Tags
Capitalism, Climate Change, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, Fossil Fuel Industry, Fracking, NIMBYism, Political Cartoons, Stephanie McMillan
Cartoonist Stephanie McMillan gave us permission to use a character from one of her books.
Here is the first result (I need a name for this strip):
Of course the fossil fuel aristocracy suffer from NIMBYism as well:
Not many places to hide once the entire planet becomes one big sacrifice zone. Rex Tillerson reminds me too much of the extinct dinosaur T-Rex.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 
Raiders of the Lost Commons?
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That is fucking perfect.
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They hang the man and flog the woman,
Who steals the goose from off the common,
Yet let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose.
— Seventeenth-century English protest rhyme
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I’m still thinking on the strip name, but what’s the CEO’s name?
Wrex Swindlesum?
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LOL. You named him.
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“Business Ethics”
What’s the definition of oxymoron?
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a-MORT-ize French helps.
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I don’t know what to say,sometimes.
http://robinwestenra.blogspot.co.nz/2014/02/radiation-leak-in-new-mexico.html
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Heart in the right place?
“Environmental advocates target climate change as Democratic election issue
By Juliet Eilperin, Published: February 22 E-mail the writer
A Democratic fundraiser last week at billionaire Tom Steyer’s home amounted to a summit between Washington’s liberal elite and San Francisco’s climate intelligencia.
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), six other senators and a 2014 Senate candidate took in views of the Golden Gate Bridge with former vice president Al Gore and some of the nation’s richest environmentalist donors.
The $400,000 fundraiser, held for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, included remarks from Gore, who said the party needs to make global warming a central issue during the midterms, participants said. And Gore called Steyer, who has vowed to raise at least $100 million,“Mr. Tipping Point.””
More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/environmental-advocates-target-climate-change-as-democratic-election-issue/2014/02/22/05d486be-9b01-11e3-ad71-e03637a299c0_story.html
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Life high in the apex has always been about killing, stealing, eating, copulating, and cheating with a few smiles and a little cooperation thrown in – often to accomplish the same acts. The world we would prefer is not the world we inhabit. There is no overall goal, just fiddling with technology to guarantee its omnipotence over the biological, including ourselves. We blow our futures on hyper-stimulation brought to us by technology. Life and its emerging complexity have existed for billions of years without examination and without need of examination. Failed genetic experiments brought to you by natural recombination have always been recycled as quickly as their maladaptive traits could send them back to the soil or depths of the oceans. Water, carbon dioxide, oxygen and sunlight mixing endlessly within the biosphere by natural currents and cycles.
Humans are maladapted, even thought they point to their overshoot populations and proclaim themselves the most successful species on earth. The malignant track of the organic/technological hybridoma is obscured by simple narratives and unseen by undeveloped, hypoxic gray matter, giddy over technology’s next miraculous achievement. We live regimented lives in concrete, steel, plastic and glass cells, are transported in synthetic cacoons and many are buried in metal boxes, all providing separation from the natural world and protection from natural limits on human longevity and population growth. What you witness now is not success, but rather rapid death by consumption. Is there a way to force remission in these widely disseminated foci of technological growth before bodily systems begin to shut down? I just don’t see it.
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I’ve enjoyed many of your comments. If you’re interested in posting an essay, let me know.
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A way to “force” such a remission exists, but it is monstrously evil, assuming that there is no force able to change the ways most of people live – dramatically, – so that they would be consuming many times less and pollute many times less. I assume there is no such force indeed, thus, only the evil way remains: to exterminate most of living people.
Please don’t think this is completely abstract thought. There are signs this may well be the event we are heading to. For example, there is a game recently made available on personal computers which is about world epidemy – the player’s task is to create a virus, then monitor the spread of the epidemy and modify the virus as needed to achieve the greatest success in exterminating people. And we know that some computer games are used for serious research – just search for “gamers help scientists” online to see what i mean. It would be the extreme of black humour, if those who play this game – would actually be helping to design their own demise, eh?
