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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

Monthly Archives: September 2012

The Technomass of Industrial Civilization Vs the Biomass of the Living Planet

30 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Pollution

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Alf Hornborg, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Machine Fetishism, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Poverty, Resource Wars, War on Terror

Here is the interview with Alf Hornborg along with a couple of essays of his. To understand our predicament, you must understand that the flow of energy, fossil fuels, humans have tapped into for running our economy, machinery, and energy-intensive mode of living has some serious environmental drawbacks, namely climate change and ocean acidification, which will certainly lead to our own destruction with the business-as-usual path we are so determined to follow. Some of the other consequences of basing our way of life so heavily upon fossil fuels are resource wars, support of brutal dictatorships in resource-cursed countries, hypocritical foreign policies based on resource control rather than the publicly professed mantra of human rights and democracy, the fomentation of resentment and terrorism towards the West, etc. So if you couple fossil fuels with capitalism, then you have a truly planet-destroying system. Capitalism is coerced competition for finite wages and resources, pitting person against person, company against company, and nation against nation. What the State calls Terrorism is really defined as those who have grievances with the plunder of their homeland’s resources to support the unsustainable lifestyles of OECD countries. If China continues to follow the same arc of resource consumption as America, the ‘War on Terror’ will be theirs as well. My favorite quote from Horborg:

Is the war on terrorism and climate debate two sides of the same coin? Imports of cheap oil are just as crucial as exports of carbon dioxide for a high-energy future. Both are confined to the parts of the world that have amassed the most purchasing power.

Alf Hornborg on How We Have Been Mystified by Technology …

14 July 2011, 12:54 PM
Alf Hornborg on How We Have Been Mystified by Technology
by Adam Robbert & JP Hayes
Alf Hornborg, professor in the department of Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden has long been untangling the tightly fused networks that merge the material dimensions of the environment with the cultural processes of society. “Machine Fetishism” Hornborg’s term for the way in which we have been mystified by technology highlights the links between technology and asymmetries in global exchange and uncovers the relationship between ecology and power. As technological devices multiply exponentially in a vain attempt to make our lives “efficient,” “luxurious” and “productive,” Hornborg, restless in his critique of technocapitalism, reminds us that on planet earth everything is a zero-sum game – one person’s gain is always another’s loss. Last January we caught up with Professor Hornborg to see where his latest thinking on machines, money and climate change stand and how we, as the concerned and informed, can intervene to make a difference.

Q: You have suggested that the difficulties in understanding the relationship between the environment, the economy and technology arise partly out of the separation between the social and natural sciences within the university. Bringing the natural and social sciences together implies entangling material dimensions of the environment with the cultural processes of society. How has this split mystified our understanding of the relationships between ecology and economics, and how is this affecting our ability to respond to major events such as the mass extinction of species, climate change and global inequality?

It is becoming increasingly obvious that material processes in the biosphere are very much intertwined with cultural aspects such as our ways of thinking and our consumption patterns. The most obvious example is perhaps climate change, which we know is largely driven by our patterns of consumption. If ecologists look at the biosphere as if there were no human societies in it, and economists look at societies as if they didn’t depend on the biosphere, none of them will know how to handle things like climate change. As long as economists continue to think that the only relevant metric for measuring global trade is money, they will not see the asymmetric net transfers of real resources such as energy and matter that make technological expansion possible within some areas of the world.

Q: Your analysis of technology as a globally situated event that requires the establishment of multiple asymmetric economic linkages to be in place raises questions about the role of technology in current ecological problems. If technology, and in particular machine technology, requires inequalities in the terms of global trade, how are we to assess the appropriate use and level of technology employed in solving ecological problems?

I don’t think modern technology will be of much use in solving ecological problems, because modern technology is basically a way of shuffling around resources and problems between different social groups. For example, by shifting to ethanol European car drivers may think they are becoming sustainable, but Brazilians engaged in growing sugar cane may be growing less sustainable as a result. Solving ecological problems should not be about finding new technological solutions, which generally means shifting the problems onto someone else, but about developing new economies and lifestyles which reduce environmental degradation.

Q: You advocate a “zero-sum” approach to your analysis of the relationship between ecology and economics, with technology acting as a kind of basin within which material exchanges of the biosphere and economic or political policies churn. In this way, what you call “machine fetishism” produces the image of a machine that exists without its connections to culture, power and ecology. Could you elaborate on how the illusion of machine technology came to take hold and what relevance unmasking machine power for what is –a globally situated object- has for encouraging a more politically just and environmentally sound society?

Our faith in technology emerged most markedly in the early nineteenth century, as colonial Britain was accumulating resources from all over the world and investing its economic surpluses in new machinery. To British economists of the time, it seemed as if ecological (land) constraints had been overcome once and for all, and the magic wands of labor and capital would suffice for economic progress to continue. That is exactly the time when modern economic ideology was born. What these Europeans could not grasp was that their capital was built on the exploitation of land and labor elsewhere in the world. In other words, the factors of production were NOT substitutable in an absolute sense. We are all ultimately dependent on land.

Q: Following David Harvey’s analysis of money, you have suggested that money is a social institution that generates “space-time” in such a way that is both an “objective, political ecological framework” and a “subjective experience.” In other words, money becomes the medium by which society, technology and even the whole biosphere are transformed within a particular set of cultural ideas. Given the latest financial crises, what do you foresee the role of currency to be in the transformation of the relationship between ecology and economics?

The financial crises illustrate the risks a society takes when it permits monetary assets and real, biophysical resources to become so thoroughly dissociated from each other. Our current problems with overconsumption would not have been possible if money had not become so completely disconnected from material resources. I am not saying that the gold standard that we abandoned in the seventies was a solution, but at least it limited the possibilities of printing ever more money to keep the treadmill of consumption (and production) spinning at a pace that satisfies the corporate demand for profits. But the real problem with money is not that it is fictitious, as all money must be, but that it embodies the idea that everything can be exchanged for everything else. What we need is an economy with at least two incommensurable currencies, to distinguish between values that should not be interchangeable, such as local subsistence and survival versus globalized entertainment.

Q: In your analysis of the industrial revolution you suggest that the “technomass” of industrial civilization is now competing with the “biomass” for living space on planet earth. How are we to approach the reality that we are already thoroughly enmeshed within a technosphere that now seems to require our continued maintenance (so as not to leak the wrong toxic substances into the wrong environments) and the fact the we need to be equally attentive to the livelihood of the biosphere which we depend upon for life?

The sooner we stop prioritizing the metabolic needs of our “technomass”, at the expense of human and other biomass, the better. Our technological fixes are no less absurd than the fetishism that brought earlier civilizations to collapse, whether through overinvestment in armies (Rome), temples (Maya), or megalithic statues (Easter Island).

Q: Given that you believe that an integration of the social and natural sciences would lead to better policy strategies, could you comment on the differences or similarities between these two spheres? Do the cultural, political and economic relations that social scientists study differ in nature from the ecological and material systems that a natural scientist study? Their conjunction seems necessary, and yet problems of integration seem numerous. What is our way forward here?

Yes, the social and natural sciences study different kinds of phenomena and need to respect the limitations of either approach. Societies have always implicated questions of power, unequal distribution, and collective processes of meaning-creation and ideology. Ecosystems can be studied and understood without insights about any of these things. On the other hand, as economists and others illustrate, social systems can be studied (if not understood) without any regard to the flows of matter and energy that preoccupy the ecologists. To understand the interface between social and ecological systems we need to understand POWER as partly material, partly symbolic. Social power is based on unequal access to material resources, but also on the ideological mystification of such inequalities.

Q: Uncertainties of measurement and misleading methodological approaches characterize current economic attempts to manage the world system. Such a measurement/theory mismatch creates uncertainty and error in understanding what is occurring in the present state of economic-ecological affairs. As a result of these poor methodologies, modern bureaucracies have created a routine of socioeconomic functioning that is notable for its lack of applicability to social & environmental reality. How can we characterize and develop change that ensures the development of a truly sustainable world system? How can we, as academics, activists, and concerned citizens, best intervene, as you say, “in the destructive logic of our current economic system?”

First of all by recognizing the dilemma as I have outlined it in my earlier responses. Second by using their political agency (ultimately as voters in democratic political systems) to choose representatives who are prepared to reorganize the economy for the long-term good of all people and ecosystems, rather than for the short-term benefits of corporate interests.

Q: Could you comment on the role of emergent popular discourses on the environment such as “green capitalism,” “sustainable development” and “ecological economics?” Though each is different in character and always subject to a variety of uses, do you think that these movements, in general, are adequate to the tasks they set out to solve?

I don’t believe in “green capitalism” or “sustainable development” the way they are currently conceived, as both are oxymorons. “Ecological economics” is a very important arena for discussion, but will lead to real changes in our thinking only if it is able to radically transcend the assumptions of conventional economics.

Q: What, in your opinion, are the most effective modes available with which to express a need for change within the current political and economic regimes? If traditional models of education, politics and economic theories are not serving the urgency of the crises at hand, what action do you advise concerned peoples to take?

The best we can do is to develop awareness of our global predicament and resort to it as opportunities for real change appear, not least as we confront crises of various kinds in the future. Crises, whether financial, environmental, or other (or a combination of them), can offer possibilities of change, and it is important for society not to be confused by such events, but to understand what is happening and be prepared to safeguard the health and security of citizens.

Q: If you are correct in asserting that “mainstream” thinking about the environment is fundamentally flawed and will not lead to positive change (as advocated by the sustainable development movement, for example) where do we start? Must we begin from scratch so as to completely re-interpret the ingredients and causes of our crises, or do we in fact have something like a base or foothold from which we can begin a renewed attempt to make a difference in the world? Who are the primary thinkers involved that provide us with tools that the 21st century can believe in?

The Internet has provided humanity with a unique chance to globally communicate about crises and how to handle them. I will not mention any specific thinkers, only note that the social and natural sciences both have rich traditions of thought that attempt to show how social power and inequalities are interconnected with natural circumstances such as land constraints, soil fertility, and thermodynamics. We need more current researchers working on how these different kinds of knowledge can be stitched together. Unfortunately, a very small minority of researchers is dedicated to such challenges.

click to enlarge…

“The last sigh of the fossil-fueled global economy” (translated)

Published January 6, 2010 – 10:00
Updated January 7, 2010 – 09:31

What will future historians say about the early 2,000’s? That it was the turning point. In the course of that decade were visualized the unsustainable contradictions within global fossil fuel-driven industrial capitalism.

First came 9/11. We sat glued in front of the television screen and saw the towers fall, again and again. We were just as shocked as the European upper classes two hundred years ago when the mob guillotined the royals in Paris. How could such a hit happen to us? Where did all this hate come from? Are there really such contradictions in the global community? Could it have to do with oil, this stored solar energy from the ancient landscape that drives most of our lives, that we can afford to continue paying for it? And to whom then is this resource so critical that some countries are prepared to go to war for it.

Then came the Peace Prize of Al Gore, a person who appeared to have become the world’s most powerful man able to say that we were destroying the planet, and be rewarded for it. If a U.S. Vice President, Nobel Committee and the UN climate panel agree on the reality of global warming, may we take it seriously? Should we stop using fossil fuels?

Then came the financial crisis – the worst stock market collapse since 1929. Is the world economy really so vulnerable? And how is it that economists could not predict it? Are there contexts in the world that economists have not understood?

The early 2,000’s was the decade when we passed the peak of conventional oil production, that which in English is called peak oil. We now, therefore, use the remaining oil faster than we can find new deposits. We realize that oil prices will rise in the future, making our current lifestyle increasingly untenable… a two hundred year old bubble approaching the breaking point.

In two centuries we have been able to forget that the earth’s land surface is the resource that limits us. We have become used to deriving our energy from drilled holes in the earth’s crust instead of from our landscape. We have lived in the former solar energy of epochs instead of the annual insolation stored in living plants.

What should we do when we can no longer afford oil? How will the land be sufficient when it once again will have to support both people and vehicles? It used to be horse feed we had to compete with, now it is the cane for ethanol.

Not only do biofuels take up land space needed for food for a growing world population, but they also can not be nearly enough to sustain the consumption levels that the rich world has become accustomed to.

The early 2,000’s was also the decade when we definitely realized that the balance of power in the world would not be forever. China became an economic power by cashing in on cheap labor and lax environmental laws. We buy Chinese goods like never before. But is continuing to wallow in their products the best thing we can do for the Chinese, their environment and our common atmosphere?

The early 2,000’s was also the decade when a new kind of president moved into the White House. A whole world had understood that the American people could no longer hope to solve global conflicts by taking up arms. But what options are there really for Obama?

During the past decade, two of America’s most powerful politicians received the Nobel Peace Prize, the one for his warning us of what can happen to the climate if we continue to burn oil, the other in hopes that he will refrain from war… always for oil.

And just before the decade is over, we will experience COP 15. Fifteen thousand delegates and a hundred heads of state will gather in Copenhagen to discuss whether there is any hope. We know that carbon dioxide emissions are only continuing to increase despite all the warnings and promises. We recognize that emissions are as unevenly distributed in the world as money. An average American emits 18.7 tons of carbon dioxide per year; an average of 1.3 tons for Indians.

Perhaps we can imagine a connection between these various trends and events? Is the war on terrorism and climate debate two sides of the same coin? Imports of cheap oil are just as crucial as exports of carbon dioxide for a high-energy future. Both are confined to the parts of the world that have amassed the most purchasing power.

Economic growth is basically about earning money to expend resources. And the more money we earn today, the more resources we can afford to consume tomorrow. No wonder it is difficult to reduce carbon emissions.

But this is a logic that economists are not trained in. Can we hope that the next decade offers more insight – and more power shifts?

Alf Hornborg
Professor of Human Ecology, Lund University

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Life in a Zero-Sum World: Capitalism, Socio-Ecological Crisis and Alternatives

30 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Peak Oil, Pollution

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17th World Congress of the IUAES, Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Gross Inequality, Peak Oil, Poverty, Social Unrest, The Socio-Ecological Crisis

For my own records and for your curious minds, I’m posting some abstracts on papers that were written for an upcoming symposium called the 17th World Congress of the IUAES (Manchester, UK; 5th-10th August 2013). Many of these papers sound very interesting:

Papers

That Big Slow Curve: Fossil Fuel Based Growth meets A Prosperous Way Down

Author: Thomas Abel (Tzu Chi University)  email

LONG ABSTRACT

This century and the last may someday be called the Oil Years. Many who view our human economies in biophysical terms have come to conceive the peak of oil production as a turning point for peoples of the world. For the Odum’s, A Prosperous Way Down (2001) is in no part inevitable as oil production peaks and declines. Their book offers guidelines for a preferable future, a hopeful scenario, but with clear recognition that there are many less desirable and more likely directions that the world may take. In this paper I will reprise the Odum’s preferred scenario as it relates to undesirable alternatives. I will place these scenarios along the path of a big slow curve—the 80-year curve of world oil consumption. At human time scales, we might think that the big slow curve is difficult to detect or attend to. However, I will argue that the effects of asset growth and decline are indeed attended to, and have dramatically affected cultural trends in these oil years. This is because the detection of the growth (or its absence) of cultural assets is of central concern to all ‘consumers’ within ecosystems, but especially to human consumers who produce and manage their own food in various ways. These issues will be explored with mini-model simulations.

Accumulation by Displaced Emission: On Climate, Consumers, and the Rhetoric of Confidence

Author: Cindy Isenhour (Centre College )  email

Long Abstract

Whether referred to as ecological modernization, bright green environmentalism, or the rationalization of lifestyles, technological improvement has long been presented as a “win-win” strategy resulting in both economic growth and improved environmental health. Yet significant and mounting research suggests that these strategies have not delivered on their promises. Efficiency gains are being rapidly outstripped by sustained net growth in consumption. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research, this paper explores a series of reports published by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and their subsequent impact on other nations. The report authors advocate a zero-sum approach to understanding green house gas emissions – recognizing that while Sweden has reduced domestic emissions since 1990 — simultaneous growth in the consumption of imported goods and services has resulted in net increases elsewhere. The Swedish “consumption approach” to global GHG emissions accounting helps to elucidate the zero-sum reality of outsourcing emissions to nations where the need for economic development results in environmental injustice. While it is certainly more just to attribute all environmental costs to the consumers who benefit from the products associated with emissions, this perspective was contentious in Sweden where many saw it as anti-market. Its logical conclusion implied moving past economic and environmental de-coupling, toward de-growth. While these reports have had a substantial impact on several other nations, I argue that the approach they advocate is unlikely to gain much traction within UN climate talks until the pro-growth rhetoric surrounding consumer choice, responsibility, and freedom are challenged.

Cornucopianism and the image of limited good

Author: Richard Wilk (Indiana University)  email

Long Abstract

In this paper I argue that the metaphors that we use to think about global economic processes suffer from inherent limitations. The metaphors come from early moral and vitalistic thinking about the economy, and from modernist mechanical models which have now been enhanced with systems thinking, nationalism, and what I call “ecologism” which fetishizes nature. I propose that both cornucopian and zero-sum limited-good ideas about the future are fundamentally flawed, and are incapable of projecting a credible imagination of sustainability. I focus particularly on the language and metaphors of temporality and boundaries, both of which incorporate assumptions which we know to be false. I also discuss the prevailing dualism in discourse about the economy, and the way it limits our thinking and blinds us to what Latour calls “the proliferation of hybrids.” The economy is a cyborg, partially human and partially machine, and the sooner we recognize this, and stop fighting the pre-determined wars of modernism, the better we will be capable of thinking about a planet with 10 or 11 billion human beings on it.

Rethinking Economy

Author: Stephen Gudeman (University of Minnesota/ Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)  email

Long Abstract

Most economists see material life as consisting of markets surrounded by market-like behavior: everything else is a positive or negative externality on market exchange. The anthropological perspective is different. I see economies as fields of value defined by crosscutting coordinates. One axis locates economies on a scale from High Relationship to Low Relationship transactions; the other positions economies on a measure from High Markets to Low Markets. Set diagonally to this “graph view” are five, increasingly abstract and encompassing institutional spheres that shift from the House, to Community, to Commerce, to Finance, to Meta finance. This view offers a comparative way to understand economies, change, and the contemporary crises. It suggests that economy is built on a material base whose uses change and are differentially valued. The more abstract spheres, through cronyism, oligopolies, information control and other devices, extract “value” that is first achieved through production and innovation. Unless mollified by communal action, this power of abstraction heightens unequal distribution and leads to environmental degradation seen in terms of entropy and pollution. I contest the belief in growth that is generated by market competition and consumption desires, as well as the ideology that growth, with its increasing toll on the environment, is the remedy to unequal distribution. Placing limits on the growth of inequalities in wealth counters the entropic toll we are incurring, and the reverse.

Revisiting the Image of Limited Good: On Sustainability, Thermodynamics, and the Illusion of Creating Wealth

Author: Paul Trawick (Idaho State University)  email

Long Abstract

This paper focuses on worldview, examining two cultural models that are now contending for dominance on the world stage: the open-system model long promoted by economists, referred to as the ‘image of unlimited good’, and a closed-system model, the ‘image of limited good’ made famous by George Foster, who attributed it to members of peasant societies throughout the world. The former worldview is based on the idea that people ‘create’ wealth, an illusion arising from a fundamental confusion about the respective properties of real wealth and virtual wealth, or productive capital and finance capital. This perspective ignores the near-total reliance of the global economy on fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources, finite forms of real wealth whose exploitation is governed by the laws of thermodynamics. The alternative “zero-sum” worldview rests on the axiom that most of the ‘goods’ that people value in life are inherently scarce, being derived from those limited resources and raw materials, a scarcity that must somehow be shared. Based on an ethnographic and ethnological argument, a radical shift toward the closed-system view is said to be necessary if people are to act collectively to impose sustainable limits on their expanding consumption, a cultural change that may already be underway.

