Eve Of Destruction - With 3 Big Catastrophe Possibilities

Exploring Big Risk Can Help Us Get Ready To Deal With At Least Some Of It More Effectively Than We Would Otherwise

Dec 13, 2024

3 Big Catastrophe Worries In This Moment

I keep getting the song above in my head. It’s called “Eve of Destruction,” from the movie “Bulworth.” It’s uncensored. Lyrics here.

“Eve of Destruction” seems like the moment we’re in, here, in the 38 days before the 2025 US presidential inauguration.

I haven’t written much yet about the 2024 election, how we got here, and what could happen. I did write a few bits on how we’re remodeling this nonprofit to get ready for big disruption (such as catastrophes), on countering fear, and on some tools to counter fear.

I haven’t had the stomach since the election to talk about my really huge, big worries: the potential for bigger and worse catastrophes than we might have otherwise if Trump weren’t president.

This post will loosely address three major catastrophe possibilities — all of which could also happen simultaneously:

Catastrophes that directly relate to or are a result of the Trump/Vance administration being in power, or disastrous situations made exponentially worse due to the administration’s actions;
A possible bird flu pandemic while Trump is in office; or
That climate change will get exponentially worsen while Trump or Vance are in power, & possibly be exacerbated by their actions/inaction.

I’ve been worried about this moment since March of 2016; these kinds of possibilities.

Once I figured out how serious the Trump threat was, I essentially rearranged my life to try to a) prevent it, and to b) be ready with an approach to help navigate related widespread catastrophe, if it ever came to that.

And… now we may well be on the eve of, well, widespread catastrophe. The eve of destruction, and all that. It’s certainly a possibility.

I should note: while I’m fixing to talk destruction, disruption, catastrophe, pandemic, and so on… I will never be a person who gives up on this democracy or what it can become. I will never write it off. I will never stop fighting for the dream of it; for the millions who came before us and for the millions who will come after. This site is not a place of resignation. This site is a place of honest risk analysis as a tool. We will better navigate risk if we are able to look at it and figure out what we can do about it — together.

So first, here’s where my worried started.

The story starts in 2015.

A Demagogue In The House

My life changed once I understood that Trump was a demagogue.

I first heard the accusation that he was a demagogue in the last week of January in 2016… just before the Iowa Caucus on February 1 that year. At first, I didn’t really understand what the word meant.

I’d only been back in Iowa for a few months after being in the Washington, DC area for 11 years. I’d been hoping to leave politics and big government behind.

Yet in the lead-up to the 2016 Iowa Caucus, I was already on alert. Friends of mine still working in the US Intelligence Community (IC) had let me know in the fall of 2015 that white supremacist groups and pro-civil-war fans including the Boogaloo Boys were making very clear their support for Trump. At the time, Trump was very much not disavowing or condemning them.

My IC connections were very concerned about these hate-group associations, their public support for Trump, and what it could all mean. My connections noticed in 2016 (I did as well) that the US mainstream media would not touch these hate-group associations with a 10-foot cattle prod — but then the US mainstream media wouldn’t touch the Russian election interference and related likely Trump-Russian election interference collusion in 2016, either.

In fact, the US mainstream media did not get around to some very barebones acknowledgment of the heavy support for Trump from hate groups until the summer of 2020; when these groups started showing up in complicated ways at protests around the US after George Floyd was killed by police in Minnesota. The hate groups were trying to divert attention and focus at these events in various ways. Only then did the mainstream finally seem to acknowledge their existence and their support for Trump; but likely only because some in the media could not ignore the men who kept showing up in certain news videos in Hawaiian shirts (Boogaloo Boys).

Not long after that, Trump seemed to go all-in anyway with these groups.

In September of 2020 during a presidential debate with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, Trump was asked if he would condemn the Proud Boys; another recognized hate group. Trump’s famous response then was to say that that group should “Stand back and stand by.” Now that Trump’s going back into office, we can expect that these groups will play a larger role in his demagoguery.

But I digress.

I was telling the story of how I was already alarmed about Trump by late January of 2016, when I heard people close with one of the three Democratic presidential candidates whispering about the spectre of Trump.

“He’s a demagogue,” the person whispered in hushed, alarmed tones. It was uttered with absolute somberness, sobriety, and concern. At the time, I knew about the support for Trump from hate groups, and I knew enough about domestic security and risk analysis to already be concerned. But I wasn’t as up-to-speed on what a demagogue can do.

Yikes.

Well so here we are… almost nine years later.

A demagogue can do a lot.

The Potential For Catastrophes

Back in January, 2016 I didn’t understand why people were whispering about the threat of a demagogue, so I dug into it.

