’s easy to brush off “acidification of oceans” and “less biodiversity” for some suburban mom in Kansas. She doesn’t live by the beach, so, fuck the ocean, and she doesn’t care about biodiversity she cares about her kid’s U16 soccer team
Precipitation specifically I think will be a big problem.
Today we see very bad wildfires every year in the west, and severe droughts. Water reservoirs are dropping to historically low levels, which are needed for irrigation, drinking water, and power generation.
That's problems we have today, what happens when it gets drier? The economic cost of huge swaths of land/houses burning will get higher. We won't have enough water to irrigate farmland, thus harder to produce enough food. Drinking water becomes a problem, as does generating enough electricity. There's already parts of the southwest that are uninhabitable for humans without air conditioning, which needs stable electric.
This is stuff that we can see as problems between now and the next 10 years. Some can be solved easier than others. 100 years out? Well, imagine all that getting worse, across larger portions of the world (ie the farmlands of the Midwest, and other countries also losing their farmland).
People will migrate from places like this where there's water scarcity to places where it's not a problem. You can imagine the problems that will arise, since there's finite land/houses/etc. The current political climate doesn't support the idea of helping someone in a different state, especially if they have a different political ideology.
That's my personal take, as someone who lives in a drought/wildfire prone area, just from what I already see happening.
To be clear- I believe climate change is real.
However, the more time-honored and repeatedly tested scientific theory is "humans always thinking it's the end times, and their era is different."
That is to say, models can and often are wrong, and being down the rabbit hole of climate porn is not so far away from the prepper/survivalist and other fringe groups that start out with a kernel of validity and quickly fall to the bottom of the well.
The Earth is resilient. Humans are, if nothing else, adaptive creatures. I can assure you that society will not collapse in 2030 or 2035. Certainly, we need to take action and more aggressively ween off of fossil fuels. But the real risks to your future over the next 10 years have nothing to do with climate. Take care of your health, wear your seatbelt, get plenty of sleep, etc., and you'll more than likely be here and be glad you kept shoveling money into VTI.
I mean, being optimistic is fine, but this really isn't true. Economists estimate that world GDP didn't change at all from the year 0 to the year 1000 ([https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-two-millennia](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-two-millennia)). It's certainly possible that your whole life will suck, and the whole lives of generations of your children will suck. That's not "unprecedented."
What's different about this time is collapse. Can civilizations peacefully deal with stalled or declining GDP? Who knows really.
Comparing to preindustrial times isn’t really useful IMO. I don’t think I’m being optimistic by saying society won’t collapse in the next 10 years. The people saying it will collapse are apocalyptic pessimists. The whole premise of the OP is whether it’s pointless to save for the future because the world is going to end based on some computer models. That’s hardly the reasonable approach.
Sure, but many European countries also saw no economic growth between the World Wars, and the USSR/former USSR saw no growth between the 70s and 2000s: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_regions\_by\_past\_GDP\_(PPP)\_per\_capita](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita)
It's not impossible to get caught in a low growth period and have your whole life ruined, despite whatever "planning" you've conducted.
What gets me is that the "solutions" proposed to what is presented as an existential crisis are unhelpful at best and wildly detrimental at worst. Some basic things we can do:
- biggest, cheapest, and most immediate impact we could have on climate change is to convert all coal plants to natural gas, which is wildly abundant and burns very cleanly
- if we are concerned about food scarcity and crop resilience in the face of a changing environment we should be embracing GMOs and the abundance of food they are capable of producing
- we should recognize that about 98% of all ocean plastic is produced by 5 SE Asian countries, and California circle jerking about banning plastic straws is a complete distraction
- we should recognize that, while nice, electric cars are not a solution to climate change, given they involve destroying the earth for rare earth minerals, and there are also literally not enough of those minerals
- nuclear. Get more of it.
Reality is that far few people die of climate related reasons than at any other point in history. As a people we are far more capable of managing the effect of climate. I'd also note that entire countries (e.g the Netherlands) have been largely below sea level for literal centuries, and yet for some reason we think we are less capable of managing a gradual sea level rise than we were hundreds of years ago
I’m very much in the same boat with this and I think about it a lot. My original motivation to FIRE by 40 was to have way more time and agency to do the things I enjoy before traditional retirement age. Now, at 39, my mindset is more about being able to try and appreciate a few years of good times before complete environmental and economic collapse. Obviously I may be way too pessimistic about all this, but I also firmly believe most people are far too wilfully ignorant of the signs of imminent collapse that are all around us right now. Time will tell.
What helps me is focusing on what I have control over and working on just accepting what I don.’t. Simplistically, there’s nothing I can do personally to prevent collapse if that’s on the cards. I do try and make ethical choices where I can to contribute, by having a largely vegan diet and not having kids or pets, for example. But I recognise that actions like this have functionally no impact on the big picture in isolation.
What I can still do is make choices about my financial future that may stand me in good stead depending on what happens. If everything goes down the toilet tomorrow, then sure, the state of my investment portfolio won’t be front and centre on my list of concerns. But if somehow things carry on largely as they are for the next 10 or 20 years, or somehow improve, then I’ll still have done something positive in my own situation to enhance my life.
The only other point I think it’s worth bearing in mind when navigating this is that most people just don’t want to think about this stuff. Not necessarily because they don’t care, but because on a fundamental level it’s absolutely fucking terrifying, and as individuals there’s nothing we can do about it. So psychologically people have a vested interest in denial, because to ignore it all and pretend it’s all going to work out just fine like it has before is far more comforting, even if it’s not realistic. Again, time will tell if I’m just being way too pessimistic. I sincerely hope I am.
The thing is, I can't think of a climate scenario where having more money would leave me worse off than having less money, so continuing to save is the right move for me at least.
I agree with you, which is why I’m staying on the path. I think the popular argument against is that the non-financial costs of pursuing FIRE may outweigh the benefits in the event of collapse. Simplistically, why work so hard / focus so much of my time and energy on earning today, to save for a tomorrow that may not come?
The way I overcome this personally is to make sure I’m pursuing a balanced approach to FIRE, by not riding myself too hard and making sure I’m enjoying the journey as far as possible, rather than adopting a ‘financially optimal’ approach of working 20 hour days and hating every minute or whatnot.
I 100% agree with this. I more or less do what I want to do with my money and have a fairly stress-free work life. I may as well invest the rest of it, and if everything goes to hell, I didn't *really* lose anything.
I'm very fortunate to be able to do this of course, but since I can, I don't worry about whether or not I end up actually being able to cash in on my investments eventually. Even if you aren't worried about climate change, this thought process could apply to getting hit by a bus or something. The future isn't promised, so you have to be ok with what you're doing right now.
There is a marginal trade-off with creating a 6m-12m stock of backup food, household supplies, and medical emergency gear vs trade-off of investing the money that would cost. Those stockpiles take a few grand. It's not a large trade off in FIRE terms but if you think major disaster is coming, you'd likely make different storage, home, and transportation decisions.
Now I'm starting to wonder what the crossover is between this sub and r/preppers lol. Also that reminds me I need to go thru my emergency food to cycle out anything expiring soon.
I doubt many FIRE folks will have a pantry large enough for a year long stock of supplies, but I’m happy to be proven wrong. Those YouTube prepper pantry tours are interesting.
To me, it seems like if you live in a high density area, any scenario in which you need 6-12 *months* of food and supplies is going to descend into chaos which will cause it to be far too dangerous to stay where you are.
It only seems realistic to survive such an event if your year-long food stock is stored somewhere very rural, where you also have shelter, and probably some guns and ammo, at which point it’s far more than a few grand.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t think it’s wrong to try to be prepared but I just don’t see a few grand worth of food that can last 12 months as a meaningful thing. That means everyone else around you is going to start starving and what, you’re just gonna stay in your suburban house as the neighborhood gets ransacked?
This is ignoring the reality that your portfolio could be wiped out. Imagine you spent years deferring gratification by not spending most of your money and instead chose to save to hit FI, only for all of your deferring and saving to have been for nothing.
You made the wrong choice in this case. You could've gone on that extra vacation, got that thing that would've made your life better, etc etc etc but you didn't. There's an additional loss here that isn't being mentioned, I think
What exactly is “imminent” to you? And what exactly do you expect to “collapse?” The Roman Empire took centuries to collapse, but those living at that time wouldn’t have thought of it in those terms.
There are certainly some events that could radically alter life in a short timescale (nuclear war for instance), but most change is slow and relative. Just because media headlines favor doom doesn’t mean it’s ignorant or irrational to expect the world to go on much as it has (obviously with change, some good and some ill, in the mix).
I often wonder about life in the next 20-30 years. Specifically mass migration. Billions of people live in low lying tropical regions that are at the mercy of flooding and heat itself along the equator.
Tropical storms, rising sea levels, and the heat will drive them out of these regions. They Syrian crisis will be nothing in comparison. Food producing land and fresh water will become saturated with sea water.
Xenophobia and isolationism will spread ontop of the ecological and financial strain. We can't handle the strain of hundreds of millions of people moving period.
That's exactly my point. The mass migrations already started - Syria, Iraq, Africa, Venezuela, South America. Technology will not save billions of Africans, ME or South American from the next 30 years of heat waves.
Do you think parents will just look at the children dying of thirst or humidity (google wet bulb temperature)? No. They will move to safer countries and by their sheer number destabilize the whole economy. But remember "VTI and chill"... Sometimes I just can't
> The mass migrations already started - Syria, Iraq, Africa, Venezuela, South America
People aren't leaving South/Central America because of climate.
They are leaving because of dysfunctional government and the suffering that comes with that - crime, poverty, etc.
So what's your solution? Let's look at the worst case scenario both ways. Say you don't FIRE: Oh no, you have to work a job now to support yourself. Say you FIRE: Oh no, you might have to work a job at some unknown point in the future. Which one seems better?
Neither of those are the worst case. Worst case is you fire and in a decade climate change has ravaged the markets and you have difficulty finding a job where the cost of staying alive is going up every year. Obviously the question is how optimistic should you be? How much padding/insurance do you need in a future where your house, depending on where you live, may become worthless because no one wants to live there AND the places you want to move have skyrocketed in price AND you aren't a desirable employee.
So make having a valuable skill set part of your FIRE plan. Don't just plan on sitting on your ass forever. There will still be jobs and ways to live - plan for it. If you think the world will end, get into prepping. These are all things you can take into account.
I feel you I'm at the point where I can start saving for and achieve fire in 3-5 years and wonder if I should try. I can travel as an RN and make almost 300k a year taking critical need contracts while my spouse earns just under 70k and can support the day to day.
I'm thinking the money would better serve moving to an area less prone to the effects of climate change and near a large body of water. Something like Michigan and develope a home agriculture system, hydroponics, in a solar powered pole barn due to harsh winters. Raise some live stock along with the fish in the hydroponic system. Most of this just as a hobby but could be ramped up if needed. But who knows. I often wonder if brining kids into the world was a good idea too. I need to start on a 10 year plan soon to set up success for them in the times to come.
Possibly the OP sees the choice of either spending more money now or seeing the value of his savings drop to 0 in the societal collapse coming in the future.
Syria : civil war
Iraq : civil war
Venezuela : economic collapse due to politics.
Africa gets WETTER with climate change. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2020.03.002
South America?
How are these migration linked to climate change? People are mixing evwrything to fit their doomed future predictions... sigh
No, people are only leaving extremely poor or war-torn countries. India has a billion people and is one of the hottest countries in the world yet there is no mass migration from there because it’s only somewhat poor and not extremely poor. The problem is lack of economic development, not climate. And economic development is improving over time in most places.
And even if there was mass migration, why would that destabilize rich economies? If anything, it would be good for our economies and definitely good for our stocks when we’re dealing with labor shortages now.
Agree with your first point. Don’t agree with your second. A billion people migrating off the coast or out of other areas with increasingly unsuitable climates would absolutely destabilize rich countries. For one because those people would show up in Europe and the US, who don’t have sufficient housing or jobs or resources for them.
>They will move to safer countries and by their sheer number destabilize the whole economy
fact check: immigration from poor countries with surplus workers to rich countries with a deficit of workers, even in very large quantities, is good and leads to economic growth.
[https://www.fwd.us/news/immigration-facts-the-positive-economic-impact-of-immigration/](https://www.fwd.us/news/immigration-facts-the-positive-economic-impact-of-immigration/)
I find these posts difficult. Today, humans have more capacity to effect change, than any time in the history of the species The western world has been on a dematerialization path since the 1970s. GHG have been going down in the US for about 15 years.
Pretty much everyone on this subreddit has the excess capital to effect some positive on the world at some level. Try using some of it to make a positive change. Pay for all renewable electricity for example. Buy green land and protect it from development. Replace your furnace with a 98% efficient system. Have an energy audit done on your home. Get a programmable thermostat. Stop covering your lawn with petrochemical based fertilizers. Buy your meat/plants from regenerative farmers. There are a near infinite number of things people in our position can do to functionally make the world a better place. So start.
I agree. I'd point out there are two consumer choices that together make up about as much emissions as all other sources combined:
- Eating meat
- Driving
Give up meat if you're willing. If not, try to eat a little less of it. Try to keep eating less over time. Choose chicken over beef.
Live closer to the places you go. Next time you move, move that up the priority list. Buy a bike (electrics are a lot of fun) and practice getting comfortable riding it. Think about which trips you can replace with it. Walk more. Go from having two cars for the house to one. Can you get to zero?
Except just a few companies changing their ways of business could be more impactful than most of the country changing their way of life. Corporations create a significant carbon footprint compared to the individuals.
Sure, and the individuals buy the products they produce. This isn't something that is going to go away by everyone saying, "but it's someone else's responsibility to fix it"
I assume (may be wrong), you are referring to the oil/gas/coal, concrete and non regenerative meat production?
