 Professor of Political Science at Hawaii Pacific University. And my co-host here is Dr. Phil King, he's a Professor Emeritus of Political Psychology at Hawaii Pacific University. We go back a long ways, about 40 years actually, because we were both graduate students at the University of Hawaii. And then after that we got positions at Hawaii Pacific University. This is a continuation of what we talked about two weeks ago, the imminent collapse of industrial civilization. And we went over seven possible ways that it could happen and it's likely to happen. And we didn't have time to go into solutions at that time, but we thought we'd reserve that for this time. Not that we can cover it all in half an hour, but we're gonna do our best. Perhaps we'll come back and do more if there are certain things that need to be unlocked. The kind of thing is that we mentioned last time that were possible causes of this industrial collapse would be the electromagnetic pulse that would come from the sun, which shuts down all electricity if it hits the earth, and that would fry our electric grid. And according to Ted Koppel in his book, Lights Out, everything would be gone, electricity, and America would be in great peril because we're dependent upon this transportation system that's so excellent, but would be paralyzed without electricity to pump the gas and trucks and things like that. So 90% of the people would starve off. So that's a possibility. Although that comes every 150 years in where they say we're due for one of the next 12 years. So that's a possibility. Also, if some enemy were to explode an electromagnetic device in our atmosphere, that would also do it. No one's likely to do that. The Chinese and Russians are too intelligent to do that. The Iranians and North Koreans, I'm not quite sure. They might do something apocalyptic like that and do a sin. Financial collapse, we all saw that in 2008. We barely got bailed out of that one when the Federal Reserve printed up about $10 trillion and passed it around the world to all the banks to keep the world from freezing up. That was just a desperation move that happened to work. If it does happen, though, and we're in very serious problem because we owe so much money. The United States owes us as much money as Europe in our debt. And Trump wants to do a lot of extra stuff if you notice infrastructure, military, et cetera, et cetera. It seems impossible to do all that. So where are we gonna get the money to do all this? People are already bailing out on the dollar. There's economic collapse that would follow from this financial collapse so that we wouldn't trade with them. We'd say, no, we're just gonna buy at home and they would do that to us. And then that would lead to the great depression that we saw in the 1930s. Climate change is a problem because of the warming of the earth and the catastrophes we see around that might be related to it. Cyclones and things like that. The pollution that's going on because of our industrial civilization, our growth. And Dr. King also thinks that social and economic inequality plays a part in here. I'm not quite so certain about that. But out of all these, and I think I might have left off maybe the most important, the overpopulation, because if we were one billion people, like we were back in 1800, we could probably go on forever. We wouldn't destroy the environment the way we are and use of our resources. But we escalated to now to seven billion onto nine billion. So let me turn to my colleague, Dr. King here, to tell me what he think is the master variable because all of life is interrelated. Our guru back in graduate school rebates and taught us that everything's interrelated. Nothing happens that doesn't affect something else. We think linearly, but we shouldn't. We should think systemically. So Dr. King, what is the master variable here that you think is causing all this problem? Well, as we talked about last time we got together, I think it's definitely overpopulation. Overshoot and collapse is the phrase that's used not only about human species but other species. Species overshoots the limits of the environment and the underlying ecology to support that species. The species crashes, which means a lot of die off. And I'm afraid that's the way we're heading as a species. You use the phrase imminent collapse of industrial civilization. I'd substitute another I word, which would be inevitable. I'm not sure how imminent it is. No one knows. It could be two years, it could be 20 years, it could be 87 years. There's a lot of imponderables here about the order and the sequence and the degree to which these various problems will manifest themselves. But it seems inevitable to me. Now are there potential solutions from a theoretical or a hypothetical point of view? Certainly there are. Are they likely to happen? Not likely. For example, in terms of the master overriding variable of overpopulation, which is spurring, all these factors that you mentioned I believe are a consequence of overpopulation and undue burdens on the planetary ecology. Now how could that be handled in principle? Well, easy, easy answer. You just have three generations of humans averaging one child each instead of 2.5 or 2.2 or 3.4. That would do it. And instead of our population, we're racing toward eight billion, heading toward 10. If it were reversed over a century, over 80 years to two billion or one and a half, that would be a relatively benign way of resolving this master problem