The moral economy and moral ecology of organic food in Western Sicily: from growth to degrowth?

Author: Giovanni Orlando (Independent Scholar)  email

Long Abstract

For almost a century now the dominant socio-ecological regime of the world agri-food system has rested on the two pillars of productivism and mass consumption. An idea of limitless growth is thus intrinsic to it. Such growth has resulted in the degradation of ecosystems and the exploitation of farmers and consumers. The organic food movement has sought to counter this situation by developing agri-food systems that renew, rather than deplete, natural resources, and that do justice to farmers and consumers. Potentially, then, organic food can be grounded in non-accumulative paradigms such as agroecology and degrowth. From a cultural point of view, what values and symbols would underpin these ‘sustainable’ paradigms? This paper tries to answer this question in Western Sicily, Italy. By looking at the practices and discourses of people who grow, sell and eat organic foods, it explores the degree to which subjects hold values about nature and people that speak to notions of degrowth and agroecology. The paper uncovers a common thread in people’s emphasis on what might be termed ‘excess’. From the fear of the dietary abominations created by an excessive use of technology in food manufacturing and processing, to the outrage for the abuses caused by a desire for excessive profits in food retailing, the paper shows how the ideal of sufficiency, documented by anthropologists in a variety of non-Western societies, creates a moral economy-ecology of organic food.

The Revival of Survival: Pioneering a Post-Financial America

Author: Eliza Jane Darling  email

Long Abstract

The financial crash of 2008 precipitated the renaissance of a primordial American tradition: survivalism. Often stigmatized as an eccentricity, the survivalist ethos is in fact deeply ingrained in American cultural production, from post-apocalyptic film to millenarian religious movements, as well as in American capitalism, generating millions of dollars in annual profits through the production of demand for palliative commodities. In recent years survivalism has indeed infiltrated mainstream American politics at multiple scales, from New York City’s “go-bag” scheme to Wyoming state’s “doomsday bill” to the CDC’s “zombie-preparedness” initiative. Like its historical predecessors, Great Recession survivalism is predicated upon a zero-sum logic simultaneously economic and environmental, entailing fears of an imminent collapse of finite financial and ecological resources as well as alternative visions for post-crisis continuity. This paper examines the history of survivalist ideology as a heterodox response to capitalistic crisis that is cyclically subsumed by its alleged antithesis: a cultural manifestation of deep-seated doubts about the propensity for endless growth which has itself been absorbed into the warp and weft of capitalist expansion through commoditisation.

Why Solar Panels Don’t Grow on Trees: Technological Utopianism and the Uneasy Relation between Ecomarxism and Ecological Economics

Author: Alf Hornborg (Lund University)  email

Long Abstract

Ever since the Industrial Revolution saved Britain from ecological crisis in the early nineteenth century, visions of miraculous new technologies have alleviated Euro-American anxieties about the impending doom of the fossil-fuelled capitalism that it inaugurated. Although Malthus’s worries about land shortages were transcended by world-historical events as well as by Ricardo’s and Marx’s different versions of technological optimism, they were soon reincarnated in Jevons’s warnings about the depletion of coal. Today economists generally dismiss the pessimism not only of Malthus and Jevons, but also of current concerns over peak oil, by expressing faith in human ingenuity. To retrospectively ridicule pessimists by referring to technological progress that they did not anticipate has become an established pattern of mainstream thought. Almost regardless of ideological persuasion, the seemingly self-evident concept of “technological progress” inherited from early industrialism has been resorted to as an article of faith serving to dispel the specter of truncated growth. The increasingly acknowledged threats of peak oil and global warming are thus generally countered with visions of a future civilization based on solar power. In this paper I discuss this technological scenario as a utopia that raises serious doubts about mainstream understandings of what “technology” really is, and what it means to say that something is “technologically” feasible. The technological utopianism professed, for instance, by ecomarxists raises difficult but fundamental analytical questions about the relation between thermodynamics and theories of economic value.

Decoupling waste from growth

Author: Catherine Alexander (Durham University)  email

Long Abstract

The correlation between increased waste production and increased wealth
headlines the EU’s environmental strategy. On the basis of trends so far,
the OECD projects a 45% increase in waste from 1995. The need for
continual economic expansion is taken as an unproblematic given. The
question that therefore seems to present itself is how to continue to
increase wealth without environmental despoilation. The EU’s Sixth
Environment Action Programme identifies waste prevention and management
as one of its top priorities. Its primary objective is to decouple waste
generation from economic activity, so that EU growth will no longer lead
to more and more rubbish. In the paper I make three points in response.
The first is that the desirability of growth remains unquestioned,
alternatives unexplored. The second is that environmental justice or
equity seems now to be foregrounded, often at the expense of other
inequalities produced by capitalist relations. The answer to waste
production, however, appears to be shifted away from economic rationales
of constant expansion to technocratic solutions or campaigns to change
consumers’ ‘attitudes and behaviour’ or the sleight of hand involved in
reclassifying wastes as energy (with the potentially bizarre prospect of
an economy that demands more waste in order to feed energy demands). I
suggest that the production of wastes is intimately tied to every aspect
of mass economic activity from extraction, through production,
distribution and consumption to disposal, and crucially, capitalist growth
depends on things breaking down, the inability to repair things, fashion.
One of the first steps forward might be to recognize that this kind of
growth is inseparable from social and environmental degradation.

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Keeping the Machine Well Fed

29 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 3 Comments

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6th Mass Extinction, Biophysical Economics, Chris Hedges, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Financial Elite, Greenwashing, Mass Die Off, Shell oil drilling in the Arctic


One of the recent headlines that caught my eye:

And of course the cartoonist Polyp had the perfect response…

While reading this morning, I stumbled across the following blog and found it informative…

Occam’s razor does not favor a climate change “hoax” {Infographic}

Occam’s razor suggests that the more likely explanation for some phenomenon is the explanation which requires the fewest number of assumptions or required assertions. Even though in science the correct answer is sometimes the more complex one, rationally speaking, the fewer amount of assumptions that we have to make in order to get a theory to work, the better.

For example, think of how many assumptions you have to make to consider the September 11th attacks a government conspiracy. So many claims about time, space, engineering, politics, prior knowledge, flight patterns, etc., must be made to even start bridging the gap. On the other hand, the simpler explanation that requires less assumptions (and indeed has more evidence) is that a group of terrorists hijacked some planes and flew them into the buildings.

By association, Occam’s razor regularly dismantles most conspiracy theories without much effort. Of course, any of the conspiracies could be true, but without evidence the numerous assumptions that need to be made push these theories into irrational confines.

The infographic below takes a similar approach. On the side that accepts anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, it takes many more assumptions to make the idea that the majority of the world’s climate scientists are in collusion to make a worldwide hoax from which they see no benefit work than it does to think that oil companies are protecting their bottom line. We know that there are huge oil lobbies, oil companies that have scientists in their pockets, and that large corporations are trying to purposefully undermine the science of climate.

Therefore, which makes more sense?

At the root of the Anthropocene Crisis of the 21st century is the unabated expansion of humankind fueled by fossil fuels. We are pushing all other living things off the cliff of extinction, with ourselves soon to follow.

Global efforts to slow extinctions lag pledges, UN says:

…32 per cent of livestock breeds are under threat of extinction within the next 20 years, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says. And 75 per cent of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops has been lost since 1900.

“Because we don’t really know the full impacts of climate change down the line, we don’t really know what’s going to happen in terms of growing conditions around the world. It’s just safer for us to have a lot of these other varieties in our pocket,” said David Ainsworth, spokesman of the CBD Secretariat.

Cooper said the pace of extinctions among the planet’s estimated 9 million species – plants, animals from insects to whales but excluding legions of tiny bacteria – was perhaps 100 times the background rate estimated in fossil records.

“If you project the rates into the future, the rest of the century, they are likely to be 100 times larger still,” he said. The rising human population threatens ever more habitats with expanding cities, farms and roads…

The machine of industrial civilization has become the master of our fate. It rolls onward under its own colossal impetus, crushing all in its path. The billions of people in the globalized economy are now mere cogs in its wheel. ‘Economic development and growth’ is the mantra chanted by all. ‘Green’ and ‘sustainable’ are the adjectives used by corporations to whitewash the continued plunder of the environment. Capitalism, an economic system that requires continued expansion and control, is inherently unstable and incompatible with the long-term habitability of the planet. Will the principles of biophysical economics become accepted as truth before we destroy ourselves?

The answer lies in this excerpt from Chris Hedges’ latest essay:

…perhaps the most egregious assault will be carried out by the fossil fuel industry. Obama, who presided over the repudiation of the Kyoto Accords and has done nothing to halt the emission of greenhouse gases, reversed 20 years of federal policy when he permitted the expansion of fracking and offshore drilling. And this acquiescence to big oil and big coal, no doubt useful in bringing in campaign funds, spells disaster for the planet. He has authorized drilling in federally protected lands, along the East Coast, Alaska and four miles off Florida’s Atlantic beaches. Candidate Obama in 2008 stood on the Florida coastline and vowed never to permit drilling there.

You get the point. Obama is not in charge. Romney would not be in charge. Politicians are the public face of corporate power. They are corporate employees. Their personal narratives, their promises, their rhetoric and their idiosyncrasies are meaningless. And that, perhaps, is why the cost of the two presidential campaigns is estimated to reach an obscene $2.5 billion. The corporate state does not produce a product that is different. It produces brands that are different. And brands cost a lot of money to sell…

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Capitalist Carbon Man

28 Friday Sep 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Arctic Sea Ice Melt, Fossil-Fuel Based Economy, Greenland Ice Sheet Melt, Greenwashing, Mass Die Off, Resource Exploitation

Sometime next week I’ll post part two of climate tipping elements, but I want to emphasize right now that industrial civilization’s undoing will be its transgression of environmental elements which will cause dramatic and worsening rates of climate change. The delusion that there will be nice, slow and predictable changes from anthropogenic climate change has already been destroyed by the first tipping point of the melting Arctic sea-ice sheet and its multiple, concomitant feedback loops. The Arctic is now irreparably altered, never to recover from the clumsy tinkering and meddling of human hands. Arctic animal species face mass extinction not only from the loss of their habitat but also from hybridization and competition from southern species migrating northward as well as the spread of diseases. Bid adieu to those disappearing glacial Arctic landscapes once designated as World Heritage sites.

Concerning rapid development of climate chaos:

The consequences for the biosphere of accelerating climate change are discussed by Baronsky et al in the following terms:

Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence.

Climates found at present on 10–48% of the planet are projected to disappear within a century, and climates that contemporary organisms have never experienced are likely to cover 12–39% of Earth. The mean global temperature by 2070 (or possibly a few decades earlier) will be higher than it has been since the human species evolved.

At 400ppm CO2, potential climate conditions have reached levels which last existed in the peak Pliocene epoch (5.3-2.6 million years ago). Given an increase in extreme weather events under conditions of +0.8C, an even higher rate of extreme events is expected under conditions of +2.0C currently shielded by industrially emitted sulphur aerosols.

Like 99.999% of the population, I do have to generate a living which means coercive participation in the predominant economy. This forced inclusion in the globalized capitalist model is illustrated quite well in the following article. If you’re in a hole, quit digging. But if you are capitalist carbon man, then you can’t help but keep digging:

KANGERLUSSUAQ, Greenland – President Lee Myung-bak said Sunday Korea wants to help Greenland pursue economic development in an environmentally friendly way, expressing sadness and concern after seeing the Arctic glaciers that are melting due to global warming…

‘Development’ is the code word for supplanting nature with the money-generating schemes of capitalist carbon man.

Lee arrived in Greenland earlier in the day to take a first-hand look at problems resulting from climate change and to hold talks with Premier Kuupik Kleist of the Danish autonomous territory about green growth, resource development and Arctic shipping routes…

There’s that oxymoron again – “green growth”. Development and growth by industrial civilization is neither green nor sustainable. It’s simply another nail in the coffin for the natural world and all other species that don’t have an opposable thumb, walk upright, and trade shares on Wall Street.

Upon arrival at the airport in the small town of Kangerlussuaq, Lee flew on a light plane to Ilulissat, a Unesco World Heritage site known for its famous icefjord, one of the best locations to observe melting Arctic glaciers, icebergs and ice sheets…

Was that “light plane” another product of “green growth” and “sustainable development”? Perhaps it was buoyed in the air by magical green technology.

Premier Kleist and Danish Crown Prince Frederik traveled together with Lee.

“This is a tragic site,” Lee said aboard an icebreaker while touring the ice-floating sea, apparently meaning that global warming, caused by economic development, is having serious impacts on the environment…

…Increasingly warm weather has led to Arctic ice melting dangerously…

No shit, it’s caused by “economic development”! But these twits think attaching the word ‘green’ to the word ‘development’ will make everything all better. Capitalist carbon man is apparently no smarter than yeast in a petri dish. Yeast in a petri dish never choose degrowth over reproducing and consuming ever more.

Melting occurred on about 40 percent of the surface of Greenland’s ice sheets on July 8, but it expanded to 97 percent only four days later. A massive glacier twice the size of Manhattan broke off from Greenland recently, officials said.

Lee’s entourage also included three special members: prominent Korean climber Um Hong-gil, who is the world’s first to scale the globe’s 16 tallest mountains; famous cartoonist Hur Young-man; and Shin Soo-min, a college student chosen for his enthusiasm about green growth.

Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are blamed for warming the globe.

In an effort to tackle the issue, Lee has championed what is dubbed the “low carbon, green growth” policy, one of Lee’s trademark policies that calls for seeking economic growth through environmentally friendly technologies and industries without releasing greenhouse gases…

Oh, so now we will also attach the words ‘low carbon‘ to the word ‘development’. Sugar and spice and everything fucking nice!!!

Greenland is also rich in oil, rare earth materials and other resources. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, about 17 billion barrels of oil are estimated to be buried along Greenland’s western coast, with another 31.4 billion barrels along the northwestern coast. 

Greenland is also believed to be holding the world’s largest reserves of rare earth materials. At least 10 regions have been confirmed to be holding the increasingly important resources, with the southern region holding enough reserves to meet 25 percent of global demand, officials said.

During the flight to Ilulissat, Prince Frederik told Lee that he hopes countries like Korea will help develop Greenland while preserving its environment. Lee said in response that he came to Greenland with “the spirit of green growth.” 

Later in the day, Lee held talks with Kleist about ways to boost cooperation in green growth and resources development, saying Korea is willing to work actively together to transform “environmental crisis” into “economic opportunities.”

The two sides also signed four memoranda of understanding calling for cooperation in resources development, geological survey and Arctic science and technology. The agreements are expected to serve as a foothold for Korea’s participation in Greenland’s development. 

“South Korea wants to seek economic development in a way that Greenland remains green,” Lee said during the signing ceremony. “I hope Greenland will be preserved as Greenland forever. In this sense, South Korea can be a good partner.

So now the truth comes out from under the cloak of feel-good greenwashing. We just can’t wait to get our hands on all that newly revealed, CO2-polluting carbon energy. How else would we be able to run our fossil fuel-based economies? Oh boy, we really do have more than enough fossil fuels to destroy every living thing on Earth, and like a moth’s fatal attraction to a flame, we just can’t stop ourselves. A few types of heat-loving bacteria will be the last remaining survivors in this brave new world of our own creation.

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Tipping Points for Runaway Climate Change, Part One

23 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 3 Comments

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Amazon Rain Forest Drought, Arctic Sea Ice Melt, Boreal Forest Destruction, Geneticist Andrea Manica, Greenland Ice Quakes, Greenland Ice Sheet Melt, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Professor Tim Lenton, Runaway Climate Change, Tipping Elements in the Climate System

Coronal Mass Ejection from August 31, 2012. And the associated 4096×4096 (!) video.

What force, more than anything else, has regulated the evolution and expansion of mankind throughout history? A new study with climate models by geneticist Andrea Manica at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues shows how sensitive the human species has been to climate over the past 120,000 years and continues to be to the present day. The rise and fall of ice sheets and sea levels and the desertification of continents acted as road blocks to control the migration and settlement of humans across the planet.

…To see just how sensitive our species has been to changes in climate over the ages, Manica ran the model several times, varying the strength of climate’s effect on populations.

In parallel, he also modelled the history of human genetic variation, and compared that with real data on the genetic makeup of modern populations. Strikingly, he was only able to reproduce the known timings of migrations, and the real-world genetic data, if the human populations in his model were highly sensitive to the climate.

It’s the first time anyone has been able to explore climate’s power to facilitate human expansion, says Rick Potts of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. “The study fills in many of the links that have only been assumed or guessed at,” he says…

…Stewart has proposed that earlier bouts of climate change helped the many hominin species to evolve, by forcing them into isolated refuges where they evolved separately (Science, doi.org/jcz). If that’s correct, climate has been determining our fate for even longer than Manica’s model suggests.

Manica argues that modern civilisation is still highly dependent on the climate. Many societies have declined or collapsed when faced with climate change, for example.

While agriculture produces more food than hunting and gathering, and so supports more people, ultimately climate’s effect on food production still limits our population. “We are very much governed by climate,” he says.

With the discovery of oil, coal, and other fossil fuels we were able to vastly increase our numbers. Our entire transportation system, industrialized agricultural system, globalized economy of trade, and modern medical system would not exist without fossil fuels. Even so, humanity could have dealt with the painful problem of peak oil by powering down to a less energy intensive way of life, but something much more insidious developed which would throw modern civilization for a loop. Professor Tim Lenton and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber wrote a paper in 2007 identifying 9 specific tipping elements for the Earth’s climate:

Click to Enlarge…

1.) The Arctic sea ice is considered a “highly sensitive” tipping point with low uncertainty and is expected to disappear completely in summer within a decade, leaving behind open and dark waters which will absorb more of the sun’s heat that once was reflected by white ice.

In figure below, global emissions cause warming, especially in the Arctic, where warming is further accelerated by feedbacks, in particular sea ice loss and methane releases, threatening to lead to runaway global warming.

 From the following graph, you can see Lenton’s and Schellnhuber’s tipping points (8 of 14) which are sensitive(yellow/red) to just a few degrees of warming:

Several positive feedbacks have been identified within the first tipping point of disappearing Arctic sea ice:

There are at least three positive feedbacks working together to reinforce one another – and now a fourth on salinity:

  1. The albedo flip effect as sea ice is replaced by open water absorbing more sunlight, warming and melting more sea ice.
  2. As the sea ice gets very thin, it is liable to break up easily and get blown into open water where it will melt more easily.
  3. The open warmer water is allowing increased strength of storms, which break up the ice to make for more open water.
  4. The storms are churning up the sea to a depth of 500 metres, producing salinity at the surface that will mean slower ice formation in winter and more open water next year.

These feedbacks are dangerous for methane. AMEG has been warning that, as the sea ice retreats, storms will warm the sea bed, leading to further release of methane. In ESAS, we only need mixing to a depth of 50 metres – so a storm capable of mixing to 500 metres will really stir things up.

Another feedback is the pollution and soot resultant from increased shipping traffic, oil drilling activity, and other exploitive ventures by our ravenous and wrong-headed culture. Like arsonists taking pleasure in their destructive activities, industrial civilization simply throws more fuel into the bonfire of anthropogenic climate chaos. You can see plainly from the current Arctic resource grab that “THE MARKET” is a soulless, nihilistic, and sapient-less entity with a one-track mind of commodification and exploitation.