I don’t think it should be “forced” this way, though. I don’t think it should be “forced” in any way, to be honest. Yes, ending the madness of modern globalized industrial civilization ASAP – is desirable, however, shutting it down before having regional, relatively small and low-tech, but fully self-sustaining societies (in James Lovelock’s term, – “oases of civilization”) – is definitely suicidal in terms of survival of human species (taking imminent thermal maximum and the peak of anthropocene extinction event into consideration, i mean).
Bodily systems “began” to shut down millions of years ago (speaking homo species) – as soon as 1st homo walked the planet. It goes on, more and less, since then. Even as we speak, every minute someone dies somewhere because his/her bodily system (or few) did shut down – and quite often, it would be preventable, given “proper” conditions. It’s part of life to die. What you probably meant is complete inhabitability of the whole Earth (for humans). And while this may seem like a real possibility for a non-specialist who knows some bits how modern industrial complexes and mankind overall “behaves” – this seem not to be the case in reality. You see, one day, i asked myself: how, exactly, mankind can become extinct? What exactly will kill every last human on Earth? And i went and searched and searched, learning how civilizations of the past died, how particular cities and regions are devastated during war time and disastrous weather events, etc etc. I also learned what cultures exist, and what conditions exist, and how likely it’d be for the whole Earth land surface to become critically inhabitable by humans. As result of this search, i am now quite sure that at least few regions will remain habitable as long as there is no “sterilizing” event of planetary scale (this would be a huge asteroid hit basically melting land surface, turning Earth into magma ball, or something like extremely strong gamma-ray burst from outside Solar system, or our Sun going Novae, etc). Venus scenario is impossible on Earth because Earth does not get enough Watts per square meter of solar radiation – not enough to get her anything close to water boiling point (because, physics says, the amount of energy radiated by a hot body (Earth is indeed “hot” in compare to near-absolute-zero nearby space) – this amount of energy is proportional to 4th POWER of the body’s temperature (in Kelvins)). Death-by-pollution (be it radioactive or chemical pollution) is also impossible to take out every last place on Earth, because pollutants of both kinds are all much heavier than air – and thus, even with intense mixing in the athmosphere, very little of pollution ever reaches high platous like Tibet. Death by starvation (tiny if any grain harvests) – be it from soil erosion, or desertification, or ecosystem collapse, or lethal epidemies of grain crops themselves, – can’t happen all around the world, especially not in all those isolated high platous already mentioned. Disastrous weather events – increasingly frequent and strong, – those already kill many people every year, and will kill times more at the peak of the thermal maximum, – but, again, not everybody-and-everywhere-at-once.
That’s why i say: do what’s right, and let those who are blind, or stupid, or evil, or otherwise unable to do what’s right for Gaia – let all those perish. They are a deadend of biological evolution of this planet – deadend which will take much (possibly, nearly all) of Earth’s biodiversity to accompany them in their grave. They are the vast majority. Don’t try to “fight” them – being a tiny minority, we (ones who do understand that well-being of the Earth biosphere is the most important thing to maintain – above all else), – would be crashed, or corrupted, or otherwise disabled, should we try to fight the currently present industrial systems to “force” the change we deem nesessary. Let’s not be don’quixots, i mean. Rather, run away, hide, and endure – possibly individually or as a family at some point, but to have any long-term odds, as community (pre-shaped or ones appearing already post-collapse, formed out of such individual survivors), – this is, i dare hope, the possibility.
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Interesting post on Reddit:
Why you should start eating mussels.
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Interesting. The author says …”it’s meat without a brain..” and I thought it was just us. Also, mussels contain lots of the amino acid taurine, which is the main ingredient in energy drinks. Mussels – They’ll give you wings! I ate mussels for the first time last Christmas. My brother the foodie made a gumbo with them and it was good.
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Many say humans are spineless as well.
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Some, are. Not all – but sadly, too many indeed. Slimy mass of consumers, eh. It wouldn’t worth a mention, this mass, if only it’d be not so huge. A spit of slime doesn’t make any much trouble for anyone, but a mountain of it – sure does, eh.
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Ocean (and freshwater lakes and rivers as well) goes rapid acidification – nearly 57% of al lthe extra CO2 mankind dumps into the athmosphere (nearly 40 billions metric tons annually last i heard) – ends up, quite quickly, dissolved in water.
