According to the Sri Lankan news, a gang of monkeys got into the Pandura power station and somehow power tripped the whole island. I don't understand how this happens, but that's what the Ministry said. As I sit in the (relative) dark, this reminds me of what I know but forget on a daily basis. That this is all going away.

Three years ago, Sri Lanka fell into the dollar debt trap, specifically petrodollars. Unable to service old loans, we couldn't get new ones, and the ongoing fantasy that this was a functioning economy became an immediate fatality. Sri Lanka ran out of fuel oil (for electricity), natural gas (for cooking), not to mention petrol and diesel for vehicles. Rich Colombadors like myself drove up the price of bicycles and my family slept on the balcony to escape the heat.

I was living peak oil and climate collapse quite viscerally. Everything you'd consider modernity just didn't work, lights, fan, car, nevermind AC. There was no electricity for at least six hours a day, and as much as 18, at which point the whole country revolted. The government was overthrown, the IMF picked the bones, and we elected leftists as soon as we could (years later, unfortunately). Debts are suspended till 2028 which does not, unfortunately, suspend reality. Even if the dollar largely disappears by then (as I hope it does), the petroleum is also disappearing. What we face is not a financial accounting problem as much as biological accountability.

This all comes back to me as I sit in the dark because, ostensibly, “A group of monkeys who entered the Panadura Power Station had ended up in a spat, interfering with the power grids, causing an islandwide power outage, sources from the Power and Energy Ministry said.” I suppose this could describe generations of comprador politicians physically fighting in Parliament since the 80s, but that would be unfair to the monkeys.

The truth is, as much as Sri Lanka is described as an economic basket case, we're all going to hell in the same hand basket. Sri Lanka's debt to GDP ratio is better than America's, but being a poor country we can't just paper it over, as America has been doing for decades. But we all have to pay the piper some day. The collapse I experienced is all of our destiny, just deferred. As William Gibson said, the future is already here, just unevenly distributed. Planetarily, the petro is running out and, politically, the dollar is bullshit. We can pretend a little longer but look at America's own electricity generation, a better metric than its coked up GDP.

This shit is flat since 2008, when their economy actually died and became a zombie kleptocracy. America has been huffing natural gas to get high ever since, literally fracking the bottom of the barrel. But new fossil fuel reserves will just get more and more expensive until they economically run out before they're environmentally unavailable. Fossil fuels are called nonrenewable resources for a reason and renewables both require and do not replace them. You know that moment when the party's over but you're too drunk to leave? Perhaps you don't, bless your heart, but this is it.

I again know this from bitter (and deeply suppressed) experience. During the Sri Lankan collapse my household—again, being rich Colombador elites—bought expensive battery storage. We already had solar panels so our house was technically self-sufficient and renewable. Even if monkeys trip the whole grid, I can just walk downstairs and flip a switch to keep my household running. But this is just destiny deferred by money, like the whole western economy.

Technically the whole house is renewable, but this is just deferral, not an actual difference. The battery power runs out in a day and then the batteries themselves run out in maybe a decade. These things are heavy (and toxic) as hell and every ‘renewable’ component is made of nonrenewable, largely non-recyclable resources that have to be dug up and transported with fossil fuels, largely diesel. Who are we kidding? Not God, who blinks through this whole charade.

Of course, Chinese electricity growth is still growing (bless them), but they're still cursed by history. Communism failed almost everywhere but China and global communism was our last chance to plan our economies in any coherent way. Not planning is just planning to fail, as they say, and you can see the results today. Unplanned capitalist economies will just grow capital at all cost, which is great for capital, but roasts the planet by mindlessly doubling every generation, with no concept of moderate prosperity (小康社会). The capitalist economy is all gas and no brake. And so it breaks. The White Empire fucked the planet and China is in the planet so they're fucked also. China's economic miracle is again just a deferral of destiny.

There was a moment where global climate communism could have hand-braked on the way to Armageddon, but that time was two doubling cycles ago, in the 70s/80s. The time when broad neoliberalism went exactly the wrong way. Now everyone is pledging to change by 2050, ie another doubling cycle in the future. It's a charade. Whether industrial civilization is wastefully capitalist or resourcefully communist, it's still going the same way. As Li Bai from the Tang Dynasty said,

Do you not see the Yellow River come from the sky,
Rushing into the sea and ne’er come back?
Do you not see the mirrors bright in chambers high
Grieve o’er your snow-white hair though once it was silk-black?

Everything that claims existence must lose it, this is the unfortunate nature of existence. We're just a bunch of jumped up apes who dug up some higher beings that were buried for good reason and now we find ourselves in well-predicted dire straits. We cannot ‘renew’ our way out of this but we can circle the drain a little longer, which is all we're doing this century. I think of this as the power comes back on, then goes off again, then comes on by literally running the national generator (burning oil).

How long can this go on? No one actually cares as long as the lights come on now. I know this because that's all I care about, right now. Globally, we're just a bunch of monkeys having a fight at the power station before the whole thing trips the light fantastic and just doesn't work anymore. I think about this often, and forget it just as soon.