How to Score this Disaster Flick?

Last post made a stop by Club Pigou. This round of clubbing takes me by Club Orlov where the idea struck me that, if you're going to play a Cassandra, be self-aware about the tenor of one's presentation. There's the pedantic, scientist approach of people like Lester Brown at Earth Watch. Not really good for a diverse audience that would like bad news to be at least entertaining. There's snarky and combative, but that's entirely cornered by the cultural right. There is a kind of oblique, scene-painting-of-disquiet approach that the National Geographic uses. Beyond the pretty pictures and going on decades of excellent articles about the degradation of the terrestrial biosphere is the single subtext message: "Heh! Stupid! Figure this out while you still can do something about it."

One could go with the Chicken Little, Hair-on-Fire, approach. I tried this early on in a lot of posts at Grist.com but moved away from it since Joe Romm helped me realize that there's little margin of error between being highminded and being vainglorious. Alternatively, there is the low-key, understated approach of someone like Dimitri Orlov. He makes impending catastrophe sound almost banal. For example, this passage from his blog, ClubOrlov:

Although a complete and instantaneous collapse of global industry doesn’t seem particularly likely just at this very moment, its likelihood begins to approach 100 per cent as we move through the 21st Century. The opposing view – that industrial civilization can survive this century – comes up rather short of facts to support it and rests on an unshakable faith in technological miracles. In an echo of medieval alchemy, the hopes for technological salvation are pinned on some element or other: yesterday it was hydrogen; today it’s thorium. Fusion reactors are currently out of fashion, cold fusion doubly so, but who knows what new grand proposal tomorrow will bring?

Whether it's the Russians or the British (The Pythons to Dr. Who,) apparently one gains the craft of gallows humor at the price of losing a global empire. Not a fair trade off perhaps, but nice consolation nonetheless.

Here is an echo of the same from Jeremy Grantham, a Brit., in his April 2011, GMO 2nd quarterly letter to investors.

"Now no one, in round numbers, wants to buy into the implication that we must rescale our collective growth ambitions. I was once invited to a monthly discussion held by a very diverse, very smart group, at which it slowly dawned on my jet-lagged brain that I was expected to contribute. So finally, in desperation, I gave my first-ever “running out of everything” harangue (off topic as usual). Not one solitary soul agreed. What they did agree on was that the human mind is – unlike resources – infinite and, consequently, the intellectual cavalry would always ride to the rescue. I was too tired to argue that the infinite brains present in Mayan civilization after Mayan civilization could not stop them from imploding as weather (mainly) moved against them. Many other civilizations, despite being armed with the
same brains as we have, bit the dust or just faded away after the misuse of their resources. This faith in the human brain is just human exceptionalism and is not justified either by our past disasters, the accumulated damage we have done to the planet, or the frozen-in-the-headlights response we are showing right now in the face of the distant locomotive quite rapidly approaching and, thoughtfully enough, whistling loudly."

The whistle, for Grantham, is the data from commodity prices, which for him resound the clarion call to consider just what kind of a pickle we all will be in if we do not swiftly make alternative arrangements to hydrocarbons and other vanishing critical resources. One hopes that it's a little harder to shoot the messenger when it's one of capitalism's titans. We'll see.

But whatever one's station, the parting thought for the moment is that Cassandra sounds best when she's holding up a graphic of the Hubert Curve, or the Keeling Curve, (insert other favored iconic representation of FUBAR) while tunefully whistling, "Always look on the Bright Side of Life."