I learned about tyranny, autocracy, authoritarianism, and so on.

By that March, I had put more of the pieces together after some deep dives. On March 1, 2016, Vox put out a piece called “The Rise of American Authoritarianism,” which explained a lot and still does. There is now in 2024 an extensive body of work on the subject from all kinds of scholars, historians, and even pundits. We’ve come a long way… but not far enough to push back the spectre. Not far enough.

It was in March of 2016 when I realized that Donald Trump could cause catastrophe and/or disruptions worldwide if he were to get into power and also understand how to manipulate the US government.

We found out when Trump was in power from 2017 to 2021 that he did not, in fact, know how to effectively manipulate government.

Then.

Now coming soon in 2025: we’ve got front-row seats to what could be some of the greatest catastrophes of modern history. It would be great if that didn’t happen, but the risk landscape is not setting up well to the contrary.

This time around… Trump’s got a more organized team, they are ready to go, and they have a corresponding plan (Project 2025) to weaken, reorganize, or dismantle huge pieces of the federal government. None of those things will help to serve the population to make things less bad in the case of a disaster or catastrophe — or to mitigate disaster risk before-hand.

Plus… at least some on Trump’s team are seeking to cause disruption, unrest, chaos, or disaster.

At least some of Trump’s team do want destruction or catastrophe in various forms; partly due to the belief that additional power, assets, and resources could be further seized or consolidated during a period of instability.

Some on Trump’s team are straight-up nihilists; going for destruction really for the sake of it.

The Trump/Vance team could also include accelerationists; especially given the affinity of hate groups and white supremacists for Trump and Vance. See more on the accelerationist threat in this post on how guards and gates aren’t enough to protect the US power grid, and the energy grid recap section of this post. Accelerationists essentially want to take down the US power grid to seize power and institute a white supremacist or similar social order dominated by those with physical strength and/or firepower. It could be more of a remote threat except that Trump and Vance associate with white supremacists types, Trump is not known for heavily vetting his associates, and most Trump/Vance team people will not face FBI scrutiny for involvement in the new administration.

Non-intentional but related catastrophes are also possible; such as those that may be a result or connected to the Trump/Vance administration being in power. These situations could related to US aggression under the Trump administration, attacks on the US due to perceived US vulnerabilities during the Trump presidency, terrorism, cyber attacks, civil unrest/conflict, or more/bigger wars.

Disastrous situations could also be made exponentially worse due to the administration’s actions or lack of actions. The prior Trump administration’s track record for effectively and appropriately handling disasters and/or catastrophes was not spectacular — and that’s aside from the Covid-19 response. All that being said, Project 2025 plans would significantly erode, block, or hinder any kind of appropriate domestic disaster/catastrophe response in the US. Impacts would depend on how far along the Project 2025 efforts would be when a disaster or catastrophe would strike; but the results would likely be very damaging for the American people.

All of that is general increased catastrophe occurrence or increased catastrophe severity during another Trump administration.

Now, to a potential pandemic.

Bird Flu

On top of the catastrophe risks noted above from the Trump’s gigantic alliance of nihilistic, pro-dictator, pro-Russian, pro-oligarchy, etc. people coming into power… we’re also set up pretty well worldwide for a bird flu (H5N1, or HPAI for highly pathogenic avian influenza) outbreak or pandemic.

While HPAI isn’t yet spreading human-to-human (which could cause an outbreak or a much larger pandemic when it does)… it’s pretty well established in wild birds worldwide, it’s pretty deadly to mammals, and it’s been shown to have spread between groups of like mammals. Of note, humans are mammals.

FYI, the WHO might have the most official website for information, but Wikipedia has easier-to-access and more current big picture bird flu info.

It goes without saying that if we have a high-mortality-rate pandemic when Trump is president, we’re in Big Trouble. Like big big big.

I am not being a smartass, or being cutesy.

Americans would be in big trouble in a bird flu pandemic no matter who would be president partly because of the damage from Trump’s culture war attacks on public health in the US. But it’s not just Americans. If bird flu went pandemic for all humans, it would be Very Big Trouble for all humans. We’d be in big trouble in a bird flu pandemic anyway — no matter who is president.

That being said, if the Trump/Vance Team is in office if we have a bird flu pandemic, they are likely to severely exacerbate that pandemic in a range of ways. I’m not even going to list all the potential ways it could be exacerbated; it won’t do any good at this point. It would be a very, very long list.

For perspective, consider that Covid-19 was like a little baby starter-pandemic.