2.) The Greenland ice sheet is considered a “highly sensitive” tipping point with low uncertainty and a decay time of approximately 300 years as cycles of degradation and regrowth tip toward melting. A rise in sea levels of more than 20 feet is estimated from the melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

As with other underestimations of mankind’s effect on nature, we have done the same with the destruction of the Greenland ice sheet:

The Greenland ice sheet is likely to be more vulnerable to global warming than previously thought. The temperature threshold for melting the ice sheet completely is in the range of 0.8 to 3.2 degrees Celsius of global warming, with a best estimate of 1.6 degrees above pre-industrial levels, shows a new study by scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Today, already 0.8 degrees of global warming has been observed. Substantial melting of land ice could contribute to long-term sea-level rise of several meters and therefore it potentially affects the lives of many millions of people.

The time it takes before most of the ice in Greenland is lost strongly depends on the level of warming. “The more we exceed the threshold, the faster it melts,” says Alexander Robinson, lead-author of the study now published in Nature Climate Change. In a business-as-usual scenario of greenhouse-gas emissions, in the long run humanity might be aiming at 8 degrees Celsius of global warming. This would result in one fifth of the ice sheet melting within 500 years and a complete loss in 2000 years, according to the study. “This is not what one would call a rapid collapse,” says Robinson. “However, compared to what has happened in our planet’s history, it is fast. And we might already be approaching the critical threshold.”…

And the surprises just keep on coming(click on pic to go to story):

…and unprecedented ‘Ice Quakes'(click on pic to go to story):

3.) The Boreal Forest, which rings the northern latitudes and provides habitat for migratory bird species and other wildlife, could die back within 50 years as trees succumb to summer heat stress, increased diseases and other threats. This is considered an “intermediately sensitive” tipping point with large uncertainty.

The most noteworthy destruction of boreal forests is the extraction of Canadian tar sands:

-Oil sands mining is licensed to use twice the amount of fresh water that the entire city of Calgary uses in a year.
-At least 90% of the fresh water used in the oil sands ends up in ends up in tailing ponds so toxic that propane cannons are used to keep ducks from landing.
-Processing the oil sands uses enough natural gas in a day to heat 3 million homes.
-The toxic tailing ponds are considered one of the largest human-made structures in the world.
-The ponds span 50 square kilometers and can be seen from space.
-Producing a barrel of oil from the oil sands produces three times more greenhouse gas emissions than a barrel of conventional oil.

PDF of report here via ::DeSmogBlog

As if the hellish blight of tar sands operations was not enough of a sacrifice zone for our unsustainable lifestyles, plans are being laid to duplicate the process for America’s own oil sands project in Utah.

Inside Climate News reports:

An administrative law judge in Salt Lake City has ruled against two environmental organizations that are trying to block a Canadian company’s plan to open the first large-scale oil sands mine in the United States.

Judge Sandra Allen sided with U.S. Oil Sands and Utah’s Division of Water Quality in deciding that the state rightfully granted the Calgary-based company permission to mine and process oils sands without requiring a pollution permit or water monitoring at the PR Spring mining site in eastern Utah. The judge agreed with the Water Quality Division’s opinion that there is so little ground water within 1,500 feet of the surface of the proposed mine that additional safeguards weren’t needed.

Greenpeace reports:

The northern boreal forests comprise almost one third of the Earth’s forest systems, covering 1.5 billion hectares. Along with the temperate forest of the mid-latitudes, and tropical forest near the equator, it is one of the three great forest ecosystems of the world, supporting a rich diversity of wildlife, endangered species, and extremely valuable timber…

…There is general consensus that climatic changes will have the greatest impact on boreal forests; their unique adaptation makes them more sensitive to temperature fluctuations than temperate or even tropical forests. Indeed, fossil pollen and macro fossil records demonstrate that North American boreal forests expanded and receded in response to temperature changes over the past 10,000 years. Even a slight increase in mean annual temperature is enough to affect many species’ growth and regeneration…

…The rate of climate change — and not the change itself — is perhaps the biggest threat to the boreal forest. With rapid change, conditions may become unsuitable for trees to complete their life cycle. Seedlings are especially sensitive to short-term drought, saplings to varying levels of sunlight, and mature trees to soil moisture during the growing season. Thus, in a kind of “arrested development,” healthy-looking tree populations may not ever mature to the point of reproduction. Entire remnant stands of forest may no longer sustain themselves, or their resident animal and plant communities. A temperature rise of only 2 degrees C could, for example, eliminate up to half of the animals currently inhabiting boreal mountain ranges from the Rocky Mountains to the Sierra Nevada…

4.) The West Antarctic Ice Sheet could collapse within 300 years, leading to a sea level rise of as much as 15 feet worldwide. This is considered an “intermediately sensitive” tipping point with large uncertainty.

A new study sheds light on the vulnerability of the Antarctic to climate change(clink on the pic to go to story):

5.) The Amazon rainforest could die back significantly within 50 years due to a combination of deforestation and global warming, which could trigger a 30% decrease in rainfall. This is considered an “intermediately sensitive” tipping point with large uncertainty.

The Amazon Rainforest is expected to be reduced by 40% by 2030 at the current rate of deforestation, despite recent reductions. A current scientific paper states that due to deforestation, the Amazon is becoming a net CO2 emitter rather than a sink for the world’s carbon dioxide. When we take into account the uncertainties of climate change-induced droughts, the prospect of losing one of the earth’s major lungs becomes a near certainty:

…One of the scarier possibilities to emerge from this body of work is worth dwelling on a bit, simply because it would be so devastating if it came to pass: the so-called Amazon dieback scenario. Many scientists were deeply skeptical of the idea when it was first published, but events in the last few years have made them less dismissive.

The scenario emerged most clearly in computer analyses in Britain led by Peter M. Cox of the University of Exeter and published in 2000 as a paper in the journal Nature. Running a large-scale computer simulation in which forests interacted with a changing global climate through the course of the 21st century, the Cox group found that forests would continue to take up carbon until about 2050.

But then, their computer predicted, warmer temperatures and water stress would cause a huge  dieback of the Amazon forest, which would stop absorbing carbon and start emitting it as a result.

That was a startling possibility for many reasons, not the least being that the Amazon is the richest single ecosystem left on the planet, and functioning as a major carbon sponge is only one of the critical roles it plays. Might the Amazon really die as a direct consequence of human-induced climate change?…

…[That question] took on a new urgency in 2005, however, when a severe drought hit the Amazon region, killing many large trees. In 2010, there was an even larger drought with potentially worse damage — two “once a century” droughts just five years apart. The 2010 drought is still under study; some evidence suggests that the 2005 drought was linked to high Atlantic Ocean temperatures that may in turn be linked to human emissions of carbon dioxide.

The droughts raise a disturbing question: Could the great dieback predicted for midcentury already be starting?

Scientists do not know. They say the effects of the two droughts are likely to be transient, but only if similar events do not recur anytime soon. Oliver L. Phillips, a researcher at the University of Leeds, led a team that documented a huge loss of carbon in the Amazon because of the 2005 drought. “The most likely outcome is that the forest will gain all that carbon back, and then some,” he said in an interview.

But he and other scientists say that if the Amazon starts experiencing such droughts every few years, all bets are off.

“It’s a worrisome moment for the Amazon,” said Daniel C. Nepstad, an American scientist working at the Amazon Environmental Research Institutein Brazil to understand the pressures on the forest. “This is either just a big coincidence that we had these two severe droughts in close sequence, or it is a sign of things to come.”…

Satellite view of deforestation in Rondônia, Brazil, 1975 and 2012

Despite recent efforts by Brazil to curb deforestation, it continues at a ferocious pace outside Brazil’s borders:

Amazon deforestation grows outside Brazil – SFGate

…In Brazil, the enforcement of land-use laws reduced deforestation by 76 percent in eight years, from 10,424 square miles in 2004 – when a swath bigger than Maryland was cleared of jungle – until last year, when the country’s National Institute for Space Research reported that 2,471 square miles had been destroyed.

But more than 40 percent of the Amazon jungle is beyond Brazil’s borders, spread across eight countries in a carpet of green six times the size of California. These countries are poorer and less stable than Brazil, with less capacity to control clear-cutting of trees. Government agencies that regulate land use are spread thin, and some of those countries, including Bolivia, actively promote development in the jungle.

Satellite data and field work by environmental and forestry ministries in the region show that deforestation in the non-Brazilian Amazon rose from an annual average of 1,930 square miles in the 1990s to 2,779 square miles last year.

“There’s more deforestation going on in the Andean Amazon than in the Brazilian Amazon,” said Timothy Killeen, an ecologist and geographer in Bolivia who works with environmental groups and has been studying deforestation in the Amazon for 25 years. “Before, Brazilian deforestation was four times as great as in the Andean Amazon. Now the Andes has more. We’re winning the battle in Brazil but losing the battle in the Amazon.”

Environmentalists say the destruction of the Andean Amazon is particularly worrisome because it affects the lifeblood of the entire Amazon, the rivers flowing down from the Andes.

This post is part one of a three-part series. In the second part I will talk about the other climate change tipping points as described by Professor Tim Lenton.

I imagine a child born today would look at all adults as grotesque monsters. With the world we are leaving them, how could they see us otherwise…

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Overly Conservative Scientific Estimates Hide the Coming Human Tragedy

22 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 10 Comments

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Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, John Reilly Senior Climate Change Researcher at MIT, Overly Conservative IPCC Estimates, Paul A. O’Gorman Professor of Atmospheric science at MIT, Take Shelter

The excerpt ‘On the Threat of Environmental Catastrophe’ at the bottom of this post is from an essay just published a few hours ago entitled ‘A Tale of Two Crashes Part 2‘ from Empirical Magazine. It elaborates a bit more on the coming climate chaos and the destruction of industrial civilization. As has been noted by others, the estimates of the IPCC have been overly conservative:

Read what John Reilly, a senior climate change researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has to say about future scenarios in ‘On the Threat of Environmental Catastrophe’. Also, take notice of this recent news article:

Climate scientists have long projected that increases in global temperatures will result in higher rainfall and flooding in tropical regions. But now a MIT study has put some numbers to the prediction. Writing in Nature Geoscience in a September 16th letter titled “Sensitivity of tropical precipitation extremes to climate change,” Paul A. O’Gorman, professor of atmospheric science at MIT, said that for every one-degree Celsius increase in global surface temperature, there will be 10 percent heavier rainfall extremes in the tropics.

O’Gorman tells MIT News that “The study includes some populous countries that are vulnerable to climate change, and impacts of changes in rainfall could be important there.” Extreme rainfall in the tropics responds to climate change in distinct ways from that of other regions. He added, “It seems rainfall extremes in tropical regions are more sensitive to global warming. We have yet to understand the mechanism for this higher sensitivity.”

For more details, read his letter here.

On the Threat of Environmental Catastrophe

“The influence of private power over human fate is as strong as it has ever been and looks set to have an impact generally on much of life on earth if the reckless and single-minded pursuit of profit so often associated with modern capitalism is not reigned in. The gravity of the problem is almost certainly unrivaled by any threat to the species in recent history since the Second World War or the Cuban missile crisis.

Yet the danger is not posed by the familiar boogeyman of corporate greed per se. The threat is represented by the effects of significant global climate change, presently on course to occur barring some miracle.

An authoritative government report released last year indicated that in only the next decade New York would be under threat from temporary or partial submergence by rising sea levels and increased storm activity similar to Hurricane Irene, causing enormous damage with a massive economic price tag attached to the mess. Yet this scenario, entirely plausible and very worrying, is only a taste of what looks set to be a part of our future.

In November last year the International Energy Agency released a report described as the “most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure,” which indicated that if global fossil-fuel-producing infrastructure (i.e. coal and power stations) is not widely replaced or significantly altered in the next five years, then it would “become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating runaway climate change will be lost for ever.”

Additionally, around the same time as the IEA report was published last year, the US Department of Energy reported that the “biggest jump” in carbon dioxide (a major cause of climate change) outputs ever measured occurred in 2010, indicating that the trajectory of risk from the effects of global environmental cataclysm is rising steeply.

World-leading academics like John Reilly, a senior climate change researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have warned that some of the most widely-accepted estimates of the effects of global warming have been far too conservative. Reilly’s team at MIT forecast carbon emissions scenarios, their likelihood, and what the most likely outcomes are in the event they occur. What they discovered recently does not bode well. According to an Associated Press report, a “[UN-organised International Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, report’s] worst-case scenario was only about in the middle of what MIT calculated are likely scenarios.” It is interesting to note that, to many climate skeptics, the IPCC report was widely derided as being “too alarmist.”

The IPCC estimates foresaw a rise in global temperature of somewhere between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit (2.4-6.4 Celsius), with the most likely outcome being a rise of 7.5 Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius). To put this in perspective, the generally-agreed baseline for “safety” in terms of climate change would see an increase in global temperatures by only 2 degrees, in itself a global climate shift that would still have profound consequences.

However, topping the safety line things begin to look really scary.  At 3 degrees alone the consequences for humanity are close to nightmarish.

According to British newspaper The Guardian’s science correspondent Alok Jha, who compiled the predictions of researcher Mark Lynas, the World Bank’s “Stern report,” and Britain’s Met Office, at 3 degrees: “Billions of people are forced to move from their traditional agricultural lands, in search of scarcer food and water. Around 30-50% less water is available in Africa and around the Mediterranean.” At 4 degrees “Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey become deserts and mid-Europe reaches desert temperatures of almost 50 degrees Celsius in summer. Southern England’s summer climate could resemble that of modern southern Morocco.”

At 5 degrees and above, the picture becomes apocalyptic. The results would see “global average temperatures … hotter than for fifty [million] years.” Additionally, Jha said that “most of the tropics, sub-tropics and even lower mid-latitudes are too hot to be inhabitable. The sea level rise is now sufficiently rapid that coastal cities across the world are largely abandoned,” with a risk that at 6 degrees and over, “there would be a danger of “runaway warming,” perhaps spurred by release of oceanic methane hydrates,” risking that the “human population would be drastically reduced.”

That’s quite some bad news. However, at present a 5-6 degree rise is not guaranteed, nor yet confidently forecast. There’s a lot of work to be done however to prevent or mitigate the worst effects of probable temperature rises above 2, 3 or even 4 degrees Celsius. God forbid anything higher.

Yet despite the urgent need for action on this issue, there are those who would try to convince the average citizen that climate change, a problem of planetary significance that Western industry has had an unrivalled role in creating, is merely the product of “liberal propaganda”–a kind of modern-day myth.

Oil companies like Exxon-Mobil are still largely the biggest in the world, and these groups have been proven to have funded climate change skeptics.

As the “carbon bubble” is being readied for bursting by rising emissions, a drop in media coverage of the effects of climate change has been measured by groups monitoring the news, helping to efface the issue from the public mind in an election year, where the aftermath of the economy still rides high among concerns for most people.

Yet regardless of the economic woes that still persist for many people, through little fault of their own, something has to shift in the world if it is to be rescued from the threat of climate change.

A Stark Choice

If this is to be done, a stark choice between submitting to the imperatives of the economy’s endless need for profit or protecting the future of the planet may be required of us. As environmentalist Bill McKibben articulated recently: “If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons–five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground. Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent towrite off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil … If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be, and that’s far scarier than drought and flood. It’s why you’ll do anything–including fund an endless campaigns of lies–to avoid coming to terms with its reality.”

“Growth for its own sake,” so the saying goes, “is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Regardless of the cliché of this thoroughly-abused slogan, its message is apt to our present crisis: the interminable desire for gain required by our present way of life may yet so damage the organism from which it derives sustenance (our planet) that it sabotages its own existence. This negative-sum game is given license to continue apace because it is inexpedient for those with real power to challenge it.

Endless clamoring for growth has meant that along with development, massive pollution has shadowed the steps of Western prosperity–yet the effects of this on the climate, now widely accepted as fact, are an “externality” not incorporated into market calculations. Climate change thus remains a total irrelevance to the closed system of global capitalism, regardless of its long-term impacts on the future of the sine qua nonbase that supports the market itself: human beings and their labor, the environment and its resources.

For big business, even when there are devastating economic crashes, somebody always benefits. Goldman Sachs famously reaped massive rewards by betting on the housing crash that they themselves contributed to, helping to consolidate their leading position in the banking world. However shocking this may seem, however such acts stink of grotesque immorality–they are merely consistent with the demands of  the system in which they operate, and the rigid logic of the market.

It remains for politicians to act on this issue. But they are not doing enough.

As a result of runaway climate change, losses in the future may be so broadly and profoundly felt, however, that future generations can hardly be expected to accept with equanimity what history may teach them about how the miserable state of the world they have inherited came to be. Explaining to our grandchildren that the Earth was left to go to hell because it was deemed too much for our politicians to reign in corporate and industrial irresponsibility will not be easy, but it won’t stop it from being true–if we do nothing.

It is time to forget what is convenient or ideologically appealing, and address what is real–for our children’s sake…”

There is a Storm Comin’…

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Global Ecological Collapse Unfolding in Plain Sight, Yet the Establishment Can’t be Bothered

21 Friday Sep 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Inverted Totalitarianism, New Zealand's Kennedy Graham MP, The Elite 1%

Epic ice melt in the Arctic puts on a spectacular demonstration illustrating the consequences of our orgy on fossil fuel consumption, yet the global bureaucrats’ and corporatists’ only reaction is to race northward for further resource plundering.

Russia suffers its most severe wildfire season in recent history and discovers over 200 massive methane fields bubbling up from their seas, yet the Russian bureaucrats and corporatists plan to increase their coal exports to China by 50%.

Compared to forty years ago, American forests now succumb to twice as many conflagrations in burn seasons lasting over two months longer, yet the bureaucrats and corporatists proclaim that the development of the Keystone oil sands pipeline is inevitable.

The U.S. bread basket gets decimated by unrelenting drought, yet bureaucrats and corporatists institutionalize taxpayer-funded subsidies and insurance bailouts for Big Ag which is resposible for up to 30% of CO2 emissions.

“Much of the world’s photosynthesis, the basis of all of our food, comes from the ocean’s plankton. The oxygen in every other breath we take is a product of phytoplankton photosynthesis.” Yet we continue to burn ever more coal and other fossil fuels and carry out bottom trawling of the oceans, the end result being the death of the cradle of life on Earth.

You have cancer; please stop smoking.

New Zealand’s Kennedy Graham MP, who has tried to raise such points with his country’s bureaucrats and corporatists, has an interesting article out which questions whether these business suits he deals with are living on the same planet he is:

Climate change and human psychoses… 

…A quarter century, actually, since the US Senate and the Brundtland Report put the issue on the international agenda.  We’ve had, since then, Rio and Cairo, Kyoto and Marrakesh, Copenhagen and Cancun and Durban, and Rio again.

But the past week has been especially intensive, and this for two reasons.  The NZ Parliament is conducting hearings on the Government’s bill to amend the ETS[emissions trading scheme], in response to the Advisory Panel’s report of 2011.  And, concurrently and with no strong causal link, the latest scientific findings of climate change are reported in.

So, in the past week, I have asked two questions of the Government on climate change.  Taken together, they traverse the range of the issue – the NZ Government’s domestic instrument for combating climate change, and its appreciation of the global reality out there.

The first questioned the Government on what the Green Party critiques as a weak emissions trading scheme, ‘subsidising polluters’ and incurring considerable net fiscal cost to the taxpayer.  The second queried whether, in drafting the latest amendments to the ETS, the Government had sufficiently taken into account the latest scientific findings.