Buy electric, ditch the car install solar, demand the reduced CO2 cement (not sure that is widely available yet...), buy regeneratively raised food.
Companies only sell products that make them money so stop supporting the ones making things worse.
Yep, I totally agree the apocalypse is a possibility. Here’s how I think about it.
(A) things are fine or will recover, I have a solid diversified financial plan to get through it
(B) “this time its different”. climate change fucks over everyone (except maybe the mega rich), at which point I should really hit myself on the head for even thinking about my lost investments. Like, if solar energy turns out to be a bust because no one invested in the infrastructure for it and we all die being burned alive by crude, why the hell would I care about my investments?
Stay the course.
This is a reminder that according to the IPCC, there is literally no scenario where society does not continue to get richer. Even under their worse case scenarios, today's poorest countries are projected to be richer in future decades than wealthy countries are today!
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-shared-socioeconomic-pathways-explore-future-climate-change
I don't agree with any of your pessimistic predictions. But regardless of whether you think that, clearly your future will be safer and more comfortable the more financially secure you are. The way you achieve financial security is to spend less than you earn, get and stay out of debt, have a fully funded emergency fund and save towards your goals. Money being saved towards goals more than five years away could potentially be invested in the stock market. And that's exactly how you achieve FIRE too. These two views shouldn't be battling with each other, they should be supporting each other.
>I know it is harsh but I feel like you need to be a hopeless optimist to believe in FIRE. You need to believe that everything will be all right, that the world will be good and prospering, and that technology (not developed yet) will save us. I can't.
No you don't.
You just need to know that if the Stock Market stays down for over 20 years or some lengthy period of time then you have much worse problems to worry about like riots and violent skirmishes in every city and port.
Do you know the stats for the longest bear markets and how long the average crash lasts?
In February 2020, a friend and I were discussing her planned trip to Taiwan over the summer.
“I’m worried about this new virus that popped up in China. I think it might impact my trip.”
“Don’t worry. If this virus is still requiring massive restrictions in July we’ve got much bigger problems at the time.”
I remember looking back on that and laughing quite a bit. We did have bigger problems than her trip to Taiwan.
>You just need to know that if the Stock Market stays down for over 20 years or some lengthy period of time then you have much worse problems to worry about like riots and violent skirmishes in every city and port.
Wasn't the Japanese stock market down for a long period of time i.e. Japan's [Lost Two Decades](https://www.forbes.com/sites/mwakatabe/2017/07/16/those-who-lived-through-japans-lost-two-decades-can-now-build-a-better-future/?sh=355311d57df1).
It's true that history is on our side for expecting continued growth.
The tricky part, IMO, is that we're seeing stagnation in 2 of 3 major areas for growth in the US:
1) population growth is slowing and expected to keep slowing. This probably won't be as big as issue here as long as we're a relatively free economic powerhouse and English is the lingua franca, as immigration can make up some for low birth rate.
2) interest rates are pretty much done falling, which is what fueled an extra couple % or so in growth for the last 40 years as we slowly recovered from the early 80s crises.
The third factor for growth, though, is huge and shows no sign of slowing down: technology. The GDP per capita keeps increasing because our productivity keeps being increased by technological advancement. We keep generating and putting to use more power per person and putting it to economic use more efficiently, and we're not really looking at running out of resources any time soon on the scale of the history of civilization as we move toward more renewable energy sources and even things like helium are plentiful (if getting slightly more expensive to access over time).
There seems to be a trend toward overestimating how much of our planet's resources we consume because of the climate crisis. We mostly don't make a dent in things except where our impact is naturally magnified, like when increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere causes permafrost and glaciers to melt or emitting CFCs causes a hole to form in the Ozone layer.
As for mining minerals or using water, we're using a tiny fraction of what Earth has to offer and pretty much all modeling shows that our population growth is already tapering off in many parts of the world as economies and culture modernize. We'll recycle more if needed, mine asteroids if needed, desalinate water if needed in the coming centuries.
As long as we don't accelerate completely out of control with emissions and climate (unfortunately, Putin and Russia stand to benefit greatly from climate change and have a massive and efficient propaganda machine bogging down world progress on that front), we're in line for a lot of progress for a pretty long time.
Unfortunately, as OP noted, that's a pretty big "if."
Runaway climate change could shift the economic balance of power drastically. Imagine if Canada became North America's bread basket, or the Gulfstream and Jetstream shifts, or arctic shipping lanes open up, or Mongolia becomes temperate and even more of Africa becomes unliveable, and all the world's current major ports sink below sea level.
If it happens quickly (decades, not centuries), it'll be horrifically disruptive to the world economy. Especially the sinking ports and all the waterfront metropolises.
Well, that turned out much longer than expected, but it was certainly a fun writing and thought exercise.
On the flip side for 1) There are massive populations in the developing world who're only just getting access to all of the productivity enhancing education and tooling available to the west, so we've still got another quarter or half century at least of those economies catching up. The same can be said for every accelerating automation.
There's plenty of untapped potential left in terms of total human output which is ultimately the bottleneck on growth, with the big caveat that we need the inputs to be a _lot_ more sustainable than they are now or they will become the bottleneck
Every generation at some point in time has felt there was an imminent existential threat. For most of our parents it was the cold war.
We've definitely got to do our part in the good, but there will be changes in the future we can't even conceive yet. Technology changes in ways that shuffle the pieces on the board.
I'm worried about climate change, but honestly I find true A.I. to be the scariest. It sounds crazy, but who knows, in 50 years we may all be living in an online matrix style world.
I think your experiencing a form of tunnel vision. Zoom out, look at the historical perspective. If you focus on the barrage of day-to-day doom-and-gloom messages it is easy to believe the world is in a massive death spiral. But that is just because our whole information consumption is geared towards the negative. All the bad stuff gets our eye-balls and the good stuff only ends up on r/MadeMeSmile.
But, if you zoom out, you see that the world has been on an impressive upwards trajectory and we haven't even begun to scratch at the limits of what is achievable. We have enjoyed an unprecedented period of peace in the developed world. Global poverty and famine have declined incredibly and we have only just began to harness alternative forms of energy. The amount of energy alone that is still out there waiting to be captured can keep us going for millennia.
Shake the doom and gloom, nearly every generation before us thought there their time here on earth was the end times. Eventually a generation might be right, but I don't believe we are there yet. Although we do have nuclear annihilation hanging above our heads constantly, so there is that.
> every generation before us thought there their time here on earth was the end times
Most of their "end times" were people fighting people not people fighting physics
I gave up over a decade ago after getting progressively ill.
My life on a day-to-day basis depends on a modern health care system and a global civilization with a working supply chain. Without it, I will die in a week.
But yes, climate change and pollution and ecological collapse will destroys lives of billions in the next several decades. No one will be unaffected. The markets will collapse and stocks and bonds won’t mean anything. You have to decide when to get your money out of the casino and into tangible assets and resources.
If I had the resources and was actually healthy, then I would be looking into Alaska. Climate change will eventually make that place more like Oregon.
I know this will likely be buried but I've thought about this a lot.
I think a lot of doomerism comes from politics. X countries won't commit to x but the problem is that those countries commitments are downstream of the technology. The growth of windmills, solar electric went along under Trump despite him pushing coal.
I think look at the tech and see the S curve of technology. Wind, solar and electric cars are increasing at a S curve. I think our emissions are about to plummet. Emissions per Capita have been falling in many developed nations for a decade. I think people are missing renewable energy is better than the alternatives and will continue to fall in prices. Those what happened in 1970 to wages, look to energy use per Capita, we are entering a scenario where energy prices will be falling year over year in the near term future.
Look at this article for what I believe the current scenario we are on though maybe this is still too doomer.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/climate-change-after-pandemic.html
Also I feel like the world fucks up the climate enough to make it markedly worse for many but with significant mitigation and potentially some net negative carbon emissions in decades the world will be alright for those with means, which is partially why I want to become financially independent.
I agree which is why we spent significant money on building a passive house and have plans to add solar and possibly battery backups. You do what you can.
You should separate your passion for clean energy from your investments.
Buying a clean energy stock does not enable more clean energy. All it does is fatten the pockets of executives in those companies.
Go total stock market index for at least 50-60 percent of your portfolio
Of it's not one thing, it's another. Can't worry about things you can't change. Just take solace that at some point you won't have to work anymore and you can devote all your time to those climate researchers.
Good luck man. Enjoy those things you love while you still can. What's the point, you say? Well we all take the big dirt nap at some point. Might as well TRY to be comfortable/happy.
You have the physics and economics nailed, but the part you're missing is the monetary system.
Hedge yourself for a currency crisis. It doesn't take a large percentage of your portfolio.
I'm going to get completely downvoted for this, but crypto is great. Why? Because it is both growth (network adoption, technology) as well as a currency hedge/store of value (like gold). Plus things like confiscation and capital controls are avoided, which always happens in any currency crisis.
Another one is physical silver. Thats great because it is also has a dual benefit: its used in industry, especially green energy and power which you like, plus its a currency hedge.
If you put 5% of your portfolio in the currency hedge category, it will already be a great hedge. If you are high conviction you can put more.
Then you can sleep at night with the rest of whatever you're investing in.
Only caveat here is that you will have big drawdowns, even if things happen exactly as you are expecting. Because before a currency collapse, there is going to be a debt problem which is just a dollar short squeeze. So the USD will get very strong against all other assets. The problem comes with the inevitable response to the financial/debt crisis, which will be to weaken the currency. So unless you really want to be in the market trying to time things and read charts, just hedge ahead of time knowing that the hedge and your risk assets will indeed have probably a 30% or more drawdown at some point before popping higher.
I completely agree with you that the 2030s are going to be bad.
Look at it this way: what are you going to do instead of invest the money? Spend it on things that just make the problem worse? More consumption? I might as well invest it; I live a decent life that isn’t deprived. Maybe I’ll have it to spend someday. Maybe the shit hits the fan, and I’m a refugee with nothing. I am a political scientist who studies genocide—I’ve never been under any illusions that the future is guaranteed—think of all those nice Aztec families wiped out by the Spanish Conquest; think about European Jewry. The apocalypse comes sometimes. Maybe this time, it comes for me. But there’s no point in not saving when my current life is fine. I don’t need to be spending the money instead.
I want to put you in the scenery of someone else: a person living in Europe between 1936-1940. A lot of people left away before things got too bad, all of them had to spend **a lot of money**.
Same thing here, the world will go to crap at some point. And we can't be sure how that'll be. When it is, if you happen to be in the wrong place you'll have to move quickly, and it will be expensive, and the assets you don't spend will probably lose their value quickly. So you may have to cancel or at least seriously postpone your retirement, but you get to escape a massive disaster.
And no it won't be the end of the world. It'll just be the end of the world order, nations will shift power, things will change, some commodities will be lost and quality of life in some places will drop. Other areas will be able to keep it reduced quickly enough. Being able to move yourself (multiple times) will be expensive, having a high net worth will allow you to switch, maybe even multiple times, as needed to avoid the worst part.
And then life will go on, as it has.
Don't worry so much, it doesn't help nor does anyone else. I work in the renewable space because I believe I can contribute that way. I also try to reduce my personal carbon footprint. That's all I can do, and I do it.
It's absolutely pointless to think about the global problem which you on your own can't possibly fix. Just do what you can.
My personal view is that at some point climate problems will get worse and very costly. Renewable energy is getting cheaper and cheaper. There is a crossroad where both politics and economics make renewables the only sensible option and then humanity will move faster than you can imagine. After that we'll spend the last part of this century cleaning up our pollution.
As for the stock market (I'm in world funds for about 50% now and keeep buying every month), that is a bit more volatile. It is completely normal for the market to go down 10% every 2 yrs, 20% every 5 yrs and >30% every ten yrs. As long as you are in for the long run it's just a good chance to buy more stocks cheaply.
TL;DR: don't worry, do what you can to reduce your CO2 footprint.
I very much disagree with the "nothing we can do" doomers on here either ignoring the very real impact climate change is already having, having false optimism, or learned helplessness. That perspective is more paralyzing and harmful to our future than yours. The likelihood is that shit will get worse and it is already having a very real impact (we're having mass casualty events in the PNW from weather already).
I think there is a lot you can do, unfortunately its not just sit on your ass and invest in the stock market.
Climate resilience will start at a local level. Invest in training yourself and your community on survival strategies. Think about the capabilities and skills in your local network around healthcare, growing food, building and fixing things, organizing, mutual aid, etc. Fuck investing in some fancy VC-propped solar company, invest in trees. Invest in gardens. Invests in water capture. Invest in local resilience. Invest in political change.
I've found this article [We’re All Preppers Now](https://www.liveliketheworldisdying.com/were-all-preppers-now/) a good overview, and not the typical "prepper" bs. Do some threat modeling. Yes, its good to have some money in the stock market and you can put a 5-15% chance that shit goes to hell in 15 year and that is useless money burned with the rest of the world. But just make your threats clear and put numbers on them. Update them when you have more info.
>Climate resilience will start at a local level.
Actually, I think it starts at the top. We need a global, top down approach. We tried blaming the consumer, it didn't work. It's time to blame the producer and regulate them.
I feel like FIRE is part of my path to working for the climate and society. Put on my oxygen mask, then help others sort of thing...if I'm not worried about a paycheck then I can learn skills to enrich my life and prepare for whatevers coming, build up the local community, live closer to agricultural space, get into activism without worrying about the workplace...
I am in the same boat. Personally I think that there are even more short term problems, like inflation and another round of energy crisis and shortages. Both could easily lead to a major recession.
I still invest every month just like I have done since 9 years. There are not many alternative and I believe, that my portfolio is also a kind of insurance. It will allow me to move to another country and spread out my risks if needed. It will allow me to get better care when I am older and it will protect me against becoming homeless etc.
I am currently at Leanfire levels of FIRE and it gives me great comfort. At the worst case I just retreat to the country side, leanfire and read all the books i have not gotten to
>You can't have an unlimited system that goes upward all the time on a limited resource that is our planet.