here. Is it likely to happen? I don't think so. Why? Babies are so cute. We're built, we're biologically, and even we're biologically built to love little kids. I work with little kids in three different elementary schools, kindergarten to third graders. Each one of them is a marvel. Each one of them is wonderful. Their parents have them, they love them, but there's too many of them. What's wonderful on an individual level is disasters and the aggregate. I'm not sure the human species is capable of dealing with that, Dr. Gatos. Yes, unfortunately, the only point that's done anything about it is China with a one-child policy. And they have to do that through an authoritarian system. So I have one solution. This is not gonna help the world because they're not gonna listen to anything we have to say. By the way, this is why, even though what we're talking about was a basis for my dissertation at the University of Hawaii about the collapse of civilization, but no one, I couldn't talk to anyone who would listen to me. At the East West Center, there are all these Asians, I was saying, you know, you've gotta cut back and stay where you are, agriculture. And they said, well, yeah, you guys got all this great stuff going there, and you want us to be peasants out here. So I realized no one's gonna listen to that. They're all gonna plow ahead with industrialization and so forth. But one thought I had, we could do, and this is minuscule, perhaps. The upper class and middle class already are down to two kids because, well, especially the middle class can't afford more than two. The lower class, unfortunately, they're in a runaway system because if they have babies, they get welfare. If they have more babies, they get more welfare. So it pays for them to have these babies. One thing we can do, it happened in New Jersey, and we can simply say, okay, one child you get what you need. Food stamps, medical care, all this sort of stuff. Pay, even cash, apartment. But no more for the second or third or fourth child. You're not gonna get any improvement. You'll get food stamps to feed them, but that's it. Right away, the growth of two and three and four child, maybe to welfare mothers, got off because they're smart enough to realize they're not getting subsidized. We could do that in America and stop that population growth. The other thing is, build a wall. I know you must love this wall that Trump is after, Dr. King. I think you're a Trump supporter, weren't you? Or was that me? I'm not sure. It was one of us. Anyway, build a wall in the water. The things you point about, the people invading is natural. Everybody wants to get to a nice place. The Africans and Middle Easterns want to get to Europe. The South Americans want to come to America. We have to build that wall, let them take care of their population, come to terms with themselves. Not just absorb the population and keep feeding it, and we grow more. Now, this solves our problem if we do this. It doesn't help the world. We can just take this telecast for global connections in the center of the world and maybe it'll have an impact. But I don't see much hope for that. Again, in America, we could do things, stop the immigration, because we're taking in a million people a year. Our own local population is, meaning Americans are at 1.9 or something. They're just at replacement. So that's a real problem. And getting something done on that is very difficult though. Trying to convince people to have fewer children because we're not draconian. We can't be the Chinese. We can punish people by taxes. That's another thing. You don't get to write kids off after the first child on your tax forms, because if you had two, three, four, and so forth, you get to write them off. How about if we didn't do that? We'll write them off and you can write off through college education, stuff like that, for the first child. But if you have more, we're not gonna do that to punish people so they don't keep having children. These are things that we can do here. Or at least not reward them for having more than one. Well, yeah, that would be an extension. I would apply that more broadly, not just to welfare people or whatever. Now, your notion of a wall as a metaphor, that's really powerful and needs discussing. Literally a wall, I don't think so. And that migration happens to be greater. USA to Mexico, by the way, than Mexico to USA right now. So it's a bit of a simplistic notion. I think that's a Obama factoid here. Well, let's not get into partisan debate. But I think the larger issue of immigration from poor countries that have droughts from global warming, from too much CO2 in the atmosphere, et cetera. And all these people naturally wanna go to a place where they can earn a living, have a life, have domestic, some sort of domestic tranquility. And they'll be increasing population, immigration pressures, particularly on Europe, as well, not so much the US, but particularly on Europe, over the coming decades. Again, that's just one way in which the global civilization could unravel. And I'm quite concerned about that. What we do, what nations do about that, we're not in the business of policy prescriptions here, but I can see trends in Europe toward slowing immigration from various countries to the more prosperous countries in Europe. Yeah, well, the Europeans simply have to build their wall. They can't just let everybody in like they've been doing it or they're in deep trouble. And if the righteous parties get in, Marine Le