In short, the Government’s response was as follows:

–  The amendments defer any strengthening of the ETS because we live in fragile economic circumstances and it is ‘not a stellar time’ to increase charges and taxes.  The changes did not amount to ‘subsidies’, and indeed New Zealand was on track to more than meet its five-year Kyoto obligations.

– The Government had, indeed, adequately accounted for the latest scientific findings, but it has to take into account a whole range of factors such as the global developments and employment levels in New Zealand.

This is as close as it gets to a meaningful exchange in the NZ Parliament on the future of the planet.  I acknowledge that Ministers Groser and Bridges are well-meaning and competent.  I count them as friends.  Tim Groser, in particular, has huge international experience and reputation.

That does not make them necessarily right in what they are doing. It is possible for such people to be egregiously wrong, fatefully, fatally.

Effectively, the ministers are acknowledging that the amendments weaken the ETS in the sense of deferring sectoral obligations, and seek to explain why – protection of jobs, firms and investment at home against risk competitiveness during tough global economic times.

That is circular logic, and it rests on an erroneous premise.   We are entering the Global Ecological Crisis.  An ecological crisis means an economic crisis.  They are one and the same thing.  You do not defer measures to combat an ecological crisis because you are in an economic crisis.  You deal with them as one crisis, and seek to resolve ‘it’ immediately.

The latest scientific findings are alarming.  They possibly portend a new era for humanity – one where dangerous anthropogenic climate change may arrive within half a decade out, not half a century.

–          Arctic ice extent, as measured this month by the US Snow & Ice Data Center, is 49% below the past 30-year average.  Between 2007 and ’11 it has dropped from 4.17 m. sq. km to 3.41 m. sq. km., an 18% drop in four years.  The different trends in Antarctica, where there is some cooling and ice-accretion, is understood by scientists to be consistent with an increase in average global temperature.

–          Russian scientists on the Viktor Buinitsky research vessel have found methane fields in the Laptev Sea of 1 km. in diameter. Methane deposits in the seabed near Spitzbergen are effervescing to the surface.

–          This has been described by Cambridge University scientist, Prof. Wadhams, as ‘terrifying news’. It facilitates the release of potent methane gas from land-based tundra and seabed floor, reducing Earth’s albedo effect, risking a positive feedback loop on temperature increase that can breach unpredictable tipping-points.  While we must await the IPCC’s 5th assessment report in 2013, the latest specific findings are of far-reaching concern.

I confess I experience my share of surreal moments in the NZ House of Representatives when I ask these questions and receive the answers I do.  It is as if we truly are, my National MP colleagues and I, on different planets.

For I am asking questions, in as measured tones as I can,  of what appears to me to be about the future of the planet and humanity, and they are answering as if (a) it is just another problem and (b) I am something of an irritant.

No-one will be more relieved than I shall, if the science proves to be wrong or excessively ominous.  I shall simply look stupid.  That will be my preference, since my grand-children will have a decent future.

But I do not see how that can be the case.

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Browbeaten Scientists Not Telling the Public the Full Truth

19 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Feedback Loops, Climate Scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, David Roberts, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Free Market Ideologues, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, The Elite 1%

Is it still possible to limit climate change to a 2 degree increase? If we don’t take into account the loss of sulfate parasols as a result of our emissions controls and if we close our eyes to the multiple feedback loops that have already been unleashed and which, in and of themselves, could dwarf anthropogenic emissions, then it might be possible in such a theoretical and hypothetical world.

(click to enlarge)

But a theoretical and hypothetical world and a world of brutal reality are two very different things. Humans must ultimately answer to brutal reality which discards all of the fabricated economic theorems and pie-in-the-sky myths about the techno-supremacy of modern man that we delude ourselves with. So the cold and hard reality is “No, we are well and truly fucked!” Despite decades of warnings by scientists, we have kept on burning fossil fuels and continue to do so as I write this post. As a matter of fact, growth in fossil fuel consumption is baked into our economic system as far into the future as we care to fantasize. We have backed ourselves into a corner where the only salvation left is some sort of globally coordinated Manhattan project of geo-engineering. And how likely is that to occur, let alone succeed? As David Roberts reports in his latest essay ‘Freaked-out climate scientists urge other freaked-out climate scientists to speak up, fight Man‘, our current enslavement to an infinite growth economic paradigm precludes such a possibility:

…Can we make the radical changes necessary to meet that challenge? No, say climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows in a recent commentary in Nature Climate Change, not “within orthodox political and economic constraints.”

There is no political or economic constraint more orthodox than the primacy of economic growth. No solution to climate change that threatens economic growth can get any traction at all — even the most “alarmist” climate hawks fear to tread there. Which is too bad, Anderson and Bows say, because “climate change commitments are incompatible with short- to medium-term economic growth (in other words, for 10 to 20 years).” What’s worse, “work on adapting to climate change suggests that economic growth cannot be reconciled with the breadth and rate of impacts as the temperature rises towards 4 °C and beyond.” In other words: We either give up economic growth voluntarily for a little while or suffer a climate that will reverse economic growth long-term…

…Anderson and Bows stress that, “within orthodox political and economic constraints,” hitting such a target is wildly unlikely. Absent some pretty revolutionary political and economic changes, it won’t happen. For obvious reasons, scientists shy away from saying this kind of thing in public. They don’t want to depress people or come off as “political.” However, say Anderson and Bows, “away from the microphone and despite claims of ‘green growth’, few if any scientists working on climate change would disagree with the broad thrust of this candid conclusion.”…

The article goes on to explain how our scientific community is hamstrung and browbeaten into reciting and presenting only evidence without expounding upon and revealing what the consequences of those findings will be for humanity:

…scientists remain reticent, often assuming that “the most effective way of engaging is by presenting evidence, without daring to venture, at least explicitly, broader academic judgment.” This kind of just-the-facts reticence, Anderson and Bows say, is neither warranted nor wise given the urgency of current climate circumstances:

[W]e need to be less afraid of making academic judgments. Not unsubstantiated opinions and prejudice, but applying a mix of academic rigour, courage and humility to bring new and interdisciplinary insights into the emerging era. This would be controversial enough in itself. Various social and professional incentives work against academic researchers speaking out beyond their narrow specialties. And there is an entire cottage industry devoted to scolding climate scientists for going “beyond the science” to political analysis or policy advocacy. These latter sins, they are warned, threaten their status as “trusted brokers.” (Because the trusted-broker thing is working so well so far, climate-wise.)

What else can you do, though, when danger of such unthinkable scope and permanence is looming and humanity’s actions in the coming decade will determine the fate of future generations? I mean, it sounds like a sci-fi movie, but it’s real. What can you do if you’re one of the scientists who understands how dire the situation is? These are not ordinary times.

And in conclusion, the article talks of something I have posted about here – the failure and inability of the free market to solve this civilization-ending problem of climate change:

Anyway, as controversial as it is to ask climate researchers to venture broad social and economic judgments, the specific critique that Anderson and Bows offer is even more likely to make some of their straight-laced colleagues wince. It has to do with the “catastrophic and ongoing failure of market economics and the laissez-faire rhetoric accompanying it.” Specifically, market economists (and the politicians and scientists in thrall to them) suffer the “misguided belief that commitments to avoid warming of 2°C can still be realized with incremental adjustments to economic incentives.” They urge their colleagues:

Leave the market economists to fight among themselves over the right price of carbon — let them relive their groundhog day if they wish. The world is moving on and we need to have the audacity to think differently and conceive of alternative futures.

One of the objectives of this blog was to speak truth to power and reveal where the human race is headed. Now that we know our final outcome, our predicament is analogous to being diagnosed with terminal cancer. You people reading this post are an infinitesimal percentage of the global population who are privileged, or perhaps cursed, to be in possession of such depressing knowledge. Where do we go from here? What do we do? How do we live our lives knowing what we know of the dismal future of the world’s youth? The entire edifice of human civilization will become a worldwide ghost city before this century ends. Perhaps the only thing left to do is live each day as if it were our last because there really is no future without some miraculous, radical, and global social change accompanied by unprecedented global cooperation. Those in charge of such matters have chosen temporary preservation of the current system over the long-term survival of our species. Evil and suicidal or foolish and ill-informed… Which is it that best describes the self-destructive choices that have been made?

A truly frightening time-lapse visualization by the NOAA of the Arctic Ice Melt:

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In the End, It Will Be Worse Than a Zero-Sum Game

18 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Arab Spring, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Daniel Quinn, Destruction to Food Supply, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Frederick Engels, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Methane Fields, Neoliberal Capitalism, Occupy Wall Street, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%

I think we can safely shorten that time span to no more than 50 years. Right now I’m with my family, so postings will be light to nonexistent until the beginning of October when I will essentially be in seclusion once again to read more often and study the state of the world. As I write this post, one particular story that stands out is the discovery by Russian scientists of ‘methane fields’ exceeding 1 kilometre escaping from the Laptev Sea, as elaborated upon by Arctic News. In the views of these scientists, methane plumes like the ones they are observing could be catastrophic to this planet’s climate. Other than some obscure website, is anyone talking about the destruction to our food supply that climate change will surely bring about? Make no mistake, this is real news as opposed to the MSM’s three-ring political circus or the perverse reporting of decadent Hollywood parties to toast the christening of a new luxury jaguar car.

Many scientists are saying that the only thing that will save us is global coordinated action and a Manhatten project of geoengineering to halt any further damage from our CO2 emissions and its catastrophic impact on the environment. Others have lamented the total failure of governments to look after the well-being of their people:

Fossil fuel companies are still making profits despite the fact that climate change is so clearly upon us. Our politicians are putting corporate interests above scientific warnings and failing in their duties to the public.”
– link

The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street were initially grassroots movements which evolved as a response to the gross social inequalities of neoliberal capitalism. Washington inadvertently created both movements through their push of the aforementioned economic policies which have made a few extremely wealthy at the expense of those country’s populations. In the near future, the issue of corporate profits over the environment will become a driving force for future social unrest and revolt.
In the end, our ill-conceived exchange of fossil fuels for a stable biosphere will be worse than a zero-sum game when you take into account the hell that climate change will wreak. On our present course, we will be left with an uninhabitable planet. We have only seen the beginning inklings of what human-induced disasters such as drought, ocean acidification, deforestation, and mass species extinction will mean to industrial civilization which has become completely delusional about its “victory” over nature:

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.” ~ Frederick Engels

The Earth giveth and she taketh away. Short-sightedness, greed, and conceit are traits undeserving of long-term survival on this once generous but now scorned planet.

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Get Me Off This Crazy Ride!

15 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Arctic Ice Melt, Capitalism, China's Massive Coal Consumption, Climate Change, CO2 Emissions and GDP, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Global Warming, Greenhouse Gases, Industrial Agriculture, Intensified Global Water Cycles, Methane Release from Thawing Permafrost, Peak Oil, Projected World Energy Consumption, Sir Robert Watson

 
Speaking on climate change in the video above is Sir Robert Watson, retiring chief scientist at Britian’s Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs. He is warning that governments cannot afford to do nothing about greenhouse gas emissions, irrespective of the current state of the economy. He says the hope of restricting the average global temperature rise to 2C is “out the window”.

If we continue the way we are, we’ve got a 50-50 shot of a 3 degree [Celcius] world – and I would not rule out a 5 degree [Celcius] world.   
~ Dr Bob Watson

Hell on Earth is coming to a reality near you:

Here’s the edition of the Royal Society journal that came out of the conference on 4 degrees C of warming. Read through it and see if you think “hell on earth” is an exaggeration. Desertification, water shortages, agricultural disruptions, rising sea levels, vanishing coral, tropical forest die-offs, mass species extinctions, oh my. Kevin Anderson, one of the lead scientists involved, was moved to say that “a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.” ~ Grist

A new article in the Journal “Nature” reports an ominous finding that far more carbon dioxide and methane are being released from parts of Arctic Siberia than previously thought.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that lack of sea ice could drive heat up to 900 miles further inland and cause the melting of permafrost. Most scientists agree that is a recipe for runaway global warming. From the findings of the NCAR/NSIDC Study:

The findings point to a link between rapid sea ice loss and enhanced rate of climate warming, which could penetrate as far as 900 miles inland. In areas where permafrost is already at risk, such as central Alaska, the study suggests that periods of abrupt sea ice loss can lead to rapid soil thaw.

Thawing permafrost may have a range of impacts, including buckled highways and destabilized houses, as well as changes to the delicate balance of life in the Arctic. In addition, scientists estimate that Arctic soils hold at least 30 percent of all the carbon stored in soils worldwide. While scientists are uncertain what will happen if this permafrost thaws, it has the potential to contribute substantial amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Arid regions will become much more dry, and wet regions will experience much more rain due to the warming planet, according to scientists:

A paper in Science today finds rapidly changing ocean salinities as a result of a warming atmosphere have intensified the global water cycle (evaporation and precipitation) by an incredible 4 percent between 1950 and 2000. That’s twice the rate predicted by models.

These same models have long forecast that dry areas of Earth will become drier and wet areas wetter in a warming climate—an intensification of the water cycle driven mostly by the capacity of warmer air to hold and redistribute more moisture in the form of water vapor…

…But the rate of intensification of the global water cycle is happening far faster than imagined: at about 8 percent per degree Celsius of ocean warming since 1950.

At this rate, the authors calculate:

The global water cycle will intensify by a whopping 16 percent in a 2°C warmer world

The global water cycle will intensify by a frightening 24 percent in a 3°C warmer world

…The changes will not be uniform across the globe, but trend toward increased drying of arid areas and increased flooding of wet areas.

And the resulting changes in freshwater availability are likely to be far more destabilizing to human societies and ecosystems than warming alone.

“Changes to the global water cycle and the corresponding redistribution of rainfall will affect food availability, stability, access, and utilization,” says lead author Paul Durack at the University of Tasmania and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

When dealing with a crisis that threatens the very existence of the human species, a rational society would not put the issues of cost-effectiveness and inconveniences to the economy above all else as the deciding factors for taking action. But that is what we are doing, allowing the “ALMIGHTY MARKET” to decide our fate. As explained in another post, this deference to “THE MARKET” to solve such a seemingly abstract problem like climate change is essentially condemning our children to a horrible fate. Climate change is not going to respect or accommodate ‘THE MARKET’, our lifestyle, and mankind’s hubris; it will just wipe us right off the face of the Earth like the pesky and bothersome vermin we have become.

You only have to look at the following graph(click to enlarge) from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2012 to understand how much industrial civilization is locked in to fossil fuels. Do you see that thin dark orange line just below the grey band representing coal? Yeah, that’s renewables.

We are so overly dependent on the high energy density of fossil fuels that the system resists change, with those in charge of it even spending large sums of money to alter public perception on the pernicious effects of burning these CO2-emitting energy sources. The advantages of hydrocarbons, summarized by Tom Murphy, have lured us into drinking an addictive and poisonous elixir:

Fossil fuels are cheap and reliable and are their own storage and allow transportation by car, truck, ship, airplane, and fit seamlessly into our current infrastructure.


Reasons for why carbon emissions will continue their upward trend are described in this article:

Worst ever carbon emissions leave climate on the brink …

• About 80% of the power stations likely to be in use in 2020 are either already built or under construction, the IEA found. Most of these are fossil fuel power stations unlikely to be taken out of service early, so they will continue to pour out carbon – possibly into the mid-century. The emissions from these stations amount to about 11.2Gt, out of a total of 13.7Gt from the electricity sector. These “locked-in” emissions mean savings must be found elsewhere.

“It means the room for manoeuvre is shrinking,” warned Birol.

• Another factor that suggests emissions will continue their climb is the crisis in the nuclear power industry. Following the tsunami damage at Fukushima, Japan and Germany have called a halt to their reactor programmes, and other countries are reconsidering nuclear power.

“People may not like nuclear, but it is one of the major technologies for generating electricity without carbon dioxide,” said Birol. The gap left by scaling back the world’s nuclear ambitions is unlikely to be filled entirely by renewable energy, meaning an increased reliance on fossil fuels.

• Added to that, the United Nations-led negotiations on a new global treaty on climate change have stalled. “The significance of climate change in international policy debates is much less pronounced than it was a few years ago,” said Birol…

…Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, said the global emissions figures showed that the link between rising GDP and rising emissions had not been broken. “The only people who will be surprised by this are people who have not been reading the situation properly,” he said.

Forthcoming research led by Sir David will show the west has only managed to reduce emissions by relying on imports from countries such as China.

Another telling message from the IEA’s estimates is the relatively small effect that the recession – the worst since the 1930s – had on emissions…

And what about that country that, to the shock of many, surpassed the U.S. in carbon emissions 3 years ago?:

In 2009 China consumed 96.9 quads. In 2012 their total is estimated to reach 110.7. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 4.54%. That’s twice as fast as the DOE has predicted going forward.

I’ll remind readers that my estimate for energy consumption in 2035 for China is 247 quads–more than twice what the DOE estimates. Recent growth supports my higher estimates.

Even if China succeeds in building the 150 nuclear plants they aspire to over the next 50 years, they will still be burning more coal in 2035 than the entire world burns now.

The Chinese economy, as I predicted, will start to struggle and even sputter at times between now and then. But if the history of other developing countries is any example, that won’t affect energy consumption nearly as much as one might think. In the United States, that Great Depression? Didn’t affect our energy consumption curve. – link

Lastly, how are we doing on transitioning away from our greenhouse gas emitting, industrial agriculture model of food production? As Stuart Staniford conjectured in his essay ‘Fallacy of Reversibility‘, industrial agriculture has become even more dominant in the age of peak oil, but with adverse effects to the environment:

Harvesting a Climate Disaster – The New York Times

…The farm bill is not only the centerpiece of United States food and agriculture policy, it is also a de facto climate bill. And in this respect, both the Senate and House versions of the legislation are a disaster waiting to happen…

…The proposed farm bill — Senate- or House-style, take your pick — would make American agriculture’s climate problem worse, in two ways. Not only would the bill accelerate global warming by encouraging more greenhouse gas emissions, it would make the nation’s farms more vulnerable to the impacts of those emissions…

…Except in a technical aside, neither the bill passed by the Senate or by the House Committee on Agriculture even mentions climate change.

Coal and cars are blamed, but agriculture is also a major contributor to global warming: by some estimates, it accounts for roughly a third of emissions globally. The industrialized, meat-heavy food system of the United States takes a heavy toll on the atmosphere; it takes an enormous amount of fossil fuel to run farm equipment and harvest the mountains of corn that fatten livestock. And most fertilizers contain nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 298 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a century.

Both of the farm bill proposals would maintain agriculture’s large climate footprint, mainly by continuing to skew subsidies toward a mere handful of commodity crops. The “big five” — wheat, rice, soybeans, cotton and above all corn — have received 84 percent of subsidies since 2004, according to the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group critical of the practice. Subsidies increase with output, encouraging farmers to run highly mechanized operations that plant “fence row to fence row” and apply oceans of fertilizer and pesticide, all of which boost emissions.

But industrial agriculture’s ability to produce gargantuan amounts of food also makes it exceptionally susceptible to climate change. Relying on vast monocultures — the miles and miles of cornfields one passes when driving in Iowa — captures economies of scale. But that lack of diversity invites trouble. A monoculture’s uniformity means that if temperatures spike or a new pest arrives, the damage is likely to spread throughout the entire planted area. By contrast, the diversified landscapes of organic agriculture — corn planted between, say, other vegetables and chicken pens — tend to limit damage.

