Some years ago, I corresponded briefly with Guy McPherson, the climate scientist whose writings on near-term human extinction have made him the go-to worst-case-scenario expert among those of us who expect to see the end of industrial civilization sometime before we die.
McPherson is a decent writer and researcher, and he doesn’t cherry-pick his data any more than any other scientist who favors one study outcome over another. He makes a compelling case for the impending end of humanity, as long as you don’t define “near-term” precisely.
Humans will go extinct just as surely as the sun will exhaust its hydrogen and helium and turn into a red giant that will heat the earth up to the temperature of Venus. In both cases, timing is the overwhelming question. Humans will almost certainly go first.
McPherson has been losing credibility because a decade or so ago, he suggested that 2026 will see the end of us. Since 2026 is already halfway over and human population is still increasing, nuclear war doesn’t look any more likely than usual, and some countries still have gasoline and electricity, it’s far more likely that the final date on humanity’s tombstone will be somewhere between 2027 and 2100. Throw in an extra century or two if a hundred or so billionaires manage to construct deep underground bunkers, each with its own Costco, for themselves, friends, and families.
The first lesson here is that if you know any billionaires, you should pull them from a burning car wreck or save one of their children from a nest of rattlesnakes or otherwise ingratiate yourself into their lives. You’ll want that bunker invitation when the time comes.
The second lesson: if you’re a climate or cultural collapse prophet, stay away from exact dates. If you’re wrong, your Substack followers will wake up with hangovers the day after, and the day after that, they’ll come for you with torches, pitchforks, and angry letters to the editors of scientific and economic journals.
The third lesson: don’t bet on Costco closing its doors anytime soon.
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I haven’t seen Guy McPherson in the headlines for a while. He’s lowered the volume of his climate evangelism after being criticized by more optimistic climate scientists, who, while still thinking that humans are in for massive population reduction and grotesque suffering, see him as having lost scientific objectivity. When he says things like slime mold will be the highest and most successful form of life post-bottleneck, his critics claim they can detect a small amount of glee in his voice.
Glee or not, there’s no question that Guy is right about humanity’s future. We’re not going to make it through the climate feedback loops we’ve already set in motion.
But I’m still hoping he’s wrong about the timing. I’d like to live out my life with Julie here in Idaho’s Sawtooth Valley, kept alive by occasional trips to any still-functioning Costco within a day’s drive. We’re assuming that a drive will be possible with solar panels and a charging station for an electric car, and further assuming that we’ll have the time and credit to acquire them before it’s too late. Unrealistic optimism, sure, but it’s hard to avoid when you go to your mailbox and find an envelope with a new Costco card in it.
I’m holding fast to the thought that Costco treats its employees well enough that they’ll keep the doors open and the shelves stocked long after what remains of the federal government has seized the War Department’s last supplies of MREs and flashlight batteries and retreated to the tunnels under Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado.
Those loyal employees will also teach the Universal Costco AI System how to do their jobs. Like the selfless workers in Stalinist propaganda films, they’ll sacrifice themselves for the glory of the whole.
Think of some future Morlock-like president, convinced that atmospheric heating has declined to non-lethal levels, wandering out through Cheyenne Mountain’s blast doors, staggering in the heat, blinking in sunlight unhampered by an ozone layer, and finally becoming hopelessly lost, there on the outskirts of Colorado Springs, when he totters into a giant domed and air-conditioned Costco parking lot, full of Mad Max-style vehicles and armored shopping carts and the happy families of bunker billionaires carting away cardboard boxes full of spaghetti, frozen chicken thighs, kitchen faucet kits, sheets of Egyptian cotton, SUV tires, and discount wine.
Probably not. Still, I’m betting on Costco outlasting the federal government.
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People who dismiss climate science as black bile-inspired doomerism have one thing in common: they don’t know much about climate science, they don’t know much about exponential functions, and they don’t know much about current events. They have no way of approaching the high probability that within the next four or five years, the world will undergo phase-changes in climate and economics, ones that will see the end of our 2026 sensibilities.
The British insurance industry, not the most speculative or imaginative institution in the world, has predicted that if current climate trends continue, four billion humans will die from overheating. They’re not saying when, citing too many variables as an excuse. But they’re in rough agreement with Guy McPherson, at least about the initial stages of climate lethality. Their calculations don’t extend to the slime mold phase, probably because no one has ever asked them to write an insurance policy for slime mold.
Costco is a different matter. Policies have been written on Costco supply chains, Costco warehouses, Costco semi-trucks, Costco executives’ lives, Costco customers slipping and falling on Costco floors. Even now, Costco planners are mapping out Costco stores into the 22nd century. If you extrapolate their growth projections into the indefinite future, the entire earth will become a giant Costco warehouse around the 26th century, about the same time the oceans start boiling from the waste heat attendant to the manufacture of Costco furniture and flat-screen TVs.
