Why Economic Collapse was needed
Despite all the good work pushed forward by Mock Cop to curb Greenhouse gas emissions, the production of consumer goods was still a big issue, and was also the most significant factor preventing further progress in this first year of implementation of the Gaia Roadmap. New standards had addressed the insidious issue of planned obsolescence and had driven prices up. Products would not break down so much, and had to be fully recyclable, that was also increasing costs and affecting consumption negatively.
But those factors had not been anywhere near enough to turn the beast around. There had been increasing resistance to the need to reduce production and to rationalize the range of goods available. That ship was not going down that quietly, and increasingly so. A few months on from the launch of the roadmap, it seemed the Davos Boys were starting to prepare for their comeback. Advertising, muted for a while to help the Gaia agenda, was now pushing more and more for consumption and resurrecting in people something they had almost forgotten, that the very essence of who you were had to be intimately tied to your possessions. The great “Show me what you buy and I’ll tell you who you are” scheme was making a comeback. One explanation was that some of the Davos Boys were losing their nerve, they were starting to override the Davos amendments, they were regaining manual control, and damn the consequences!
Until the end of 2025, even the aviation industry was still very much alive despite virtually no more passengers traveling. Fresh lobster tails still had to be flown to the elite, who were happy to pay for the premiums associated with chartering a Boeing 747 to bring a tin of fresh caviar to your doorstep, wherever you had chosen to be on that day.
The record for the most Greenhouse Gas equivalent for any product had strangely been reached in that supposed period of fast de-growth when Randy Drongo had ordered some fresh saffron for his lunchtime paella in the Caribbean, which contributed exactly an extra 0.001 W of RCP for the whole planet on the 18th of July 2025. His wife had insisted the 20 saffron strands come from a reputable sustainable Tasmanian supplier with whom she was friends on social media, and who was only too happy to hand-deliver the goods via the private jet that was waiting at the local airport. Further such lucrative business would surely come from the photo- op in the Bahamas and would push the supplier’s eco-friendly image even further when pushed by such a great eco-warrior as Randy’s wife. Calculated on a per-gram basis, those few strands of saffron had needed the equivalent of one small 50,000 ton tanker of crude oil burned to the atmosphere before they could reach the chef on the beach. Another conversion calculated the cost to the human world as a future agricultural productivity decrease of 0.3%, and an extra 6 animal and plant species would also go extinct within the next 50 years or so thanks to that otherwise very tasty paella.
Targeted government subsidies were now propping up internet stores via aid vouchers aimed at the unemployed and cash- strapped masses, which nevertheless absolutely needed to be maintained as consumers to at least keep the machinery ticking over in preparation for the great rebound. The recipients of that generous aid would probably not be able to buy too many carrots at their local greengrocer, but they did qualify for a free TV upgrade{2} in these difficult times that would see them seeking comfort from their hunger in front of a Games of Thrones episode relished in 12K Full DHD 150 inch screen, the magnificent piece of hardware having been flown directly from the store depot to their door within 48 hours.
On government expenditure levels, there were also a large number of planned new thermal power plants in the construction pipeline for 2026, which would help in the planned rebound induced by the first upswing of the Davos Revolution, the construction of those alone would extinguish within a year all the headway in emissions reductions that had been made in the 5 years to date following the adoption of the Mock Cop recommendations. Once operational a year later, they would indeed make a mockery of any attempt to avoid cooking the planet altogether.
Overall, the message to push for lower consumption, in line with the recommendations of the Gaia Roadmap, did not reflect what was now happening behind the scenes. The message to stop consuming was still being strongly pushed by the governments, but the Davos-backed now universal and generous incentives to spend more were inducing an enormous amount of dissonance. The two worlds were starting to clash.
To revert to a more vegetarian diet, one of the mainstays of the fight towards lower emissions was a message now muddled by the relentless advertising for new technology that would capture methane from cow burps and use that renewable energy to power entire cities. How would you power those cities if you didn’t have cows? Surely that was a valid point! And PETA activist would probably want to free those cows, bring them out of those exploitative methane production factories, get them out into the fresh air where their methane releases would cause much worse issues for the planet, surely that’s indeed what those reckless tree- hugging activists were already planning to do? That’s what people would understand from the very unsubtle innuendo embedded in the very good pieces of investigative journalism that were now beginning to roll out of every reputable news outlet in the world!
Calls to end plastics were answered by the same government- sponsored investigative journalists exploring the possibilities offered by the vast array of new photo-degradable, oxy-degradable or even photo-oxy-biodegradable plastics that would magically solve all problems. Surely, even if they were still plastic polymers, those thousands of tons pouring into the oceans in small enough fragments could not possibly cause any harm? And if those plastic polymers were made from sugar cane rather than from petroleum, what could go wrong, it’s all natural, right? Biodegradability seemed to be a bit overrated anyway, surely in time with that now abundant food source floating everywhere in the seven seas there would be natural processes that would emerge and take over? And wasn’t it time that those very notions of biodegradability be reviewed, shouldn’t we introduce a new timeframe for nature to do its work peacefully rather than imposing our own anthropocentric vision of biodegradability? Who were we to deny those future bacteria the right to evolve into the future eco-saviors, even if it meant waiting a few paltry decades or even centuries? Wasn’t there already a push to have those biodegradability definitions amended at a ministerial level, which had to be an indication that something was wrong with those previous definitions?
A group of industrialists had also become very vocal and were pushing their point about having to invest massively into battery development for power storage. Laws pushing for greater ESOEI (Energy Stored Over Energy Invested) were being resisted in a number of appeals financed by the deep pockets of some concerned Davos Boys. Increasingly, it was looking like even lead- acid batteries with an ESOEI of less than 5, not to mention disposal issues at the end of their useful lives, might now be safe. In another indication that the rich boys were getting nervous, the active eyes of the SSB had uncovered a wholly fictitious and very James Bond- looking character named Bernard Garron, computer generated as the fake CEO of a deep sea vent tapping company better later remembered in history by the name of Deep Greed. The dissonance generated by the strong greenwashing effort fine tuned to the very name of the company, was causing damages in the collective psyche and was part of a carefully orchestrated mental manipulation campaign aimed at muddling any attempt at critical thinking.
Regarding the issue of overpopulation and of the world running out of food, a few affable looking professors were starting to appear not just on mainstream media, but also on an increasing number of alternative channels. Those familiar faces from a very close but almost forgotten past were now again giving reassuring speeches, explaining the whole population issue had been overblown, that there was no problem at all feeding 10 billion people indefinitely as long as we were a bit more reasonable with our meat consumption and careful with portion size. A nice hearty vegetable soup in the evening and a smaller serve of meat 3 to 4 times a week, that’s all that would be required to solve the world’s feeding woes, so there was no need to panic on population, that was just another