This makes water more acidic, because in water CO2 gets binded to a water molecula (which is H2O), so that it actually exists in a form of relatively weak acid: H2CO3 (physically existing as HCO3- and H+ particles, if i remember my chemistry right). Since the start of the industrial revolution, pretty much all the near-surface (i.e. 50 meters deep or less) waters on Earth got extra 30% of those acidic particles. Which is why nearly half of world’s corals are already dead, etc, etc.
Mussels, in particular, are also affected. Wikipedia says, they are “using calcium carbonate to build their shells”. Carbonates are sensitive to acidity. Make it too acidic, and no structure based on calcium carbonate will be possible to exist. You can imagine this quite like human skin submerged into, say, sulphuric acid: if the concentration of the acid is strong enough, the skin and possibly other tissue underneath – simply vanishes. It “dissolves”. Same thing will happen, more and more, to mussels (as CO2 concentration in air – and thus also in water – raises up higher and higher). Without their shells, those species are vulnerable to predators and/or epidemies (they wouldn’t be getting a shell in the 1st place if they’d be able to exist without one, – a shell is a much “deadweight” and nutrient-demanding thing to have).
Bottom line: don’t count very hard on mussels. In a few decades, most of species of mussles may well go SPLAT, – extinction or nearly so. In a few regions some of their species – ones most tough, like the one which buries itself in sand, – may endure, but who knows if your region will have those or not, eh?
I’d rather hope for something truly @#%$ing durable to show up for us to eat – the idea’s not mine, good ol’ Shekley got it right back in old glory days of classic sci-fi: http://www.rulit.net/books/i-see-a-man-sitting-on-a-chair-and-the-chair-is-biting-his-leg-read-244343-1.html . Well, one can hope it won’t bite our legs, too.
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Collection of pictures from Ukraine Revolution (Nov 2013 – Jan 2014)
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“Peak Oil is dead” and the future of oil supply
…
Q: Andrews: BP has recently said definitively that “peak oil is dead.” How does an oil super-major reach such a conclusion, at least for purposes of public policy dialogue?
Dr. Richard Miller: I can’t shed any light on why they’re saying that today because it hasn’t been their consistent position in the past. A CEO like Lord John Browne clearly at least kept his options open on the idea; and he was the one who started to steer the company into alternative energy. The one who really didn’t have any sympathy with peak oil was Tony Hayward; it was really sad to see him bring the company’s investments in photovoltaics and other non-conventional energy almost to a screeching halt, deciding that the company was going to become a pure hydrocarbons company. That did seem very short-sighted. What’s odd of course is that he’s a geologist, and a very good geologist. You would think that someone like that could at least see that peak oil is not only coming, it’s quite probably here, in terms of conventional oil.
…
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Implies that Tony Hayward does not see that peak oil is coming/here. Wrong. I bet that Tony, being – quote – “a very good geologist”, – sees it very, very well. What he sees is not nesessarily what he says, though. I assume that exactly “purposes of public policy dialogue” are behind Tony’s statement. If the statement is done as an official BP statement, then it’s not even a “lie which Tony said”, – rather, it’s merely a “lie which BP says, which Tony has to spell out personally as part of his duties”, if you know what i mean…
I hope that despite moments like this, a very good geologist – being, in his heart, a true scientist above all else, despite all the corporate “clothes” (in all meanings) he gotta “wear”, – we can hope such a person will still be able to do much good being at such a position within BP. I mean, at least, that it’d be still worse if his position would occupied not by very good geologist, but by, say, a “very good lawer”. If you know what i mean…
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Reblogged this on Gaia will prevail.
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“We’ll adapt.” By “we” Rex means his buddies at the club, not you or me. The super-rich are too accustomed to solving their problems by throwing money at them. They know no matter how bad it gets, they’ll be at the top. Now I finally understand the billionaire climate change deniers. They realize the coming storm cannot be stopped, so they’re all thinking they need to keep maximizing their profits in order have enough to buy a (first class) seat on the lifeboats.
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