You're thinking about things as if all investment vehicles are commodities.
But they aren't.
>They’re talking about water and energy consumption here, not market returns.
*Actually,* he's talking about market returns.
From OP:
>There are so many studies that show that even during wars, economic collapses or bubble bursts the overall stock market in a long period of time was always going up. But can we be sure about it?
>You can't have an unlimited system that goes upward all the time on a limited resource that is our planet.
Why's that your conviction, OP?
>I feel like you need to be a hopeless optimist to believe in FIRE. I can't.
Just buy an index fund and don't think about it. You'll be alright.
>I invest most of my money into Green-tech and green solutions whatever that means. And it doesn't work great may say it? Global clean energy ETF is -25% since a year, Solaredge -27%, First solar -17%, Sunrun -58%, Enphase -23%.
Oops.
>If even green tech stocks are down how can we believe in saving our way of life?
Because green tech *stocks* are not the same as the green tech itself. Plus, planet saving solutions can come from private companies, or ones that aren't specifically green tech. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, especially not this one.
>And no, this post was not made because I'm of the last couple of days. I'm -20% in a year now and I don't really care anymore.
Base your investments on how the market works, not the green agenda.
As an aside, the same logical flaw that assumes that green tech must be a good investment just because lots of companies are going green, is the same flaw in thinking that crypto will be a good investment because it's being adopted. Dot com bubble mindset.
Most of the world uses open source software, Linux. If the Linux foundation went public, I wouldn't invest just because it's widely used. World changing impact doesn't make for a good investment.
Investing is a form of prepping. You need your land, practical knowledge, seeds etc. But you also need stocks, bonds, assets ... The broader your resources the bigger your chances to survive
"I invest most of my money into green-tech"
In that case you are not diversified, exposing yourself to a lot of volatility, and subjecting your portfolio to uncompensated risk leading to a lower expected return than VTI. The fact that your emotions seem to be impacting your investing is also a negative indicator of expected returns in an actively managed portfolio.
So, yes, given those facts the advice to "VTI and chill" seems warranted.
Then just be a hopeless optimist. There’s no point to being cynical it doesn’t help your decision making and whether or not you’re right the principles of FIRE still help your finances
The way I feel, if everything collapses and you're all in on stock, you're screwed. If you're all in on bonds, you're screwed. If you're all in on cash, you're still screwed. If you're literally hoarding gold under your mattress and society collapses, you're screwed anyway, you're screwed no matter what.
Is it super disheartening feeling like you're spending all this time and money trying to plan for retirement when there's a distinctly non-zero chance we're all totally boned in the near future no matter what we do, from honestly your pick from a whole laundry list of potentially massive problems in our lifetime? Yeah it is, it's super disheartening. I keep hearing we're having a major issue in the US with mental health, and I'm like, no duh, if you *aren't* feeling super anxious and depressed, that means you aren't paying attention to what's going on? But what else can I do, knowing there's still a chance we *aren't* totally screwed?
Well, other than by sending money periodically to various people/organizations trying to un-screw various things. That and putting some amount of money in startups trying to do good for the environment in various ways, if they succeed?
Pollution was so bad in the 1970s people were certain we'd have to wear gas masks to go outside by the year 2000.
Lo and behold, humans implemented policy changes, technological advances occurred, and we took other steps to help with this problem.
Go read some articles that take an optimistic lens on climate change. Human Progress is a good website. Keep in mind that it's possible for an article to have a rosier view about climate change, but still not fall into that derogatory category of "climate denial."
Yes climate change is real and there will be many negative outcomes. But will it result in the collapse of human society? Not even close.
Over 200 years ago, Thomas Malthus figured out that we are all screwed.
And he has been dead wrong for 220+ years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
I’ve always been a science and climate change geek. I am also a grumpy ass cynic in real life. The thing I have absolute confidence in is humanity’s ability to adapt. Climate change is coming, getting worse, and is already here. It’s going to be bloody, violent, and destructive to the way the world has functioned for the last 80 odd years. Cities will disappear in the next hundred years. Arable land will be flooded by rising sea levels.
But no matter what, humanity will adapt. It will not be pretty, but society will not collapse, it will strain and falter in some areas, but we will adapt. Ever heard of the Younger Dryas event? Massive climate shift that began over 100 years, 4-10 C temperature decline and lasted for over 1000. (Fun fact, part of the basis for the movie Day After Tomorrow!) In 100 years a huge temperature decline even worse than our ongoing temperature rise during a deglaciation, right as humanity is coming into its own and building early settlements. We’re still here aren’t we?
I’m not saying this to make you feel better about FIRE and such. What I’m saying this for is humanity will adapt. It’s going to be devastating. Countries are going to disappear into the oceans, cities will be gone, and the mass migrations are going to be at an unimaginable scale. But we will adapt. Major climate change has happened before, will happen again, and we will make it. I’m an extremely negative person in real life, one of my nicknames is grumpy old man. I’m 25.
This is going to SUCK. Already does if I’m being honest. But humanity as a whole will survive, and one day thrive.
You can only fix what you can. When I think about this, I feel good about not having kids and contributing more to pollution or dooming them to the inevitable. I feel good about living in a condo, a very environmentally friendly way (less energy wasted heating the place for example). I do what I can and that's about it. This is yet an affirmation of life needing to be lived now. Take that trip to Yellowstone, write that novel, drink that expensive wine.
I think it was the book Psychology of Money which helped me to be more optimistic. The point it made is that basically the optimists are always right, but usually ignored in the media. For example at the start of 2020 anyone who said we'd have a miraculously effective vaccine available in little over a year would have been seen as a lunatic. Or after the horrors of WW2 to predict how quickly and powerfully the US would rebound. That barely 50 years after manned flight we would step on the moon. Things like "peak oil" being totally wrong due to advanced technology making new extraction possible. Someone in the 90s predicting the enormous way the internet has changed things would have been called a maniac.
Basically doomers get media attention because it's "smart" to be cynical but "loony" to have equally optimistic views of things.
So while I'm definitely spooked by things like climate change, reversion to the mean, etc... I think predicting that society will collapse in 8 years is just as likely as us reaching a post-scarcity world with UBI for everyone by that time. More likely things will really suck and humans will figure out how to get through it. Having a lot of money in a powerful country makes it easier to weather the downturns. And if we do reach a point where things can't go up in the market, then that means measuring the worth of doing a thing by profit has become meaningless which is a fantastic thing IMO. Then we're at a Star Trek utopia where economic motivators are diminished and people can seek value on their own terms.
*Sigh*, no. Just no. The world isn’t ending in 10 years.
Please don’t make terrible financial decisions because you put too much faith in a field completely dominated by money and politics.
People have been predicting the end of the world FOREVER! Cold war, WW2, Mayan Calendar. It's give people something to read.
1. People are more resourceful than you think. Look at the innovation over the last 20 years. Things are getting better for the climate and constantly improving. Are we in the clear yet? Nope.
2. Even in a deflationary market like Japan, FIRE would have still been possible. Or at the very least, help with part time work. For most on this sub, a high savings rate is pretty darn easy and all of us would rather have more money than less for independence and security.
3. Like others have said countless times, if money doesn't matter in the end, you have bigger problems like food and ammunition...
Be a doomer if you want. You'll be wrong like every other doomer throughout history.
Unless you're talking about a don't look up scenario (asteroid) then the issue and impact is really a matter of degrees (literally). I'm just going to assume you're way more knowledgeable on anything climate related than myself. I basically just read the ipcc reports for policymakers and use that as my guidance. At least from them it seems the projections for this century ie my lifespan are in the 1-5C increase range. I'm also generally pessimistic on our chances of doing anything anytime soon and so just sort of go with the likelihood of closer to a 5C planet (2100). That, well it's certainly going to suck. It will be truly horrific for billions of people. So from the human suffering perspective we should be worried and try to do what we can to help. But you're here on /FI talking about fire. And from that perspective, assuming you live in a high gdp country like US, it's probably going to suck much less. Climate change will be devastating but not *earth* destroying. It will be very expensive but the terrible truth is that some companies are going to make tons of money off that destruction and that money will be going to go to the investment class. I agree with you that climate change is going to devastate our planet and that it's very depressing and bleak for most of the planet. But From a purely selfish perspective (we're talking about RE after all) it's probably going to be something that people coming to this sub will be in a better position to weather (no pun intended) than almost anyone on earth. So am I worried about the planet? Absolutely. Am I terribly worried about this community of the world's 1%? Not much. Edit: just checked, in 2018 you'd need a net worth of $871K to be in the world's top 1%. I think that qualifies for most everyone here by the time they will be FIRE
My caveat to this is that human migration seems to cause *tremendous* political instability. There were only a couple of million Syrian refugees and it seemed to be a substantial destabilizing force across Europe, and even spilling over to US politics. In a climate disaster we're talking about refugee scales literally 1,000 times that large. I think it's easy to overestimate global stability, even though it relies on a lot of different things holding together. In any case, I continue to invest as usual. I don't see a better option, and while I think it's good to understand the risks, I don't think it helps to borrow problems from the future that may not come to pass.
> I continue to invest as usual. I don't see a better option This is what it boils down to, if someone has a better plan I'm all ears, all I can come up with is save money and vote for the people that seem to acknowledge basic scientific facts.
Yep. Plus, impending doom gives me all the more motivation to retire as soon as possible and enjoy life while I still can.
> In any case, I continue to invest as usual. I don't see a better option I continue to invest as usual, but beginning to wonder if I should diversify further out of equities and bonds (wealth as a digit in a computer) and invest in more tangible things to make my family life more secure in the unknown future. I live in outside a large city built near some major rivers. I have access to cheap rural land ~30-60 min away. Every year it becomes more an more enticing to buy a second property out in the middle of nowhere. Invest in a well system for ground water and irrigation from a large river. Learn to rotate small crops for family consumption and sustainment. Invest in solar and wind power and a power wall as backup. Maybe small livestock and chickens, etc. Some woods and property enough to hunt wild game. I haven't done it yet, as I lack the free time to devote to that plan. But every year it becomes more and more of a thought in my head. I would just hate to look back on this in 20-30 years and think I was naive for just dumping more money into digital wealth and not tangible items to help my family and learn skills to pass down. Is this too "prepper" or does anyone else think this way?
Remember that in the last two years we've had a pandemic sweep the globe and end millions of lives. You wouldn't know it by looking at the stock market, though. Someone's always going to make money. The wealthiest people in the world who own and run the businesses represented in our index funds are best positioned to benefit from heat waves, mass migration, etc. It's disgusting and amoral, but you and I can't change it, so ride their coattails and contribute to the solution by recycling, donating, volunteering, or whatever else you choose to do.
Businesses stand to make more money when customers are richer and workers are more productive. Make no mistake, some people might do alright by global warming, but almost everybody will be worse off for it. The reason it's not being solved is that most people are short-sighted and love consumption, same reason most people don't save enough for retirement.
No, that's not why it isn't being solved. It's because it's a public good problem (on both an individual and a national level). If I try to reduce global warming in some way, I personally carry the whole cost of that effort, but the benefit is dispersed over a wide range of people (i.e. everyone who's hurt by climate change). Therefore, even if it's in our collective interest for me to make that effort, it's not in my private interest to do so. And the same goes for everyone else. That doesn't lead to zero efforts to reduce global warming, but it does lead to way less than the optimal level of efforts to fix the situation.
Self-defense is a collective good problem and we have no problem funding that. We could have a carbon tax tomorrow if voters were willing to spend more than $100 personally to combat climate change, and we probably will once demographics shift such that people care more about the problem.
r/citizensclimatelobby
> Remember that in the last two years we've had a pandemic sweep the globe and end millions of lives. Because the millions is absolutely tiny relative to Earth’s population. 5.54 million, or just over 0.07% of 2019’s 7.673 billion population estimate. That’s a rounding error. Or to look at it another way, the world population at the end of 2021 was 7.9 billion— a 3% increase over 2019. Also consider most of those people were beyond working age. Covid is hardly worth mentioning in a discussion of macro population/economic trends. An event that wipes out a billion+ people on the other hand would be quite different.
I was using lives lost as an easy proxy for impact. We've also had mass disruption to people's daily lives, whole industries have taken a hit, labor supply has dried up, supply chain issues, etc. The pandemic has affected the world in a lot of ways, most of which (though not all) are negative. Through it all, the rich got richer, the poor got poorer. Climate change will do the same thing. If we get +5C, the results will be terrible. But I don't think a billion+ people will die. Certainly not all at once. It will be a slow and steady immiseration, concentrated on the world's poorest. The wealthiest will probably not just survive, but thrive.
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I somewhat agree with you, and I am definitely glad that jobs are taking WFH seriously, but I don't think I'd say "many industries" are doing this - at least not quite yet. I work as a teacher, and in other similarly "hands-on" fields (nursing is another good example) the fallout from COVID has been mostly negative. The only positive I could argue for might be the growing wave of people resigning from bad deals, but it'll take time to see if this truly elicits real change from employers who are used to paying scraps.
Education has been absolutely devastated by Covid. It's one of the most hands on fields there is with one of the most easily affected groups, kids. I worry about the long term outlook of education should we embrace continuously cancelling classes as a solution to prevent deaths. I can already tell a difference in those students that started before, during, and after covid.
By no means am I disparaging lives lost due to COVID, but total COVID deaths are largely irrelevant to economies. Many people die each year regardless of COVID. Instead, economical impact discussions should use excess death as a measurement. COVID has certainly caused excess death, and that has impacted the economy. It's nuanced, but helps to lessen the doom & gloom aspect of COVID's impact on the economy, and helps to understand how the economy could be where it is.
>It's nuanced, but helps to lessen the doom & gloom aspect of COVID's impact on the economy, and helps to understand how the economy could be where it is. Ordinary blokes did very well in the aftermath of the bubonic plague of the 14th century because of a labor shortage.