Farmers can best boost resilience to climate change, scientists say, by improving their soil’s fertility and capacity to retain moisture. That means cutting back on chemical fertilizers, which kill many of the microorganisms that ventilate soil, and shifting to compost and manure fertilizers and crop rotations.

Instead, leading lobbyists for agribusiness want to retain the current production system but shift the mounting climate risks to the taxpayer. Both versions of the farm bill would expand the $11 billion crop insurance program, a move championed by the National Corn Growers Association. The Senate bill, for instance, would authorize $3.8 billion a year for additional insurance.

But neither version would require farmers to take other measures to reduce their climate vulnerability, like investing in healthier soil. In fact, the draft bills would actually make it harder for farmers to do that because the expanded crop insurance would be paid for by cutting the Conservation Stewardship Program, which helps farmers improve their land’s ecological health…

So it looks like we are going balls out in our race toward oblivion. A technologically advanced civilization, once known for sending spacecrafts to distant planets, looks to be headed toward a bleak existence of huddling in subterranean caves and scavenging for insects to eat.

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Who really pulls the strings?:

The megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. The bought-and-paid politicians sitting in Washington are simply the marionettes of the corporations and financial elite who are dictating public policy and regulations.

Preserving the Status Quo

There is no right wing or left wing, only the aristocracy and the serfs (a vertical paradigm). To know this is to be like a fish who has broken the surface of the water, realizing he was in water the whole time.

A Kabuki Play

"What we have, in what passes for US democracy in 2012, is a kabuki play that Cicero put to papyrus 1948 years earlier. All historical empires and war aggressors have used propaganda to claim their looting and police states were necessary and helpful to the 99%. Instead, a sorrowful history tells us they were almost always for the sole benefit of the 1%." - Albert Bates

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Movies and Videos

  • 1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed
  • 1976 Hubbert Clip
  • A meteorite is not the greatest danger of environmental change – The Sixth Extinction
  • After Armageddon – A SHTF scenario
  • American Blackout 2013 National Geographic
  • American Coup
  • An Unreasonable Man (Ralph Nader)
  • Anima Mundi
  • Answering Climate Change Skeptics, Naomi Oreskes
  • Apocalypse, Man (Full Documentary)
  • Apologies Of An Economic Hitman (Full Documentary Movie)
  • Arctic Death Spiral and the Methane Time Bomb
  • Arctic Emergency: Scientists Speak
  • Are Humans Inherently Unsustainable? …Yes.
  • Are Humans Smarter Than Yeast?
  • Atomic Wounds
  • BBC Global Dimming Documentary About Geoengineering & Global Warming
  • Blind Spot
  • Born Into This – Charles Bukowski Documentary
  • Cabot Institute Annual Lecture 2012
  • Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction
  • Capitalism Hits the Fan – Richard Wolff
  • Capitalism is the Crisis (Full Movie)
  • Cinema Politica
  • Clive Hamilton 'Requiem for a Species'
  • Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
  • Conspiracy Rising
  • Consumed – Is Our Consumer Culture Leading to Disaster?
  • Conversations with Great Minds – Climate Scientist Dr. Curt Stager
  • Dark Days – Documentary by Marc Singer
  • David Fridley – Green Dreams: Future or Fantasy?
  • Developing a Sustainable Community – Simon Michaux
  • Do Fox News Viewers Understand Basic Science At All?
  • Do Fox viewers understand the propaganda they are watching?
  • Earth 2100 – Full Documentary / Movie Full HD
  • Earth Days (2009) – Full Movie
  • Earth Under Water – Worldwide Flooding | Sea Level Rise (SLR)
  • END CIV Resist Or Die (Full)
  • END:CIV 2011
  • Facing the Anthropocene: fossil capitalism and the crisis of the earth system
  • Final Warning Limits to Growth
  • Four Horsemen
  • Garbage Warrior [Full Length Documentary]
  • Gasland Part II
  • Geo Scarcity – Geo Destinies in the Coming Age
  • Geologic and human time scales: How can we salvage our global civilization?
  • Green Illusions
  • Green Illusions: "Solar Cells and Other Fairy Tales"
  • Guy McPherson – Earth Extinction 2030
  • Guy’s Climate Chaos Presentation from Pauline Schneider
  • Harvest of Empire
  • Hoodwinked: Who Stole Our World – Presented By John Perkins
  • Into Eternity ( A Nuclear Waste World )
  • Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers • FULL DOCUMENTARY
  • Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs, & Steel
  • Jeremy Jackson: Ocean Apocalypse
  • Joseph Tainter: The Energy Crisis and the End of The Industrial Age
  • Journeyman Pictures
  • Koch Brothers Exposed
  • Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance
  • LAST CALL: the untold reasons of the global crisis
  • Last Hours for Humanity?
  • Lecture on Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter
  • Life After People
  • Manufacturing Consent
  • Modern Black Death – The Next Pandemic – BBC Horizon
  • Nate Hagens – Limits to Growth: Where We Are and What to Do About It
  • Noam Chomsky – Propaganda & Control of the Public Mind
  • Obey
  • Ocean Acidification
  • Ocean Acidification in Earth's Past: Insights to the Future – James Zachos
  • Oil, Smoke & Mirrors
  • Peak mining & implications for natural resource management
  • Permian – Triassic Mayhem: Earth's Largest Mass Extinction
  • Peter Ward Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps
  • Peter Ward The Medea Hypothesis II
  • Peter Ward: The Medea Hypothesis I
  • Photographing the Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima
  • Pirate Television: Financializing America with Randy Mandell
  • Professor Al Bartlett – Arithmetic, Population and Energy
  • Professor Kevin Anderson: Real Clothes for the Emperor – Facing Climate Change
  • Rick Wolff // A Cure for Capitalism
  • Six degrees could change the world
  • Somewhere In New Mexico Before The End Of Time
  • Submedia TV
  • Surplus: Terrorized Into Being Consumers
  • Surviving Progress
  • Techno Fix – Why Technology Won’t Save Us Or the Environment
  • Techno-Fix – Dr. Michael Huesemann interview
  • The Age of Stupid
  • The Big Fix
  • The Century Of The Self
  • The Chomsky Videos
  • The Coming Famine
  • The Corporation : The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
  • The Crash Course
  • The Crisis of Civilization : Full Movie
  • The Day the Earth Nearly Died
  • The Domino Effect – Overpopulation
  • The False Solutions of Green Energy – Wilbert & Foley (PIELC 2014)
  • The Flaw
  • The Fuck-it Point
  • The Long Emergency
  • The Man who Quit Money
  • The Methane Ticking Time Bomb has Struck Again…..
  • The Myth of Capitalism with Michael Parenti
  • The Myth of Sustainability – Guy McPherson
  • The Myth of the Liberal Media: The Propaganda Model of News
  • The Ordinary Madness of Charles Bukowski
  • The Overview Effect
  • The Permian–Triassic Extinction Event [FULL VIDEO]
  • The Planet by Johan Söderberg
  • The Power Principle: (Full Length Documentary)
  • The Secure & the Dispossessed: How the Military and Corporations are Shaping a Climate-Changed World
  • The Shock Doctrine 2009
  • The Sixth Extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert)
  • The Twin Sides of the Fossil Fuel Coin – Guy McPherson
  • There's No Tomorrow (peak oil, energy, growth & the future)
  • Threads (Nuclear War)
  • Tom Murphy: Growth has an Expiration Date
  • TOXIC: AMAZON – FULL LENGTH
  • Up & Coming Liquid Fuel Crisis by Tom Murphy
  • VICE Documentaries
  • What A Way To Go: Life at the end of Empire
  • Who's Afraid Of Machiavelli?

Notes and Documents

  • 'Conspiracy Theories' and Clandestine Politics
  • (2019) UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’
  • 2019 UN Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services(One Million Species At Risk of Extinction)
  • American Empire and Killing Hope – The Essays of William Blum
  • An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security
  • An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for US National Security
  • An Anarchist FAQ Webpage
  • An Inconvenient Truth: Does Responsible Consumption Benefit Corporations More Than Society?
  • Animal Minds and the Foible of Human Exceptionalism
  • Averting Collapse: 6 Steps
  • “Are Humans Unsustainable by Nature?”
  • Book review of Turchin’s “Secular Cycles” and “War & Peace & War”
  • BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED
  • Burning Energy to Keep Cool: The Hidden Energy Crisis in Saudi Arabia
  • Capitalism cannot solve our ecological collapse: articles by Richard Smith
  • Capitalism's Ideological Crutches
  • Carmageddon and Karl Marx
  • Carmaggedon or Rational Discourse?
  • Charles Eisenstein Essays
  • Chatham House: Sustainable Energy Security
  • Christopher Clugston ~ Research Papers and Essays
  • Climate and collapse: Only through the insurrection of civil societies will we avoid the worst
  • Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis (2012)
  • Climate Change is Simple – We Do Something or We're Screwed
  • Climate Change: Just the Facts.
  • Consistency in American Foreign Policy
  • Could the 'Black Death' Strike Again?
  • Dangerous Climate Warming: Myth & Reality
  • Dangerous Speech Project
  • Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis
  • Dennis Meadows: “There is nothing that we can do”
  • Desert
  • DieOff.org
  • Dinosaur, We
  • Dispelling myths about oil
  • Dr. Steven Best – Writings
  • Drill, Baby, Drill
  • Earth may be 140 years away from reaching carbon levels not seen in 56 million years
  • Ecoglobe: Requiem
  • Edward Morbius
  • Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) for photovoltaic solar systems in regions of moderate insolation
  • English version of German military peak oil study
  • Entropy and Economics
  • Eric R. Pianka: The Vanishing Book of Life on Earth
  • Fleeing Babylon
  • FOURTH NATIONAL CLIMATE ASSESSMENT Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States
  • FRACKING GONE WRONG: FINDING A BETTER WAY
  • Getting to the Nearest Star? Not in Our Lifetimes…If Ever!
  • Gleanings for an Understanding of the Endgame
  • Global Drought Monitor
  • Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism
  • Global Warming & Climate Change Myths
  • Globalization and the Emergence of a Transnational Oligarchy
  • Green Capitalism: the God that Failed
  • Green Capitalism: The God That Failed (Updated)
  • GRIFFIN: The political writings of G.S. Griffin, activist and author
  • Hirsch Report
  • How a Culture Dies
  • How Many Gigatons of Carbon Dioxide?
  • How to Avoid Population Overshoot and Collapse
  • Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind
  • Humans will not 'migrate' to other planets, Nobel winner says: The 77-year-old said he felt the need to "kill all the statements that say 'OK, we will go to a liveable planet if one day life is not possible on earth'."
  • Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future
  • Implication of our technological species being first and early
  • Intentional Ignorance
  • Interview with Jay Hanson
  • Is Global Collapse Imminent?
  • Jason W. Moore: Essays
  • Johnny Reb's Freethought Website
  • Julian Cribb
  • Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II – Part I by William Blum
  • Le Monde interview with Dr Robert Hirsch from September 2010
  • Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
  • Living Dangerously: Stories of Climate Change
  • Living for the Moment while Devaluing the Future
  • Lloyd's adds its voice to dire 'peak oil' warnings
  • Looking Back on the 'Limits to Growth'
  • MARY BOOTH ON THE MYTH OF “GREEN” ENERGY FROM WOOD
  • Michael E. Mann
  • Mysterious Siberian Crater Found at "End of the World" May Portend Methane Climate Catastrophe
  • NATURAL CAPITAL AT RISK: THE TOP 100 EXTERNALITIES OF BUSINESS
  • Natural Law
  • Natural Way of Farming Masanobu – Fukuoka Green Philosophy
  • Nature’s Laws No Longer Apply…
  • Net Energy and The Economy
  • New scientific study predicts that plastic pollution and toxic chemical-induced ocean acidification will cause a trophic cascade collapse of the entire marine ecosystem, destroying human society within the next 25 years.
  • NOAA & U.S. Geological Survey Interactive Sea Level Rise Map (up to 25 ft)
  • Noam Chomsky on human extinction: The corporate elite are actively courting disaster
  • Oil and gas industry using military psyops techniques to reduce opposition to fracking
  • OilCrash.com
  • On Human Nature
  • Partnership for Civil Justice
  • Peak Energy, Climate Change, and the Collapse of Global Civilization
  • Peak Oil – A Turning Point for Mankind by Dr. Colin J. Campbell
  • Peter H. Gleick : Has the U.S. Passed the Point of Peak Water?
  • Plastic and toxic chemical-induced ocean acidification will cause a plankton crisis that will devastate humanity over the next 25 years, unless we stop the pollution.
  • Poles Threaten “Climate Chaos” from Continued Warming
  • Policy Makers Slow to Take Peak Oil Action
  • Power Point Presentation on “Corporate Globalization, Corporate Power, Free Trade, Mega Trade Agreements and the Negative Impacts of TPP” by Janet M Eaton, PhD
  • Power Shift Away From Green Illusions
  • Primitivism
  • Professor Charles Hall
  • Renewable energy – Hope or hype?
  • RENEWABLE ENERGY – THE ARGUMENT AGAINST ITS CAPACITY TO SUSTAIN AN ENERGY-INTENSIVE SOCIETY
  • Richard Reese on 'Near Term Extinction'
  • Saudi Arabia May Become Oil Importer by 2030
  • Searching for a Miracle: 'Net Energy' Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society
  • Secular Cycles, Chapter 1
  • Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter planet, by Mark Lynas
  • Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
  • Stephanie McMillan's 'Capitalism Must Die'
  • TED talks – a recipe for civilisational disaster
  • The Anarchist Library
  • The Authoritarian Personality
  • The Bichler & Nitzan Archives
  • The climate threat: What our children can expect
  • The Coming Reality of Sea Level Rise: Too Fast Too Soon
  • The Consumer Trap
  • The Current Mass Extinction
  • The Damage of Current Human Activities Without Precedent in Past 'Mass Extinction' Fossil Records.
  • The Discovery of Global Warming
  • The End of Growth, Seven Years Later
  • The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
  • The evolution and psychology of self-deception
  • The Final Empire THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION
  • The Final Empire: THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION
  • The Free Press
  • The Future of Ice Sheets and Sea Ice: Between Reversible Retreat and Unstoppable Loss
  • The Gore Vidal Pages
  • The Great Oil Swindle
  • The human brain is in Denial.
  • The Human Nature of Unsustainability
  • The Idiot's Guide To Buying A Congressman
  • The Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & U.S. Policy
  • The Last Great Global Warmıng
  • The Limits to Growth (PDF scanned version)
  • The Loss of Biodiversity: a Dangerous Game
  • The Meritocracy Myth
  • The moral environment on Wall Street is pathological — money rules all
  • The Myth of the 1970′s Global Cooling Consensus
  • The myth of US self-sufficiency in crude oil
  • THE NEED FOR A NEW ECONOMIC SYSTEM: "…he feared that human society is headed for a crash."
  • The Network of Global Corporate Control
  • The New Middle Ages
  • The physics of long-run global economic growth
  • THE POPULATION PROBLEM AND SOCIALISM
  • The Power Elite
  • The Principle of Imminent Collapse
  • The Science of Apocalypse
  • The Story of P(ee)
  • The Story of Phosphorus: 7 reasons why we need to transform phosphorus use in the global food system
  • The Temptation of The Technofix (The Quest for “New Nature”)
  • The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
  • There Is No "Green" Energy
  • Thomas Homer-Dixon
  • Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar Photovoltaics
  • Tipping Towards the Unknown
  • Too many bodies? The return and disavowal of the population question
  • Trade-Off: Financial system supply-chain cross contagion – a study in global systemic collapse
  • Twenty Premises on Industrial Civilization from Derrick Jensen
  • Twenty-First Century Collapse
  • Underminers: A Practical Guide to Radical Change
  • We Are All Madoffs
  • Wealth and Inequality – Pareto, Gini and Contingency
  • What Evolution Is?
  • Who Rules America: An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%
  • Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power
  • Why shale gas won’t end our energy woes
  • Why Space Opera Won't Fly
  • Why won't planting trees stop global warming?
  • Zygmunt Bauman

RSS 3 Quarkes Daily

  • 3 Quarks Daily has moved!
  • polixeni papapetrou (1960 - 2018)
  • bob dorough (1923 - 2018)
  • charles neville (1939 - 2018)
  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘This could be the beginning of a revolution’
  • Sunday Poem
  • Why Only Art Can Save Us: An Interview with Santiago Zabala
  • Cell by Cell, Scientists Map the Genetic Steps as Eggs Become Animals
  • The Islamic State’s Lingering Legacy among Young Men from the Mosul Area
  • Where the wild tales are: how stories teach kids to nurture nature

RSS A Closer Look

  • Cookies
  • The structure of this blog
  • Supreme Court not representative
  • Spanking Is Physical Abuse, Study Shows
  • Pseudo-Patriots
  • Everyone's Irrational
  • The Mathematics of Inequality
  • The Arctic may be sea ice-free in summer by the 2030s, new study warns
  • Good news on energy
  • Spanking and crime rates

RSS A Prosperous Way Down

  • A really inconvenient truth
  • Energy ethics for survival of people in nature
  • Don’t come around here no more
  • Systems thinking and the narrative of climate change
  • Nuclear power and the collapse of society
  • A systemic perspective on life
  • The Asian Miracles: Free renewables made it all possible
  • Responsibility for regeneration
  • Treatment wetlands equal cleaner water and more birds
  • Reflections on scientific illiteracy

RSS Adam Curtis Blog

  • SAVE YOUR KISSES FOR ME
  • WHILE THE BAND PLAYED ON
  • HE'S BEHIND YOU
  • MENTAL CHANNEL NUMBER ONE - THE MAN FROM MARS
  • HOW TO KILL A RATIONAL PEASANT
  • IF YOU TAKE MY ADVICE - I'D REPRESS THEM
  • WHITE NEGRO FOR MAYOR
  • RUPERT MURDOCH - A PORTRAIT OF SATAN
  • BODYBUILDING AND NATION-BUILDING
  • WHO WOULD GOD VOTE FOR?

RSS Adam Vs The Man

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RSS AdBusters

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RSS Against the Grain

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RSS Aljazeera

  • Deadly blast rocks explosives factory in Turkey’s capital
  • The AI apocalypse: Imminent risk or misdirection?
  • Sudan’s 24-hour truce begins amid dire humanitarian situation
  • ‘Collective punishment’: Israel demolishes Palestinian homes
  • How will Saudi Arabia’s oil output cut affect prices?
  • Can Trump run for president after indictment?
  • Pakistan’s FM: ‘We’re at the fork in the road towards democracy’
  • Colombian gang leaders announce talks to address urban violence
  • Discarded mortar detonates killing more than 20 in Somalia: Media
  • Putin claims Russian forces halting Ukrainian counteroffensive

RSS Aljazeera – Opinion

  • Deadly blast rocks explosives factory in Turkey’s capital
  • The AI apocalypse: Imminent risk or misdirection?
  • Sudan’s 24-hour truce begins amid dire humanitarian situation
  • ‘Collective punishment’: Israel demolishes Palestinian homes
  • How will Saudi Arabia’s oil output cut affect prices?
  • Can Trump run for president after indictment?
  • Pakistan’s FM: ‘We’re at the fork in the road towards democracy’
  • Colombian gang leaders announce talks to address urban violence
  • Discarded mortar detonates killing more than 20 in Somalia: Media
  • Putin claims Russian forces halting Ukrainian counteroffensive

RSS All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go

  • Another Christmas
  • Objective Crisis, Subjective Crisis
  • Jesse Jackson on poverty
  • Quote of the day
  • Voting and the ‘rule by law’
  • Wendy Brown on neoliberalism and democracy
  • Thomas Ferguson discusses our situation
  • This way doth dictatorship lie
  • Quote of the day
  • President Kamala Harris

RSS Alternative Radio

  • [Omer Aziz] Fascism in America

RSS AlterNet

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RSS Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

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RSS Anarchist News

  • Chatzianggelou in solidarity w/ Michailidis
  • Anti-LGBTQ+ Neo-Nazi Chased out of Anarchist Bookstore
  • Green Anarchy Graffiti Spotted In North Jersey
  • Update on the June 7-8 hearings of the Diamante trial
  • Call For Action Against The Moms For Liberty Conference
  • Pakistan: Activists celebrate Bakunin's 208th birthday
  • Alfredo Salerni is no Longer With Us
  • News about Belarusian anarchist prisoners from March 2023
  • Anarchist Zines & Pamphlets Published in May 2023
  • [Athens] Banner drop in solidarity with G. Michailidis

RSS Antony Loewenstein

  • The Majority Report tackles The Palestine Laboratory
  • LitHub speaks The Palestine Laboratory
  • Electronic Intifada on the how and why of testing weapons in Palestine
  • The Australian Greens strengthens its policy on Israel/Palestine
  • TRT World interview on Saudi and Israeli romancing
  • The challenge in defanging the Palestine laboratory
  • Better Reading interview on Zionism, Judaism and Palestine
  • Background Briefing interview on Palestine, Wikileaks and war crimes
  • Chatham House reviews The Palestine Laboratory
  • “The Harvard of anti-terrorism”

RSS Apocadocs

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RSS Arctic Emergency Institute

  • Declining Summer Sea Ice Threatens More than Arctic Wildlife

RSS Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG)

  • AMEG Strategic Plan
  • Breaking the Chain
  • AMEG Policy Brief
  • The biggest story of all time
  • Getting the picture
  • Storm exacerbates Arctic predicament
  • Food security threatened by sea ice loss
  • Supplementary evidence to the EAC from John Nissen on behalf of AMEG
  • Message from the Arctic Methane Emergency Group

RSS Arctic News

  • Smoke over North America
  • A Climate of Betrayal
  • Arctic sea ice under threat
  • Nuremberg trials for imperiling all and bringing on mass extinction of species
  • Will there be Arctic sea ice left in September 2023?
  • Humans may be extinct in 2026
  • High sea surface temperature in North Atlantic
  • Temperatures rising fast March 2023
  • IPCC keeps downplaying the danger even as reality strikes
  • Sea surface temperature at record high

RSS Arctic Sea Ice

  • PIOMAS December 2019
  • PIOMAS November 2019
  • PIOMAS October 2019
  • PIOMAS September 2019
  • PIOMAS August 2019
  • Comparing
  • PIOMAS July 2019

RSS Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis

  • Springing into summer
  • A slow start to the Arctic spring
  • From polar dawn to dusk
  • Arctic sea ice maximum at fifth lowest on satellite record
  • Transition time
  • Antarctic sea ice settles on record low extent, again
  • Antarctic sea ice extent sets a new record low
  • Arctic sea ice low, Antarctic lower
  • December lows
  • Lingering open water areas

RSS Around the Coast Mountains

  • The name’s Mark… Mark BC
  • Packrafting / Fatbiking Buntzen Lake
  • My New Surly Pugsley Fatbike Build
  • Salsipuedes Canyon by Fatbike
  • Bridge River Recon Part 3 — Chilcotin Mountains Park
  • Bridge River Recon Part 2
  • Bridge River Recon, Part 1
  • Chilcotin Bikerafting Route
  • May 25 to 28 — Long Beach, California to Alfonsinas, Mexico
  • Ring Pass, Attempt #2

RSS Arthur Silber

  • Moving Interruptus, and Why Hospitals Suck
  • Crisis
  • How Many Damn Fucking Times Do I Have to Explain This?
  • So Close, Yet So Far
  • Very Sick, Very Scared
  • Help! Please
  • Mama's Last Hug
  • Twilight Zone America
  • Concerning Moral Judgment, and Moral Monsters
  • SERIOUS TROUBLE: Pain. Hospital. ???

RSS Arundhati Roy

  • Modi’s model is at last revealed for what it is: violent Hindu nationalism underwritten by big business | Arundhati Roy
  • This is no ordinary spying. Our most intimate selves are now exposed | Arundhati Roy
  • ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe – podcast
  • Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe: ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’
  • Modi's brutal treatment of Kashmir exposes his tactics – and their flaws | Arundhati Roy
  • Arundhati Roy extract: 'The backlash came in police cases, court appearances and even jail'
  • Literature provides shelter. That's why we need it | Arundhati Roy
  • Amid arrests and killings, Bangladesh and India must fight censorship | Arundhati Roy
  • An exclusive extract from Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness
  • Edward Snowden meets Arundhati Roy and John Cusack: ‘He was small and lithe, like a house cat’

RSS Arundhati Roy Says

  • A perfect day for democracy
  • Arundhati Roy speaks about the issue of rape in India
  • We Call This Progress
  • ‘Those Who’ve Tried To Change The System Via Elections Have Ended Up Being Changed By It'
  • Roy Against the Machine
  • If we do not love people, what are we fighting for?
  • All roads lead to Sharjah book fair
  • ‘Fairy princess’ to ‘instinctive critic’
  • Arundhati Roy shuns 'activist' tag
  • State attacking tribals in name of Green Hunt: Roy

RSS ASPO – USA

  • On hiatus
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 23 October 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 17 October 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 10 October 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 3 October 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 26 September 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 19 September 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 12 September 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 5 September 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 29 August 2022

RSS Avedon’s Sideshow

  • But only now my love has grown
  • You can't jump a jet plane like you can a freight train
  • Did you have to traumatize my kids?
  • And in your death's mask face there are no signs which can be seen
  • Don't let it slip away
  • And hope that my dreams will come true
  • You can not do that, it breaks all the rules
  • Twelfthnight
  • You just gotta call on me
  • There's too much confusion

RSS Bad Astronomy

  • The SEC’s Crypto Crackdown
  • Can a Florida Judge Protect Trump from Jack Smith’s Case?
  • Why “The Ultimatum: Queer Love” Ultimately Fails
  • The Slatest Jun 9: The Trump Classified Documents Indictment Have Been Unsealed—and Whew Boy!
  • Donald Trump’s Second Indictment—This Time in Federal Court
  • You Can Get Married in a Room Where It Appears Donald Trump Hoarded Classified Documents
  • The Most Damning Part of the Trump Indictment
  • Unsealed Indictment Formally Accuses Donald Trump of Keeping National Secrets Near a Toilet
  • The Documents Trump Hoarded at Mar-a-Lago Are Even More Sensitive Than We Thought
  • I Discovered Something Very Unexpected on My Teen’s Phone. What Now?

RSS Barbara Ehrenreich

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RSS BBC: Science & Environment

  • Wildfires: UK to set up new Mediterranean-style specialist units
  • El Niño planet-warming weather phase has begun
  • Is climate change fuelling Canada's wildfires?
  • Crocodile found to have made herself pregnant
  • Climate change: How is my country doing on tackling it?
  • Could ultra-processed foods be harmful for us?
  • 'Extinct' butterfly species reappears in UK
  • Solar panels - an eco-disaster waiting to happen?
  • Are tornadoes in the US getting worse?
  • Conservationists tackle decline of Scottish coastal species

RSS Big Picture Agriculture

  • BIG PICTURE AGRICULTURE'S LATEST NEWS
  • How to Stay Informed About Agriculture, Food, and Farming Issues
  • Dr. Walter Falcon's 2019 Iowa Farm Report
  • Agriculture Reading Picks
  • The Merits of Amaranth
  • Global Food and Agriculture Photos October 28, 2018
  • Unloading Livestock in Ohio 1938
  • Agriculture Reading Picks
  • Managed Rotational Grazing with Profitable Dairy in Minnesota
  • Global Food and Agriculture Photos October 21, 2018

RSS Bill Moyers

  • PODCAST: Dr. Bandy Lee Saw It Coming – The Violence Foretold in Donald Trump’s Election
  • Trump-Russia-Ukraine Timeline
  • Insurrection Timeline
  • Juneteenth: America’s Other Independence Day
  • March 30, 2021
  • Letters From an American: Heather Cox Richardson
  • The Pandemic Timeline
  • Racism in America
  • Bill Moyers On Democracy Podcast
  • Stop Attacks on Asian-Americans NOW!

RSS Bit Tooth Energy

  • Waterjetting 37e - Using Cavitation to disintegrate rock
  • Waterjetting 37d - Underground Drilling with Waterjets
  • Waterjetting 37c - A Drilling Diversion
  • Waterjetting 37b - How safe is it?
  • Waterjetting 37a - Removing Explosives
  • Waterjetting 36d - Going through more complex walls.
  • Waterjetting 36c - Cutting walls
  • Waterjetting 36b - Katrina anniversary and the power of water
  • Waterjetting 36a - Jet stripping of tires
  • Waterjetting 35e - A low cost version of the soil sucker

RSS Bizarro Blog

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RSS Brane Space

  • Solutions To Simple Linear Algebra Problems (4)
  • Dystopian Skies In Eastern U.S. Provide Preview Of Life At Cusp Of Runaway Greenhouse Effect
  • The "Mind Is Flat"? No "Inner Mental World"? No Specific Knowledge? Then We're Already In A Realm Of Illusion
  • Solving Simple Problems In Linear Algebra (4)
  • Don't Blame Biden For Ongoing Inflation -- And Why Only An Idiot Would Make A Big Deal Over Biden's AFA Fall
  • Solution To Simple Linear Algebra Problem (3)
  • Newcomer Independent Yemi Mobolade Trounces Career Conservo To Become Colorado Springs First Black Mayor
  • Solving Simple Problems In Linear Algebra (3)
  • Cocky House Dems' Bravado During 2022 Lame Duck Is Partly Responsible for the Debt 'Pickle' We're In
  • Solutions To Simple Linear Algebra Problems (2)

RSS Brave New World

  • Islam: The Overlooked Aspect of Rumi’s Poetry
  • Remembering Nur ad-Din Zengi: The Light of Faith
  • Francophobia Among Muslims: Just Another Myth?
  • A Year in Kazakhstan: Some General Observations
  • ‘Dirilis Ertugrul’ — A History We’ve Forgotten?
  • Almaty, Kazakhstan: City of Tourists and Mountains
  • Nur-Sultan City (Astana): A Young and Futuristic City
  • Tashkent, Uzbekistan: The City with 2200+ Years of History
  • Remembering Berke Khan, 1209-66
  • Tbilisi, Georgia — The City Where (Almost) Everyone Owns a Hotel

RSS Breaking the Set

  • Abby Martin Breaks the Set One Last Time
  • Never Stop Breaking the Set!
  • Cuba Part III: The Evolution of Revolution
  • Cuba Part II: Ebola Solidarity & Castro’s Daughter on Gay Rights
  • Why Are Americans Getting Their Medical Degrees in Cuba?
  • Cuba Part I: Revolution, Sabotage & Un-Normal Relations
  • Why the CIA Won’t Give Up on Venezuela | Interview with Eva Golinger
  • [531] Bayer Infects Thousands with HIV, Clinton's Shocking Bedfellows & Netanyahu’s Cartoon Lies
  • CIA Torture Whistleblower John Kiriakou: Wake Up, You’re Next
  • Abby Responds to John McCain Promoting Breaking the Set

RSS Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  • Artificial intelligence: challenges and controversies for US national security
  • Why the IAEA model may not be best for regulating artificial intelligence
  • Wildfires push air quality in East Coast cities almost off the charts
  • Once ‘defanged,’ H5N1 bird flu is gaining teeth again
  • Most AI research shouldn’t be publicly released
  • ‘Uncharted territory’: Warming oceans and disappearing sea ice alarm scientists
  • Ukrainian dam is destroyed; nuclear plant lives in a ‘grace period’
  • One way attack: How loitering munitions are shaping conflicts
  • New START: To succeed, plan for failure
  • Scientists identify over 5,000 new species at future deep-sea mining site

RSS Business Insider

  • 2 blind passengers say being ordered to leave a cruise ship before it set sail was 'humiliating': report
  • I tried the highly touted 'monk mode' productivity hack but burned out again — this time for a different reason
  • A man said Dave Ramsey's blunt advice 7 years ago helped him get out of $38,000 of car debt
  • The moon's pull is so strong it may trigger earthquakes on Earth. Scientists are still baffled by its power.
  • I wanted to simplify my life, so I downsized my big house for a rental home and sold most of my stuff. I feel like I can breathe for the first time in years.
  • Anthony Bourdain died 5 years ago. Here's 5 ways he helped reshape the food industry.
  • A sushi chain is suing a teen who licked a soy sauce bottle for nearly half a million dollars. His lawyer argues the teen never meant for footage of the incident to go viral.
  • You're wrong Zuck — the metaverse really is just sitting alone on a couch
  • Chris Christie — a onetime Trump ally turned foe — calls the case laid out in the indictment 'devastating'
  • A 'lifelong criminal' who told his wife — and a jury — that he had 'fun' on January 6 was sentenced to 6 years in prison for attacking cops

RSS C-Realm

  • Automation and SJWs: A Conversation with James Howard Kunstler
  • It's official. The Age of Limits gathering is on hiatus
  • Three Conferences in Three Weeks
  • Mantra and Collapse
  • Dirty Pool: A Response to Guy McPherson
  • Interview with Dmytri Kleiner, Venture Communist and Miscommunications Technologist
  • Epochs and Applecarts
  • The Smell of Betterness
  • Descent in Anarchy?
  • Has Charles Mann Turned to the Dark Side?

RSS Cagle: Premium Cartoon News

  • TAKING ONE FOR THE TEAM
  • WILDFIRES MADE IN CANADA
  • PUTIN’S BRAIN
  • SMOKEY’S TEARS
  • ASSAULT RIFLE HUNTING
  • NAACP should focus less on symbolism, more on action
  • DHS invites in, then releases criminal aliens
  • Chris Christie’s can’t win, but he can serve a good purpose
  • SUPERBUG MRSA
  • MANKIND LOVES EARTH

RSS Cassandra’s Legacy

  • Cassandra is Dead. Long Live Cassandra!
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect": The Collapse of Saudi Arabia's Water Supply
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect"
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest post on "The Seneca Effect"
  • Ugo Bardi's latest post on "The Seneca Effect"
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect". The Hydrogen Myth
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect." The Tunnel Vision Problem
  • Cassandra has Moved
  • Censorship: How the West is becoming more and more like the old Soviet Union
  • Donald Trump: The Sacrifice of the Sacred King

RSS Censored News

  • New Wave of Violence Targets Natives: Cops, feds, corporations engulfed in new rage of power and greed
  • Dine' Woman Terrorized by Cops and Lithium Americas while Protecting Paiute Massacre Site
  • American Indian Genocide Museum 'How Indian Territory Became the State Of Oklahoma'
  • Ox Sam Camp Being Raided, Arrests Underway at Paiute Massacre Site
  • Choking with grief, Myron Dewey's family described their loss, as court hands down minimal sentence
  • Driver of Truck Killing Myron Dewey to be Sentenced Today
  • The Death of Paiute Journalist Myron Dewey: The Poisonous Destruction by the U.S. Government
  • Descendants of Ghost Dancers Protect Paiute Massacre Site from Canada's Lithium Americas
  • Mohawk Nation News 'Rocking Mohawk Mothers'
  • MNN -- INNU & GUARDIANS OF NITASSINAN EVICT LOGGERS

RSS Center For Biological Diversity

  • Legal Agreement Gives West Coast Fishers New Shot At Crucial Protections
  • Press Conference Monday to Explain Harms From Environmental Law Rollbacks
  • Rare New Mexico Plant Proposed for Endangered Species Protections
  • Legal Intervention Defends Protections for Lesser Prairie Chickens
  • Legal Victory Gives Southern Hognose Snake Another Chance at Endangered Species Protections
  • Federal Judge Nixes Approval of Idaho Phosphate Mine
  • Supreme Court Denies Oil Industry Challenge to California Offshore Fracking Moratorium
  • Global Plastics Treaty Negotiations End in Paris With “Zero Draft” Still to Come
  • Embattled Puerto Rico Dredging Project Faces Court Hearing
  • Secretary Haaland Protects Chaco Canyon From Oil, Gas Drilling

RSS Center for Investigative Journalism

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RSS Center for Economic & Policy Research

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RSS Charles Eisenstein’s Blog

  • Peace-building
  • FASCHISMUS UND DAS ANTIFESTIVAL
  • Das Fest ist tot, es lebe das Fest
  • Die Erde als Tempel
  • Time to Push
  • The Rehearsal is Over
  • Some Stuff I’m Reading
  • Beyond Industrial Medicine
  • A Temple of this Earth
  • The Sacrificial King

RSS Chomsky

  • The Kind of Anarchism I Believe in, and What's Wrong with Libertarians
  • Upcoming speaking event in Boston with Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, and Jeremy Scahill
  • Violence and Dignity: Reflections on the Middle East (2013 Edward Said Lecture)
  • How Noam Chomsky is discussed, by Glenn Greenwald
  • Profile of Noam Chomsky in the Financial Times
  • Brief profile of Noam Chomsky in The Guardian (UK), by journalist Charles Glass
  • Rare video of Noam Chomsky interviewed with Gore Vidal in 1991
  • Complete videorecording of 1971 debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault
  • Noam Chomsky profile in the Financial Times
  • Additional video excerpt of Noam Chomsky speech at East Stroudsburg University, Pennsylvania

RSS Chris Hedges

  • Whitewash and War Zones
  • How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine
  • How Kelp Can Help Save the Oceans
  • Asian Americans and Affirmative Action: An Interview with Jeff Chang
  • NYC Officials Were Unprepared for the Airpocalypse
  • Fighting the Patriarchy in Mother Russia
  • Third of Humanity Could Be Pushed Out of Most Livable Environment
  • Indigenous Tribes Respect Multiple Gender Identities—Anti-Trans Bills Threaten Long Tradition
  • 250,000 Floridians Get Kicked off Medicaid as Governor DeSantis Tours the Country Raking in Campaign Cash
  • Festival of Riches: Cannes Premieres by Godard, Wenders, Scorsese and More

RSS Class Warfare Blog

  • But Whadabout . . .
  • Trump Claims His Indictment is a Hoax
  • Donald J Trump: “Orange is the New Black”
  • Was the Founding American Dream an Illusion?
  • It’s a Miracle I Tells Yuh!
  • The AIs are Coming for Us!
  • Free Will, Again . . . Again?
  • Signs and Portents
  • We’ve Had No True Christians™ for Millennia
  • Eighteen . . . Really?