Pen and so forth, they probably will build that wall. I can say, nope, nobody's coming in. Because right now, everyone has free immigration around Europe once you're in Europe. They just assume it was gonna be Europeans there, it wouldn't be a problem. But since all the masses are flooding in from Asia and Africa, now they have to contend with, that's why England had Brexit. Hey, we have no control over who comes here. Anybody who gets into Spain can come here. We'll be overloaded, no, we want out. And I suspect others will want out. So that would be their solution. It's up to them to do that. We can't do that for us. But for us, we can, like I say, build a wall, we'll stop immigration. And another problem that we have is we're a multi-ethnic society. And the left is trying to make us into a multi-cultural society where everybody comes and keeps their culture. Now, maybe in ideal times, that's possible. But since we're leading into collapse and people are suffering privation and so forth, very easily there could be aggravations between ethnic groups. And they could be at each other's throat. A little symptom that was this case in Chicago where these four black kids tortured this mentally disabled guy and saying, F.U. and you voted for Trump, which he didn't vote for Trump, by the way. But why should that come out? Race relations have never been worse. I don't know how do you think about it, but the 60s was really bad. We remember that. And then it got better. Rodney came a year or two as bad. And then it got better and better and better. We thought, hey, Obama's elected. Things are gonna be great now. And look how bad it's gotten. So race relations could be a real problem. I'm less concerned about that than about class relations. And here's where the inequality comes in. Because people in the middle classes get along pretty well. People in the upper classes get along pretty well across racial groups and ethnic and religious groups. It's the despair of both whites and blacks in the lower classes, born largely from lack of opportunities for good jobs and so forth. We've always had an ethos in America that each generation is going to at least slightly better than the previous generation. And the goal of all parents is that their kids do at least slightly better than them. And that call it materialistic, if you will, but it's almost a spiritual bedrock of American society having a better life and so forth. And if that doesn't look like it's in the cards anymore, we're in trouble. Yeah, I agree with that entirely. This rising expectations, that's what America's built on. It is spiritually part of America. It's our birthright to be better than our parents. And this is the first time when people are starting to dawn on them as these college graduates move into their parents' basement. Oh my God, I'm not gonna be as well off as my parents. I can't afford this home. I'll never afford this home. And it leads to despair. And so I think we have to really be concerned about that and worry about inequality within our country at least in that regard. So let's think about that and come back in a minute and get all that further and about, look into social cohesion of society. Aloha, everyone. I hope you've been watching Sintek Hawaii but I'm here to invite you to watch me on Viva Hawaii every Monday at 3 p.m. I'm waiting for you. Mahalo. Hi, I'm Kili Ikeena, president of the Grassroot Institute. I'd love you to join us every week Mondays at 2 o'clock p.m. for Ehana Kako. Let's work together. We report every week on the good things going on in our state as well as the better things that can go on in the future. We have guests covering everything from the economy, the government, and society. See you Mondays on Ehana Kako at 2 o'clock p.m. Until then, I'm Kili Ikeena. Aloha. I've got the Beagle Sisters here with a healthy tip. We encourage you to enjoy the food you eat this holiday season and keep it local and healthy. Yeah. Eat the rainbow, eat the rainbow and if you need any produce come to the red barn on the North Shore. Welcome back to Global Connections. I'm Dr. Greg Datus and my colleague here is Dr. Phil King and we're talking about the imminent collapse of industrial civilization solutions here. We talked a little bit about that in the first 15 minutes. One of the problems with all these financial economic problems is that they exacerbate tensions between people. You mentioned tensions between classes. Also between races. Also between religious groups because the influx of Muslims, which are very, very small. I mean, it's a minuscule, 1% of the population and yet they're popping up all over. So we have to take action that's going to minimize the social disruptions. The ball on the southern border, that's good because everybody comes across that, not just Latinos. But also I think we have to follow up on Trump's suggestion Muslims have to be vetted seriously by somebody, not by care or somebody like that. Somebody who says, yes, these are good Muslims. They are not as hot as they can come in. Because otherwise we're just asking for the same kind of problem that Europe has. Now, that is, if you want to say something about that, that's fine, but I want to turn our attention to another idea, not just what's happening now, five years from now and so forth and a collapse, which you talked about. But long term, let's go 100 years. Let's say the year 2000. What do you see as the impending problem that's serious here? Well, first of all, the problem