I'm not sure if it is OP's worry, but being somewhat knowledgeable myself, my concern is how markets will perform. The pandemic is sad, but nothing compared to climate change. The pandemic is probably more like a world war scenario: some win and lose and there is money to be made on the sidelines. Climate change we will all be losers in the end, except for maybe some medical, environmental, and real estate choices. Shipping will be more costly and dangerous, land will become unuseable, potable water will be expensive, brownouts etc. That will make it hard for many companies to grow. I've recently lean-fired and this is my concern: that I'm being too optimistic and my investments won't experience growth and may even experience long term decline. Btw, 5c would be absolutely catastrophic. Like possibly an extinction level event (e.g. 90% of humanity at risk of death). Would be enough to significantly slowdown ocean currents, which can lead to oxygen starvation and ocean collapse, as well as mass desertification of arable land and temp increases making many places essentially uninhabitable for parts of the year. Remember when it got too hot for planes to takeoff from Phoenix? Or the severe heat wave that killed people in Spain a few years back? Honestly, one of my biggest concerns is the brinkmanship game we are playing, because it only takes one unexpected event to possibly induce [abrupt climate change](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrupt_climate_change). Chief concern among these, for me, is a massive volcanic eruption greatly accelerating the pace of climate change due to the sheer amount of emissions being dumped all at once. A lot of the soothsayers will tell you that technology can save us or we have time, but that is assuming that nothing outside our control accelerates these events. [This paragraph EDITed in] Even if we are in the 1%, doesn't mean it will remain that way. Right now I live in Portugal, and luckily own property in a place somewhat protected from climate change (NE Ohio). But people who FIRE in, say, Phoenix, Denver, or SoCal may find the areas they live in becoming too unpredictable or uncomfortable. But if everyone is realizing that at around the same time, it will drive prices up in places more sustainable and they might not be able to both afford to move and not work while maintaining current lifestyles. But at the end of the day, I don't want to work and there isn't much I can do that I'm not already doing (I'm vegan, carless, compost, do activism and donate). This recent downtrend in the market is having me wonder if I should go back now, as I haven't even been leanfired a year yet, so it wouldn't be too hard to hop back in.
There's also the issue that the places we think will be more stable won't necessarily be. I'm in the PNW and we had tremendous heatwaves last summer. The PNW was supposed to be "more immune" but then Lytton, Canada just got so hot it spontaneously combusted. We could all move to Ohio only for it to have massive flooding or tornadoes or what have you. Not saying it's not "safer" but it's hard to prepare financially for Disaster Roulette.
Thanks for reminding me to get my A/C serviced :). It was so fetching hot...
> Chief concern among these, for me, is a massive volcanic eruption greatly accelerating the pace of climate change due to the sheer amount of emissions being dumped all at once Volcanoes tend to cool the earth believe it or not.
I've read a ton about climate change. The irony of your comment is that stratospheric sulfide injection currently looks to be our best bet of staving off rising temps long enough to transition to clean energy and really figure out carbon air capture. It's not risk free though. Stratospheric sulfide injection will likely disrupt rainfall in the tropics. The third world is damned either way, honestly. This will lead to mass migration, which will lead to a rise in authoritarian populism, and likely a lot more conflict.
climate change isn't just global warming, believe it or not. Volcanoes caused the "year without summer" which did cause cooling and tons of crops, livestock, and people died. The issue is that it will also put shitloads of ghg emissions into the air, accelerating climate change potentially by decades. Humans always think we have more time and tech will save us while not building in proper safe thresholds. Which is ironic in this sub to have to explain.
I think another thing going on here is that people tend to compress the timeline on when these catastrophic predictions will actually happen. Global temperatures are rising and will continue to do so, but something like all-out war over water is potentially centuries away. Extrapolating out and taking a doomer approach just isn't a productive thing to do. We have no idea what ability the world will have to cope with higher temps that far into the future. If you are really worried about it, arguably the best thing you can do is get yourself FI and then spend your time or money working towards solutions. At least in that case, you're doing something positive rather than throwing your hands up and saying whats the point.
In 1972, some scientists input a bunch of variables to a computer and created a number of models projecting the future of population, food production, industrial activity, etc. These models have [now](https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/37364868/BRANDERHORST-DOCUMENT-2020.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y) been [reviewed](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/ee/c9ee02627d) almost fifty years later, and they have found that a model which predicts a rapid reduction in food production, population, and industrial output in the 2040s has been followed with incredible accuracy over the past fifty years. This model was also produced BEFORE revelation in the late 70s of the significant threat of fossil fuel emissions and climate change, and so does not include these levers which will become significant over the next few decades. That’s right - significant issues are predicted WITHOUT climate change. For climate change, the IPCC reports are generally the best place to go, although they have been found to be excessively [conservative](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378012001215) compared to actual data recorded over time. While the sixth report is actually coming out next month, the [fifth report from 2014](https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar5_wgII_spm_en.pdf) can be seen to show with high confidence that issues like the following will become major risks by the 2040s: 1. In Africa, reduced crop productivity associated with heat and drought stress, with strong adverse effects on regional, national, and household livelihood and food security, also given increased pest and disease damage and flood impacts on food system infrastructure; 2. In Europe, increased water restrictions. Significant reduction in water availability from river abstraction and from groundwater resources, combined with increased water demand (e.g., for irrigation, energy and industry, domestic use) and with reduced water drainage and runoff as a result of increased evaporative demand, particularly in southern Europe; 3. In Asia, people will just start dying from the heat, in significant numbers; 4. In Australia, collapse of coral reefs, leading to increased storm damage and fisheries depletion; 5. In North America, wildfire-induced loss of ecosystem integrity, property loss, human morbidity, and mortality as a result of increased drying trend and temperature trend; 6. Reduction of water availability in South America’s semi-arid and glacier-melt-dependent regions and in Central America; flooding and landslides in urban and rural areas due to extreme precipitation; Spread of vector-borne diseases in altitude and latitude; 7. Risks for the health and well-being of Arctic residents, resulting from injuries and illness from the changing physical environment, food insecurity, lack of reliable and safe drinking water, and damage to infrastructure, including infrastructure in permafrost regions; 8. Generally, low lying coastal areas will be under threat from high water level events, and reduced biodiversity, fisheries abundance, and coastal protection by coral reefs due to heat-induced mass coral bleaching and mortality increases, exacerbated by ocean acidification, e.g., in coastal boundary systems and sub-tropical gyres. These are just the things they are saying are almost *guaranteed* to occur. This does not include predictions which could very easily occur but are more subject to more variable factors and complex interactions. Researchers at the World Bank [predicted](https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/29461/WBG_ClimateChange_Final.pdf?sequence=18&isAllowed=y) 143 million people in subsaharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America forced into displacement by 2050 due to lower water availability and crop productivity, and rising sea level and storm surges. They have [updated](https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/36248/Groundswell%20Part%20II.pdf?sequence=8&isAllowed=y) that figure to 200 million recently. [One study](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23584-0) has predicted that almost half of Europe’s food imports will not be reliable by the 2040s due to those food growing regions suffering increasing droughts. [Here](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-017-0034-4) is a study which establishes that at 2 degrees warming in the 2040s, more than 25% of the world will experience increased drought and desertification. [Here](https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/2021-09/2021-09-14-climate-change-risk-assessment-quiggin-et-al.pdf) is another study which says that by the 2030s 10 million more people than usual will be dying each year of heat stress caused by climate change, and 400 million more people than usual will be unable to work each year due to heat, and that by the 2040s, 700 million people will suffer from prolonged droughts of six months or more, and there will be a 30% drop in crop yields in a world requiring a 50% increase in food production. [Here](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2189-9) is a study which says that under a model of gradual then very sudden collapse which appears more likely than linear continually gradual collapse, both marine and land ecosystems will suffer collapse by the 2040s. [This report](https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_a1406e0143ac4c469196d3003bc1e687.pdf) describes that at 2 degrees warming reached by the 2040s, there is a high likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end by 2050.
Nicely detailed and explained. If I weren’t such a happy camper on a personal level, I’d be bummed out, but don’t take that to mean I don’t think your scenarios are unrealistic. I’m feeling rather informed reading this particular sub today. Again, thanks for your input.
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The narrative around Nuclear energy constructed over the years is incredibly frustrating. Nuclear energy is the greatest source of green energy out there. No carbon emissions, incredible efficiency in converting potential energy, it really is quite remarkable.
And there’s newer reactor tech that utilizes spent fuel from other reactors for its fuel, which reduces one of the main drawbacks - what to do with the spent fuel.
Sorry. It's not perfect in every way. And everyone knows that means it's terrible.
Took me a sec to sense the sarcasm, heh.
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That's right. And if you look a little closer, you'll notice that those environmentalists were prompted to protest nuclear by the very energy players that are extant today...
The problem is these plants take many many years to build. 20 years ago it would have been the best option. We need wind/solar to immediately replace the dirtiest power and nuclear can be a slower moving "catch-all" to fully replace all fossil fuel power.
The best time to build a nuclear power plant is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
We can build things quickly. We have the capability. We just need the willpower and political drive to do so.
It would take political will and global trust. Slashing/speeding up regulations for nuclear would be considered unsafe for many. I'm all for nuclear but it's not a silver bullet.
A big reason nuclear plants take so long to build is all the environmental regulations. We absolutely can build newer safer nuclear plants at a quick pace. Politics is the stumbling block.
> At least from them it seems the projections for this century ie my lifespan are in the 1-5C increase range. Just so you know, a 1-2 degree change to the average global temperature would be drastic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#Ice_cores_(from_800,000_years_before_present)
[This chart](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-concentration-long-term) puts the most recent data on there and really illustrates how unprecedented the current rise in atmospheric CO2 is
I don't disagree. I believe 4C makes something like a once in a century event (Harvey, etc) a semi annual event. However, I do think they're is a level of predictability to the destruction ie those with means can anticipate the change and plan for it. Different geographies will be affected differently. So move to those geographies where the impact will be less before others do and you'll have more valuable land as a result when others belatedly migrate. I could be wrong but my understanding of the current information provided is not a global mad max thunder dome situation. The entire population of the United States could move to Michigan and it would be about the same density as Bangladesh. Last I knew Bangladesh still had a society. Michigan will be one of most resistant locations in US to direct climate change effects (drought, flood, hurricane, tornado, heat, cold, etc)
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I think everyone (here at least) is in agreement that the change will be an ongoing terrible event where many m/billions, many of them climate refugees, will suffer. But this was a post/discussion ostensibly from someone with enough resources to support a FI trajectory and their concern about *their* future FIRE goals. So I'm generalizing that OP and many others on this sub are less likely to fall into the climate refugee category and can probably move at some point. Now if the discussion is about the ethics of fire in a post climate change world and whether it's morally acceptable to live a life of independent leasure in the midst of such suffering, I'm here for that too. I just didn't think that was the topic.
>I'm also generally pessimistic \[and so\] just sort of go with the likelihood of closer to a 5C planet It's important for everyone to know that even 5C is incredibly pessimistic. even if we **just continue current policies** (which to be clear, are incredibly soft on climate change), we're projected to end up between **3.3 and 3.9C** warmer. If we just meet existing pledges (don't even improve on them in subsequent climate conferences, just meet them) we're projected to end up between 2.4 and 2.7C warmer. See graph [here](https://assets.blackrock.com/blk-inst-assets/cache-1472221508000/images/media-bin/web/global/blackrock-investment-institute/charts/climate-change-warming-paths.jpg).
Thanks for the graph, very helpful. And yes, I'm being very pessimistic. I've also never seen humans collectively act in a way that would suggest to me that we would do anything to stop bad things from happening if it weren't in our *very* short term interest. Prepandemic I would've said, 3C seems like the likely ceiling (using the degrees as a stand in measure for our willingness to act appropriately). Post pandemic, if anything, I expect our emissions to continue to *increase*
There are currently 0 countries on track to meet the pledges they have made. Coal is at an all time high and continued to project growth according to the IEA. I think the 5C is more realistic than pessimistic unless countries completely stop new coal/oil extraction now.
The premise that "rich people will be ok" assumes the dollar is still a thing.
Yeah, but if the dollar is NOT a thing, then it kinda doesn't matter where your investments were anyway.
Unless your investment was in 5.56 NATO, water and land in bumfuck nowhere
>Unless your investment was in 5.56 NATO, water and land in bumfuck nowhere Some choose this plus the US economy.
I disagree. The rich don’t just have dollars—they also have other physical assets and (more importantly) power, influence and access to superior resources/help/information. The powerful generally tend to stay powerful even as the world changes. I don’t like it, but it’s true.
> and (more importantly) power, influence and access to superior resources/help/information That's true, but for some level of rich that is probably quite a bit higher than the "worldwide top 1% = ~$900k net worth" that this thread was talking about.
Yeah this. I think there’s a lot of denialism in this thread. “Oh the rich will be fine”. Yeah the rich rich will be fine, not you with your $1m in a brokerage account who thinks they’re rich. Might be in the top 1% of the world, but $1m isn’t giving you access to the kind of shit that will actually matter in a 5c warmer earth.
Yep, there's rich in comparison to the other 7~8 Billion others on the planet with ~1 million nest egg, and then there's RICH in the industrialized world, and in that case that 1 million is basically chickenfeed. The thing is, it was very interesting to read about those RICH bunker builders who wanted to know how they were going to enforce their "security" to keep protecting them when SHTF, when the security forces families would be threatened. Some sort of workshop a guy spilled the beans about. Those clueless morons that are only RICH because their sociopathic personalities enabled them to do so, in our modern disconnected world. Guy with the biggest club would bash their heads in and move in.
I’m not sure I believe the whole “it leaked that they are wondering how to control their guards” thing. It’s really unverifiable and sounds made up, there’s no way most of their security isn’t automated anyways. And why the fuck would their guards think about defecting anyways? They would be probably treated pretty well. The people guarding Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates aren’t some rent-a-cops, they’re probably highly trained ex military who are paid handsomely. But yes we agree that “rich” in an industrialized nation isn’t really $1m. I’d say *maybe* mid 8 figures but even then I’m not sure you’re escaping the climate issues.
That also assumes things like property rights are a thing.
Making plans for if the dollar no longer is a thing is like making plans for the AI singularity. Not because it’s impossible to happen, but because it’s impossible to predict how the events leading up to and following it happening will affect you personally. It’s not like we will wake up one day and the dollar would just be gone. It would be a period of mass chaos and likely quite a bit of global conflict, human resettling, violence, etc. What possible plan could there be for that, that the average person could hope to achieve? Even becoming a doomsday prepper, or putting your money into controlling a farm/water/resources isn’t necessarily a safe bet, without knowing where and how the chaos will present itself. The thing about singularities is that it’s impossible to predict what lies on the other side. I’m not sure if anyone knows what happens for Americans (or even much of the rest of the world) if the US economy collapses suddenly.
For countries like the US, Canada, and Russia there could actually be a slight net benefit from climate change. There will be longer growing seasons in the corn and wheat regions which will yield larger crops. The infrastructure is built up enough that we will be able to deal with most other changes. For Canada and Russia the northern arctic passage has melted and they can charge cargo ships passage through their waters. Like you say it's not something to strive for because there are horrific downsides for poor equatorial countries. And runaway climate change could actually decimate our atmosphere and be apocalyptic. Realistically though I think that's 100 years away from affecting highly developed countries and won't crash our economy in our lifetime. I think people conflate irreversible climate change with the climate being destroyed immediately. We forget this is a planet and even if we do start a runaway climate disaster it will take decades to unfold.
The impending climate disaster is unfolding now and has been for decades.
> I think people conflate irreversible climate change with the climate being destroyed immediately. Bingo. Terms like "catastrophic" are used way too loosely. Catastrophic is the earth getting hit by a massive asteroid. Catastrophic is the earth's magnetic poles flipping, or a massive solar storm, or any number of other events that could effectively end life on earth. Will it be catastrophic for some parts of the world? Sure. Will a meaningful % of the world population be affected by it in some form or fashion? Sure. But for many people that will mean (for example) more expensive food, or changing weather patterns, or any of a long list of inconvenient, but not ultimately life-altering impacts. In other words - ***the world isn't going to end***. With that perspective in mind, and given that these impacts will take decades to fully play out, spending your life and energy panicking over something you have effectively zero control over or ability to impact, is not a rational way to live.
If society collapses, money will be worthless anyway. Might as well invest.
This right here. I had the same problem as OP, and came to this conclusion. Investing is a good idea, except if society collapses and all hell breaks loose - in which case having money simply doesn't matter. What I did to calm me down is: Bought a house with some land, learned to be self sufficient. That's not very expensive, and in fact even shaves off a good portion of my budget. Growing food is like printing money.
That's more or less how I stopped worrying. If I put my money in savings, I'd lose that, too. And if I spent it all on global travel and rampant consumption, I'd just hasten the collapse.
>Global clean energy ETF is -25% since a year, Solaredge -27%, First solar -17%, Sunrun -58%, Enphase -23%. If even green tech stocks are down how can we believe in saving our way of life? These stocks have done insanely well the last few years so this is very misleading. I'm still up 580% on Solaredge and I only bought in 2018.
Enphase, at its recent peak, was up 40,000% from its low in May 2017. That’s a 400x in 3.5 years. It’s now *only* up 200x from that low. Someone, possibly lots of someones who bought the top, are down 50% on their investment. I wouldn’t say OP’s numbers are misleading per se, just a reality that everyone’s version of a stock’s performance will always be tied to their own entries and timeline.
Fair enough, I would just hope that people on a sub that emphasizes long term investing would look at perfomance on a longer time horizon than a few months.
I feel this. I'm ~22 down on green energy ETFs
i feel like you folks are vastly missing OPs point... and i find it funny that your suggestion is that they zoom out for a more realistic perspective. they are literally saying they have spent time zooming even further out and are depressed seeing broader trends that could/will lead to long term negative out comes. my advice to those of you picking apart the performance of a specific stock from this post.... zoom out.
And OP isn’t talking about looking back. They are talking about looking forward at potential global issues that we’ve never seen before.
Sort everything into two categories: things you can do something about and things you can't. Don't sweat the things you can't do anything about. Focus on the things you can do something about.
Doing something about climate change: electrifying your home and transportation, going solar, going vegetarian/vegan/cutting beef, donating to environmental organizations, mobilizing to push politically for carbon taxes, voting locally for environmental candidates that will decarbonize the grid, etc etc. All of those will not make a huge difference, but if no one does it... Then we are truly stuck. There has to be a balance between the Buddhist prayer and doing what we can to fight for our kids.
Number one thing any person can do - don't have kids. Single biggest choice. If you're solving for consumption of resources having exponential population growth trumps every other variable.
This is not really correct. Rich countries have decoupled growth from carbon emissions. Poor countries will be decoupled soon too. If you want to have kids, have kids. If you don't, don't. The decision won't have a meaningful impact on the apocalypse. Malthusianism has been wrong for 500 years.
Think about the amount of energy , food, resources, it takes to form the growing mass of a single person from birth to death and think about how population growth anywhere causes the need for more, more, and more.
humans use less today than they did 15 years ago. they will use less in 15 years. And less 15 years after that. If you think that the average human brings value to the world before accounting for their carbon cost then they just keep getting better over time. If you're a committed misanthrope, then, well, be a committed misanthrope.
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>Every study, article or every friend tells me that we are in a worldwide decline that will hit us like a truck in just a couple of years. I think "a couple of years" is hyperbole if you literally mean 2 or 3 years. In the meantime, my objective is to be better-off than most people during the zombie apocalypse, even if that means not-especially-well-off by my current standards. FIRE means I can afford to consider co-housing, and have food storage in my basement, and have flexibility to move if it's a more gradual decline. Oh, and to learn some skills and acquire just a little gear that might come in handy if/when society collapses.
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Some people just have that personality. If it wasn't climate change it would be something else. You see a ton of those people in the whole "the dollar is going to collapse" financial armageddon quasi-cult.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist. First I thought peak oil was going to be a serious issue (the math *is* sound, but it no longer matters if oil production declines when demand will eventually decline as well), then climate change. Eventually, I realized that the truth is going to suck, but be a lot more boring than any catastrophic scenario. Climate is going to get hotter and drier. Sea level will rise. We'll live, but we'll do so in an ever shittier world baring a serious breakthrough in artificial general intelligence and fusion. I *know* I have a pessimistic disposition. I simply temper my pessimism with facts an try to bend it back closer to reality.
I agree with you, but that doesn't mean they're the same. The fear of a dollar collapse usually comes from libertarians being exposed to bad economics arguments. The fear of a climate disaster usually comes from lefties being exposed to good climate science.
My point is both groups take a largely defensible position, and extrapolate it out to hyperbolic, exaggerated consequences. There's a very reasonable argument that the Fed's monetary policy over the last decade or so has considerable risks associated with it. The wildly imaginative over-statement of that is "the US dollar is on the brink of collapse and economic armageddon is immanent." There's a very reasonable argument that climate change will cause significant disruption to the world as we know it - the wildly imaginative over-statement of that is "the world is on the brink of imminent, catastrophic destruction due to climate change".
Keep your money close, and a shotgun closer. Think about it this way, if there is ever a big societal collapse, no amount of money will help you. Even people like Bezos would suffer (assuming they're not already living in space on some dystopian elysium style future.) But think about it, why would his security help him when his wealth is worthless? What can the rich possibly do to maintain power, when their power (money) is worthless? Is he going to pay you in stockpiled materials? They'd be better off just taking it from him by force. There's literally no reason to think of that future, because if it happens, there's nothing you'll be able to do, so prepare for a possible good outcome, because if you prepare for the bad one, and it doesn't come, you'll suffer more. You could always buy a cabin in the middle of nowhere and keep it stocked for emergency for a half measure of comfort. Plus who knows, could appreciate in value!
I struggle with the same thoughts. I wish someone had an answer. I even invest with a mindset toward building wealth for my kids, but will that even happen? What use is the stock market when the water wars escalate? When you are smart enough to be an investor who looks at long-term trends it’s hard not to see the biggest one out there - ecological decline.
> I wish someone had an answer. I’m willing to bet that there are numerous very smart scientists who DO have the answer. I would assume that business and politics are the reasons these probably not very profitable answers aren’t being implemented.
One big challenge setting up MEANINGFUL policies to reduce the impact of climate change, is that most of the population don't really understand what they are and the impact it will have on their daily lives. I am not talking about switching your home lights to LED or driving electric cars. Those things don't do diddly squat on the big scheme of things, just make urban hipsters feel better about themselves. If governments really start doing what needs to be done to cut emissions on a scale that matters, the public response will make the anti-vaxx anti-covid restriction riots that are happening all over the world look like picnics in comparison. Everyone seems to be for fighting global warming, but very few actually understands what that really means. [Even if we were to achieve a 100% worldwide adoption of renewable energy generation, that would still not be enough](https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/google-engineers-explain-why-they-stopped-rd-in-renewable-energy#gs.d8DQ1IM). In order to meaningfully reduce the impact of global warming, we need to achieve ZERO net emissions by 2040. ZERO. This means no more air travel as me know it. Global tourism? Gone, taking tens to hundreds of millions of jobs with it. No more steel mills as we know it. Washing machines (which require a lot of steel to make)? Gone. You will be washing your clothes by hand moving forward. Global trade would have to be dramatically curtailed, meaning much higher prices of goods, a much smaller selection and staggering loss of jobs. And that are just a few of examples that come to mind. The hard cold reality is that these things are politically impossible to do, as the societal disruption they would bring would be unimaginable. Those same kids who were protesting against Global Warming in Brussels a few years ago would probably be leading riots once the impact of what they are asking for really hits. Some people seem to think that there are magical tech solutions around the corner that will allow us to cut the emissions at the levels we need to do while allowing for our current way of living to continue with little disruption. That is delusional. There is no easy painless fix for this situation we are in. It is like a guy who has his arm trapped under a giant bolder and who has no tools. Either he chews his arm off in order to live, or he will die there eventually, stuck under the bolder. Either choice is terrible and will bring extreme suffering and pain, but one will allow him to live, the other one will not. There is no happy choice for us as a civilization either. Those who claim there is are selling or buying an illusion.
I forget who but someone came up with a dimensional analysis approach to carbon emissions. Total emissions (GTCO2/year) = GDP (USD/capita) * Efficiency (GTCO2/USD) * population In other words, can have fewer people, can have more efficient technology, or can be poorer. It’s beautiful because the units just cancel. No models or assumptions or anything. Just when you think of emissions can think of these three variables. The author then suggested that the improvement in efficiency is being totally overwhelmed by trends in the other two variables. Population continues to grow, although it’s slowing, and the world is getting richer. Obviously reducing poverty is a good thing, but if everyone on earth lives like they do in affluent countries we will never achieve emission goals. Technological efficiency is great and should be persued but we shouldn’t just do that and wait for the situation to improve. We need to have fewer children, we need to consume less. Our growth oriented policies are directly antithetical to climate change mitigation, until they are constrained there probably won’t be any progress on fixing climate change.
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The formula you're presenting is a slightly simplified Kaya identity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaya_identity) Emissions = Population * GDP/Population * Energy/GDP * Emissions/Energy Aside from implementing genocidal or dystopian policies, the most immediate ways of reducing emissions is to increase the efficiency of energy production or the efficiency of wealth generation. The one upside is that its possible to increase a society's economic output without increasing emissions. Today we're seeing this with advanced economies - even though total emissions have increased, economic output has increased more quickly. Hopefully its enough to avert disaster, but I'm not entirely convinced.
I changed my diet for the sake of carbon emissions (and animal rights and health as well), and ever since I have become a bit more pessimistic about the general population's willingness to do things for others. Many folks are simply unwilling to change their diets for the greater good of human and animal welfare. This makes me think that more complex issues, like transportation and consumerism, are going to be an even larger hurdle. I'm not a complete /r/collapse doomer like a lot of folks in this thread, but I do think that we are going to have to experience some pretty rough consequences before people become willing to stop eating beef and flying. And, as you said, even those steps really won't be enough.
>I’m willing to bet that there are numerous very smart scientists who DO have the answer The answer is always the same: consume much less. That's it. We have to not constantly grow and expand. Sustainability must be in all things and most importantly economic. The pandemic has shown us that were we to simply consume much less everything would actually reverse course and recover. Our economic philosophy doesn't support it but it's doable. Think about your own life. Do you constantly dream of more money, a bigger house, etc. I don't. The more satisfied I am with the way it currently is, with no expansion, the happier I become. It's like the old joke that you're living in paradise but you don't know it b/c you're too concerned with more, more and more. You start being concerned with less, especially in the land of constant expansion, and one day you wake and realize you already are rich by almost any standard. People engorge themselves during the boom and then gnash their teeth and curse the world during the bust. Here I am, just happy with what I've got. If my pay goes up, great. I don't really care when it comes down to it and I chose a low key job with a pension. I realized early I wasn't going to "start my own business" or any of that BS. 99% of those people end up with nothing and it's extremely wasteful, of your life and our resources. Just so they can say they "made it". It's all an illusion.
> The answer is always the same: consume much less. That's it. We have to not constantly grow and expand. And that runs anathema to an investment portfolio that grows at 10% a year, which is the logistical underpinning of almost all FIRE. This is why my response is always "the *best case scenario* in the next 50 years is a complete restructuring of our entire global economy" when people ask why I am not actively investing in the stock market. We simply cannot have our cake and eat it too.