RSS Cliff Schecter

  • ‘Collective punishment’: Israel demolishes Palestinian homes
  • How will Saudi Arabia’s oil output cut affect prices?
  • Can Trump run for president after indictment?
  • Pakistan’s FM: ‘We’re at the fork in the road towards democracy’
  • Colombian gang leaders announce talks to address urban violence
  • Discarded mortar detonates killing more than 20 in Somalia: Media
  • Putin claims Russian forces halting Ukrainian counteroffensive
  • Four children found in Colombian jungle 40 days after plane crash
  • Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 472
  • Canadian appointee investigating China election claims steps down

RSS Climate and Capitalism

  • Latest data reveals ‘unprecedented’ increase in global warming
  • Industrial farming has killed billions of birds
  • Coverup: Industry hid dangers of ‘forever chemicals’
  • The ‘net zero’ hoax: Chevron’s fraudulent climate plan exposed
  • Ecological ruin or ecological revolution?
  • Global heat will hit new records in next five years
  • Has the ocean heat bomb been ignited?
  • Capital’s long war to dispossess the poor
  • Indigenous fighters resist forest destruction in Peru
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, May 2023

RSS Climate Central

  • The looming threat for Maine’s iconic potato industry
  • Ellis Island, lighthouses among historic NJ sites flooding as seas rise
  • Still rare in Iowa, electric car powers Des Moines family’s home during blackouts
  • Storied Maine ski resort bets future on reining in high costs of warmer winters
  • Hardly any past Winter Olympic host cities will have the snow to host in 60 years
  • Data may be Colorado’s best bet to mitigate increasing wildfire risk on the Front Range
  • How sea level rise is affecting your commute to and around Atlantic City
  • ‘A moral imperative’: Monastic sisters in rural Midwest make faith-based case for climate action
  • As flooding amplifies along the East Coast, Buddhist and Jewish faith leaders join the climate fight
  • ‘Preach now or mourn in the future’: How Key West faith leaders are confronting climate change

RSS Climate Change: The Next Generation

  • Historic Greenland ice sheet rainfall unraveled
  • Flip Flop: Why Variations in Earth's Magnetic Field Aren't Causing Today's Climate Change
  • Let's call climate change deniers what they really are: CLIMATE LIARS!
  • Amy Westerfelt: The Reason COVID-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation
  • Bill McKibben's response to Michael Moore's Planet of the Humans
  • WaPo: The Congo rain forest is losing ability to absorb carbon dioxide. That’s bad for climate change
  • Mark Carney of the Bank of England unveils climate stress test
  • Tropical forests may be heating Earth by 2035
  • Roger Harrabin, BBC: Bank of England chief Mark Carney issues climate change warning
  • Evidence that an ice-free Arctic Ocean allowed ancient CO2 and methane emissions

RSS Climate Citizen

  • Australia at Global Plastics Treaty negotiations in Paris #INC2
  • Importance of funding active transport infrastructure in Merri-bek budget to 2027
  • Logging Native Forests in Victoria to end by 1 January 2024, saving 14 million tonnes of carbon by 2030
  • Submission on Synthetic Turf to Moonee Valley Council for JH Allan Reserve
  • Guest Post: Despairing about climate change? These 4 charts on the unstoppable growth of solar may change your mind
  • Australia ramps up funding for energy efficiency in Budget 2023. Baba Brinkman: Insulate it
  • Melbourne Protest at Korean Government agencies funding the Santos' Barossa Gas project
  • Australia talking renewables at Petersberg Climate Dialogue 2023 while new gas projects launch
  • Email to the Treasurer for Budget 2023: stop subsidising fossil fuels
  • Guest Post: Labor’s scheme to cut industrial emissions is worryingly flexible

RSS Climate Code Red

  • James Hansen’s new climate bomb: Are today’s greenhouse gas levels enough to raise sea levels by 60+ metres?
  • Why markets fail on fossil fuel pollution, heralding an era of climate disruption
  • Are climate–security risks too hot to handle for the Albanese government?

RSS Climate Connections

  • Climate Connections Update
  • CIC’s environmental and social justice photography contest open for entries
  • FBI Harassing Activists in Pacific Northwest
  • Global Justice Ecology Project Executive Director Anne Peterman on the GE American Chestnut
  • Zapatistas Host Festival of Resistance and Rebellion
  • GMO Chestnuts Draw Scrutiny this Holiday
  • Photo Essay: The Pillaging of Paraguay
  • Greenpeace Chooses Marketing Over Ethics in Peru Action

RSS Climate Denial Crock of the Week

  • Fox Weather: What are the Long Term Health Effects of Wildfire Smoke?
  • If You Think It’s been Bad in New York, Check This Video from Canada’s Fires
  • Journalist: “We are In an Information War”
  • NBC News: Is Smoke Laden Air the New Normal?
  • Solar for Soil, Water, Pollinators and Farmers
  • What are the Dangers of Wildfire Smoke?
  • In Smoke Emergency, Fossil Fuel “Expert” Insists Dirty Air is “no Health Risk”
  • Tropical Bacterium Found on US Gulf Coast
  • Have Wildfires Increased in Canada?
  • NOAA’s Newest El Nino Notes in the News

RSS Climate Progress

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RSS Climate Snapshot

  • "Carbon tsunami" lead by Enbridge Northern Gateway takes aim at BC
  • BC's tar sands? Thirteen proposed LNG projects equivalent to 13 times current BC emissions
  • Car Carbon series: cool new animation, plus the jaw-dropping impact it left out
  • Climate change fuels both California's record drought and "polar vortex" storms
  • Obama's Keystone XL delay forces Harper into the "choose first" hot seat
  • Four charts reveal gigantic climate impact from proposed Kinder Morgan mega-pipeline
  • Climate fail. Surging fossil fuels are leaving renewable energy far, far behind.
  • Twenty one ways America would destroy a safe climate -- and one way they won't: US govt. report
  • Fracking in America kills off clean energy, leading to higher emissions: EIA report
  • BP calls for global carbon price to avoid the "worst impacts of climate change"

RSS ClimateSight

  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia (Part 2)
  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia.
  • Talking, typing, and the social model of disability
  • We need your help! Share your views on climate change with us.
  • Ice sheet melting: it’s not just about sea level rise
  • How I became a scientist
  • How does the Weddell Polynya affect Antarctic ice shelves?
  • Climate change and compassion fatigue
  • The silver lining of fake news
  • Future projections of Antarctic ice shelf melting

RSS Club Orlov

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RSS ClusterFuck Nation

  • KunstlerCast 378 – Former Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas on How His State of Vermont Got So Woked Up
  • The Great DOJ Werewolf Hunt
  • What’s Next
  • June 2023
  • Who Can You Trust?
  • Memorial Service
  • Trial By Ordeal
  • Fade to Black in Ukraine
  • Dum-Da-Dum-Dum…Dah
  • Dirty Secrets

RSS Cocktailhag – FDL

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RSS Colin Tudge

  • Let's not bet the farm | Colin Tudge
  • Why the world needs a renaissance of small farming | Colin Tudge
  • Are modern British children suffering from 'nature deficit disorder'? | Colin Tudge and Aleks Krotoski
  • Let the country, not the City, drive the UK economy | Colin Tudge
  • Farming needs Adam Smith's invisible hand, not finance capitalism | Colin Tudge
  • Survivors by Richard Fortey - review
  • Why woodlands are wonderful
  • Fossil Ida's great big family | Colin Tudge

RSS Common Dreams: News

  • Wyden Calls McCarthy Social Security Commission 'A Glide Path to Reduce Benefits'
  • As Insurers Cut Coverage Due to Climate Disasters, Senators Probe Continued Backing of Fossil Fuels
  • As 'Absolutely Devastating' Trump Indictment Unsealed, Special Counsel Stresses Gravity of Charges
  • UN Report Accuses Israel of 'Silencing of Civil Society' to Repress Palestinians
  • Progressives Tell Biden He Better Have a Backup Plan If SCOTUS Kills Student Debt Relief
  • READ IT: Federal Indictment of Donald J. Trump Unsealed
  • 'Disturbing': 12 Million US Adults Think Violence Is Justified to Put Trump Back in White House
  • Dems Unveil Debt Ceiling Reform Act to Prevent Future GOP Hostage-Taking
  • 'The Fight Has Only Just Begun': Greta Thunberg Pledges More Protests After Final School Strike
  • 'This Is Secret... Look': Trump Admits on Tape He Didn't Declassify Documents

RSS Consortium News

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RSS Consumer Energy Report

  • Death of the Florescent Shop Light – Energy Efficiency
  • Methanol VS Ethanol – Technical Merits and Political Favoritism
  • Bill Nye the Science Guy – Social Primate and Nuclear Energy
  • World’s Smallest Gasoline Engine – Technology Breakthrough
  • How Much Oil Does the World Produce? – Production Facts and Figures
  • World Sets New Oil Production and Consumption Records
  • What Makes Up the Cost of a Gallon of Gasoline? – Gas Price
  • Road Trip – Thoughts on the Satsop Nuclear Power Station
  • What Happened at Choren? – History & Events
  • Gasoline Prices Doubled Under Obama: True or False?

RSS Corp Watch

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RSS CorrenteWire

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RSS CorrenteWire – Quick Hits

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RSS Counter Currents

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RSS CounterPunch

  • Less Freedom, More Money: Tony Blair’s Vaccine Passport
  • The U.S. Dares to Criticize Israel
  • Gaza – Betrayed In Thought and Deed
  • Boeing Workers Take a Stand & Take the Heat
  • Bank Corruption Down Under
  • Europe’s Deadly Transition From Social Democracy to Oligarchy
  • The Sham of Homeland Security
  • What We Can Not See
  • Beauty from the Heart of Texas
  • Encountering Benazir Bhutto

RSS Crooked Timber

  • Counterfeit digital persons: On Dennett’s Intentional Stance, The Road to Serfdom
  • Disinformation and the Intercept
  • Happy World Ocean Day
  • Pew quits the generation game
  • Sunday photoblogging: Malbork Castle, Poland
  • In the Zone: Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism
  • Sunday photoblogging: Girona
  • Misogyny and Violence in Michigan Politics
  • Ban LLMs Using First-Person Pronouns
  • Sunday photoblogging: cloister

RSS Crooks and Liars

  • If Bars Were Honest
  • Even Turley Can't Defend Trump Indictments: 'Extremely Damning'
  • Trump Hoarded Classified Docs In A Ballroom, Shower, And His Bedroom
  • Fox Legal Hack Recommends Trump Run On Pardoning Himself.
  • Another Indictment Drops, This Time For Trump Aide
  • OJ Simpson Offers Trump Free Advice About His Indictments
  • Mark Levin Foams At The Mouth Over Trump Indictments
  • UPDATED: House GOPer Calls For Civil War Over Trump Indictment
  • Crack-Smoking RI Republican Arrested For Child Molestation
  • Bummer: MAGA Republicans Are Not Taking The Indictment Well

RSS Cryptome

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RSS Culture Change

  • Low Cost Polluting: The Real American Dream?
  • We Did It: Sailing Cargo in the Aegean
  • Cure for Depending on 90K Oil Spewing Cargo Ships: Sail Power Makes Inroads, Now in Mediterranean
  • The Trump Presidency: Celebration of the Little Boy, and Mass Awakening
  • Stepping Back from Trump's Election: Critique of underlying US Culture in a List - 25 Limitations
  • Dirty Fossil Fuel ‘Business-As-Usual’ Tactics Spew Out of the IMO at COP22
  • The Unconnected and Unrewarded in the New Divisive Dichotomy: Being Either Online Or Not
  • The Ameliorators: a possible coalition of progressives on (e.g.) NAFTA
  • It's the 21st, and this is what a growing movement is doing
  • Pro-Climate Actions - a community flier and poster

RSS Dahr Jamail

  • For a Worse Tomorrow
  • Covid-19’s Not Through With Us Yet
  • Living in a World in Which Nature Has Already Lost
  • Life in the US Has the Hallmarks of a “Low-Grade War Zone”
  • Fracking Company Has Made It Rain Toxic Water Upon New Mexico Without Penalty
  • Interview: TODAY IS BETTER THAN TOMORROW: A TIME OF ENDINGS; SHADES OF DENIAL W/ DAHR JAMAIL
  • Grieving My Way Into Loving the Planet
  • New York Times reviews The End of Ice
  • A Future Filled With Pathogens
  • Tested

RSS Daily Kos Comics

  • Cartoon: A Jack Smith in the box for Trump
  • Cartoon: Wearable tech expo
  • Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on the spineless Mike Pence
  • Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on the PGA's deal with the devil
  • Cartoon: A Calvinesque and Hobbesian look at Meatball Ron
  • Cartoon: Mike Luckovich wonders WWJD about LGBTQ+
  • Cartoon: West
  • Cartoon: Junk jargon
  • Cartoon: Targets
  • Cartoon: Guardians of the Fallacy

RSS Damn the Matrix

  • More metabolic syndrome epidemic news
  • ERoEI, it depends…
  • Insanity rules….
  • Nuclear Fantasies
  • More Metabolic Syndrome news…
  • Empty Planet
  • On NOT joining the dots…
  • The Hydrogen fallacy explained
  • Yours Truly on the local FM radio station
  • Limits everywhere

RSS Dan Hagen

  • A Lesson in Humanity from Star Wars
  • A Wit Called Wanda
  • Ethics Begins in Empathy
  • The Devil is in the Dumbasses
  • 'Succession' Dramatizes a Death Knell
  • CNN Parades Primal Resentment
  • We Like What He Knew
  • CNN Bellyflops into a Moral Sewer
  • 'Guardians 3:' Ya Gotta Have Heart
  • Song of Spring

RSS Dangerous Intersection

  • Dr. Peter McCullough Discusses COVID-19 Vaccine Injury Syndromes
  • Following the Science
  • FIRE’s Model Legislation Prohibiting Universities from Requiring Faculty Member to Make Loyalty Pledges or Ideological Commitments
  • U.S. is Provoking War with China Because … What the Hell? Why Not?
  • CDC’s Easy Solution to Inconvenient Data

RSS Dark Ages America

  • Schmegegge
  • Healing
  • Beating a Dead Horse Dept.
  • A Grotesque Bulvan. However...
  • The Sopranos, William Golding, and Contemporary America
  • 7 million and going strong
  • Karma City
  • Muddy Waters
  • The Midterms
  • Meatball

RSS David Bollier

  • Can We Move Beyond Philanthrocapitalism?
  • The Revelations of 'Black Earth Wisdom'
  • Foster & Iaione Probe Commoning in the City
  • Expanding Regenerative Agriculture through Open Source Technologies
  • Binna Choi of the Casco Art Institute: Curating Art through Commoning
  • John Thackara on Designing for Life
  • Joe Brewer's Bold Quest to Help Restore a Bioregion
  • David Sloan Wilson on Evolutionary Science and Prosocial Behavior
  • Cecosesola of Venezuela Wins Right Livelihood Award!
  • Greg Watson's Bold Campaign for a World Grid

RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – National Memo)

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RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – Tax Analysts)

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RSS David Harvey

  • Video: David Harvey on capital, theory, and becoming a Marxist
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 12
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 11
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 10
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 9
  • Video: David Harvey in Dialogue with Jean-Luc Mélenchon
  • Video: The Geography of Capital
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 8
  • Book Talk: Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 7

RSS David Hilfiker

  • Welcome
  • Announcement
  • Racism in Our Small Faith Community?
  • Spirituality of Weakness
  • My Alzheimer's Disease
  • A Theology Out of my Life with Alzheimer Disease
  • More Than Surviving the Crisis
  • Facing Our Mistakes
  • Hope in an Environmental Wasteland
  • Geoengineering ... because we must

RSS David McNally

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RSS David Roberts

  • Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck
  • Please support Grist
  • There’s an emerging right-wing divide on climate denial. Here’s what it means (and doesn’t)
  • Everybody needs a Climate Thing
  • Jonathan Franzen is confused about climate change, but then, lots of people are
  • Turns out the world’s first “clean coal” plant is a backdoor subsidy to oil producers
  • A way to get power to the world’s poor without making climate change worse
  • “Climate change” vs. “global warming”? It really doesn’t matter
  • How American journalists deal with climate deniers
  • Nothing is nonpartisan any more

RSS Death by Car: Capitalism’s Drive to Carmageddon

  • Leading the way in preventing traffic accidents
  • Truck safety rate system 3 years
  • Traffic accident in the school zone
  • cerebral hemorrhage in a traffic accident
  • Uiseong-gun receives donations from children’s safety umbrella to prevent traffic accidents
  • 100% fruit delivery driver
  • a traffic accident
  • Prevention of traffic accidents on school buses for children
  • More than 80% of truck traffic accidents are “car-to-car” accidents
  • “Infusion truck”. Anger explodes. If you forget, you’ll get attacked again

RSS Decline of the Empire

  • Defending Reality
  • Fascism And The Uniparty
  • Apocalypse Now and Apocalypse Not
  • Fascism Marches On — Episode 1
  • There Is No Middle
  • The Elites And The Sheeple
  • For Your Own Good
  • America Is Finished, There Is No Way Out
  • The Whole World Is Watching
  • Glenn Greenwald Censored At The Intercept, Resigns

RSS Deep Green Resistence News Service

  • Scientific Progress vs Natural World
  • DGR France Visits Proposed Lithium Mine Site
  • Over 150 Groups Urge to Immediately Shut Down Line 5
  • Kangaroo Walks and Talks [Event Alert]
  • For the Sake of Nature
  • Ecosabotage: A Heroic Action Against Ecocide
  • Indigenous Women’s Camp Set to Block Water Supply to Peehee Mu’huh [Thacker Pass]
  • Call for Comments on Women’s Sex-Based Rights in Sports [Press Release]
  • Despite Warnings, Norway Proposes Deep Sea Mining
  • Tomorrow Is Ours

RSS Deepak Tripathi’s Diary

  • Afghanistan Awaits Uncertain Future After US Withdrawal
  • UK’s Brexit Maze
  • Book Review: Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy
  • Book Review: How Democracy Ends
  • A Bloody Hot Summer in Gaza: Parallels With Sharpeville, Soweto and Jallianwala Bagh

RSS Democratic Underground

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RSS Democratic Underground – Breaking News

  • Judge required Pence to answer most of special counsel's questions, newly unsealed court docs show
  • Man who told jurors he had 'fun' at the Capitol riot is sentenced to 6 years in prison
  • Florida woman who fatally shot neighbor granted $154,000 bond
  • Boris Johnson stepping down as MP with immediate effect and says he is 'bewildered and appalled'
  • White House says Iran is helping Russia build a drone factory east of Moscow for the war in Ukraine
  • Trump charged with 37 counts in classified documents case, indictment says
  • Trump aide Walt Nauta indicted in classified documents case
  • Trump lawyers quit classified documents case
  • George Santos files appeal to keep names of those who helped post $500,000 bond sealed
  • Sudan's government declares UN envoy no longer welcome; warring sides agree to 24-hour cease-fire

RSS Democratic Underground – Good Reads

  • 'Airtight' Trump Indictment Bursting With Powerful Evidence: George Conway
  • Lawfare deep dive analysis of the Trump indictment
  • Pat Robertson and the End of Fake Compassion
  • In the House, a spectacular flameout
  • Before-and-after satellite images show profound toll of Ukraine dam collapse
  • The party of pollution, disease and death: When Republicans tell you who they are, believe them
  • A very simple proof that the 1920-1945 Nazi Party was not truly socialist
  • Judge Aileen Cannon Can Absolutely Sink the Federal Prosecution of TrumpThe federal criminal case ag
  • One-time Biden accuser now in the 'safe' hands of Russia
  • Hope for democracy among Trump's challengers? If only

RSS Democracy Now

  • DOJ vs. African People's Socialist Party: Omali Yeshitela Blasts Charges of Being Russian Agent
  • Supreme Surprise: Court Upholds Voting Rights Act, Strikes Down Alabama's Racially Gerrymandered Maps
  • Indicted Again: Donald Trump Faces Federal Espionage & Conspiracy Charges in Classified Docs Probe
  • Headlines for June 9, 2023
  • "World's Deadliest Wars Go Unreported": Journalist Anjan Sundaram
  • "Airpocalypse": David Wallace-Wells on Red Skies, Raging Wildfires & Pollution Link to Climate Crisis
  • Headlines for June 8, 2023
  • Cornel West on Running for President, Ending Ukraine War & Taking on "Corporate Duopoly" of Dems & GOP
  • A National State of Emergency: Human Rights Campaign Sounds the Alarm over Anti-LGBTQ+ Laws in U.S.
  • Headlines for June 7, 2023

RSS Derrick Jensen

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RSS Desdemona Despair

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RSS Desertification

  • Climate change in Nigeria: Can youth activists turn the tide of inaction?
  • Tobacco-free farms: a healthier future for people and land
  • World Environment Day: Data shows China an important contributor to global environment protection
  • NAMIBIA DRIVES TO HALT, REVERSE THE TRENDS IN LAND DEGRADATION AND DESERTIFICATION
  • Middle East faces grave environmental challenges as world marks Environment Day
  • Forum to focus on combating desertification
  • Desertification is destroying fertile land. Here’s how we’re fighting it.
  • Understanding of diurnal gas exchange in order to exploit the dynamic coordination between the rate of carbon assimilation (A) and stomatal conductance (gs)
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  • Geo explainer: How are deserts formed?