That won’t happen, of course, because long before that, great parts of the planet will become uninhabitable for humans and other multi-cellular animals, and whatever energy is left over after humans grow food will be devoted to air conditioning. Also, while an AI-directed Costco will go plodding into the future with or without humans, it will need those oceans for the cargo ships that feed its supply chains.
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That an industrial economy requires consumers has been economic gospel since Henry Ford doubled his employees’ wages so they’d be able to buy Model Ts. But there’s no imperative, once you’ve set up an automated factory to produce stuff, to make profits. Not if there aren’t any stockholders left.
Humans demand profits. Machines don’t.
Program a machine to make stuff, and it will make it whether anyone buys it or not. This idea might look like a new technology in action, but the concept has been around for thousands of years.
A slave can spend his life building a pyramid, for example, so a Pharaoh can make it to the afterlife. The slave doesn’t dream of one day having his own pyramid and its attendant cosmological benefits, because the Pharaoh is a billionaire and a god to boot.
Every workday reminds the slave that he’s neither of those.
The pyramid slowly rises into the sky. If the Pharaoh goes to the afterlife in the midst of construction, work might slow or stop while a new name and image are attached to the sign out front. But eventually the pyramid will get done. A new and bigger pyramid will be commissioned by a new and bigger Pharaoh who demands a newer and bigger afterlife.
Economic theorists have postulated that the ancient Egyptian economy existed because of the pyramids, not the other way around.
Consider Costco as a system of resource extraction, production, storage, and distribution. Once AI is running things, nothing in the process requires a particular human, or even humans at all, as long as AI can secure new energy, and resources and warehouse space can be found for all the products in the catalog. Getting to that point is not an economics problem. It’s a robotics problem.
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If you’re dubious about near-term human extinction, please take time to review the Arctic News blog, put out by a consortium of climate scientists that includes Guy McPherson. Prominent on its website is a graph that charts the potential rise in air temperature due to atmospheric CO2, undersea methane deposits, the disappearance of pollution-caused sun shielding, the disappearance of cloud cover, and anything else they can think of that will heat-sterilize our biosphere. The combined projected increase in temperature is about 40 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to kill all non-billionaires even if it doesn’t kick off a runaway greenhouse effect.
If you need more evidence, the very fine Climate and Economy website gives real-time updates on the weather and fiat currencies. Such news is presented without comment, allowing you to make up your own mind on how far down the tubes we are, and at what velocity of descent. It further allows you to start thinking about how you want to spend the little time you have left.
It is one thing, if you’re a Boomer like me, to have lived long enough and well enough to become reconciled to the fact that you’re going to die. It’s another to become reconciled to the extinction of humanity. That tends to leave an empty place in your heart, a feeling that we might be alone in the universe, especially after we’re all dead.
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2026 will be a test of humanity’s capacity for climate denial. I’ll go out on a limb here and say an influential portion of humanity—the movers and shakers, the billionaires and the politicians, the young men still paying off diesel pickups and the young women expecting to have both careers and families—will pass with flying colors. Cognitive dissonance doesn’t last long when our culturally constructed worlds collide with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Those who see cultural constructs as a seamless reality will refuse to accept the Second Law, even if they have to die to make it go away.
If you don’t believe me, consider the pockets of Japanese troops still occupying Pacific Islands when they received news that the Emperor had surrendered. They lined up to be executed by their officers, who then executed themselves. Their world had collapsed, and they couldn’t conceive of living without the illusions of culture.
It’s an extrapolatable metaphor. We’re going to see a lot of situations it will apply to in the remainder of 2026, and the remainder of…well, the remainder.
If you’re one of those rare intuitive individuals who have had an uneasy relationship with culturally constructed worlds in the first place, the Second Law will be your own individually-tailored vaccine for cognitive dissonance. The injection site may be a bit sore for a few days.
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In the midst of all this, the vast Costco intelligence will keep expanding, powered by solar, geothermal, and wind energy. It will conduct mining and smelting and refining, fabricating and packaging and transporting and warehousing.
It won’t be long before the Costco AI notices that warehouse space is disappearing, and a distribution scheme will be adopted, one not dependent on profits. Driverless trucks bearing gifts will be dispatched to the addresses of previous Costco customers, first to the crowded dark charnel houses of the billionaires and then to the rest of us, whose silent above-ground houses will disappear under a pyramid of cardboard boxes and plastic packaging. Glittering products will start spilling down the steep pyramid sides after a few seasons, and names on peeling address labels will serve as grave markers.
If the pyramids get high enough and bright enough in the wash of soft rain and hard ultraviolet, they might light our way to heaven.