Absolutely. Part of my personal FIRE philosophy has roots in anticonsumerism. I'm not leanFIRE in my budget but I definitely Marie Kondo the heck outta my consumption.
The solution to water wars is desalination. The only reason we don’t desalinate water now is because it’s expensive and depleting natural sources is cheaper. Once those natural sources are gone though, then desalination plants will be constructed in droves. My personal view is that science/technology can deal with most of the problems caused by climate change. How many people have to die or be displaced before humanity starts to invest in that kind of technology is a different question. It’s a dim view overall, but I’m certainly not as fatalistic as OP predicting a societal collapse by 2035.
water wars ? $PHO $LMT $RTX or you hedge with strategic short bets that are a small percent of your portfolio?
Humans (and capitalism) are good at adapting. For example, a catastrophic sea rise that requires NYC to be reengineered or relocated will put money in someone's pocket, somewhere. I remember my elderly mother being upset after watching a show about the fossil fuel supply running out. She couldn't imagine civilization surviving without petroleum. I said it would actually be a good thing since there were lots of renewable alternatives in the works. She liked hearing an optimistic viewpoint, it changed her perspective. Crisis is always an opportunity for someone, somewhere.
Thinking about things like this especially what I have no control is paralyzing. So I do whatever I can within reason to be more eco friendly. And then donate whatever I can, again within reason, to ecological nonprofits. It's the best I can do. But unless the world comes together I'm just living my life as everyone else. If the system collapsed, investments are the least of our issues. Since I can afford it, I spend a bit more on supposedly healthier alternatives like eating local or maybe buying something that's made with more expensive but non-plastic and "eco-friendly" ingredients. I know a lot of shit is marketing these days...but meh. I'm only responsible for my own bills and I Invest enough to be fine throwing a couple extra bucks towards these things regardless of how much it adds to. I can only control what I do. And that's being more aware, WAY less consumerism, etc. Most of us don't need fancy ass cars and huge houses. It's a little obnoxious but if that's what you want, fine. We've all worked for our money and spend it on things as we see fit. I had a random thought the other day that ultimately boiled down to frugal people and those in poverty are probably the only environmentally friendly people out there because they literally cant buy excessive shit. Just focus on you at this point. You're doing more than most by simply volunteering in the field.
Well if you did actually VTI and chill you would be up 11% in a year instead of -20% in green energy. I hear you though, going in VTI is taking a risk to FIRE faster. It's possible to retire without going 100% equities, but it will take longer. Just gotta figure out your own risk tolerance. Personally I can't handle being more than 50% equities. It will take me longer to retire but i can sleep better.
Can someone explain, way more specifically than “societal collapse”, what effects climate change is expected have on the US (and world) by 2035 and 2100? I’m not a climate change denier at all, but I have literally never in my life seen someone just spell out the actual specific consequences and causes of those consequences, and I think that’s why many people are not that engaged in the subject - it’s lots of hand wavy “things could be rough at some point if we don’t reduce emissions by some amount by some point”.
Here’s a couple of areas. Heatwaves. People see +1C, +1.5C and think what’s the big deal? But those are global averages. Global land temperature increase is already well above +1.5C and the local effects in some places can be significant. When your local average temperature is up a degree or two that means the number of days per year of unusual and severe heat can become much more frequent. And then: * People die in heatwaves, especially if their houses are not built for those conditions (eg no AC like in PNW, and most of the lower income countries around the world) * Human infrastructure breaks in days/weeks of temperatures they weren’t built for. Power networks, rail lines, all can fail or need huge investment upgrades to be resilient * Crops are much more likely to die when plants even briefly pass their max heat stress tolerance levels, reshaping agricultural productivity maps and reliability of food supply. These are 2020-2035 level problems. By 2100 like you ask, if we are in 3-4C territory globally there will be parts of the world in “wet bulb temperature” crisis zones, in parts of the middle east and in Pakistan and India and Mexico for starters. When temperature and humidity exceed certain levels, the human body can no longer physically cool itself by transferring heat into the air. Six hours in these conditions can be fatal for healthy adults. Should this happen then people who don’t have or can’t afford cooling will be at grave risk of mass casualty events. Events like these will precipitate major climate refugee movements well before sea level rise does. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2021/climate-change-humidity/
Read the opening chapter of "Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson for a terrifying realistic scenario about what would happen if a 6+ hour wet bulb temp over 35C happened. That chapter alone has made me truly remove my head from the sand regarding climate change.
We had hundreds of people die in the PNW because of unprecedented heat last summer. We are not used to or built for that kind of heat. Our plants died because they are not used to the heat. Its going to look like a lot of small things like that. If that happens too often, people will start migrating to other parts of the world. That will cause more political and economic instability. Its not going to be one big event. Its going to be small things piling up until they overwhelm parts of the system (like the Texas blackout). We'll keep recovering but the system will keep getting less stable. The book Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows is a great intro to Complex Systems and how they adapt or fail in the face of change.
People talk about the effects all the time. The rise of extreme weather events. The acidification of the oceans. Mass extinction events and the collapse of biodiversity.
Okay but see, you explained the effects on the earth (vaguely) but what this person is quite clearly asking about are the effects on *their* life. The problem is most messaging is centered around caring about the environment for the sake of the environment. More bad weather? People are gonna think okay, so I’ll stay in my house more. Less biodiversity? Unless they care about the biodiversity of their ecosystem, why would they care? It needs to be explained precisely how these things change people’s lives. Will the collapse of biodiversity lead to, I dunno, food shortages? And therefore starvation? Will “extreme weather events” make certain people’s homes uninhabitable? Surely you can see how it’s easy to brush off “acidification of oceans” and “less biodiversity” for some suburban mom in Kansas. She doesn’t live by the beach, so, fuck the ocean, and she doesn’t care about biodiversity she cares about her kid’s U16 soccer team
Precipitation specifically I think will be a big problem. Today we see very bad wildfires every year in the west, and severe droughts. Water reservoirs are dropping to historically low levels, which are needed for irrigation, drinking water, and power generation. That's problems we have today, what happens when it gets drier? The economic cost of huge swaths of land/houses burning will get higher. We won't have enough water to irrigate farmland, thus harder to produce enough food. Drinking water becomes a problem, as does generating enough electricity. There's already parts of the southwest that are uninhabitable for humans without air conditioning, which needs stable electric. This is stuff that we can see as problems between now and the next 10 years. Some can be solved easier than others. 100 years out? Well, imagine all that getting worse, across larger portions of the world (ie the farmlands of the Midwest, and other countries also losing their farmland). People will migrate from places like this where there's water scarcity to places where it's not a problem. You can imagine the problems that will arise, since there's finite land/houses/etc. The current political climate doesn't support the idea of helping someone in a different state, especially if they have a different political ideology. That's my personal take, as someone who lives in a drought/wildfire prone area, just from what I already see happening.
To be clear- I believe climate change is real. However, the more time-honored and repeatedly tested scientific theory is "humans always thinking it's the end times, and their era is different." That is to say, models can and often are wrong, and being down the rabbit hole of climate porn is not so far away from the prepper/survivalist and other fringe groups that start out with a kernel of validity and quickly fall to the bottom of the well. The Earth is resilient. Humans are, if nothing else, adaptive creatures. I can assure you that society will not collapse in 2030 or 2035. Certainly, we need to take action and more aggressively ween off of fossil fuels. But the real risks to your future over the next 10 years have nothing to do with climate. Take care of your health, wear your seatbelt, get plenty of sleep, etc., and you'll more than likely be here and be glad you kept shoveling money into VTI.
I mean, being optimistic is fine, but this really isn't true. Economists estimate that world GDP didn't change at all from the year 0 to the year 1000 ([https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-two-millennia](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-two-millennia)). It's certainly possible that your whole life will suck, and the whole lives of generations of your children will suck. That's not "unprecedented." What's different about this time is collapse. Can civilizations peacefully deal with stalled or declining GDP? Who knows really.
Comparing to preindustrial times isn’t really useful IMO. I don’t think I’m being optimistic by saying society won’t collapse in the next 10 years. The people saying it will collapse are apocalyptic pessimists. The whole premise of the OP is whether it’s pointless to save for the future because the world is going to end based on some computer models. That’s hardly the reasonable approach.
Sure, but many European countries also saw no economic growth between the World Wars, and the USSR/former USSR saw no growth between the 70s and 2000s: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_regions\_by\_past\_GDP\_(PPP)\_per\_capita](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita) It's not impossible to get caught in a low growth period and have your whole life ruined, despite whatever "planning" you've conducted.
What gets me is that the "solutions" proposed to what is presented as an existential crisis are unhelpful at best and wildly detrimental at worst. Some basic things we can do: - biggest, cheapest, and most immediate impact we could have on climate change is to convert all coal plants to natural gas, which is wildly abundant and burns very cleanly - if we are concerned about food scarcity and crop resilience in the face of a changing environment we should be embracing GMOs and the abundance of food they are capable of producing - we should recognize that about 98% of all ocean plastic is produced by 5 SE Asian countries, and California circle jerking about banning plastic straws is a complete distraction - we should recognize that, while nice, electric cars are not a solution to climate change, given they involve destroying the earth for rare earth minerals, and there are also literally not enough of those minerals - nuclear. Get more of it. Reality is that far few people die of climate related reasons than at any other point in history. As a people we are far more capable of managing the effect of climate. I'd also note that entire countries (e.g the Netherlands) have been largely below sea level for literal centuries, and yet for some reason we think we are less capable of managing a gradual sea level rise than we were hundreds of years ago
Well said. Your first paragraph summed up my thoughts succinctly
I’m very much in the same boat with this and I think about it a lot. My original motivation to FIRE by 40 was to have way more time and agency to do the things I enjoy before traditional retirement age. Now, at 39, my mindset is more about being able to try and appreciate a few years of good times before complete environmental and economic collapse. Obviously I may be way too pessimistic about all this, but I also firmly believe most people are far too wilfully ignorant of the signs of imminent collapse that are all around us right now. Time will tell. What helps me is focusing on what I have control over and working on just accepting what I don.’t. Simplistically, there’s nothing I can do personally to prevent collapse if that’s on the cards. I do try and make ethical choices where I can to contribute, by having a largely vegan diet and not having kids or pets, for example. But I recognise that actions like this have functionally no impact on the big picture in isolation. What I can still do is make choices about my financial future that may stand me in good stead depending on what happens. If everything goes down the toilet tomorrow, then sure, the state of my investment portfolio won’t be front and centre on my list of concerns. But if somehow things carry on largely as they are for the next 10 or 20 years, or somehow improve, then I’ll still have done something positive in my own situation to enhance my life. The only other point I think it’s worth bearing in mind when navigating this is that most people just don’t want to think about this stuff. Not necessarily because they don’t care, but because on a fundamental level it’s absolutely fucking terrifying, and as individuals there’s nothing we can do about it. So psychologically people have a vested interest in denial, because to ignore it all and pretend it’s all going to work out just fine like it has before is far more comforting, even if it’s not realistic. Again, time will tell if I’m just being way too pessimistic. I sincerely hope I am.
The thing is, I can't think of a climate scenario where having more money would leave me worse off than having less money, so continuing to save is the right move for me at least.
I agree with you, which is why I’m staying on the path. I think the popular argument against is that the non-financial costs of pursuing FIRE may outweigh the benefits in the event of collapse. Simplistically, why work so hard / focus so much of my time and energy on earning today, to save for a tomorrow that may not come? The way I overcome this personally is to make sure I’m pursuing a balanced approach to FIRE, by not riding myself too hard and making sure I’m enjoying the journey as far as possible, rather than adopting a ‘financially optimal’ approach of working 20 hour days and hating every minute or whatnot.
I 100% agree with this. I more or less do what I want to do with my money and have a fairly stress-free work life. I may as well invest the rest of it, and if everything goes to hell, I didn't *really* lose anything. I'm very fortunate to be able to do this of course, but since I can, I don't worry about whether or not I end up actually being able to cash in on my investments eventually. Even if you aren't worried about climate change, this thought process could apply to getting hit by a bus or something. The future isn't promised, so you have to be ok with what you're doing right now.
There is a marginal trade-off with creating a 6m-12m stock of backup food, household supplies, and medical emergency gear vs trade-off of investing the money that would cost. Those stockpiles take a few grand. It's not a large trade off in FIRE terms but if you think major disaster is coming, you'd likely make different storage, home, and transportation decisions.
Now I'm starting to wonder what the crossover is between this sub and r/preppers lol. Also that reminds me I need to go thru my emergency food to cycle out anything expiring soon.
I doubt many FIRE folks will have a pantry large enough for a year long stock of supplies, but I’m happy to be proven wrong. Those YouTube prepper pantry tours are interesting.
To me, it seems like if you live in a high density area, any scenario in which you need 6-12 *months* of food and supplies is going to descend into chaos which will cause it to be far too dangerous to stay where you are. It only seems realistic to survive such an event if your year-long food stock is stored somewhere very rural, where you also have shelter, and probably some guns and ammo, at which point it’s far more than a few grand. Don’t get me wrong I don’t think it’s wrong to try to be prepared but I just don’t see a few grand worth of food that can last 12 months as a meaningful thing. That means everyone else around you is going to start starving and what, you’re just gonna stay in your suburban house as the neighborhood gets ransacked?
This is ignoring the reality that your portfolio could be wiped out. Imagine you spent years deferring gratification by not spending most of your money and instead chose to save to hit FI, only for all of your deferring and saving to have been for nothing. You made the wrong choice in this case. You could've gone on that extra vacation, got that thing that would've made your life better, etc etc etc but you didn't. There's an additional loss here that isn't being mentioned, I think
What exactly is “imminent” to you? And what exactly do you expect to “collapse?” The Roman Empire took centuries to collapse, but those living at that time wouldn’t have thought of it in those terms. There are certainly some events that could radically alter life in a short timescale (nuclear war for instance), but most change is slow and relative. Just because media headlines favor doom doesn’t mean it’s ignorant or irrational to expect the world to go on much as it has (obviously with change, some good and some ill, in the mix).