RSS deSmog Blog

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RSS Digbys Blog

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  • They can save the world by @BloggersRUs
  • Just drifting: R.I.P. Buck Henry By Dennis Hartley
  • It looks like he wants to take Iraq's oil money
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  • Let's not forget who worked with Suleimani's IRGC
  • You can't win if you don't show up to play by @BloggersRUs
  • Friday Night Soother
  • I'm just going to leave this here.
  • Who wants to be the next Andy McCabe?

RSS Disinfo – Ecology

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RSS Dispatches from the Underclass

  • China’s Saudi-Iran Peace Deal Is a Major Setback for US Empire, w/ Prof. Mohammad Marandi
  • EXCLUSIVE | Interview with Mexico’s Leading Presidential Contender Claudia Sheinbaum
  • Bombshell w/ Seymour Hersh: US Blowing Up Nord Stream Was ‘Act of War’
  • Exclusive Interview w/ Hezbollah’s Second-In-Command Sheikh Naim Qassem
  • UN Official Calls for Lifting ‘Illegal’ Syria Sanctions After Seeing Devastation First-Hand
  • Europe Self-Destructing for U.S. Proxy War In Ukraine, w/ Prabhat Patnaik
  • US Brings World to Brink of Nuclear Armageddon As Europe Self Destructs, w/ Ali Abunimah
  • Reality vs Propaganda: Understanding Iran’s Protests, w/ Navid Zarrinnal
  • How the US Used Saudi Arabia to Fuel Fanaticism & Fight Progressive Movements, w/ As’ad Abukhalil
  • Round 2: Lula vs Bolsonaro, What’s At Stake In Brazil?

RSS Dissent Magazine

  • Fighting Fire and Fascism in the American West
  • Know Your Enemy: What’s Wrong With Men?
  • Money Power
  • Belabored: How Workers Escape, with Saket Soni
  • Cruelty and Luxury:
  • Barcelona’s Experiment in Radical Government
  • Ultra Violence
  • The Lithium Problem: An Interview with Thea Riofrancos
  • Belabored: Reviving the Strike in Britain, with Morag Livingstone and Joe Rollin
  • The IRA Is an Invitation to Organizers

RSS Dissident Voice

  • A Matter of Interest: The RBA, Inflation and Corporate Profits
  • Promethean City Builders vs Finance Capital Malthusians
  • Technology Needs Assessments by Congress, Municipalities, and Local Civic Groups
  • Charter Schools Are Quintessentially and Irreversibly Private Schools by Design
  • Diamonds for the Antichrist
  • Who is behind Operation Fear?
  • For Argentina’s Small Farmers, the Land Is Predictable but the Markets Are Not
  • Empire Fables: Vladimir Gluten and the Country that Keeps Attacking Itself
  • France’s Global Warming Predicament
  • Connecting the Dots

RSS Do the Math

  • Keeping Up On Appearances
  • Holiday Haikus
  • The Simple Story of Civilization
  • Finite Feeding Frenzy
  • A Random Fix to Polarization
  • The Cult of Civilization
  • A Climate Love Story
  • Death by Hockey Sticks
  • Limits to Economic Growth
  • The Ride of Our Lives

RSS Dollars & Sense Blog

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RSS Doug Stanhope

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RSS Douglas Rushkoff

  • Team Human ep. 248: I Will Not Be Autotuned – Live from All Tech Is Human’s Responsible Tech Mixer
  • SXSW 2023: The End of the Billionaire Mindset: A Celebration with Douglas Rushkoff
  • The Guardian: Douglas Rushkoff on why tech billionaires are in escape mode
  • Wired: Doug Rushkoff is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution
  • Team Human ep. 236: Fenton Bailey
  • Escape plans of the rich and famous
  • Cyber: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
  • Survival of the Richest
  • Duncan Trussell Family Hour Ep. 522: Douglas Rushkoff
  • In ‘Survival of the Richest,’ author Douglas Rushkoff examines the escape plans of the tech elite

RSS Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

  • A Voice from the Past
  • What has happened to Julian Assange shows the total helplessness of “the people” in the Western “democracies.”  Alternatively, it shows the total unconcern of “the people” about their civil liberty.
  • Judicial Watch Now Harassed by FBI
  • The FBI Ignores Real Crime while bringing false cases against Republicans
  • Today is the 56 Anniversary of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty.  
  • The Department of Homeland Security Is a Threat to the Homeland
  • America Has Been Overthrown in a Coup
  • America on the Brink by David Ray Griffin
  • Tucker Carlson Is Back
  • This explains why there is no prospect of fair elections

RSS Dredd Blog

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RSS Ear to the Ground – Truth Dig

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RSS Early Warning

  • New York Not Close to Exiting Lockdown
  • Is New York Containing Covid?
  • New York vs Italy
  • NYC Update - 46.5% increase Sunday over Saturday.
  • We Are About to Lose New York City to Covid
  • Containing Covid-19 (Or Not)
  • Covid-19 update
  • Covid-19 Infection Rates
  • Global Carbon Sink Holding Up So Far
  • The Wake-Up Call from David Buckel

RSS Earth First

  • “UNC Dildo-Boy” accosts homophobic preacher, releases anti-technology declaration
  • Subpoena caps bad week for fossil fuel
  • Less Than 60 Hours Left to Support Indigenous Land Defenders!
  • Shh! That Zookeeper Is a Total *&^%#!
  • Marcellus Shale Earth First! Aerial Blockade Celebrates 2 Weeks
  • Sabotaging the Badger Cull
  • Occupied Abenaki Lands Desecrated by 9/11 Memorial Protesters Intervene to Address U.S. Imperialism & Genocide
  • The Earth First! Newswire Has Moved
  • Massive Mine Proposed at Oak Flat, Sacred Tribal Land
  • Wharton Coal Prep Plant Spill Turns Boone County, WV River White

RSS Earth Observatory: Image of the Day, Natural Hazards, and News

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RSS Earth Observatory: Image of the Day

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RSS Earth Observatory: Natural Hazards

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RSS Earth Policy Institute Blog

  • Data Highlight - Wind Power Beats Nuclear Again in China
  • Data Highlight - Plastic Bag Bans or Fees Cover 49 Million Americans
  • Plan B Update - Fossil Fuel Development in the Arctic is a Bad Investment
  • Data Highlight - Geothermal Power Approaches 12,000 Megawatts Worldwide
  • Data Highlight - China’s Solar Panel Production to Double by 2017
  • Plan B Update - The Swinging Pendulum of Population Policy in Iran
  • Eco Economy Indicator - China Leads World to Solar Power Record in 2013
  • Data Highlight - Denmark, Portugal, and Spain Leading the World in Wind Power
  • Plan B Update - The Downfall of the Plastic Bag: A Global Picture
  • Plan B Update - Plastic Bag Bans Spreading in the United States

RSS Ecocide Alert

  • The Basics of Poker
  • What is a Lottery?
  • What is a Slot?
  • What to Know When Playing at a Casino Online
  • How to Bet at a Sportsbook
  • How to Win at Poker
  • What Is a Lottery?
  • Togel Sidney Pasaran Togel Online Terkenal
  • What You Should Know About Online Casinos
  • What Does a Sportsbook Do?

RSS Ecohuman World

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RSS Eco-Shock News

  • Radio Ecoshock: Why Make a World Nobody Wants?
  • Radio Ecoshock: The Big Greenhouse Gas You Don’t Know
  • Radio Ecoshock: On Fire Again
  • Radio Ecoshock: Extreme Heat #2: How It Kills (replay)
  • Radio Ecoshock: Jean-Marc Jancovici: Whistling Past the Graveyard (replay)
  • Radio Ecoshock: Making $$ from Endless Record Heat
  • Radio Ecoshock: Nomad Century & Bad Banks
  • Radio Ecoshock: The Dirt Behind Betrayal
  • Radio Ecoshock: Climate: A Big Change Emerges Down Under
  • Radio Ecoshock: What I Really Think Will Happen Is Happening Already

RSS Ecological Headstand

  • Dilke, Chapman, and Dahlberg Pop-ups
  • For the Abolition of the Wages System!
  • The Incredible Shrinking Blog
  • Keynes "hadn't got round to it"
  • Napoleon Solow and the Phantom Mechanism
  • Mathiness, Growth and Increasing Returns
  • Viral Gyro Spiral
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  • Never Mind the Bollocks. Here's the Gyro.

RSS Ecological Sociology

  • Commons Enabling Infrastucture
  • A Short History of Progress: Book Review
  • Foucault, Power, Truth and Ecology
  • Democratizing Capital at Scale: Cooperative Enterprise and Beyond
  • Stanford: Climate Change Ten Times Faster than Previous 65 Million Years
  • Beyond Market and State: The Renaissance of the Commons
  • What Then Must We Do? The Next American Revolution
  • John Thackery: Limits to Resilience
  • Timothy Mitchell: Carbon Democracy
  • The Informal Economy Blog

RSS Ecologise

  • Why this Maharashtra village is fighting for the long forgotten Gramdan Act?
  • Ignored health risks, bungled pilot projects, bonanza for Dutch firm: Modi Govt. forces fortified rice on poor
  • Protests against Ratnagiri Refinery: Skeletons in the Development Closet
  • What will be the history of India without the history of its plant life?
  • We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction
  • [WATCH] We are living in a deluded world: Interview with Iain McGilchrist
  • The Avocados of Wrath
  • How Mr Miyawaki Broke My Heart
  • On International Forests Day: Reality of Forests in India
  • P.V. Satheesh, the Original Millets Man of India

RSS Economic Hardship Reporting Project

  • Parajo’s Quest to Rebuild
  • Erosion and sea-level rise are coming for their Louisiana home. They’re staying anyway.
  • Ithaca Bets on Heat Pumps in Mobile Homes
  • Republican Debt Ceiling Proposals Could See Neediest Americans Lose Benefits
  • Wrecking Women’s Healthcare
  • What It’s Like to Have an Abortion Denied by Dobbs
  • Belabored: Reviving the Strike in Britain, with Morag Livingstone and Joe Rollin
  • School Support Staffers Stuck Earning Poverty Level Wages
  • EHRP-Grist comic on Kentucky disaster relief distributed as educational tool
  • LGBTQ Students Face Barriers to Getting Student Loans Without Parents’ Participation

RSS Economic Undertow

  • Z Marks the Spot
  • The Death of Economics
  • Cars and More Cars …
  • Repost From 2015: Pied Piper of Dumb Money
  • The Arc of the Moral Universe
  • Meet the New Year, Same as the Old Year
  • David Graeber Dead …
  • Frieden In Unserer Zeit, Peace In Our Time
  • Doing God’s Dirty Work
  • The Numbers Game

RSS EcoWorldView

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RSS Empire Burlesque

  • Generation of Vipers: The Original Sin and Continuous Crimes of America’s Involvement in Afghanistan
  • Reich and Reality: Culture Wars of the Conquerors
  • On the 18th Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq
  • On the Acquittal of the Murderous Thug Donald Trump
  • Impeachment Cave-in: Dems Plumb New Depths of Perfidy
  • In Memoriam Richard Kastelein (1967-2021)
  • The Surrenderists: Dem Leaders Stand Down; No Consequences for Coup
  • Unwrung Withers: No Downsides for Trumpists From Their Coup Push
  • House of Death: Trump’s Endgame Plan to Kill Democracy
  • Brief note on a bleary post-election morning

RSS Empirical Magazine

  • From the Empirical Archives: Genius or Folly?
  • From the Empirical Archives: Nights Such as These
  • From the Empirical Archives: Second Time Foster Child
  • From the Empirical Archives: A Moment with Mary Nash-Pyott
  • From the Empirical Archives: In the Shade of a Cave
  • From the Empirical Archives: In Search of a Good Teacher
  • From the Empirical Archives: The Circle and the Pyramid
  • From the Empirical Archives: Why Human Rights Matter
  • From the Empirical Archives: Arizona
  • From the Empirical Archives: The Offer by Jennifer Hanno

RSS EmptyWheel

  • The Flavors of Trump’s Obstruction
  • Defendant-1’s 38 Count Indictment
  • John Durham’s Blind Man’s Bluff on DNS Visibility
  • Lock Him Up! Trump Charged with Crimes He Believes Candidates Can Be Charged With
  • Prosecutors Interviewing Witnesses Who Knew Trump Was Hoarding Documents
  • This Indictment Will Likely Come Too Early for Trump to Consolidate the Party
  • The Thirteenth Amendment
  • Dry Run: The Filing Room Came to Trump
  • NYT’s Pre-DOJ Meeting Attempted Rebuttal
  • Now Fully Normalized: Sportswashing the Bonesaw with Golf

RSS End of More

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RSS Energy Balance

  • "The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower."
  • "Living the Change," Film Screening + post-film Q&A. 6 pm, April 17th (2023), Reading Biscuit Factory (Reading, UK).
  • "Living the Change," Film Screening + post-film Q&A. 6 pm, April 17th (2023), Reading Biscuit Factory (Reading, UK).
  • “The Oil Machine” and the Changing Climate.
  • Architects of Our Future: Energy and the Changing Climate.
  • The Energy War, and Climate Breakdown.
  • “Reading Hydro” – Microhydropower on the River Thames at Caversham Lock (Reading, UK).
  • “Four Meals From Anarchy” – We Must Grow More Food Locally.
  • Russia-Ukraine War and the Changing Energy Landscape.
  • Confronting the Changing Climate: COP26 - Scientists’ Warnings into Action, from Local to Global.

RSS Environment & Food Justice

  • National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Statement on the Climate Crisis
  • La Lucha por La Sierra | Scion of Texas Oil Barons Seeks to Overturn Historic Use Rights to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant
  • Biopiracy in Mexico | Foundation stealing wild beehives in Yucatán
  • Deep Seeds at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues | April 2018
  • Exclusive Update - Monsanto in Mexico | Corporate impunity and the beekeeper struggle against transgenic soybeans
  • Student Blogs | Race, Gender, and Settler Colonial Violence
  • Notas de Campaña | Por una Tortilla 100 ciento Nixtamalizada
  • Campaign Notes | For 100 Percent Nixtamalized nonGMO Tortillas | Part One
  • Maize: Our Identity, Our Food | Photo Exhibit of Indigenous Corn Farmers Featured at UN Headquarters
  • Protecting the Sacred in Corn | Seed Sovereignty Documents | Berenice Sánchez Intervention on the Protection of Indigenous Agroecosystems presented to the UNPFII-2018 | 1 of 2

RSS Envisionation Blog

  • Dr Chad Briggs – Integrating disaster risk and national security with climate policy
  • “..colossal risks with the future of civilization” First study quantifying Earth System Boundaries
  • Archive: Michael E Mann, Michael Ghil, James E Hansen – Discussing Earth System Sensitivity
  • Dr Jennifer Francis – 2023’s symptoms of climate chaos, El Niño, Ocean Heatwaves, and Arctic Sea Ice lows
  • Archive: Dr Natalia Shakhova (& Igor Semiletov) Vienna Interview 2012 UNCUT 42mins
  • “Leave Africa Alone” – Solidarity With The Voices Of The Voiceless: Ina-Maria Shikongo
  • David Spratt: [Articulating &] Reclaiming the Climate Emergency
  • Archive: Professor James Hansen – EGU, Vienna, 2012 Unedited Interview
  • European Parliament Proposes Including “ECOCIDE” In EU Law
  • Capture6 CEO, Ethan Cohen-Cole, talks: SVB bank, climate tech & being bullish on gigaton’s of CO2 removal

RSS Extraenvironmentalist Blog and Podcasts

  • [ Episode #95 // Economy of Things ]
  • [ Episode #94 // Rocking the Google Bus ]
  • [ Episode #93 // Climate Agreements ]
  • [ Episode #92 // Decrypting Cryptocurrency ]
  • [ Episode #91 // Age of Stagnation? ]
  • [ Episode #90 // Missing Out ]
  • [ Autumn 2015 Interlude // Archaeoacoustics ]
  • The Energy Transition Show – [Episode #0] – subscribe @ energytransitionshow.com
  • [ Episode #89 // How on Earth ]
  • [ Episode #88 // Resilience Imperative ]

RSS ExtraEnvironmentalist’s Videos

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RSS ExtraGeographic

  • Teary in Decathlon
  • What happened to Let’s Wrestle?
  • An Unsuitable Job for a Woman film
  • Covid-19 antibody test photo
  • Smartphone cartoon
  • The Shard / London Bridge photo gallery
  • David Bowie
  • DayZ: 36 hours in a foreign, familiar land
  • Photos: First 3D Printing Show
  • One Day in the Life of Television: 25 years on

RSS Facts for Working People

  • Modern supply-side economics and the New Washington Consensus
  • ChatGPT, value and knowledge.
  • After Congress Stops The Rail Strike. The SCOTUS Doubles Down.
  • Afscme Local 444 History From a Participant #2
  • Interesting Comments from Black American Radicals. Class Good Indentity Bad
  • US China Conflict. History Repeats Itself
  • Acemoglu, AI and automation
  • Water is a Human Necessity. We Should Own it. But What sort of public ownership?
  • Yes It's True. I Wish Bernie Sanders Would Just Bugger Off.
  • THE FIRE ANTS OF GUANTÁNAMO BAY

RSS Fair: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

  • ‘Border Crisis’ Means Migrants Coming—Not Migrants Dying
  • Montana TikTok Ban a Sign of Intensified Cold War With China
  • WSJ Worries Debt Limit Fight Could Jeopardize Military Contractors’ Profits
  • Sorry, Sulzberger—NYT’s Anti-Trans ‘News’ Is Neither True Nor Important
  • NYT’s Anti-Trans Bias—by the Numbers - A FAIR study comparing front-page transgender coverage in the New York Times and Washington Post
  • Ukraine’s ‘Press Freedom’ Score Increases Despite Martial Law, Banned Media
  • Media Crime Hype Helps Roll Back Reforms
  • ACTION ALERT: False NYT Spy Claim on Iran Nukes Needs Correction
  • Calling Bud Light Saga a ‘Controversy’ Falls Flat
  • Western Outlets Send Warning to Lula Over Ukraine Dissent

RSS Fairewinds

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RSS Fairfax Climate Watch

  • How to Slow Down Global Warming
  • Not All Asphalt Types Are Created Equal
  • How Does Climate Change Affect Your Health?
  • Health Screening Tests Every Woman Should Have
  • The Day 2 Antigen Test When Travelling From The UK 
  • Steps Towards Reducing