The Covid-19 case fatality rate is/was extremely low. Johns Hopkins University of Medicine reports the Covid-19 case-fatality-rate (CFR) worldwide to range generally between .1% and 5%, with a few exceptions.

Even with that very low rate, the US experienced hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 deaths under Trump. The damage continues to this day as we’re doing very little to stop the spread of the virus, as people have stopped wearing masks, as vaccine usage has dropped, and so on.

But bird flu.

Oh my.

Alarmingly, the WHO reports that of known H5N1 cases, “Globally, from 1 January 2003 to 27 September 2024, 904 cases of human infection with avian influenza A(H5N1) virus were reported from 24 countries. Of these 904 cases, 464 were fatal (CFR of 51%).”

The actual H5N1 mortality rate is anticipated to be lower than 51% because we have not tested every human for bird flu, so we don’t know what the survival rate is of people who have mild or no symptoms.

Still.

That case fatality rate is bad.

It’s just unimaginable.

We would have a hard time with a bird flu pandemic under any administration, but a Trump/Vance administration implementing Project 2025 plans and continuing anti-public-health behaviour would be so much worse.

But that’s not all.

Critical Infrastructure & Bird Flu

One of the reasons such a deadly pandemic would be so deeply troublesome even in a more normal US governmental administration is because of the impacts to infrastructure.

I started working in the Office for Infrastructure Protection (OIP) in the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on November 1, 2005 (of note, OIP is now under DHS CISA).

That was immediately after Hurricane Katrina, and during a small H5N1 outbreak that lasted from 2003-2005.

Because of the pandemic risk related to the H5N1 outbreak, we were working on pandemic planning for critical infrastructure in the US. That and a whole lot of other pandemic planning work done across the federal government over years eventually became the “Biological Incident Annex (BIA) to the Response and Recovery Federal Interagency Operational Plan (FIOP)”, currently posted on FEMA’s FIOP page but probably not for long after January. Download yours now! This pandemic plan was one of the many critical things ignored or actively blocked during Covid-19 during the first Trump administration.

Back to winter 2005.

Our DHS infrastructure office did a tabletop exercise (TTX) for bird flu and US infrastructure… using a case-fatality-rate of around 30%.

All of those things are important because:

It turns out that you can’t run critical infrastructure with well more than 30% of your workforce not working because they are either quarantining due to possible exposure, because they are quarantining due to showing symptoms, because they are hospitalized, or because they are dead.

It’s called critical infrastructure because society needs it.

We ran that exercise with essentially a 30% case fatality rate, but with a higher percentage of people exposed and/or infected. I don’t remember the percentage that we used in the exercise of people with either possible exposure and/or showing symptoms.

In that 2005 bird-flu-and-infrastructure exercise, something like one-half to two-thirds out of infrastructure operation employees were out of service either temporarily or permanently. Hypothetically, of course, because it was an exercicse.

Yet if/when that actually happens, the infrastructure stops.

Also by the way, you need just as many if not more employees to restart certain types of infrastructure; assuming that’s an option at some point.

Critical Infrastructure & Society

So what are we talking about? What is critical infrastructure?

DHS currently groups critical infrastructure into 16 sectors; many with sub-sectors. They include:

Chemical Sector
Commercial Facilities Sector
Communications Sector
Critical Manufacturing Sector
Dams Sector
Defense Industrial Base Sector
Emergency Services Sector
Energy Sector
Financial Services Sector
Food and Agriculture Sector
Government Services & Facilities Sector
Healthcare & Public Health Sector
Information Technology Sector
Nuclear Reactors, Materials, & Waste Sector
Transportation Systems Sector
Water & Wastewater Systems

Infrastructure Restoration?

A well-functioning government that was taking the threat of bird flu seriously might be thinking at scale how to fund and train like a whole lot of the people in the society to run the infrastructure in case of a bird flu pandemic… or other catastrophe, as far as that goes.

And that right there is something those of us not in government should be thinking and talking about. We’ll be doing more of that here at this nonprofit for sure.

Lots of folks seem to just be expecting society to fall apart in the case of bird flu or climate emergency stuff… but what if we retool and retrain like a whole lot of people so we can hold parts of infrastructure and society together if some of this stuff comes to pass? It’s worth further exploration.

Intensifying Climate Catastrophe Potential

This post is already terrifying enough without a huge big exploration into climate crisis stuff so this section will not do a huge deep dive. Also, there are thousands of climate change analyses already on the interwebs if you want heavy analysis and details.

So here are some basics.

Disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change, and due to an increasing world population living heavily in high-hazard and high-risk zones.

