Where are we headed for in 2025?

With 2024 coming to an end, we start looking at what 2025 will bring.

For the first time, I am not automatically filled with excitement and hope for the new year. So many things have gone wrong lately that I can’t help myself but to think that we are in fact heading to even darker days.

FYI – This isn’t my usual kind of piece, more of a rant that has nothing to do with grooming.

Inflation and the overall cost of living has reached new heights with no real signs or returning to what we once knew.

The job market is in total chaos.  No one wants to do service or retails jobs because of the measly wages, as well as the growing exposure to violence caused by theft and robbery that are going through a revival.

IT jobs are disappearing with countless layoffs in the last 2 years (2023: 191000, 2024: 149000). This can’t be all be AI…?

Just the simple reality of running a small business is nearly unsustainable now-a-days. The recent Canada Post strike was very likely the final nail for many – but we will only get the numbers on that later in 2025.

Then there is the literal insanity of government policies and spending.  The word on the street is that Canada is now in the worst debt situation it has ever been in.  We are spending more on the interest of this debt than anything else.  Clearly, we will be squeezed with even more taxes to pay for that and get less and less services like: education, health care, roads…

And as we are trying to hold on, war is raging in eastern Europe and the middle-east.  The loss of life, resources and money is completely absurd.  Let’s not talk about the fact that both Russia and Israel possess nuclear weapons.  When push comes to shoves, would they do the unthinkable?  If anything, more and more nations are being pulled into this territorial expansion frenzy. It’s like 1939 with a hint of 1985.

If we were to consider how much CO2 and other pollutant are being released in the atmosphere for each arms or petrol depot that is destroyed how would that compare in numbers of cars on the road?  Over the last 3-4 weeks Israel bombed every military base and arms depot in Syria.  The same is going in the Ukraine-Russia conflict.  Basically, an insane amount of resources and money is being swallowed whole on a day-to-day basis.

Let’s not forget that these conflicts are also causing a general panic and the need to re-arm to be ready for when the enemy comes for us.  This is certainly good for the owners of weapons manufactures.

And while people in the west are trying to figure out which pronoun to use, China is growing and taking over.  One could even argue that China is going to be the same position America found itself in after WWII. But that is a whole post of its own.

Another colossal elephant in the room is the massive population displacement the planet has suffered over the last decade.  This has brought on enormous challenges for integration and space/housing to name but the obvious ones.  In the second half of 2024, the stresses of these new realities have started to crack the established order of our society. The result is social chaos.

The compounded problems have lead to the collapse of governments.  France, Germany and Canada are all experiencing this.  The failure of the Biden administration in the US has resulted in the re-election of Donald Trump.

What about the electric car revolution?  Up front this sounded like a well intended and possibly logical transition.  But if you factor the raw material necessary for lithium batteries, how it is extracted, the life span of the resulting batteries and how or if they can even be disposed of them afterwards, it doesn’t sound like a very good idea at all.  I am fully aware that extracting oil/petrol is no better.  But at least there isn’t the false premise that it is safer or healthier, etc…

My point on this, is that the electric revolution has turned out to be nothing more than a card shuffle.  We are just displacing where the pollution happens. The reasoning is the simplistic calculation that if the electric car driving on the road doesn’t pollute, it is a zero emission win.  In Canada and in Quebec in particular we are spoiled because we were able to develop massive hydro-electric plans in the late 1960’s. But for most of the world, electricity is produced by burning: gas, charcoal and petrol. So if those electricity plants now have to produce more power for cars… the pollution is just a being centralized most likely to the break point.  California is an interesting example of this, pushing for the electric car, but the electric grid barely being able to handle the regular demands for electricity.

And we aren’t even talking about nuclear power and the so-called clean solution like solar panels and wind mills which have their own set of risks and issues.

If we hadn’t been scammed in the early 1900’s to go gasoline (Internal Combustion – Edwin Black), we would have been driving electric cars for the last 100 years and would now be on the cusp of the hydrogen revolution.  Or maybe even something better.

The thing about power, is that we aren’t looking for an actual solution.  Everything remains tied to financial gain and greed.  It isn’t about pollution or safety.  It’s about control. The fundamental problem is us.  We are supposedly at the top of the evolutionary scale, but we are the most dangerous thing on and for the planet.

In the words of Moby: Everything is wrong.

It’s going to be 2025 by tomorrow and I am not clear on how we are going to get out of this mess, let alone where we are heading.

But enough of this, I am putting my head in the snow and wishing every one a happy new year, good shaves and great hair days.