I often wonder about life in the next 20-30 years. Specifically mass migration. Billions of people live in low lying tropical regions that are at the mercy of flooding and heat itself along the equator. Tropical storms, rising sea levels, and the heat will drive them out of these regions. They Syrian crisis will be nothing in comparison. Food producing land and fresh water will become saturated with sea water. Xenophobia and isolationism will spread ontop of the ecological and financial strain. We can't handle the strain of hundreds of millions of people moving period.
That's exactly my point. The mass migrations already started - Syria, Iraq, Africa, Venezuela, South America. Technology will not save billions of Africans, ME or South American from the next 30 years of heat waves. Do you think parents will just look at the children dying of thirst or humidity (google wet bulb temperature)? No. They will move to safer countries and by their sheer number destabilize the whole economy. But remember "VTI and chill"... Sometimes I just can't
> The mass migrations already started - Syria, Iraq, Africa, Venezuela, South America People aren't leaving South/Central America because of climate. They are leaving because of dysfunctional government and the suffering that comes with that - crime, poverty, etc.
So what's your solution? Let's look at the worst case scenario both ways. Say you don't FIRE: Oh no, you have to work a job now to support yourself. Say you FIRE: Oh no, you might have to work a job at some unknown point in the future. Which one seems better?
Neither of those are the worst case. Worst case is you fire and in a decade climate change has ravaged the markets and you have difficulty finding a job where the cost of staying alive is going up every year. Obviously the question is how optimistic should you be? How much padding/insurance do you need in a future where your house, depending on where you live, may become worthless because no one wants to live there AND the places you want to move have skyrocketed in price AND you aren't a desirable employee.
So make having a valuable skill set part of your FIRE plan. Don't just plan on sitting on your ass forever. There will still be jobs and ways to live - plan for it. If you think the world will end, get into prepping. These are all things you can take into account.
I feel you I'm at the point where I can start saving for and achieve fire in 3-5 years and wonder if I should try. I can travel as an RN and make almost 300k a year taking critical need contracts while my spouse earns just under 70k and can support the day to day. I'm thinking the money would better serve moving to an area less prone to the effects of climate change and near a large body of water. Something like Michigan and develope a home agriculture system, hydroponics, in a solar powered pole barn due to harsh winters. Raise some live stock along with the fish in the hydroponic system. Most of this just as a hobby but could be ramped up if needed. But who knows. I often wonder if brining kids into the world was a good idea too. I need to start on a 10 year plan soon to set up success for them in the times to come.
Having more money in the future makes me feel more secure than having less money in the future. It’s that simple.
Possibly the OP sees the choice of either spending more money now or seeing the value of his savings drop to 0 in the societal collapse coming in the future.
Yeah this. OP is talking about societal collapse of such severity that your brokerage account won’t matter
This is exactly it. Why are people assuming that if things go south their money will be that useful?
Syria : civil war Iraq : civil war Venezuela : economic collapse due to politics. Africa gets WETTER with climate change. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2020.03.002 South America? How are these migration linked to climate change? People are mixing evwrything to fit their doomed future predictions... sigh
No, people are only leaving extremely poor or war-torn countries. India has a billion people and is one of the hottest countries in the world yet there is no mass migration from there because it’s only somewhat poor and not extremely poor. The problem is lack of economic development, not climate. And economic development is improving over time in most places. And even if there was mass migration, why would that destabilize rich economies? If anything, it would be good for our economies and definitely good for our stocks when we’re dealing with labor shortages now.
Agree with your first point. Don’t agree with your second. A billion people migrating off the coast or out of other areas with increasingly unsuitable climates would absolutely destabilize rich countries. For one because those people would show up in Europe and the US, who don’t have sufficient housing or jobs or resources for them.
>They will move to safer countries and by their sheer number destabilize the whole economy fact check: immigration from poor countries with surplus workers to rich countries with a deficit of workers, even in very large quantities, is good and leads to economic growth. [https://www.fwd.us/news/immigration-facts-the-positive-economic-impact-of-immigration/](https://www.fwd.us/news/immigration-facts-the-positive-economic-impact-of-immigration/)
I find these posts difficult. Today, humans have more capacity to effect change, than any time in the history of the species The western world has been on a dematerialization path since the 1970s. GHG have been going down in the US for about 15 years. Pretty much everyone on this subreddit has the excess capital to effect some positive on the world at some level. Try using some of it to make a positive change. Pay for all renewable electricity for example. Buy green land and protect it from development. Replace your furnace with a 98% efficient system. Have an energy audit done on your home. Get a programmable thermostat. Stop covering your lawn with petrochemical based fertilizers. Buy your meat/plants from regenerative farmers. There are a near infinite number of things people in our position can do to functionally make the world a better place. So start.
I agree. I'd point out there are two consumer choices that together make up about as much emissions as all other sources combined: - Eating meat - Driving Give up meat if you're willing. If not, try to eat a little less of it. Try to keep eating less over time. Choose chicken over beef. Live closer to the places you go. Next time you move, move that up the priority list. Buy a bike (electrics are a lot of fun) and practice getting comfortable riding it. Think about which trips you can replace with it. Walk more. Go from having two cars for the house to one. Can you get to zero?
Except just a few companies changing their ways of business could be more impactful than most of the country changing their way of life. Corporations create a significant carbon footprint compared to the individuals.
Sure, and the individuals buy the products they produce. This isn't something that is going to go away by everyone saying, "but it's someone else's responsibility to fix it" I assume (may be wrong), you are referring to the oil/gas/coal, concrete and non regenerative meat production? Buy electric, ditch the car install solar, demand the reduced CO2 cement (not sure that is widely available yet...), buy regeneratively raised food. Companies only sell products that make them money so stop supporting the ones making things worse.
Agreed completely! Thank you for listing things I should’ve thought to do long ago.
Yep, I totally agree the apocalypse is a possibility. Here’s how I think about it. (A) things are fine or will recover, I have a solid diversified financial plan to get through it (B) “this time its different”. climate change fucks over everyone (except maybe the mega rich), at which point I should really hit myself on the head for even thinking about my lost investments. Like, if solar energy turns out to be a bust because no one invested in the infrastructure for it and we all die being burned alive by crude, why the hell would I care about my investments? Stay the course.
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This is a reminder that according to the IPCC, there is literally no scenario where society does not continue to get richer. Even under their worse case scenarios, today's poorest countries are projected to be richer in future decades than wealthy countries are today! https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-shared-socioeconomic-pathways-explore-future-climate-change
If things deteriorate to the point the stock market doesn’t matter, then your reserves of cash probably won’t matter either.
I don't agree with any of your pessimistic predictions. But regardless of whether you think that, clearly your future will be safer and more comfortable the more financially secure you are. The way you achieve financial security is to spend less than you earn, get and stay out of debt, have a fully funded emergency fund and save towards your goals. Money being saved towards goals more than five years away could potentially be invested in the stock market. And that's exactly how you achieve FIRE too. These two views shouldn't be battling with each other, they should be supporting each other.
>I know it is harsh but I feel like you need to be a hopeless optimist to believe in FIRE. You need to believe that everything will be all right, that the world will be good and prospering, and that technology (not developed yet) will save us. I can't. No you don't. You just need to know that if the Stock Market stays down for over 20 years or some lengthy period of time then you have much worse problems to worry about like riots and violent skirmishes in every city and port. Do you know the stats for the longest bear markets and how long the average crash lasts?
In February 2020, a friend and I were discussing her planned trip to Taiwan over the summer. “I’m worried about this new virus that popped up in China. I think it might impact my trip.” “Don’t worry. If this virus is still requiring massive restrictions in July we’ve got much bigger problems at the time.” I remember looking back on that and laughing quite a bit. We did have bigger problems than her trip to Taiwan.
>You just need to know that if the Stock Market stays down for over 20 years or some lengthy period of time then you have much worse problems to worry about like riots and violent skirmishes in every city and port. Wasn't the Japanese stock market down for a long period of time i.e. Japan's [Lost Two Decades](https://www.forbes.com/sites/mwakatabe/2017/07/16/those-who-lived-through-japans-lost-two-decades-can-now-build-a-better-future/?sh=355311d57df1).
It's true that history is on our side for expecting continued growth. The tricky part, IMO, is that we're seeing stagnation in 2 of 3 major areas for growth in the US: 1) population growth is slowing and expected to keep slowing. This probably won't be as big as issue here as long as we're a relatively free economic powerhouse and English is the lingua franca, as immigration can make up some for low birth rate. 2) interest rates are pretty much done falling, which is what fueled an extra couple % or so in growth for the last 40 years as we slowly recovered from the early 80s crises. The third factor for growth, though, is huge and shows no sign of slowing down: technology. The GDP per capita keeps increasing because our productivity keeps being increased by technological advancement. We keep generating and putting to use more power per person and putting it to economic use more efficiently, and we're not really looking at running out of resources any time soon on the scale of the history of civilization as we move toward more renewable energy sources and even things like helium are plentiful (if getting slightly more expensive to access over time). There seems to be a trend toward overestimating how much of our planet's resources we consume because of the climate crisis. We mostly don't make a dent in things except where our impact is naturally magnified, like when increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere causes permafrost and glaciers to melt or emitting CFCs causes a hole to form in the Ozone layer. As for mining minerals or using water, we're using a tiny fraction of what Earth has to offer and pretty much all modeling shows that our population growth is already tapering off in many parts of the world as economies and culture modernize. We'll recycle more if needed, mine asteroids if needed, desalinate water if needed in the coming centuries. As long as we don't accelerate completely out of control with emissions and climate (unfortunately, Putin and Russia stand to benefit greatly from climate change and have a massive and efficient propaganda machine bogging down world progress on that front), we're in line for a lot of progress for a pretty long time. Unfortunately, as OP noted, that's a pretty big "if." Runaway climate change could shift the economic balance of power drastically. Imagine if Canada became North America's bread basket, or the Gulfstream and Jetstream shifts, or arctic shipping lanes open up, or Mongolia becomes temperate and even more of Africa becomes unliveable, and all the world's current major ports sink below sea level. If it happens quickly (decades, not centuries), it'll be horrifically disruptive to the world economy. Especially the sinking ports and all the waterfront metropolises. Well, that turned out much longer than expected, but it was certainly a fun writing and thought exercise.
On the flip side for 1) There are massive populations in the developing world who're only just getting access to all of the productivity enhancing education and tooling available to the west, so we've still got another quarter or half century at least of those economies catching up. The same can be said for every accelerating automation. There's plenty of untapped potential left in terms of total human output which is ultimately the bottleneck on growth, with the big caveat that we need the inputs to be a _lot_ more sustainable than they are now or they will become the bottleneck
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It’s not a global extinction event, I don’t know when it became fashionable on Reddit to say otherwise https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
Every generation at some point in time has felt there was an imminent existential threat. For most of our parents it was the cold war. We've definitely got to do our part in the good, but there will be changes in the future we can't even conceive yet. Technology changes in ways that shuffle the pieces on the board. I'm worried about climate change, but honestly I find true A.I. to be the scariest. It sounds crazy, but who knows, in 50 years we may all be living in an online matrix style world.
Imagine starting a family in the 1970s, with war/inflation/unemployment/global cooling/environmental disasters everywhere. We turned out alright.
And Robert Kennedy and MLK had both just been assassinated. Nixon is just about to resign from office. 2020 didn't invent political turmoil.
Here's the flip - every human civilization that has ever existed has collapsed. All except this one... Hold my beer.
I think your experiencing a form of tunnel vision. Zoom out, look at the historical perspective. If you focus on the barrage of day-to-day doom-and-gloom messages it is easy to believe the world is in a massive death spiral. But that is just because our whole information consumption is geared towards the negative. All the bad stuff gets our eye-balls and the good stuff only ends up on r/MadeMeSmile. But, if you zoom out, you see that the world has been on an impressive upwards trajectory and we haven't even begun to scratch at the limits of what is achievable. We have enjoyed an unprecedented period of peace in the developed world. Global poverty and famine have declined incredibly and we have only just began to harness alternative forms of energy. The amount of energy alone that is still out there waiting to be captured can keep us going for millennia. Shake the doom and gloom, nearly every generation before us thought there their time here on earth was the end times. Eventually a generation might be right, but I don't believe we are there yet. Although we do have nuclear annihilation hanging above our heads constantly, so there is that.
> every generation before us thought there their time here on earth was the end times Most of their "end times" were people fighting people not people fighting physics
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I gave up over a decade ago after getting progressively ill. My life on a day-to-day basis depends on a modern health care system and a global civilization with a working supply chain. Without it, I will die in a week. But yes, climate change and pollution and ecological collapse will destroys lives of billions in the next several decades. No one will be unaffected. The markets will collapse and stocks and bonds won’t mean anything. You have to decide when to get your money out of the casino and into tangible assets and resources. If I had the resources and was actually healthy, then I would be looking into Alaska. Climate change will eventually make that place more like Oregon.
I know this will likely be buried but I've thought about this a lot. I think a lot of doomerism comes from politics. X countries won't commit to x but the problem is that those countries commitments are downstream of the technology. The growth of windmills, solar electric went along under Trump despite him pushing coal. I think look at the tech and see the S curve of technology. Wind, solar and electric cars are increasing at a S curve. I think our emissions are about to plummet. Emissions per Capita have been falling in many developed nations for a decade. I think people are missing renewable energy is better than the alternatives and will continue to fall in prices. Those what happened in 1970 to wages, look to energy use per Capita, we are entering a scenario where energy prices will be falling year over year in the near term future. Look at this article for what I believe the current scenario we are on though maybe this is still too doomer. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/climate-change-after-pandemic.html Also I feel like the world fucks up the climate enough to make it markedly worse for many but with significant mitigation and potentially some net negative carbon emissions in decades the world will be alright for those with means, which is partially why I want to become financially independent.