Climate change catastrophes will include traditional-looking natural disasters as well as other unprecedented disaster phenomena; new or worsening disease spread; pandemics; mass migration; increases in violence; and fights/wars for territory, limited resources, infrastructure, water, & food.

Climate change impacts/effects are intensifying in many ways faster and more unpredictably than anyone can forecast, because complex systems include feedback loops, interdependencies, and cascading effects that are hard to predict or track.

Catastrophes or other spectacular and wide-ranging impacts from climate change are absolutely likely during the new Trump administration.

Due to all the factors discussed in this post, such impacts and effects could well be amplified or worsened exponentially; depending on the incident itself and on the response, lack or response, obstruction to the response, or sweeping changes to government and government capabilities when climate impacts occur.

This factor is likely to impact entire communities and regions of the US; particularly in hotter or near-sea-level areas, on islands, and of course across much of the south.

There’s so much more to all of this, but I promised that the climate section would not be an exhaustive analysis.

The thing is, though… even if we manage to not get a human bird flu pandemic anytime soon, we are absolutely going to have to deal with climate crisis stuff more and more every day and in all the places; some places more than others.

The Trump/Vance administration is likely to be in place for at least some of this climate stuff. It’s obviously not likely to go well; for an array of reasons.

Infrastructure impacts would be different for the climate crisis than for bird flu, but they are still likely to be a big deal and to be widely impactful.

Once again, dealing with some stuff like critical infrastructure in our communities and regions ahead of time and/or collectively would be wise. Even if government at the top in the US is not helpful for prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response, or recovery… there are things we can do. We have other government structures, and we do have a complex society.

We can work together as communities to take on some of this stuff, but again — that’s going to be material for other posts and for conversations together with some of you. Subscribe to keep up on this, if you aren’t already:

So What Do We Do?

There are things we can do. This nonprofit will be doing more to answer that question — and to help people, groups, and communities get ready for some of these really spectacular catastrophe risks.

There’s a ton of stuff we can do to build resilience, to grow the connection and community we’ll need, and to think through strategies that can help. The work at Shift the Country is set up for exactly those things, and for fostering civic engagement and public pressure to help, too. Subscribe here to keep up.

Invite us to speak to your group, or set up a conversation to explore options. Email team@shiftthecountry.com or text/call (202) 556-0317.

This stuff sounds unreal but it’s not actually imaginary — unfortunately.

As this post’s subtitle says, “Exploring big risk can help us get ready to deal with at least some [risk] more effectively than we would otherwise.” We will do more of that here.

Next Week — 2 Events

Speaking of which… there are two events next week related to all of this.

The first event is Thursday, December 19 mid-day, when the Electric Infrastructure Security Council (EIS Council) holds an online “EARTH EX” exercise that anyone can observe (Shift the Country is not associated with the EIS Council).

The EARTH EX registration page says, “Join our panel of experts from Emergency Management, Communications, and the Electric Sector as they tackle the challenging scenario of a strong CME [coronal mass ejection] impact causing multi-continental disruptions to critical infrastructure combined with an opportunistic worldwide cyber-attack.”

Sounds just as wicked bad catastrophe-wise as the stuff we’ve discussed on this post, but different. Of note, the EIS Council may be the only group I’m aware of in the world doing actual work on “the fragility of modern civilization’s interdependent infrastructures” through work they’re calling the “Human Continuity Project.” So that’s cool.

Which relates to the second possible event next week. I’d like to do an online Shift the Country forum as a summary/discussion/follow-up on the EIS Council’s EarthEx event noted just above. If you’re interested, let me know that you are and what times would work for you next Thursday/Friday. I’m leaning toward an event Thursday evening around 8 pm Central, so we’ll see if people are interested.

Again, email team@shiftthecountry.com or text to (202) 556-0317. Once we set up a Shift the Country event next Thursday, I’ll send out details via this Substack — so subscribe if you’re not already to stay posted.

Wrap Up

Our recent posts here at Shift the Country have been pretty big-disruption-oriented. That’s because the entire risk landscape in the US has shifted since the election. As this post says, this nonprofit was set up to help us avoid this moment if at all possible… but Shift the Country is also structured to pivot and to help navigate big disruption now that the US is on the cusp of it.

We’ll have a better chance at navigating and surviving certain things if we walk through possibilities, explore options, make plans, grow alliances, get resilient, have strong communities, and so on to help us deal with whatever is coming.

Much more to come here on options for navigating all of this. Shift the Country is here to help you and your people figure this stuff out.

Join us. Reach out. Invite us to talk. Subscribe to keep up on what we’re doing. Whatever works.

Keep the faith. Humans are incredibly resilient.

Forward.

Fierce Community

Discussion about this post