On desiccated river beds

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5 responses to “On desiccated river beds”

1. 

   Your Name’s not Bruce?

   Jul 21, 2026 11:55 AM

   The Rhine, a vital artery for European trade, also runs through Germany. Water levels in parts of the river have fallen so low that cargo ships have had to reduce their load and spread it across multiple vessels, increasing costs.

   “We have come back from the brink, with an improvement compared to the lowest water levels earlier this week, but much more rain is still needed,” one commodity trader told Reuters.

   And now we find that some “commodities” just can’t be traded. You can’t just put in an order for “more rain”. The world just doesn’t work that way, any more than it worked through sacrifices to the gods. We are not a self-made, self-supporting species. We still (and always have, always will) rely on the biogeophysical systems of our planet. They are the foundation we can’t escape. However much we degrade, erode, buy, sell, trade and supplant it with our products and our waste, its presense (or, if things go further south) its absense, will decide our fate. We might think we have free will, freedom of choice, and the ability to keep “developing” and “growing”, our choices have always been constrained, the physical limits on our actions have always been there. We’ve only begun to notice them on a global scale.

   Europe’s drought is not a local anomaly, but part of a much broader picture that we’ve only begun to grasp, however unwillingly and unevenly. There is no magic bullet, no free lunch, no deus ex machina that will save us from ourselves, that will let us continue as we have been going. That way lies disaster.

   Every human activity has a cost. Not a just the trivial, arbitrary monetary one, but a real cost on the Earth’s ability to sustain and absorb it. There are far too many things that we can afford financially that we cannot afford ecologically. There are eight billion of us. We have an inevitable, irreducible, base level of activity needed to support us. Anything beyond that starts to bring in matters of justice and ethics. We can’t all live at billionaire levels of consumption and acquisition. Billionares are not actually “worth” more than anyone else, no more important, no more worthy of safety and health. They are as unable to order “more rain” than any of us, though they may be, proportionately, more responsible for there being less rain. Who adjudicates this? More importantly, how to solve this?

   Our window for action gets narrower all the time, with actions required becoming more desperate and more drastic. We lost more than four decades during which we could have worked out less painful and costly measures. That time is gone, burnt with the carbon that has brought us to where we now find ourselves. Our ability to “manage” this unfolding disaster diminishes by the hour, and if we don’t manage it ourselves, it will be managed for us, by forces and processes, the complexity and ramifications of which we barely understand. But we don’t need any more knowledge or understanding to realize that “business as usual” will simply hasten disaster. And, we already understand enough to know that they cannot be bribed, bought, or placated.
2. 

   Omar

   Jul 21, 2026 5:45 PM

   YNnB:

   Our window for action gets narrower all the time, with actions required becoming more desperate and more drastic. We lost more than four decades during which we could have worked out less painful and costly measures. That time is gone, burnt with the carbon that has brought us to where we now find ourselves. Our ability to “manage” this unfolding disaster diminishes by the hour, and if we don’t manage it ourselves, it will be managed for us, by forces and processes, the complexity and ramifications of which we barely understand. But we don’t need any more knowledge or understanding to realize that “business as usual” will simply hasten disaster. And, we already understand enough to know that they cannot be bribed, bought, or placated.

   Well said. To which I would add the estimation by experts via AI that:

   At current global consumption rates and extraction technologies, known reserves suggest there is roughly 47 to 50 years of oil and 130 to 150 years of coal left. These estimates fluctuate as new technologies allow companies to access previously unreachable deposits, and as global demand shifts.

   And as the fossil-carbon reserves run down, prices for coal and oil will rise. The coal that it took Nature about 110 million years to lay down back in the Carboniferous and Permian will be gone in the relative blink of an eye, and head us for a repeat of the End Permian extinction event, likely precipitated by a massive release of CO2 from what geologists refer to as the ‘Siberian Traps.’ This in turn is the likely trigger that set off ‘the Permian-Triassic extinction event,’ of 252 million years ago, which wiped out up to 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species.

   And we sit here at this point in time, ill-prepared for the repeat performance that appears to be starting up, and with Donald Trump as king of the denialists.
3. 

   Holms

   Jul 21, 2026 11:06 PM

   I find a touch of irony in that among those indicators of climate change, we find the exemplar of excessive consumption of fossil fuels – cruise ships are raising the alarm.
4. 

   Ophelia Benson

   Jul 22, 2026 3:18 AM

   Oh yes – I didn’t even notice that. I suppose I assumed the cruise ships are nowhere near as big as the ocean-going ones, because I once took a river trip from Köln to somewhere and back, a matter of a few hours, and the boat was just an ordinary boat, not a dinosaur.
5. 

   What a Maroon

   Jul 22, 2026 7:36 AM

   Fortunately the Trump administration is addressing the situation by promoting alternative energy and efficiency.

   Oops, sorry, wrong universe. In this one:

   The Trump administration is dismantling a wide array of federal energy-efficiency programs at the same time that war in Iran is raising oil prices, climate change is fueling record heat that is driving up demand for air conditioning and new data centers are straining America’s electricity supply.

   But caring about the environment is sooooo woke.

   “Americans should be free from radical Green New Scam mandates to choose the appliances they want in their homes,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman. “These unpopular mandates disrupted consumer choice and raised costs on air conditioning units, gas stoves, washing and drying machines, water heaters, refrigerators, and other products American families and businesses rely on every day.”

   Yes, we want big hulking fridges and AC units* that suck up energy and raise our utility bills (and probably break down after five years–how else are we going to create all those wonderful manufacturing jobs?).

   https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/climate/trump-energy-efficiency-standards.html

   *As a kid growing up in Massachusetts, I had such bad allergies that I couldn’t keep the window open during the summer, so my parents bought a monster of an AC window unit that had just one control switch. I’d turn it on at night, and by morning my window would be covered in frost and I’d be shivering under the cover. Let’s bring back those days!