Additional note: when foodprices rocket, that is ALMOST ALWAYS the trigger for civil unrest and revolutions. (The other is a fiscal/tax/revenue crisis, caused by government turning into rent-seeking by the rich *and* trying to fund a war simultaneously, as with the French Revolution.)
Does this look familiar to you, too?
…For the northern hemisphere, fertiliser for next year’s growing season will be needed towards the end of this year.We can expect food prices to rocket.
And in the UK, we have only a single fertiliser manufacturing plant left
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Joe Brockmeier
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •The right in the U.S. is certainly pulling all the levers it can to drive unrest and system collapse: driving inflation, higher food prices, unemployment, flat or depressed wages, and making peaceful change through voting impossible.
It's starting to look inevitable to me. Maybe it's been inevitable since Citizens United, or even before that. No doubt they think they can ensure the outcome of civil unrest to their benefit. I really hope they're wrong.
Ever notice that almost all sci-fi that imagines a utopian future for humanity has its path through a system collapse/dystopia first (e.g., Star Trek)? I don't think we can imagine incremental change that results in a better society - just rip & replace.
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Lorraine Lee
in reply to Joe Brockmeier • •The current right wing coalition includes a lot of accelerationists. Also, they seem to be betting that 2024 will have been America's last election.
Even in real history, the period of relatively shared prosperity is referred to as the postwar period, as if the war was what made it possible. Surely the New Deal can't have any of the credit.
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Charlie Stross
in reply to Lorraine Lee • • •Graydon
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Right-to-repair is a huge issue for farm equipment.
One of the reasons is not so much that the OEM prices are high is that the stocks of spares are sized based on the order rate against the high prices; you order it, they make it, and you get it many weeks later.
Combine "the software servers are down" with "the supply chain to the plant that makes spares is disrupted" with "fuel prices are too high for profitable farming according to the financial system" and food supply shrinks.
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Graydon
in reply to Graydon • • •What I think people don't get is that the farm skillset in the US is in old people (on the whole and by and large), COVID has been hard on them, and the ethnic cleansing has taken away big chunks of the skills base.
Compelled system change in a context where you've got some patrician landowners and invalidated-axioms agribusiness and not much else not going to hold together so well. Then throw in the extreme weather events, plural, the US has already had through the Midwest.
Graydon
in reply to Graydon • • •A lot of this has been driven by a desire to re-open Russia's sales channels so they can afford their war of conquest. (Dropped sanctions by the US, calls from the EU right, etc.)
We're seeing late stage Carbon Binge efforts to use military force to be the last supplier standing.
What we aren't seeing yet is the Coalition to Decarbonize; I think we're gonna, and then we're going to see military efforts to prevent any such thing.
Society insists you buy gas, even when there isn't any.
Charlie Stross
in reply to Graydon • • •Chip Butty
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •PhilSalkie
in reply to Chip Butty • • •@otfrom @graydon
The USA could have been the driving force behind world electrification, but we didn't have the political will nor the insight.
Much like VHS videotape and the transistor radio, the US invented something, looked at it, said "meh", and continued doing what we were doing. Another country (Japan before, China now) looked and said "Ooooooh, we can use that!" Japan also did a similar move with small, excellent cars when the US couldn't be bothered.
China realized there's no future in polluting with coal nor in buying oil - it's a mug's game.
They made a calculated political decision to take over the world solar market, and to be the driving force behind world electrification. (Maybe something only possible in a command economy.)
Result? Lots of money coming into China for solar panels and electric cars / bikes. Economic destruction of the petroleum car and petroleum extraction industries. The world looking to China as the provider of energy needs, instead of the US and the Middle East.
Oh, and BTW, much cleaner air and water, and maybe slowing down climate change.
WellsiteGeo
in reply to PhilSalkie • • •@PhilSalkie @otfrom @graydon
America invented electricity?
Faraday, Swan and many others would beg to differ.
Graydon
in reply to WellsiteGeo • • •@WellsiteGeo The US was well ahead in solar photo-voltaic technology in the 1970s; for what would have been his second term, Carter ran on a platform of 25% renewables by 2000.