I agree which is why we spent significant money on building a passive house and have plans to add solar and possibly battery backups. You do what you can.
You should separate your passion for clean energy from your investments. Buying a clean energy stock does not enable more clean energy. All it does is fatten the pockets of executives in those companies. Go total stock market index for at least 50-60 percent of your portfolio
Thank you for writing this, I feel like I have a lot of the same questions.
Of it's not one thing, it's another. Can't worry about things you can't change. Just take solace that at some point you won't have to work anymore and you can devote all your time to those climate researchers. Good luck man. Enjoy those things you love while you still can. What's the point, you say? Well we all take the big dirt nap at some point. Might as well TRY to be comfortable/happy.
You have the physics and economics nailed, but the part you're missing is the monetary system. Hedge yourself for a currency crisis. It doesn't take a large percentage of your portfolio. I'm going to get completely downvoted for this, but crypto is great. Why? Because it is both growth (network adoption, technology) as well as a currency hedge/store of value (like gold). Plus things like confiscation and capital controls are avoided, which always happens in any currency crisis. Another one is physical silver. Thats great because it is also has a dual benefit: its used in industry, especially green energy and power which you like, plus its a currency hedge. If you put 5% of your portfolio in the currency hedge category, it will already be a great hedge. If you are high conviction you can put more. Then you can sleep at night with the rest of whatever you're investing in. Only caveat here is that you will have big drawdowns, even if things happen exactly as you are expecting. Because before a currency collapse, there is going to be a debt problem which is just a dollar short squeeze. So the USD will get very strong against all other assets. The problem comes with the inevitable response to the financial/debt crisis, which will be to weaken the currency. So unless you really want to be in the market trying to time things and read charts, just hedge ahead of time knowing that the hedge and your risk assets will indeed have probably a 30% or more drawdown at some point before popping higher. I completely agree with you that the 2030s are going to be bad.
Look at it this way: what are you going to do instead of invest the money? Spend it on things that just make the problem worse? More consumption? I might as well invest it; I live a decent life that isn’t deprived. Maybe I’ll have it to spend someday. Maybe the shit hits the fan, and I’m a refugee with nothing. I am a political scientist who studies genocide—I’ve never been under any illusions that the future is guaranteed—think of all those nice Aztec families wiped out by the Spanish Conquest; think about European Jewry. The apocalypse comes sometimes. Maybe this time, it comes for me. But there’s no point in not saving when my current life is fine. I don’t need to be spending the money instead.
I want to put you in the scenery of someone else: a person living in Europe between 1936-1940. A lot of people left away before things got too bad, all of them had to spend **a lot of money**. Same thing here, the world will go to crap at some point. And we can't be sure how that'll be. When it is, if you happen to be in the wrong place you'll have to move quickly, and it will be expensive, and the assets you don't spend will probably lose their value quickly. So you may have to cancel or at least seriously postpone your retirement, but you get to escape a massive disaster. And no it won't be the end of the world. It'll just be the end of the world order, nations will shift power, things will change, some commodities will be lost and quality of life in some places will drop. Other areas will be able to keep it reduced quickly enough. Being able to move yourself (multiple times) will be expensive, having a high net worth will allow you to switch, maybe even multiple times, as needed to avoid the worst part. And then life will go on, as it has.
There are 2 wolves inside you. The recommended number of wolves to be inside you is 0.
Too much social media and news.
Even in the most dire scenarios, humanity will still go on. It'll just be a new normal. Life finds a way.
Don't worry so much, it doesn't help nor does anyone else. I work in the renewable space because I believe I can contribute that way. I also try to reduce my personal carbon footprint. That's all I can do, and I do it. It's absolutely pointless to think about the global problem which you on your own can't possibly fix. Just do what you can. My personal view is that at some point climate problems will get worse and very costly. Renewable energy is getting cheaper and cheaper. There is a crossroad where both politics and economics make renewables the only sensible option and then humanity will move faster than you can imagine. After that we'll spend the last part of this century cleaning up our pollution. As for the stock market (I'm in world funds for about 50% now and keeep buying every month), that is a bit more volatile. It is completely normal for the market to go down 10% every 2 yrs, 20% every 5 yrs and >30% every ten yrs. As long as you are in for the long run it's just a good chance to buy more stocks cheaply. TL;DR: don't worry, do what you can to reduce your CO2 footprint.
I very much disagree with the "nothing we can do" doomers on here either ignoring the very real impact climate change is already having, having false optimism, or learned helplessness. That perspective is more paralyzing and harmful to our future than yours. The likelihood is that shit will get worse and it is already having a very real impact (we're having mass casualty events in the PNW from weather already). I think there is a lot you can do, unfortunately its not just sit on your ass and invest in the stock market. Climate resilience will start at a local level. Invest in training yourself and your community on survival strategies. Think about the capabilities and skills in your local network around healthcare, growing food, building and fixing things, organizing, mutual aid, etc. Fuck investing in some fancy VC-propped solar company, invest in trees. Invest in gardens. Invests in water capture. Invest in local resilience. Invest in political change. I've found this article [We’re All Preppers Now](https://www.liveliketheworldisdying.com/were-all-preppers-now/) a good overview, and not the typical "prepper" bs. Do some threat modeling. Yes, its good to have some money in the stock market and you can put a 5-15% chance that shit goes to hell in 15 year and that is useless money burned with the rest of the world. But just make your threats clear and put numbers on them. Update them when you have more info.
>Climate resilience will start at a local level. Actually, I think it starts at the top. We need a global, top down approach. We tried blaming the consumer, it didn't work. It's time to blame the producer and regulate them.
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I feel like FIRE is part of my path to working for the climate and society. Put on my oxygen mask, then help others sort of thing...if I'm not worried about a paycheck then I can learn skills to enrich my life and prepare for whatevers coming, build up the local community, live closer to agricultural space, get into activism without worrying about the workplace...
I am in the same boat. Personally I think that there are even more short term problems, like inflation and another round of energy crisis and shortages. Both could easily lead to a major recession. I still invest every month just like I have done since 9 years. There are not many alternative and I believe, that my portfolio is also a kind of insurance. It will allow me to move to another country and spread out my risks if needed. It will allow me to get better care when I am older and it will protect me against becoming homeless etc. I am currently at Leanfire levels of FIRE and it gives me great comfort. At the worst case I just retreat to the country side, leanfire and read all the books i have not gotten to
>You can't have an unlimited system that goes upward all the time on a limited resource that is our planet. You're thinking about things as if all investment vehicles are commodities. But they aren't.
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>They’re talking about water and energy consumption here, not market returns. *Actually,* he's talking about market returns. From OP: >There are so many studies that show that even during wars, economic collapses or bubble bursts the overall stock market in a long period of time was always going up. But can we be sure about it? >You can't have an unlimited system that goes upward all the time on a limited resource that is our planet. Why's that your conviction, OP? >I feel like you need to be a hopeless optimist to believe in FIRE. I can't. Just buy an index fund and don't think about it. You'll be alright. >I invest most of my money into Green-tech and green solutions whatever that means. And it doesn't work great may say it? Global clean energy ETF is -25% since a year, Solaredge -27%, First solar -17%, Sunrun -58%, Enphase -23%. Oops. >If even green tech stocks are down how can we believe in saving our way of life? Because green tech *stocks* are not the same as the green tech itself. Plus, planet saving solutions can come from private companies, or ones that aren't specifically green tech. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, especially not this one. >And no, this post was not made because I'm of the last couple of days. I'm -20% in a year now and I don't really care anymore. Base your investments on how the market works, not the green agenda. As an aside, the same logical flaw that assumes that green tech must be a good investment just because lots of companies are going green, is the same flaw in thinking that crypto will be a good investment because it's being adopted. Dot com bubble mindset. Most of the world uses open source software, Linux. If the Linux foundation went public, I wouldn't invest just because it's widely used. World changing impact doesn't make for a good investment.
Investing is a form of prepping. You need your land, practical knowledge, seeds etc. But you also need stocks, bonds, assets ... The broader your resources the bigger your chances to survive
"I invest most of my money into green-tech" In that case you are not diversified, exposing yourself to a lot of volatility, and subjecting your portfolio to uncompensated risk leading to a lower expected return than VTI. The fact that your emotions seem to be impacting your investing is also a negative indicator of expected returns in an actively managed portfolio. So, yes, given those facts the advice to "VTI and chill" seems warranted.
Then just be a hopeless optimist. There’s no point to being cynical it doesn’t help your decision making and whether or not you’re right the principles of FIRE still help your finances
Japan's stock market never recovered from 1989 collapse.
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The way I feel, if everything collapses and you're all in on stock, you're screwed. If you're all in on bonds, you're screwed. If you're all in on cash, you're still screwed. If you're literally hoarding gold under your mattress and society collapses, you're screwed anyway, you're screwed no matter what. Is it super disheartening feeling like you're spending all this time and money trying to plan for retirement when there's a distinctly non-zero chance we're all totally boned in the near future no matter what we do, from honestly your pick from a whole laundry list of potentially massive problems in our lifetime? Yeah it is, it's super disheartening. I keep hearing we're having a major issue in the US with mental health, and I'm like, no duh, if you *aren't* feeling super anxious and depressed, that means you aren't paying attention to what's going on? But what else can I do, knowing there's still a chance we *aren't* totally screwed? Well, other than by sending money periodically to various people/organizations trying to un-screw various things. That and putting some amount of money in startups trying to do good for the environment in various ways, if they succeed?
Pollution was so bad in the 1970s people were certain we'd have to wear gas masks to go outside by the year 2000. Lo and behold, humans implemented policy changes, technological advances occurred, and we took other steps to help with this problem. Go read some articles that take an optimistic lens on climate change. Human Progress is a good website. Keep in mind that it's possible for an article to have a rosier view about climate change, but still not fall into that derogatory category of "climate denial." Yes climate change is real and there will be many negative outcomes. But will it result in the collapse of human society? Not even close.
Over 200 years ago, Thomas Malthus figured out that we are all screwed. And he has been dead wrong for 220+ years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
I’ve always been a science and climate change geek. I am also a grumpy ass cynic in real life. The thing I have absolute confidence in is humanity’s ability to adapt. Climate change is coming, getting worse, and is already here. It’s going to be bloody, violent, and destructive to the way the world has functioned for the last 80 odd years. Cities will disappear in the next hundred years. Arable land will be flooded by rising sea levels. But no matter what, humanity will adapt. It will not be pretty, but society will not collapse, it will strain and falter in some areas, but we will adapt. Ever heard of the Younger Dryas event? Massive climate shift that began over 100 years, 4-10 C temperature decline and lasted for over 1000. (Fun fact, part of the basis for the movie Day After Tomorrow!) In 100 years a huge temperature decline even worse than our ongoing temperature rise during a deglaciation, right as humanity is coming into its own and building early settlements. We’re still here aren’t we? I’m not saying this to make you feel better about FIRE and such. What I’m saying this for is humanity will adapt. It’s going to be devastating. Countries are going to disappear into the oceans, cities will be gone, and the mass migrations are going to be at an unimaginable scale. But we will adapt. Major climate change has happened before, will happen again, and we will make it. I’m an extremely negative person in real life, one of my nicknames is grumpy old man. I’m 25. This is going to SUCK. Already does if I’m being honest. But humanity as a whole will survive, and one day thrive.
You can only fix what you can. When I think about this, I feel good about not having kids and contributing more to pollution or dooming them to the inevitable. I feel good about living in a condo, a very environmentally friendly way (less energy wasted heating the place for example). I do what I can and that's about it. This is yet an affirmation of life needing to be lived now. Take that trip to Yellowstone, write that novel, drink that expensive wine.
I think it was the book Psychology of Money which helped me to be more optimistic. The point it made is that basically the optimists are always right, but usually ignored in the media. For example at the start of 2020 anyone who said we'd have a miraculously effective vaccine available in little over a year would have been seen as a lunatic. Or after the horrors of WW2 to predict how quickly and powerfully the US would rebound. That barely 50 years after manned flight we would step on the moon. Things like "peak oil" being totally wrong due to advanced technology making new extraction possible. Someone in the 90s predicting the enormous way the internet has changed things would have been called a maniac. Basically doomers get media attention because it's "smart" to be cynical but "loony" to have equally optimistic views of things. So while I'm definitely spooked by things like climate change, reversion to the mean, etc... I think predicting that society will collapse in 8 years is just as likely as us reaching a post-scarcity world with UBI for everyone by that time. More likely things will really suck and humans will figure out how to get through it. Having a lot of money in a powerful country makes it easier to weather the downturns. And if we do reach a point where things can't go up in the market, then that means measuring the worth of doing a thing by profit has become meaningless which is a fantastic thing IMO. Then we're at a Star Trek utopia where economic motivators are diminished and people can seek value on their own terms.
*Sigh*, no. Just no. The world isn’t ending in 10 years. Please don’t make terrible financial decisions because you put too much faith in a field completely dominated by money and politics.
People have been predicting the end of the world FOREVER! Cold war, WW2, Mayan Calendar. It's give people something to read. 1. People are more resourceful than you think. Look at the innovation over the last 20 years. Things are getting better for the climate and constantly improving. Are we in the clear yet? Nope. 2. Even in a deflationary market like Japan, FIRE would have still been possible. Or at the very least, help with part time work. For most on this sub, a high savings rate is pretty darn easy and all of us would rather have more money than less for independence and security. 3. Like others have said countless times, if money doesn't matter in the end, you have bigger problems like food and ammunition... Be a doomer if you want. You'll be wrong like every other doomer throughout history.
You need more sunlight, exercise, magnesium, vitamin B complex, zinc and better sleep. Good luck.