of any immigrant group to any country I think is what, assimilation or non-assimilation. Maybe you can apply that to Muslims, certainly, but other groups as well. I've always been something of an anti-immigration person, but not on ethnic or religious grounds, stems way back to my concern with overpopulation. Because the US keeps growing, but it's growing largely from, essentially all the growth is from immigration. And at some point, I think a nation and a culture has the right, or the planet's based on nation-states. And it's not just one big country. On the planet, there's 200 countries. I think every country has the right to say, this is the kind of country we want to have, and this is the kind of culture we want to promulgate and honor historically. So the Danish people should have a right to Danish culture. America's a different ballgame, as you say, because we're so multi-everything. We're all immigrants here. It's a little more complex in America. But Dutch people should have a right to their adult Dutch culture and so forth. And typically, when people come in and immigrate in, they, at least over a generation or two or three, become Dutch, become Danish, become American, whatever country is they're going to. It's a tough one. It's a tough one. And that's why I say the inevitable collapse of industrial civilization rather than the imminent. Iminate maybe, maybe not. But inevitable, hate to be such a doom crier, but I am. What can I say? This is a result of IU and many other people having studied this problem for many, many decades. It's not getting better, that's for sure. So in the long run, to answer your question, I think ecological factors such as the rise of sea levels that we discussed last time, the pollution of the environment by CO2, looks like the Antarctic ice sheet is starting to go as well as the Arctic ice sheet. Hence the increase in the prediction of the rise of the sea levels by the turn of the next century from three feet to now 6.6 feet. So 6.6 feet, no more subways than New York, they'll be flooded. And so on that catastrophic, really apocalyptic level, even the important problems we've discussed here today pale in comparison to those. We're being sociologists here and maybe we need to be global geophysicists at some point. Yes, I agree that that's a potential problem. I don't think that's imminent though. I think our generation will die and our children will die before that happens, but you're right, long term, probably port cities will be in deep trouble in Europe as well, London, as well as New York and places like that. Miami certainly, because they're already under water and there's high tides and owls. They're water dam. Yeah, so there are these concerns. And so long term, I guess we ought to think about that. I don't know how we're gonna stop global warming. No, that depends on the assumption that we can stop it, that we're causing it and we can stop it. I don't think necessarily that it's automatically anthropogenic. I think maybe we're contributing cause, but I have a feeling we're in some sort of cycle of global warming, not just man-made. I beg to differ on that one. 80% of the increase in global warming is due to anthropogenic causes. There's other causes like the sun, activity of the sun, the sun warms and cools. That can raise it a little bit. Volcanoes go off, that cools it a little bit. There's a random fluctuation year to year, but all the information I've read, about 80% or more, 80, 85% of the increase in CO2 and global warming is, in fact, due to the CO2 we're putting in the atmosphere. I'll concede it's a factor. I'm not conceding it's that dominant. I'll tell you why, because there has to be a correlation between CO2 and global warming. And throughout our century, that pretty much happened. The CO2 went up, the global warming went up. The CO2 went up, global warming went up. But in 1998, the CO2 dropped off in, correction, CO2 went up and the global warming stayed steady for 18 years until 2014. And now it's starting to rise again. But this confounded people at East Anglia, they couldn't explain how come the CO2 is going up and we stopped warming. That scared them because they mean there's something else that's causing it. So I don't wanna say I'm refuting your idea, I'm just saying it's a positive, it's a contributor, I agree, but there might be something else that's causing it as well. But even if it was CO2, could we really stop it? Let's say we wanted to, let's say we stopped all of ours. Is China gonna stop theirs? No, they're building a new coal plant every week. Next week, next week, next week. They're going on and on and on, billions of coal plants, India too. Cause it's cheap, they have coal, they don't have oil. So they're going to the only energy source they have. And as you pointed out, energy is the source of this whole industrial civilization in the last 200 years. If you don't have energy, it's back to the plow and the horse. Yeah, we're, one person, someone expressed it. We've blown through, in 200 years, we've blown through over half of the non-renewable fossil fuels, coal and oil. The dinosaurs laid down for us basically. The billions of years of all those dinosaurs and trees and all, they're getting buried and turned into coal and oil, they're half gone. So we don't have any new dinosaurs. And the next half is a lot harder to extract. We've extracted the easy part. The days of oil bubbling up in Pennsylvania from the ground, you stick a pipe in the ground, you have your oil, 1880, they're long gone. Yeah, this is a main point of John Kunstler's post. And I think that every viewer here should read Kunstler's posts, especially his last one. What was the title of that? Oh, 2017 predictions. Read that. If you want a good education, the social economic history, political history of the world the last 100 years, read that because he talks about all the tensions, racial tensions, Muslim tensions, the instability of the financial sector. I wrote a book review of Michael Lewis's The Big Short. And that's a book or movie everyone should see as well about how that collapse came about financially and almost took the whole country under. And there's a subsequent book, forget the name of it now, but the guy who saw that made billions of dollars by betting that things are gonna go down said, hey, wait a minute, the country's bailed out all these banks, that's how we survive. Who's gonna bail out the countries? And then he realized, oh, damn, no one's gonna bail them out. So now he's getting himself for survival because he sees countries going under. This is the guy who made billions off of the last crash. Yeah, back to the Kunstler blog, which is a very good one, it's K-U-N-S-T-L-E-R dot C-O-M. That's how to find there on the internet. It's a weekly blog, an extremely interesting and important blog. It's the best we've ever seen, believe me, we've been talking about this for years. We're all PhDs, all of our colleagues, we're glued to this because this guy is the guy who writes in a very funny way too. His blog's name is, I can't quite say it, it's clusterfbombnation, right, dot com, if you want to find it. And it just lays it out, it'll introduce you to the kind of things that you and I talked about here, although we talked even more so about it, but also basically focusing on the financial markets and the way that Janet Yellen's trying to jazz things up and say, oh yes, we're gonna have this rate increase and so forth, and the only reason we had one last year is because she'd been saying it for a long time and had to keep her credibility. So when you read him, you realize how shaky everything is and we really have to take action here. And just going on as if nothing is wrong and spending a lot of money and so forth is probably gonna be a disaster. Let me make a point about the generations. We're now in the older generation, who would have ever thought it would happen that young guys like us could get older. But things happen and it's not gonna be our generation that's gonna fix this problem. But at best we can cry out and be kind of, look out, something's coming down the path and we have to hope that younger generations, and I really mean people less than 50 years old, including the children of today, the adolescents, the young adults, people in their mid-careers, they're the ones that have to deal with this. We're serving out our time basically and having a great time and trying to contribute to society in ways we do. But one thing we're not doing that some people are doing to help this situation is just reverting to a simpler lifestyle. This is not a political action, it's a personal lifestyle choice where people are starting to grow their own food, they're starting to get more self-sufficient, try to get off the grid, try to minimize their interactions with the internet, trying to raise kids to be self-sufficient so their kids might become electricians and beer makers and harness makers rather than paper pushers and some bureaucracy. There's a lot that can be done if we were 29 years old now or 39 even, we, I'm sure we'd be doing that. We can't call on people our age, including the political leadership, many of whom are our age, to have the energy and the far-sightedness to look ahead and do this. We're really looking at it from above intellectually and it's a profoundly interesting and fascinating intellectual conundrum that we've been working on all these years. But in terms of doing something about it, either politically in the political process or by being an example in our own lifestyle, I don't think we're gonna do it. One person said, it might have been, counselor, we should collapse now and avoid the rush. In other words, the people who adopt a simpler lifestyle now out of choice avoid the necessity of 10 years from now or 20 years from now having to do it. And that probably will survive at a greater rate than the average person who is oblivious to this issue. Yes, it's a tough one. I'm, you're right about us just crying wolf, well, not crying wolf. We're crying, hey, there's a wolf and there really is a wolf out there. And maybe we can't do anything anymore. But they could change their lifestyle. They could say, hey, instead of resending my parent's basement, I'm gonna, I should really just simply, I should get a shack in the woods or something and go back to growing my own food or whatever. Or at least grow mushrooms in the parent's basement. Oh, Dr. King always has a little levity here too. He's always done this to make life easier for us whenever we get into these conundrums, these puzzles that can't be solved. But at any rate, yes, I think that the young people especially have to solve this. We have to, they have to commit themselves to what we've been talking about. Perhaps we'll have other sessions on this, Dr. King. And I wanna thank the audience for watching us and listening to the global connections. And please tune in again. We're absolutely back shortly with more solution.