A lot of oil money woke up and objected in ways which were most probably extra-legal in order to install Reagan. (They absolutely did know at the time that climate change would kill many, many people. That was part of Carter's stated motivation.)
@PhilSalkie @otfrom @cstross
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Charlie Stross
in reply to WellsiteGeo • • •PhilSalkie
in reply to WellsiteGeo • • •While the photoelectric effect was first recorded by Becquerel in France, the photovoltaic cell was invented in New York City in 1883. Practical silicon cells were invented at Bell Labs in New Jersey in the early 1950s.
Graydon
in reply to PhilSalkie • • •@PhilSalkie The US had both; what it didn't have was a way to stop the original October Surprise.
@otfrom @cstross
Graydon
in reply to Chip Butty • • •@otfrom It's de-facto everyone vs the US, once you realize that Russia and the US are the same entity. (Same aristocracy, same strategic goals, same issues with fading glory, same memetic capture by TESCREAL and mammonism).
From that perspective, one may recognize the UK ongoing political wrangle as being over whether the emotional comfort of identifying with the fading glory faction is worth the economic devastation.
Glen T, heated, not stirred
in reply to Chip Butty • • •@otfrom @graydon It's very much the case that China and the EU want an embedded CO2 tariff as a way of preventing the US from using older plants with a lower marginal cost of production from undercutting newer zero-CO2 plants which are still paying down their loans for the construction.
Not all zero-carbon industrial capital goods are as fortunate as electricity generation with the zero-carbon plant costing less to buy than the four-year running cost of the carbon-emitting plants. There's real pain involved in moving steel production to be zero-carbon.
When the timing is right, China and the EU will do a deal on a revised international trading system. India is a little further behind decarbonisation, but China will be looking for somewhere to sell its solar and wind goods once the Chinese market is mostly satisfied, so it wouldn't shock me if decarbonisation in India was astonishingly fast, maybe 15 years.
The Penguin of Evil
in reply to Glen T, heated, not stirred • • •Nazani
in reply to Graydon • • •The Penguin of Evil
in reply to Graydon • • •@graydon It's also old people because new people see the capture involved. A US farmer basically buys overpriced one use seed from a vendor that requires overpriced one use fertilizers and other products to grow, then they harvest it and have to take the price the tiny number of buyers will give them.
They were told this was where their behaviour was leading in the 1980s, so now there is no point being a new US farmer.
Even bailouts will just end up captured by the big corporations.
annejohn
in reply to Graydon • • •Graydon
in reply to annejohn • • •@annejohn Oh yeah. There's going to be a lot of that going on.
One of the absolutely critical things about OODA loops is to get them working on the same time scale as the problem. Only nothing structural thinks the problem is "having food to eat"; you've got a supermarket problem of maintaining margins, you've got a financial problem of minimizing risk, you've got a shipping problem that reduces to scheduling, but no systemic representation of "people need to eat every day".
davecb 🇨🇦
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Sebastian Zdrojewski
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •RootWyrm 🇺🇦
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Paul Chernoff
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •@urlyman I am not going to try to guess the price of fertilizer a year from now internationally, but Sarah Taber @sarahtaber has covered fertilizer prices right now in the US. We are not seeing an increase but the Farm Bureau is doing everything possible to get the US government to give more money to farmers.
But she is basing this on US fertilizer prices. I would love to hear what price changes are happening outside of the US.
youtube.com/watch?v=13gQAt7Ozx…
Real Crisis Or Clickbait?
Farm to Taber (YouTube)Dan McDonald
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Might be US-centric, but a REAL farmer has a reality check:
mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/11…
Sarah Taber
2026-03-15 14:03:13
SeanBurlington 🌈 🕊️
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •this article predates the USA/Israel bombing campaign by a few days
theguardian.com/food/2026/feb/…
‘Tinderbox’ UK may be one shock away from food riots, experts say
Damian Carrington (the Guardian)Nini
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Guillotine Jones, Flâneur
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •You heard it here first.
Mary Mazzocco
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •