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6th Mass Extinction, Annalee Newitz, Capitalism, Charles Bukowski, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumer Culture, Corporate State, Dr. Paul Willis, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, General Electric, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Omar N. Bradley, Overpopulation, Privatization of Science, Security and Surveillance State, Singularity Network, Social Unrest, Techno-Optimists, Technocapitalism, Technotopia, The Elite 1%, Transhumanists, unwashed public, Zdzislaw Beksiński, Zygmunt Bauman
What had been designed to be our servants became our masters, then our owners and gods, and finally our destroyer….
Some days I wake up and despise the monotony and pettiness of this culture and its followers: its celebrity worship, its staged news reporting, its chameleon politicians, its conniving marketers of consumerism, its cookie-cutter neighborhoods, its push-button surveillance state, and its clueless masses all working together to create the illusion of normalcy. Everyone goes along with this mindless program like obedient slaves, afraid of the social stigma attached to questioning any radical deviation from what constitutes normal. God forbid anyone openly discusses the cliff we are fast approaching, its sheer drop-off and craggy rocks below coming more clearly into view. One last scramble for the last bit of habitable land at the poles will be the inevitable end game as atmospheric warming catches up to the glacial melt and sea level rise humans have set into motion. In light of all the scientific evidence accumulated over decades, mankind has known for some time that a radical reconfiguration of our socio-economic system was the only way to avoid collapse, as described beautifully back in 2008 by a longtime blogger who has been writing for nearly a decade:
There can be no “soft-landing” for a species adding another million of itself every 4 and a half days to consume and convert into more and more human flesh what little remains of the planet’s tattered web of life. Worshiping paper symbols of wealth as the only measurement of social and environmental worth, our species has monetized and misunderstood nature, ignoring its true incalculable value. Surely something is amiss when the financial interests of the insecticide industry trump the health of humans and the survival of pollinators. Examining the root cause of such corrosive effects in our economic system, i.e. capitalism, is nearly as taboo as mentioning the collapse of modern civilization. The culturally Pavlovian responses to any such criticism directed at capitalism or the unsustainability of industrial civilization is to argue for the rehabilitation of capitalism into something less destructive and tout humanity’s unfailing ability to adapt to any situation. Reinforced by past successes such as the Green Revolution, robotic exploration of distant planets, and Moore’s Law of technological advancement, the marriage of capitalism and technology has created a mindset which takes for granted the belief that the marketplace will create a hi-tech fix to any and all problems. Little green aliens, paranormal experiences, and techno-utopian futures seem to be more socially acceptable subjects for discussion rather than the collapse of a way-of-life that requires several more Earths if everyone were to live like Americans. Perhaps that is why we get technotopian books like this one:
The myth of progress is central to corporate ideologies of materialism, modernism, and technocapitalism. The mythical quality of technological progress was expressed most succinctly in GE’s slogan from the 1950’s: “Progress is our most important product.”
The newly revealed cover-up of GE’s PCB contamination of the Hudson River is just the latest in a not-so-stellar record of “bringing good things to life.”
There are reportedly hundreds of Transhumanist-affiliated groups(life extensionists, techno-optimists, Singularitarians, biohackers, roboticists, AI proponents, and futurists) in the world with the largest, the Singularity Network, claiming 10,000 members. Few in our society can imagine this planet exhausted of its resources, inhospitable to agriculture, and devoid of all its keystone species, but such a world is fast becoming reality as industrial civilization steamrolls the planet under the direction of technocapitalism. Millions of factories continue to spit out products by the ton to be shipped to every corner of the globe. The ravenous hordes struggling for a higher standard of living never think twice about the energy and eco-social damage tied to these consumer products that magically appear on store shelves.
“A transhuman future is a day-dream and we are rapidly running out of the luxury of being able to do nothing about the very real problems that face us now. A transhuman future is a nightmare of the electric sheep.”
~ Dr. Paul Willis
The boundaries of a finite planet have been temporarily extended by technology, giving mankind a false sense of power over his environment, but technological complexity is not immune to the law of diminishing returns; the problems are overwhelming the solutions:
“…Technology cannot bring back a concentrated resource deposit like soil, phosphates and fossil fuels that have been dispersed and converted so completely that no amount of energy can get them back. The links in the technological evolutionary chain have been successful so far, but all it takes is a single broken link that will drop us into the waste heap of failed evolution. The next link of the chain always exists in the imaginations of men, technological wonders to carry us forward, but malignant growth, the kind sponsored by corporate, banking and Wall St. entities, will guarantee the current technological link is our last one…”
For a culture that lives for today and ignores the consequences of tomorrow, the show must go on even as cracks and weaknesses in this false façade become more evident day by day. Omar N. Bradley may have been thinking about weapons of mass destruction when he made an observation about mankind’s tools of self-destruction, but he could not have been more prescient in the broader sense of technology’s reach into our lives when he said, “If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.”
As in previous fallen civilizations, today’s elite are more out of touch with our precarious position than most realize, and they will try to cling to their wealth and social status despite how much blood flows in the streets as the masses bear the brunt of collapse first –poverty, disease, war, starvation, etc., but ultimately no one can run from the death of the Earth’s oceans, the spread of novel diseases, and the die-off of trees. Those now deciding how our technologic scalpels will be wielded are not institutions looking out for the greater good of humanity, but by the ultra wealthy for their own personal financial enrichment and narcissistic interests:
“For better or worse,” said Steven A. Edwards, a policy analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “the practice of science in the 21st century is becoming shaped less by national priorities or by peer-review groups and more by the particular preferences of individuals with huge amounts of money…
…that personal setting of priorities is precisely what troubles some in the science establishment. Many of the patrons, they say, are ignoring basic research — the kind that investigates the riddles of nature and has produced centuries of breakthroughs, even whole industries — for a jumble of popular, feel-good fields like environmental studies and space exploration…
..the rise of science philanthropy may simply help “rich fields, universities and individuals to get richer.” The new patrons are responsible for one of the most striking trends on these campuses: the rise of privately financed institutes, the new temples of science philanthropy.
This privatization of science is just one more aspect of capitalism’s usurpation and corruption of the body politic.
The art in this blog post is from Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksiński whose intricately detailed paintings of apocalyptic landscapes, mutated and deformed humans, and surreal images were said to be inspired from his nightmares. He never gave titles to his paintings and signed them on the back. It is said he would often wake up in the middle of night to paint his dark visions. In 2005 he was found dead lying on the floor of his Warsaw flat in a pool of blood, stabbed 17 times.
Perhaps the greatest nightmare of modern man is the fact that he is at the mercy of an ever-expanding industrial civilization running on autopilot, as Zygmunt Bauman described, with no realistic way to stop its onslaught of toxic waste, greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and numerous other ecocidal features. I can see this horror when I look at much of Beksiński’s work, but I also see nature reclaiming the battlefield after man has defeated himself.
To a great degree, humans are their own worst enemy, prisoners of their flawed cerebral wiring with its neuroses, blind spots, and cognitive biases, but the real enemy is the omnicidal juggernaut our numbers have created; its base urges can’t be contained.
Kevin Moore said:
Damn it! There must be something to say but I can’t think of anything, since we’ve been over it all a thousand times, and nothing in the mainstream culture changes……. other than to become more idiotic and more destructive.
There is probably quite a lot of potential future that can be sacrificed to maintain present levels of lunacy.
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xraymike79 said:
This recurring nightmare has no cure except, as you’ve said yourself, death.
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buz painter said:
Sorry Mike– It was somewhat rude of me to go down thread and babble without commenting upon your article. I’m amazed at how many ways there are to tell us we are toast. I also love the art. I noticed the other day while looking at my unfinished collage that there were not only no people in it but no life of any kind – only rocks, water, mountains and cracked dirt. Damn! Can it be that this is how I see our world?
So… in order to change my collage what do I add? a couple of mummies, what else?
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xraymike79 said:
Detritus of modern civilization— old tires, plastic cups, ruins of buildings, the skeleton of a car, a few skulls?
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buz painter said:
Right you are… plenty of those. Perhaps some golden arches just poking up through the sand.
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Jacob Horner said:
“What is known is that Leviathan, the great artifice, single and world-embracing for the first time in His-story, is decomposing.
“From the day when battery-run voices began broadcasting old speeches to battery-run listeners, the beast has been talking to itself. Having swallowed everyone and everything outside itself, the beast becomes its own sole frame of reference. It entertains itself, exploits itself and wars on itself. It has reached the end of its Progress, for there is nothing left for it to progress against except itself.
“Leviathan is turning into Narcissus, admiring its own synthetic image in its own synthetic pond, enraptured by its spectacle of itself.
“It is a good time for people to let go of its sanity, its masks and armors, and go mad, for they are already being ejected from its pretty polis.”
Fredy Perlman…Against His-story, Against Leviathan! 1983
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xraymike79 said:
Pingback from FireDogLake:
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xraymike79 said:
And definitely read the article on elitist Bill Gates to know how the masses will be
treateddiscarded.LikeLike
Apneaman said:
It’s a small consultation, but Gates and most of the other elites will eventually be discarded too. When the system has failed the strong men will take over. Military men will be the leaders once again.
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F.Tnioli said:
Possible, i’d say, even likely, yes. Note though, that “military men” you are talking about – will not nesessarily be same men who serve in t he military within the current system. In the current system, military folks are quite darn soft folks. Most of them anyhows – exceptions exist, of course, like some of truly tough special ops units. Those are relatively few though. The bulk of armed forces in so-called “developed” countries, as well as in most “developing” ones – are people who are most busy doing some silly things. Many soldiers and officers are in fact not soldiers – they don’t ever do what soldier is expected to do (i.e. war, i.e. killing people professionally), but instead, for the most or even whole duration of their service, they are
– construction workers, building some generals’ houses and “military” buildings;
– technical specialists and operators, operating some sophisticated modern military equipment such as missile systems – yet operating those without ever actually using them to kill anybody;
– social unrest control forces – rods, rubber bullets, flash bangs, tear gas and water throwers is all such “military” men will ever have at their disposal;
– border control forces. Perhaps the closest to real military among so far mentioned, vast majority of those folks are not yet much military, despite having some military weaponry and equipment; most of them did not see any combat during whole time of their service, nor they are actually prepared and ready to do actual combat (despite declaring otherwise).
I am quite affraid that people who may end up “on top” after the system collapses – they’ll possibly _become_ military, but they are not military men right now (before the collapse) – i’m affraid it’ll be most cruel, heartless and evil people from present-days criminal world. Those are folks who even now have most important features which allowed “military lords” of the past to prevail and reign by-force: namely, ability to kill, and to kill without second thought. Tested, proven, and known by their peers ability, even now.
During old times, military men – at least, many of them, – had honor. Criminals often don’t have any. And it takes centuries of relatively stable civilized existance for military-like honor codex to develop (should i say, re-appear).
If you’d research in some detail about past civilization shutdowns, you’d notice that often – if not always, – quite lengthy “dark ages” period is involved after such a shutdown, and one of most significant features or such “dark ages” – is barbarianism. But who are barbarians? Barbarians are, in fact, military men without honor codex (and without much discipline nor any much high command, too). In other words, criminals with good guns (axes, clubs, etc), so to say.
I’m affraid this is how it’ll be this time as well. Especially considering the scale of the shutdown expected…
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Apneaman said:
I would rather live in a so called barbarian society than ours. If your understanding of barbarians comes from the Romans and their latter day admirers you have been greatly misinformed.
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F.Tnioli said:
“Neighbour’s grass is always greener”, though. I doubt you’d prefer barbarianism if you’d actually have a chance to live in it for a while.
No, my understanding of barbarians mainly comes not from ones who torn apart Roman empire. It’s too long ago. My primary understanding – however little it might be, – comes from a number of much more recent incidents, few of which are:
– russian civil war after so-called great october revolution of 1917. For years after, vast territories were ravaged by all sorts of military units (“red”, “white”, “green”, anarchists), as well as gangs; there was “golodomor” (wikipedia it if you’re not familiar, perhaps), too;
– disintegration of regimes in most poor countries, mainly in Africa, and barbaric practicies becoming widely spred as a result, see, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Macho-Violence_in_the_Democratic_Republic_of_Congo#Rape ;
– inability of so-called “civilized” people to avoid barbaric behaviour when in life-threatening situations (whether real or only suspected as life-threatening), see, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Andes_flight_disaster#Anthropophagy for the former (real), and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_Hurricane_Katrina_in_New_Orleans#Gretna_controversy for the latter (suspected).
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xraymike79 said:
Don’t you mean Holodomor:
Grappling With Holodomor
JAN 3 2014, 4:44 PM ET
A few days ago, I listened to a chapter in Timothy Snyder’s The Bloodlands on famine in Ukraine during the 1930s. The famine was man-made–the result of Stalin making war against his own citizens in Ukraine. I listened (I have the book in MP3 format) to about 90 percent of the chapter before I just had to cut it off. I generally have a strong stomach when it come to reading about evil, but this was too much: …
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ebos depew (@onebigaroony) said:
FT: to be clear–you’re talking about murder by police following Katrina, correct?
there were hysteric media accounts of bestial acts by stranded, starving citizens on the streets and similarly within the Superdome, which were found to have been unfounded and grossly overstated. ultimately this hysteria served to justify (in the minds of the authorities) martial law policies and the illegitimate use of deadly force.
that is: cops shooting unarmed people in the back.
don’t forget also that some wealthy communities during that storm had their own private security–Triple Canopy and the like. not only will the poorz be unprotected by the State, but the private ‘justice’ of the rich will be on display as well. cf Iraq (or elsewhere) for comparison.
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Apneaman said:
I am familiar with the Holodomor. My grand parents, Baba and Dido, got out of Ukraine just in time and came to Canada. They would never speak of it, but my aunt told me they both lost most of their families. So I guess I did too by extension. No one ever came for a visit and they never went back.
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xraymike79 said:
I had the wrong link in the essay to Zdzislaw Beksiński’s amazing art –now corrected:
http://belvederegallery.com/Beksinski-Zdzislaw-/acrylic-paintings/
http://art.vniz.net/en/beksinski/
http://sevasevol.blogspot.com/2012/02/zdzislaw-beksinski.html
http://zdzislaw-beksinski.blogspot.com/p/paintings_7738.html
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BeezleyBub said:
Ever since the 1970s, I loved doomer art, stuff like Heavy Metal magazine when it first came out. Back then it was the post nuclear thang. The techno life after death thing is featured in an upcoming movie called Transcendence. It’s pretty much the same bullshit we get from regular religion. But, what really pisses me off is the solar-wind-biofuel salvation thing being shoved down our throats, along with the electric car thing. It seriously fucking steams me when I think of all the non-thinking, suckling intellectual babes in the woods slurping this shit up, along with the never ending slacktivist revolution that’s always coming, but never gets here. But, I gotta say, the artwork on this site inspires.
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Harry said:
Agreed! The disingenuity of green posers (and their weird inattentional blindness to the issue of Energy Return on Energy Invested) is galling. That humans are driving around in Toyota Priuses and similar imagining themselves to be somehow benefiting the environment is beyond laughable.
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Tom said:
http://robinwestenra.blogspot.co.nz/2014/03/geopolitics-and-oil.html
Tuesday, 18 March 2014
Geopolitics and Oil
Why ExxonMobil’s Partnerships With Russia’s Rosneft Challenge the Narrative of U.S. Exports As Energy Weapon
[quote from article]
In Steve Coll’s book “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power,” he documents that Lee Raymond — former CEO of ExxonMobil from 1993-2005 — was asked if his company would build more U.S. refineries to fend off gasoline shortages.
Raymond’s reply: “I’m not a U.S. company and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.”
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Harry said:
Bundeswehr Peak Oil Study 2011: “Already today, Russsia’s foreign policy calculus, for example, includes energy aspects and the option to use them in order to enforce Russian interests. At the strategic level, this is re flected in Moscow’s Foreign Policy Concept of July 2008. In practice, Russia’s gas disputes with Ukraine are an indication of a political instrumentalisation of its energy riches. A similar connection between an offensive foreign policy and energy richness can be observed for Venezuela.”
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The National Razor (@National_Razor) said:
Great article! Truth is rarely popular and usually uncomfortable, which is why it has so few fans. It’s taken a long time for me to learn that a significant plurality–perhaps even a majority–prefer to believe a comfortable fantasy over an uncomfortable reality, even if it means their own doom.
On the other hand, we’ve only been on this planet for the blink of an eye compared with, say, the dinosaurs, so perhaps this is all probationary. Compared with other species, humans have a relatively low infant mortality rate, combined with an overactive procreative instinct that isn’t limited to estrus. The faster the population explodes, the more quickly it will become unsustainable. Evolution is slow but inexorable. Not to get too Zen about it, but perhaps the things we find so objectionable about ourselves–such as war, inhumanity and the gluttonous exploitation of natural resources–are simply a part of the natural selection process. We’ve been given a lot of rope to hang ourselves with.
It is apparent from a variety of phenomena, such as rising greenhouse gases, the commercial depletion of ocean fisheries, and the massive, gyrating accretions of garbage and chemical sludge known as the Great Pacific and Atlantic Garbage Patches, that human industrialization has had a deleterious impact on the natural environment. Nevertheless, there are those who will argue the vanity of presuming too much about the permanence of man’s impact on the planet, and that eons after the brief efflorescence of human civilization has crumbled to atoms, the Earth will still be spinning through space, unmindful we ever existed. It’s a grim and humbling prospect, and it may even be true. But if life is as rare and precious as we presume it to be, and we’re all going to die anyway–insects, dinoflagellates and humans, all fellow passengers to the grave–where are the moral or spiritual consequences, if any, of having caused the extirpation of so many of our fellow creatures during the infinitesimal blip of human existence on the Universal timeline?
It’s almost enough to make one hope that there is some sort of transcendent spirit or supreme intelligence out there–call it God, or call it Michael Rennie from “The Day the Earth Stood Still”–waiting to set things aright. Because we’ve damned well made a mess of things. I expect the next Permian extinction will erase the ignominy.
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xraymike79 said:
Thanks for the brilliant comment. You touched on something that gnaws at anyone truly concerned about the environment — “where are the moral or spiritual consequences?”
Humans have failed miserably in that respect and really have no moral high ground when it comes any sort of theoretical judgment day that may come for our conduct as the “most sentient and intelligent species on Earth” entrusted with the responsibility of caretakers of the planet.
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Harry said:
The unprecedented scope of the unfolding tragedy does beg these questions. Certainly I have felt compelled to go on a spiritual journey. I find Terence McKenna’s talk of eschaton intriguing but it doesn’t really ring true for me. You want to feel that there’s some purpose to it all though – that all of this horror and destruction serves some greater purpose… I do, at least. Are these infernal fires we’re lighting the crucible for some transformation of consciousness?
Adyashanti and Eckhart Tolle have brought me a great deal of comfort, here talking about extinction/collapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4XxMVH9hmk
And I really like Paul Chefurka’s thermodynamic critique of the human situation because it allows for the possibility that we are simply sticking to life’s script and that all of this is meant to be – or at least no less ‘meant to be’ than any other natural event: https://www.facebook.com/notes/bodhi-paul-chefurka/a-thermodynamic-critique-of-the-human-situation/10152292323202589
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F.Tnioli said:
Oh, for sure, our sapience does not cancel other features we humans (vast majority of us anyways) are packed with. We still have lots of things happening – including most of things which deteriorate our environment, – happening because those things were made to happen by “primitive” human intincts, desires and fears.
In other words – yes, mankind, collectively, still act much like “apekind” size of 7 billions would.
There is an excellent – in its wisdom – proverb: “lazyness is the engine of technical progress”. Indeed, i see natural people’s lazyness being one of primary reasons – or sometimes the only reason, – for people to pollute and destruct more than otherwise expected.
Simple example of the above which i like quite much – is nearly any person with a car: instead of walking half a mile, – most of those folks will _drive_ half a mile. Even when they have time to walk it, and air is good enough for the walk to be good for one’s health, – they’d still drive. Why? Because they are lazy. What’s “lazy” is? It’s the natural intinct, present in most of us, aimed to reduce the body’s energy spending whenever possible. A natural “energy saving” circuit in our brains, so to say.
Other natural intincts and needs, – such as need to keep eating food and drink (clean enough) water, need to have a warm shelter, need to sleep, intinct to care and provide for one’s children, and even high feelings such as love and compassion (by some people), and also as low as greed and jealousy (by some other people), – all those being quite natural things if you’d ask me, heck, even experiments with apes detect most of those clearly present in apes, you know? – all those things together, manifestating themselves through (now) billions of people – is the primary reason for much (if not most) of existing industrial infrastructure to be present.
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xraymike79 said:
“I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention – invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.”
~ Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, 1977
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F.Tnioli said:
Oh, invention sure does arise from idleness, i agree. But invention and widespread implementation of previously invented solutions – are different things. The latter is, i guess, mainly a result of necessities and/or greed. I may be mistaken here, though.
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Lidia17 said:
I came across this excellent article yesterday:
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-03-19/how-to-be-trapped-an-interview-with-david-korowicz
For all sorts of reasons the possibility of a controlled orchestrated de-growth to some viable steady-state position is probably deluded in the extreme. I’ll just point to one thing, such a view tends to embody the confusion that because the globalised economy is human-made it is therefore designed, understandable and controllable – humans can do this in niches, but the emergent structure of multiple niches interacting on many scales over time is not. This mirrors the sort of argument made famous by William Paley in his Natural Theology who said that the existence of living organisms proved the existence of a divine creator/ designer by analogy with how the finding of a watch would lead one to believe in the existence of an intelligent watchmaker. Half a century later Darwin and then his followers showed that natural selection could do emergent design without a controller- the ‘blind’ watchmaker in Richard Dawkins words. But as believers in Man’s progress we seem to have taken on the role that Paley once ascribed to god- that is, as the creators of the complex globalised economy it is therefore designable and controllable and potentially perfectible if only the right people and ideas were in the cockpit. We find all sorts of confusion arising from this when attempts are made to take linguistic dominion over the economy by confusing complex interdependent emergence with intentional design (as in, the economy is capitalist/ neoliberal/ socialist, or, we need to change ‘the monetary architecture’). So even without getting into details about irreversibility in complex systems or the myriad practical problems with a controllable de-growth, the power of the belief in its possibility seems, to me at least, to represent Titanic hubris…
….The broad point here is that growth and collapse is a much more fundamental process than capitalism, the debt-based monetary system or technological change, as the history of collapsed civilizations and extinct species can attest. It’s part of us, part of life.
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xraymike79 said:
Oh yeah. We talked about that further down this thread… 🙂
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ulvfugl said:
Hi Lidia, hope your hospital thing went ok, Part of life ? Sure, huge ancient trees 2000 years old crash down in the rain forest, they are LIKE whole civilisations, but we are supposed to be smarter than yeast… I don’t see him as one of the bad guys, just think it’s a crap analysis, and he’s playing to the corporate gallery and the Transition people, and it’s the same old stuff that’ll help everyone ‘come to terms’ with ‘our predicament’ because it isn’t anybody’s fault we can’t help being what we are, blablahblah. I don’t agree. Everybody could choose to do something ELSE tomorrow.
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Lidia17 said:
Hah! The hospital.. This time it was my husband, and likely another “maximum waste” event. Long story. I will wait to see how it ends before I write it up.
As for Paul’s stuff, a.) he is not the only proponent of this thermodynamic jazz, and b.) you’ve accused me of conventional thinking—here you are with your very conventional and boring human protagonism again…Why *must* we be smarter than yeast? Who says? It’s been proven in various ways that bacteria can drive our behavior, so who is the master? Please do keep up with the latest discoveries! 😉
I can’t speak for Paul’s reasoning but mine certainly does not come from a place of political correctness or emotional pandering. On the contrary, it comes from trying to remove the cloud of emotion from what are otherwise extremely conspicuous phenomena. “Remove” is not really the right word because, looking back, I never felt invested in the human race as the greatest thing since sliced bread and had a hard time understanding why anyone did. At the age of about 12, I decided that there was “no such thing as progress”. I couldn’t tell you why—that’s just how I felt.
ANyway, I’m not winning friends by any means, am I?,in my perception of what is, at root, a very simple and logical process. I don’t know about the “corporate gallery” but the Transition Town people are going to be extremely resistant, if not impervious, to this explanation, because it takes away their idea of Agency. People want stories where they are the stars of the show, whether fierce like you or fuzzy like artleads. I’m not looking for Stories to compete with your Stories; that’s not how it works for me. If you would like a visual analogy, it’s like someone is working on a jigsaw puzzle, and I see a piece that fits-zack! Meanwhile, you’ve written a million complex and elaborate pages tying yourself into knots over the same thing. You seem to be coming around, on the information=entropy front. You’re just one step away from Ac and Paul and the other determinists, it would seem to me, once you reach *that* point…
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Kevin Moore said:
There go those dollars again:
Shame they seem to have missed the time frame by about 75 years.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/climate-change-leaked-draft-of-un-ipcc-report-predicts-global-warming-will-cause-violent-conflict-displace-millions-of-people-and-wipe-trillions-of-dollars-off-the-global-economy-9198171.html
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F.Tnioli said:
It’s just one more message which in fact is aimed to pacify societies, via “yeah it’s big problem but it’s not a big problem now nor in near future – so keep going business as usual; folks some 50+ years later will have to deal with it, but not you, not today”.
I can see it all over the message presented:
– They say: the report predicts that by the end of the century “hundreds of millions of people will be affected by coastal flooding and displaced due to land loss”.
, I say: how about millions of people who are displaced – and quite many of them simply dead, see http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-14084670 – in Africa? Why talk “end of the century”, when poorest countries of the world already have it going (as usual, poorest suffer 1st)?
– They say: “The report forecasts that climate change will reduce median yields by up to 2 per cent per decade for the rest of the century”.
, I say: oh, really? “For the rest of the century”, -2% every decade – is quite like saying “we’ll have industrial agriculture going, with minor losses, for at least 86 more years”. Any sane, aware and capable scientist today who paid attention to the matter – knows that this is highly unlikely to happen;
– They say: “A global mean temperature increase of 2.5C above pre-industrial levels may lead to global aggregate economic losses of between 0.2 and 2.0 per cent, the report warns”
, I say: +2.5C above pre-industrial will result in PDSI (drought index) to drop below Great Dust Bowl levels for more than a half of present agriculture lands on the planet (as evident from professor Dai analysis for expected PDSI changes in the warming world, particularly his excellent maps for it). This nearly certainly means that the world will lose more than a half of its food output – much more than a half, since on lands which will still be cultivable, yields will be greatly decreased, as mentioned above. This one consequence alone will result in much more than 0.2…2% economic loss. But who cares! 0.2…2% loss – is an excellent example of “nothing to REALLY worry about – manageable” figure, eh?
– They say: “climate change by 2050 would increase the number of undernourished children under the age of five by 20-25 million globally, or by 17-22 per cent”
, I say: by 2050, many times more children will be dead because of climate change, but since dead do not count as “undernourished”, those do not count, eh? Let ’em people think this is about “some more hungry kids in Africa, nothing to really worry about, besides, it’s about 2050, not about now” – this is what they are saying, eh.
– They say: “For example, it indirectly increases the risks from violent conflict in the form of civil war, inter-group violence and violent protests by exacerbating well-established drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks”
, I say: risks? Risk – is a thing which is about “may happen, or may not happen”. Violent conflicts because of climate change – are not “risks”. Not even “inevitability”. Violent conflicts because of climate change – is a REALITY, here and now. See about the role of food prices in violent conflicts in Egypt and some other middle east countries, see about food riots in Africa, see about people in USA who don’t get food stamps anymore – and how they are quite literally enslaved by some US farm businesses to work much like slaves, and how few of them are simply killed for disobedience. Unconvinient truth is – it ain’t a risk, it’s a process already happening, and it’ll get much more widespred as warming goes on.
– They say: “Terrestrial and freshwater species will also face an increased extinction risk under projected climate change during and beyond the 21st century.”
, i say: same thing – not a risk; already happening, we have hundreds (by some estimates, thousands) times faster die-out rate of species even now. It’ll accelerate further. Talking about “increased extinction risk” of species now – is much like talking about “increased risk for one’s table to burn” when nearly 30% of one’s house is already burned down, and much of the remainder of it – is already on fire. Silly, eh? But no, ain’t silly, if the goal is to keep people cool. The phraze “during and beyond 21st century” is especially good at it – it makes many people to subconsiously (if wrongly) assume that much/most of species will still be around past 2100. While in fact, we’d be lucky if some 20% will still be present in at least some small numbers.
– They say: “Machair, a grassy coastal habitat found only in north-west Scotland and the west coast of Ireland, is one of the several elements of the UK’s “cultural heritage” that is at risk from climate change”.
, I say: oh, what a “nice” way to conclude the message! Why, suuure, we are MOST concerned about the loss of some cultural heritage, that’s the most important thing about climate change consequences out there, isn’t it? Sigh. Again, not a “risk” – it’s coastal, so it’ll be under the sea, there is no “whether” about it – it’s only a matter of “when”. Not a risk – but a certainty. Saying “risk” again and again instead of explaining why and how we know we’ll lose those things, – is a good way to keep people passive about it (for now). And then, what a brilliant way to conclude the message itself – instead of summary of any sort, they talk about a thing nearly noone cares about any much – “grassy coastal habitat” in the middle of north-west Scotland. Efficient conclusion of an efficient message, eh.
IPCC reports – late drafts and parts as well as the whole AR4, – are to calm down the public, minor figures and amateurs who don’t see much of the big picture. The IPCC quite likely issues much different – and much closer to the grim reality, – version of their reports, one which is classified, and is not for public eyes. Their public works are not ones i’d recommend to base one’s decisions on, be it personal or professional decisions. But “messages” like this one, discussing “leaks” – are even worse. Carefully crafted to seemingly present the problem, while in fact doing quite well to mask the problem, – i.e. the opposite, – such message are among things i dislike the most.
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qscwsxesz said:
Excellent analysis, I fully agree with what you said. The point is that it’s an incredibly ‘difficult’ situation, to say it very lightly. I am sure that the ‘important’ people, the big fish, etc do have a pretty clear picture of what’s to come: the great human population bottleneck & dieoff, the 6th massive extinction of biosphere, all the coming droughts floods storms sea level rise etc etc etc we all know are already here and with each passing year will substantially worsen because of feedbacks tipping points etc. My point is… how can the puppet masters communicate this to the ignorant brainwashed enslaved zombies they call the ‘people’ without starting a mass crazyness chaos anarchy unrest and all the rest of it…? On one side they obviously have all the position privilege money resources etc so keeping BAU for as long as possible is what they do, but in the other hand they are NOT so stupid as most of us think they are and so consequently they also probably know and understand NTE and all the rest of it… what can governments do? can you imagine some president or PM communicating the population the REALITY? Dear citizens, relatively soon we are all going to die because of the dozens of civilization kiilling genies we have released (AGW, CC, oceand acidfication desertification drought mass extinction of most higher life forms, etc etc etc) ??? all people would go crazy if they could see the truth… not gonna happen… BAU will continue until it simply cant… as for IPCC yeah its allways been a joke… arctic sea ice gone by 2060 anyone??? but yeah, probably they have a real IPCC with the ‘real deal’ which is obviously classified so as not to scare the sheeps moving to slaughter. That’s why I’m so gratefull to have access to THE TRUTH in sites like this one and similar ones… the 0,001% of human population aware/awaken/with little dirt in the eyes knows what’s coming… really interesting times… Greetings to xraymike, tom, kevin, ulvfugl, brutus, frinoli, and the rest of this great community. Keep up the excellent work xraymike!
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Tom said:
Realistic interpretation of the current state of the world, Tnioli and I agree that the message is about “buying time,” the most precious part of reality, to continue the façade as long as possible so the few can enjoy a few more moments of manufactured pleasure.
i’m desperately trying to convince my wife to let go and let’s do something else for our remaining years. She says “You’ve been saying this for forty years, Tom.” I explain that more and more people saw it coming and that now it’s HERE. She continues to work in a corporate job that she dislikes and wants me to work full-time at something menial – bank teller, substitute teacher, and the like. In my mid-60’s i’m not into it any longer and really don’t care if I live in a tent on the side of the road somewhere. No matter what we do, it’ll all end badly. Why not try something else? Not yet, not today.
The years drag on and after while you start running out of energy for bullshit and can’t continue to function in industrial society and start backing away – what I’ve been doing.
There’s no “winning” here – it’s all just a giant waste of time to me. I comply and do what i’m told, but realistically i’m in my last 10 “good” years and while I still have the energy and perfect health I want to change some things. I have to wait for my love (and the rest of my family) to catch on. By then, of course, they’ll regret their delay. Me too.
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Lidia17 said:
Tom, reading your comment I thought of an old Kunstlercast I just listened to, featuring Steve from Virginia. His waste-based economy exhortions are succinct and compelling. Even I had still labored under the notion that some things were “worth doing.” But no, really they’re not, as it turns out… it’s all loss-making from A to Z.
[audio src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/Kunstlercast_249.mp3" /]
Maybe your wife would agree to take a listen.
It is tough, though, to admit that what you’ve spent your whole life doing has been a waste. The psyche is always gonna try and protect itself.
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xraymike79 said:
Pingback from Occuworld:
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TR said:
1:59-3:15
“..obviously it’s my programming.”
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Tom said:
Climate Trump Card
Exciting as the energy geopolitics stand-off is to follow from afar, the climate disruption implications of it serve as the ultimate trump card.
“Sadly, few seem to care about diminishing the threat posed by climate change, since it has become increasingly clear that LNG would make things worse,” wrote ClimateProgress Editor Joe Romm in a March 12 article.
“First, natural gas is mostly methane, (CH4), a super-potent greenhouse gas, which traps 86 times as much heat as CO2 over a 20-year period. So even small leaks in the natural gas production and delivery system can have a large climate impact.”
It appears the U.S. push to export LNG has trumped climate change concerns, with export facilities in Freeport, Texas; Elba Island, Georgia; and Lusby, Maryland all barreling ahead through the permitting process.
So even if the U.S. (and/or ExxonMobil) comes out ahead in this energy-centric geopolitical brouhaha, we still all end up losing in the end.
[conclusion to above article @ 4:37 am]
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Apneaman said:
Funny how Exxon and the other majors have had such a free hand largely due to the tax payer funded military, yet can claim “I’m not a U.S. company and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.” I wonder where these companies would be if the Navy decided to stop protecting certain shipping lanes. Lloyds would probably cancel their insurance to begin with. The very fact that a CEO can speak like that in public indicates the government has no real authority and most people are clueless as to how their taxes have paid for the strong military presence that has enabled many US companies to dominate. Junkies will put up with all sorts of abuses and humiliations as long as their getting their fix.
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xraymike79 said:
John Perkins(Confessions of an Economic Hit Man) was the first to really enlighten me on the nature of multinational corporations who “have no allegiance to any particular nation-state or people.” Perhaps we should extend that to “no allegiance to any particular habitable planet” as well.
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Apneaman said:
I was glad when Perkins came out, but even he thinks that capitalism just needs tweaking and accountability and then we will be alright. Until my mid twenties, I believed in the Gene Roddenberry future, then in techno fixes for 10 years. Every year for the last dozen years I have progressively lost any and now all faith in civilization. Although, I still like many people.
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PMB said:
Perkins book came out in 2004. The year before the film and book of The Corporation came out. I literally dragged and paid for 20 people to see this movie which I believed would be the way towards opening their eyes to what was happening and provoke them into action. Didn’t work out so well.
It was through this film that I first learned about Smedley Butler, his book, and the use of military to aid the corporate intrusion in South America and the attempted overthrow of Roosevelt in 1933. His book, War is a Racket should be required reading.
I was stunned that at no point in all my years of schooling was this gentleman ever mentioned. Any time I brought up Butler to those more educated (Columbia, Harvard, Wharton, etc, etc) I was met with disdain and arrogance; not the slightest bit of interest. I couldn’t have been any more isolated than had I been an island.
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F.Tnioli said:
20 people, eh. I estimated somewhere else that people who would actually able to both understand complex issues, and also act accordingly to their new knowledge – are, at best, about 0.1% of the population. If this estimate is true, then chances for you to get lucky and find just one such person out of group of 20 – is 0.1%*20 = 2%. I.e., repeat the act and drag 20 more folks to see the movie, then do so 48 more times – and then you’ll have fairly decent chances (in fact, ~63.5% if my probability theory is not too rusty yet) to find a SINGLE person who’d be provoked into action.
Sorry, but it seems we need much more refined, precise and intelligent methods to find out who’s those few who actually needs to see such movies.
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Tom said:
This is why I believe fast collapse is in the offing – maybe just to start things off the roller coaster of chaos.
As soon as some, possibly insignificant, trigger is pulled (maybe it’s one that silently creeps up on us like methane and sea level rise) environmentally, but similarly on the food chain and certainly along social lines – the whole structure will likely unravel rather quickly, then maybe plateau off for some random length of time and zoom, down we go again, momentum building along the destruction vector, from food shortages, bank runs, panic of all kinds, desperation washing over civilization (not confined to former ‘third world’ countries as when capitalism was running things) to standard services evaporating. Once the electrical goes out there are no water, sewage, fire/emergency, medical, financial systems and the craziness begins.
What difference will morality and ethics make? In a nation awash in guns and pharmaceuticals the scenarios one can imagine make The Road a bedtime story in your now lived dystopian reality. There’s going to be so much death and mayhem, with no one to clean up, that it practically guarantees that diseases of all kinds emerge to further the rate of decay.
The stench alone will be enough to kill, as it indicates enormous levels of hydrogen sulfide, which will cause massive fires and explosions to continue for quite some time.
Add to that the baked-in radiation increases as the world’s nuke plants and storage sites set off the largest slow atomic bomb of all. With nothing to eat that will sustain anyone for long, what kind of decisions is one more likely to make? Ultimately, the question becomes “Survive, for what?”
It’s likely to bEcom@ hardRRRR to keeeeeepp one’s sAn ity.
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buz painter said:
Tom– I said goodbye to my sanity long since. Was it Krishnamurti who said, ” It is no measure of health to be adapted to a profoundly sick society”? I have been wondering myself of late what further there is to say. I am beginning to think that perhaps, instead of focusing on all of the symptoms of collapse which manifest all around us, we should begin to seek out those practical things which can mitigate or at least ameliorate our condition.
It already is apparent that many of us see music as our refuge. I used to (in the old days) walk around with a sketch book and a guitar. I was prepared for what life threw at me. I have a collage scattered around on my drawing table waiting for me to have the time in which to assemble it. That time never comes because I have rearranged my priorities such that it has always seemed trivial to think about art. Slowly it is dawning on me that my priorities are misplaced and mistaken.
What else is there if we do not create in our mental/conscious environment that which profoundly announces our humanity? The trees are dying all around me. Since I can do nothing to stop the carnage what better meditation than to use the wood to create a sculpture honoring the life of the tree?
Our technological world is collapsing because of human action. Perhaps it is time to stop. I have often wondered at the thought process behind the construction of the great pyramid at Giza. If that pile of stone did nothing else it definitely announced to us in the future, “We were here.” Is that enough? …that we were here?
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Apneaman said:
That’s a great question buz. It reminded of a Guy McPherson talk where after shocking the audience with some realities of how much damage we have done and suggesting the possibility of NTE he says “at least you got to live”. That made me ponder if I would rather not have been born. What disturbs me most is that, try as i might, I do not think I can protect the people I love. Not in any significant way. Powerlessness in the face of their suffering is my big fear. If I had no family it would be easy to just take that last walk in the woods when the time is right.
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Tom said:
buz: yes, I too do what I can now – grow my own veggies (try), take care of what’s in front of me, backing out of society a little at a time and waiting for my wife to change her mind about working her remaining years away. I used to spend a lot of time in the political anti-fracking campaign, but the snails pace of change was not for me so I just stick to local concerns now – trying to build community (it’s not working because of politics too) and connecting on-line, bearing witness.
We’re running out of time but nobody seems concerned. Most are satisfied with the plastic existence of industrial civilization with its job-slavery and all its devil’s-bargain perks like unaffordable health care, foods that kill, legal cancer-causing and health-ruining industries (nuclear energy, tobacco and liquor to name a few), and a military and security state that keeps us all in prison all the time – and we’re not supposed to notice.
Apneaman: that’s one of my concerns too – there’s no plan when nobody even wants to talk about the mere possibility that anything is wrong. Makes for some fitful sleep at times.
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Paul W said:
Buz, per your thoughts on meditation and the pyramids, what about mankind building a monument to our folly on the moon? I know this is entirely impractical, but take it as a thought experiment. I say the moon because it is geologically inactive. You could build a few monuments to ensure redundancy in the case of an errant meteor strike. The point would be to leave a warning. If higher life forms reinhabit the earth and intelligence appears again, we could warn them of our folly and the lure of the fossil fuel energy gradient. That could be our legacy.
It doesn’t have to be the moon. The goal would be to create something lasting millions of years that could communicate our warning and apology. It’s probably totally impossible to create such a monument, but that’s the kind of thoughts my mind wanders to when it seems like there’s no way to change the present.
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xraymike79 said:
@Tom
Too much truth in this little masterpiece of horror you’ve written, and with BAU it will most assuredly come to pass. The psychological effects are already well underway (previously posted here):
Americans’ Mental Health is Latest Victim of Changing Climate (Op-Ed)
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Tom said:
Thanks Mike, but I gotta tell you – your site is inspirational! The artwork and your writing and contributors’ too – you’re expressing our group emotions, striking a chord so to speak, and our responses are the reverberations, harmonics.
Helps to be baked too . . . . . . . .
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Apneaman said:
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Tom said:
HA-HAAA! Good one Apneaman! I wish I could miss what’s happening. It’s extremely hard to live “a productive life” or make “plans for the future” when you see there isn’t much longer to go and it’s getting worse all the time. I muddle on though.
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xraymike79 said:
Missed this article from 3-8-14 in which we are mentioned…
A Gift from the Collapseniks
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xraymike79 said:
Kevin Moore was just quoted in the San Diego Free Press:
Putting Our Financial Well Being Above Our Children’s Ability to Survive a Warming Planet
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TR said:
How about a theme song for our NTHE club?
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xraymike79 said:
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F.Tnioli said:
This was mentioned above, and i gave argumented reply above, stating that this is in fact a kind of message to pacify the society – not to motivate it. Sadly.
Quite betrayal’ish of IPCC to do so, but then, may be not, – who said IPCC was for “us people” in the 1st place? AFAIK, it never was.
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xraymike79 said:
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xraymike79 said:
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Tom said:
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/theres-a-coal-base-in-china-the-size-of-la
China Is Building a “Coal Base” the Size of LA
China, faced with ever-worsening pollution in its major cities—a recent report deemed Beijing “barely suitable for living”—is doing what so many industrializing nations have done before it: banishing its titanic smog spewers to poor or rural areas so everyone else can breathe easier. But China isn’t just relegating its dirty coal-fired power plants to the outskirts of society; for years, it’s been building 16 unprecedentedly massive, brand new “coal bases” in rural parts of the country. There, they won’t stifle China’s megacities; they’ll churn out enough pollution to help smother the entire world.
The biggest of those bases, the Ningdong Energy and Chemical Industry Base, spans nearly 400 square miles, about the size of LA. It’s already operational, and seemingly always expanding. It’s operated by Shenhua, one of the biggest coal companies in the world. China hopes to uses these coal bases not just to host some of the world’s largest coal-fired power plants, but to use super-energy intensive technology to convert the coal into a fuel called syngas and use it to make plastics and other materials.
Syngas is healthier to breathe when burned than typical coal—but as Motherboard has noted before, synthesizing the stuff emits nearly twice the carbon pollution. That’s why when Inside Climate News, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative environmental outfit, traveled to China to investigate the operation, they, and a number of climate experts concluded it would “doom the climate.”
[and, further down]
It’s projected to finally be finished by the end of the decade, when it will produce a jaw-dropping 30,000 MW of power, sucking down 100 million tons of coal every year in the process. And it’s just one of over a dozen such sprawling operations.
As such, Ningdong does a fairly good job of epitomizing China’s grave threat to the global climate system. A recent paper in Nature Climate Change noted that if all of the coal-to-gas plants get built, they’d produce 21 billion tons of CO2 alone. The Washington Post’s Brad Plumer puts that in context: “The entire nation of China produced 7.7 billion tons of carbon-dioxide in 2011.” Put simply, China’s on a path to produce an unholy amount of carbon pollution.
[concludes]
China’s giant coal bases, then, may very well be the largest looming threat to a stable global climate. [“So, then what’s Fukushima, chopped liva?”]
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Apneaman said:
So much for the theory of the Asians being smarter than us.
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xraymike79 said:
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Tom said:
well at least they’re honest and up front about it, as in:
YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
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xraymike79 said:
Virtual stress relief:
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buz painter said:
Now you’re talking. If I don’t at least kick a rock my day is wasted. I face a knee replacement which will sideline me for the duration. That is more depressing than a nuclear war for me.
I can hear the water…
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Tom said:
very nice – how do you do that?
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Treemystic said:
Reblogged this on Gaia will prevail.
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xraymike79 said:
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xraymike79 said:
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xraymike79 said:
Land of the serfs, home of the subservient…
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Kevin Moore said:
Yes, as I have often pointed out (not the only person, of course, but perhaps more frequently and more vocally than many), war has been declared on young people, those who are generally least able to defend themselves.
New Zealand’s child poverty rate began to surge in the early 2000s, and is rising rapidly. Nobody in power cares. I guess it’s all part of the plan.
As I said to NPDC last year, most of councillors and senior officers are worse than the Nazis who ran the death camps because those Nazis did love their own children and did much to protect them. The mob in power around here (and their ‘brothers in arms’ elsewhere) won’t lift a finger to protect the next generation, and most of the time actively work to destroy the next generation (in its entirety). Younger members of staff actively promote their own destruction.
I discussed the fall in oil consumption in most ‘developed nations’ over recent years with the newly appointed NPDC Policy and Strategy Manager today, and pointed out that when you have 25% general rate of unemployment and 60% youth unemployment (Spain, Greece, Italy etc.) oil consumption falls because people stop driving to work, stop taking holidays, stop doing anything much.
One of the biggest problems at the moment is the high Kiwi dollar (currently around 86 cents US compared to 42 cents 15 years ago) because NZ is losing the race for the bottom; that creates the illusion that oil and other imports are cheap, and spurs continued over-consumption and maintenance of the various delusions associated with industrial living. Relatively rich migrants pouring into Auckland are fuelling a rampant housing market and raising the general poverty rate.
Waiting for the crash, but the worse it gets overseas, the more attractive NZ becomes to those with lots of digits in computer systems.
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Tom said:
Kevin: I just came across this article. Care to comment?
http://robinwestenra.blogspot.co.nz/2014/03/nz-pm-drops-dollar.html
Wednesday, 19 March 2014
NZ PM drops the dollar?
“Woa, this is big!!!. John Key as a Wall street banker signed a deal with the Chinese to deal directly with them and not via the global currency the US dollar?????”
—Travellerev
Wall Street Banker NZ Prime Minister John Key Drops the US Dollar?
New Zealand has become one of the first countries in the world to be allowed direct currency trading with Chinese, a move aimed at reducing the cost of business in the economic superpower.
Prime Minister John Key announced the deal after a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing last night (NZ time), the first day of his state visit this week.
The deal would “make doing business with China easier by reducing the costs of converting between the two currencies, and will stimulate trade and investment”, Key said.
The announcement was a sign of “how close the relationship is growing”. Since he became prime minister, exports had quadrupled to $10 billion, he said.
“You can sort of pick any metric you like but it’s a remarkable relationship and one gets the feeling we’re only part way through it in terms of the potential for New Zealand.”
Work to allow the direct trade began in April last year, shortly after an announcement that Australia had been granted a similar deal.
While China is emerging as a global economic superpower, its currency remains tightly controlled by Beijing, with the exchange rate allowed to rise in value only slowly and trade allowed only through approved currencies.
This means currency trading has generally had to be conducted indirectly, usually through US dollars, even though New Zealand’s exports, of $10b in 2013, exceed that of Australia.
New Zealand is only the sixth currency in the world to be granted direct convertibility with China. Australian-owned Westpac has been granted the licence to operate as a market maker between the kiwi and China’s renminbi.
[there’s a little more and it’s unrelated to the topic]
Russia is giving up their dollars and China probably doesn’t want them any more, now here’s NZ! This could be a HUGE development in that it could cause the dollar (already on shaky ground) to collapse! You can imagine the effect on the global banking system.
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Kevin Moore said:
Like most western nations, NZ has lost most of its economic diversity (deliberate government policy over many decades whichever party or coalition was in power) and is now largely dependent on agricultural exports and tourism (pus borrowing) to pay for imports of energy, consumer products, machinery and construction materials,
40 years ago most imports came from Britain or the USA, with a fair portion coming from Australia. Almost nothing came from China. And almost the only Chinese living in NZ were those descended from those who had come to NZ in the gold-rush days of the nineteenth century. Now a huge portion of goods, everything from greeting cards and clothing to refrigerators and cars, comes from China. And there are huge ‘ghettos’ of Chinese in Auckland where English is the second language. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with Chinese people; when living in Auckland I found many of be quite delightful; indeed, many aspects of culture would vanish without the money and energy injected by Chinese. But ultimately it’s all a short-term numbers game..
Like practically all other politicians, John key is totally untrustworthy and will say anything publicly to remain in power whilst privately working on his agenda of self-promotion and personal acquisition. Sabotage of NZ is a major component of his government’s economic strategy, just as has been the case ever since I came here (1974). NZ should be one of the richest countries per capita in the world but never will be because a huge portion of wealth is continually siphoned off and delivered to the ‘owners’ (founders of The New Zealand Company) and various components of the global Rothschild empire etc. .
In the short term, which country offers the best opportunities for self-aggrandisement, looting of the commons and perpetuation of Ponzi schemes?
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Tom said:
History of Man:
http://robinwestenra.blogspot.co.nz/2014/03/the-end.html
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Tom said:
Mike: I have an idea/title to a future post
Everything’s Under Control! [when of course it clearly isn’t]
http://enenews.com/crisis-underway-fukushima-plant-amid-worker-shortage-alcoholism-rampant-tepco-base-sells-whiskey-workers-spray-hose-full-radioactive-waste-water-video
NYTimes: Crisis underway at Fukushima plant, worker shortage — “Alcoholism is rampant” — Tepco base is selling the whiskey — Help wanted ad seeks employees “able to carry out a conversation” — Workers spray hose full of radioactive waste on themselves and others (VIDEO)
WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!
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xraymike79 said:
Excerpt from How to be Trapped
…cannot we just switch to green growth?
DK: First of all, if it is growth, it will still be energy and resource consuming. Secondly, the starting point will still be path dependent and thus constrained. Thirdly, technology cannot make energy, only help to find, process and distribute what is already there. And what’s potentially left, renewable or not, is less economy-adaptive, is of lower quality and lower energy return than what it’s replacing. So there is no magic way around our central predicament. Anyway, what do we mean by ‘switch’? It suggests a level of insight and control of the globalised economy that we do not have. It implies a rapid transformation that in reality is inherently rate limited (energy revolutions have happened over many decades), and dependent upon the continuing coherence of the globalised economy and its constituent critical systems.
In addition problem solving in a complex society suffers from declining marginal returns. New solutions require more and more scientific, economic and social efforts and economies of scale and resources. They don’t live in a vacuum, they live in this interdependent system- the globalised economy. For example, the smallest particle, the electron, discovered in the 1890’s was done by Thompson on a lab bench; now it takes 10,000 PhD’s and a 27km high tech ring, and the coherence of our modern globalized economy to reveal the newest particle, the Higgs Boson. The discovery of penicillin in the 1920’s in today’s money cost almost nothing and had a revolutionary impact; now we are spending €100’s of millions to make minor improvements on niche drugs. To ‘solve’ the problems of growth with green growth still requires the rising cost of complex problem solving- and that requires rising energy and resource flows- which themselves are suffering from declining marginal returns (Energy-Return-On-Energy-Invested).
In the end though, we’ve run out of time. The implications of crossing the limits to growth are the complex globalised systems (financial, monetary, adaptive social behaviors, supply-chains, critical infrastructures, factories, resource access and processing, R&D etc) needed to invent, manufacture, and deploy at scale begin to stress, lose resilience and finally break down. In such a case our green growth aspirations will fall away from our grasp as the socio-economic ground collapses beneath our feet.
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Lidia17 said:
Mike, I hadn’t read down all the way before I posted a different excerpt from this same article above. What made me think of it was your talking about what sorts of human morality come into play in our situation; Ac’s argument is that this is all baked into the cake and it makes no sense to hand out blame.
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xraymike79 said:
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ulvfugl said:
Maybe all managed ?
In the final segment of a March 3 broadcast of her show, [Abby] Martin lashed out at the invasion: “I can’t stress how strongly I am against any state intervention in any sovereign nation’s affairs. What Russia did is wrong… I will not sit here and defend military aggression.”
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/03/links-31914.html#comment-1925231
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xraymike79 said:
I’ll hold off judgment for a while longer before I unleash.
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xraymike79 said:
Zdzislaw Beksiński definitely had a dark sense of humor…
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Harry said:
The excellent David Korowicz is here interviewed on the subject of collapse. As with Paul Chefurka’s thermodynamic paradigm, he allows for a perspective which precludes any need for handwringing or apportioning of blame: http://www.feasta.org/2014/03/17/how-to-be-trapped/
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xraymike79 said:
I quoted from it(what I found most useful) a few comments above, yet there are most assuredly those to blame, and there are evil people, and there are solutions, albeit radical.
Korowics acknowledges that these broad brush strokes of evolutionary behavior he paints are not entirely deterministic:
“People can be uncomfortable with such evolutionary explanations. However, they’re not mechanistically deterministic, but statistical, people and small groups will always surprise more than very large human groups. After all coming across a convent of celibates is not a sign that human sex is dead! Nor do such arguments rigidly define behavior.”
So the “handwringing” and “pointing of blame” is most certainly justified by the abused, exploited, and disenfranchised.
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Kevin Moore said:
I agree.
We should hold to account those who deliberately lie and mislead society for their own short-term gain or in order to prop up dysfunctional and destructive systems..
And personally find it utterly appalling that local government officers continuously lie
to the community in order to promote bizarre schemes and dysfunctional systems.
I have recently examined the NPDC ‘draft plan’ for the district I live in. It contains much of the nonsense that has been copied and pasted year after year and which has been repeatedly demonstrated to be utterly false. In other words, the plan is to keep lying for as long as possible.
As with last year’s ‘plan’ and the one before the most common statement in this year’s ‘plan’ is: ‘There are no significant negative effects from this activity’, which is an absolute lie.
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Apneaman said:
In one of his talks on free will, Sam Harris more or less said that even though we do not have it we all need to act as if we do. There is no excuse for the behaviors of many of the powerful and so called successful people. In most instances they could have still made a tidy profit, but caused much less damage to many people and the environment. They chose otherwise because they wanted it ALL at any cost. These are not crimes of passion. Cold blooded crimes.
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ulvfugl said:
My view
http://guymcpherson.com/forum/index.php?topic=591.msg44047#new
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Brutus said:
The interview with David Korowicz is quite excellent and gets so many things right, but at one point he says (or writes): such a view [proposing a mythical steady-state economy] tends to embody the confusion that because the globalised economy is human-made it is therefore designed, understandable and controllable — humans can do this in niches, but the emergent structure of multiple niches interacting on many scales over time is not.
So our categorical confusion stems from language and labels. Whoda thunk? I’ve been beating the metaphor drum for a while now, including the reduction into arbitrariness distinctions between natural, artificial, and man-made. Korowicz gets that much of how we understand the world is flawed because we cannot conceive of our own handiwork as being something other than an outcome of natural processes when placed in a cosmic context, but in fact, if everything is “natural,” then nothing can ever be “unnatural.” It’s another linguistic escape hatch. “Um, uh, well, we did it, all of it, and the results are catastrophic. Everything and everyone died. But hey, we’re just part of the pageant of life, right? No harm, no foul, and we get to keep all our goodies.”
If we can understand and control the niches to some degree but not the overall sweep of history or indeed complex, emergent systems (culture can’t be steered), then we can sure as hell take some responsibility and/or assess some blame over those behaviors that are not the results of aggregation and demographics (abstractions with teeth, perhaps) but instead stem from straight-up bad faith and poor character, which has very real human agency (mostly lunatic and pathological) behind it. Yes, we’re trapped in cycle upon cycle of that shit. Some of us rise above it.
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ulvfugl said:
Hmmm, I think the whole ‘We got language 50,000 years ago abstract thought’ thing is nonsense… no evidence, just a made up evo story. I think he mentions Pinker, who is a neoliberal shill for the Empire, because it’ll get him some corporate consulting work, I think the whole thesis is ‘We are just poor helpless locusts doing what locusts do, so we’ll eat the planet, nobody’s fault’, as evasion of guilt, remorse, responsibility, etc, so nobody needs to do anything, shrug’… naah
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Lidia17 said:
Oops, here’s this article again… Mike, I think it looks that way, but over larger time-frames oppressors can easily find themselves oppressed and vice versa. It’s really only the era of energy slaves that eclipsed the era of real slavery, with the real slavery coming back into fashion.
@u, it’s not a question of what “needs” doing—nothing “needs” doing—it’s a question of what *is*, and who we *are*. Everyone here will agree, I wager, that humans are deluded as to the degree of power we have: in the universe, in politics, in our own lives. You’re asking people to stop eating, and stop moving about except on foot, and stop heating their homes, and stop reproducing, immediately, cold turkey. (And even that would not be enough, as you well know.) We are master exploiters of our surroundings: that’s what we do. We turn matter and energy into human flesh, as Mike put it so trenchantly. The rest is just decoration: justification for various strategies of executing the above function more effectively. Ac is just stating the obvious, but with a clarity I’ve rarely seen in such a short communication.
“Needs” doing… sheesh. I forgot which commenter said “we need answers”, to which I replied that we’ve plenty of answers, we just don’t like them because they happen to be “no”.
Ulvfugl, I’m surprised to see you use the construction “*just* locusts”, as though there’s something wrong with locusts. Locusts are not helpless —who knows how many of “us” they have starved, hm? They are a very old creature, about 300 million years old; we will not match their track record. (Because we are even more successful than they, don’t you see?)
It seems as though you understand *some* of the rules of the game, but don’t want the game to ever have an end. That’s wishful thinking, where elsewhere you make calls to science and rationality.
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ulvfugl said:
@ Lidia, either I have expressed myself very badly, or you have misunderstood what I was trying to say, or both, nevermind, I am busy elsewhere, and, um, I know what there is to know about locusts, or some of it, having spent a year in a very small room with 80,000 of them… 🙂
To build nuclear power stations is a policy decision. Somebody signs a piece of paper, I see that as a choice, option, free will, humans have, locust not.
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Brutus said:
Ulvfugl, I agree: we have options and choices of our own making that most other species do not. The fact that we can zoom out far enough to recognize that we’re merely creatures inhabiting a water planet spinning around a sun and hurtling along the edge of a galaxy or some other wide-angle lens (e.g., energy gradients) does nothing to absolve us of our decisions and actions that have brought about cataclysm. It would appear we’ve lost the fight to reframe the issue more narrowly in human terms, as there are now several others boasting of our powerlessness to do anything constructive with our knowledge except to continue consuming and destroying.
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ulvfugl said:
@ Lidia
Oh dear, no, that’s a total misunderstanding of how I see things
@ Brutus
Well, I do believe we are locked in to the mass extinction event, but I do not believe that it HAD to be this way…
And, yes, I do think it is worthwhile fighting for justice and retribution and taking a moral stand, and that there is such a thing as human dignity and responsibility and integrity and so on, that gives existence meaning.
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Lidia17 said:
Perhaps you missed the Epicurus quote, which I formatted poorly. The last part reads: “…an unquenchable thirst for life keeps us always on the grasp.”
Nuclear power promised energy too cheap to meter.
We don’t have the free will to deny ourselves the energy needed to turn other matter into human flesh, if it seems there for the taking. Or rather, as Ac points out, using the analogy of the existence of nunneries not having wiped out sexual relations, *most* of us don’t. There will always be outliers.
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Tom said:
Everything’s under control (example), Relax, the gentech industry has it all covered.”:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/03/rootworm-resistance-bt-corn/
Voracious Worm Evolves to Eat Biotech Corn Engineered to Kill It
One of agricultural biotechnology’s great success stories may become a cautionary tale of how short-sighted mismanagement can squander the benefits of genetic modification.
After years of predicting it would happen — and after years of having their suggestions largely ignored by companies, farmers and regulators — scientists have documented the rapid evolution of corn rootworms that are resistant to Bt corn.
[read the rest]
I can hear Rod Serling’s clipped voice in the background, “File under hubris, as we continue our journey . . . . through the Twilight Zone . . . “
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Kevin Moore said:
Tom, I feel like I am living in the Twilight Zone, and your comment is another example.
A while ago I had a conversation with Robert Atak (of oilcrash) and mentioned Hemmingway’s baby shoes story. The next time I turned on my computer(a few hours later) and came to CoIC Mike had posted a new essay with that title!
Not long after that I made a comment about lies being like a hydra, and the next link I read had the same analogy!
This morning I woke early and watched a DVD of …… The Twilight Zone! I turned on my computer, looked at a few items then came to your link and comment,
I know it is all pure coincidence and has no meaning whatsoever. Nevertheless, it is definitely TZ.
It will soon be time to got out and face the walking, talking mannequins who think they are people.
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Apneaman said:
Glitch in the matrix?
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B9K9 said:
Couple of comments:
Kevin, I think you misunderstand the nature of why the PTB continue pursuing policies that, in your opinion, could prove harmful to their own flesh & blood. On the contrary, what if they believe in the principles articulated by Comte, mainly:
“The history of the human species is comprised of one word, of struggles which have arisen from the desire to seize all physical enjoyments of the entire species and to impose upon all others the pain of the same kind.”
In other words, it’s not merely sufficient to ‘win’; no, you must also deny your adversaries any comfort/solace as well. Since this is the core objective driving all class struggles, what strategies and tactics should be employed to increase the odds of success of those pursuing these endeavors?
Well, this is where it begins to get interesting; what if, just say, you’re able to run the system into the wall at maximum full speed, all the while preparing your own safe haven? Now, wouldn’t the impact cause such shock to possible competition that it could, in all probability, render them incapable of any defense and thus create easy marks to be picked off at leisure?
—
If P. Chefurka created a church, I’d probably be one of his first disciples. I mean, his theory of dissipative energy driving the behavior of both living and non-living energy sinks is so intuitive, it really resonates with those who fall into the mechanistic camp.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Nat’l Razor was essentially addressing these same themes in his excellent comment upstream. If H Sapiens is just another (mal)adaptive species that has now reached the end of its fitness regime with regard to the global environment, then why should anyone shed any tears?
So, along these lines, I have to wonder why people get emotionally upset about what is occurring. It is what it is, so the only thing left to do is dance. Now, for those who are into playing games, the intriguing notion is how are the PTB are going to play their hand(s)?
This is the direction where I see state-of-the-art doomerism heading. Really, how many times must the obvious vis-a-vis the 3 E’s be stated? Doesn’t anyone get bored around here? But the great mystery, the untold story, are the machinations of the entire cast – PTB, intelligentsia and sheep – that will take place as the truth eventually begins to reach larger audiences.
At the least, doesn’t anyone want to pull up a seat and start placing some bets? Think about how much time & effort some put into the things like sports betting – studying the stats, considering the options, point spread, injury reports, etc. Now here, we have a global life game taking place right in front of us. Personally, I find it fascinating, and I’d surprised if I’m the only one who thinks this way.
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Apneaman said:
I find it fascinating too. Horrifying and fascinating. I’m a fan of Chefurka as well, but is it not possible to be in more than one camp? Part of me thinks that our self induced collapse and probably our extinction were unavoidable. On the other hand, I feel a lot of suffering could be avoided if even some of TPTB chose to make an effort. I know power never gives it self up (except for Cincinnatus) but they could, amongst themselves, make concessions and still be wealthy and powerful. I guess there is no benevolence in our time. TPTB are human so they will have different motivations for their actions, but I bet many do get off on denying comfort. Who are their adversaries though? The common man? I always thought they hated each other the most and were largely indifferent to the plebs as long as we remain useful. The 3 E’s will be discuses till we die.
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Kevin Moore said:
With reference to other senior council officers, today I asked the NPDC Regulatory Manager: “What part of the brain is missing from all the council officers who promote the destruction of their own children’s futures, or if they are young their own future?”
Maybe someone here can provide an explanation because all I got back was that I was too intelligent/too well informed/ operating at too high a level. Apparently one has to descend to 12-year-old level to communicate with PTB.
Yes Apneaman, we should be working towards reducing future suffering, not trying to intensify it.
I guess concept is too rational for most people to cope with.
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xraymike79 said:
The sapient part of their brain is obviously not working properly.
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Lidia17 said:
Apneaman, to invoke Korowicz’s interview with Ac once again: Ac cited Epicurus:
So long as the object of our craving is unattained it seems more precious than anything besides. Once it is ours we crave for something else. So an unquenchable thirst for life keeps us always on the grasp.
For the super-rich whose wealth is only conceivable in large numbers, it’s just the number that counts: the status, the means of keeping score. Don’t think you’re immune to the status bug. After downsizing my life considerably, I still act as though I belong among a certain type of cohort of folks in the small town I moved to: the educated professional class. It’s clear they don’t all hold the same opinion of me. I’m having to get used to being thought of as lesser (less wealthy, less intelligent, less competent) because of my cheap house and thrift-store furniture. It’s hard to remain undamaged by it—human and animal studies both show deleterious effects caused by low-status stress, I believe.
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Apneaman said:
Yes I know. It happened to me. I was a well paid union tradesmen with many perks (food, accommodation, travel expenses, 12% holiday pay, pension, full dental, etc) for a dozen years and had to leave it due to injury. For a long time the status loss got to me more than the money. I have never been obsessed with the money. Useful and necessary. In addition, I will admit that at least a part of my life long quest of never ending curiosity and learning is motivated by wishing to appear “wicked smart”.
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Brutus said:
I also started out with never-ending curiosity as a child, driven in part by an erroneous belief in the perfectibility of things. Adulthood, cynicism, and misanthropy disposed of that belief long ago, but I’m still remarkably curious to know and understand without any particular aim toward application, which often enough leads down the road of unintended consequences. Sharing is enough.
I also note that appearing wicked smart is different from being wicked smart. Neither is particularly high status, which is typically reserved for things like youth, beauty, talent, charisma, and of course, power and wealth. Most of those are heritable, and only a few get them.
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ulvfugl said:
Those heroes… um, Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Pierre Omidyar…
“In 2003, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar purchased an 11-acre lot on the edge of Seven Hills and began building a massive estate. In 2006, he completed his 48,000-square-foot, 33 bedroom, 36 bath mansion that is assessed at more than $23 million.”
“In March, 2007, Omidyar invested $10M in Maui Land and Pineapple. Steve Case invested $5M. The following year it was revealed that ML&P was a target of the nation’s biggest human trafficking prosecution….”
http://www.hawaiifreepress.com/ArticlesMain/tabid/56/ID/8247/Pierre-Omidyar-The-Secret-Empire-of-a-Resort-Developer.aspx
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xraymike79 said:
Nice summation of a lot of material concerning the collapse of past civilizations and the recent Nasa article on our own. If you actually read it all and take everything in, your head will explode:
Climate change and human civilization: Nasa-funded study warns of ‘collapse of civilisation’ in coming decades
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Kevin Moore said:
‘The government was very happy to promote New Zealand as a low-wage/insecure work destination for multi-national companies, but did nothing to keep decent jobs in sectors such as food manufacturing, he said.’
http://news.msn.co.nz/nationalnews/8817286/cerebos-greggs-auckland-factory-to-close
Food, sauce and coffee maker Cerebos Gregg’s says it will close its south Auckland factory just before Christmas with the loss of 125 jobs.
The East Tamaki factory had become too costly and inefficient to run, so food production will move to Sydney and coffee production will go to Dunedin, the company said on Thursday.
“This is a truly sad day for everyone involved,” chief executive Terry Svenson said in a statement.
“Our East Tamaki factory now needs major capital investment. But we can’t justify continuing to invest money in this ageing plant when we already have more modern manufacturing facilities capable of increased volumes.”
The East Tamaki factory will close on December 19.
The staff would have their jobs up until that date and the company would in the meantime help them find work elsewhere.
The Service and Food Workers Union says Cerebos Gregg’s has spent $10 million upgrading its Dunedin factory but that won’t create more jobs.
It will be difficult for the workers as none of the big food factories nearby are hiring, says union spokesman Chas Muir.
Around half of them had given Cerebos loyal service for more than 10 years, he said.
“Although the work is not highly paid, it is well above the minimum wage, with stable hours of work,” he said.
The union blames government policies for the job losses.
“Government’s lack of support for manufacturing is hitting areas like food processing hard,” Mr Muir said.
“That flows on to families and communities.”
The government was very happy to promote New Zealand as a low-wage/insecure work destination for multi-national companies, but did nothing to keep decent jobs in sectors such as food manufacturing, he said.
Cerebos Gregg’s is the only New Zealand manufacturer producing instant coffee. It employs around 450 people in New Zealand and 500 in Australia.
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xraymike79 said:
I’m taking a fondness for reporter Dahr Jamail these days since he seems to be really connecting the dots. I’ve been following him for a few years now and a while back he wrote an essay entitled “Are We Sustainable?“… I think he knows the answer now.
Reporting on a World of Environmental Catastrophes – All in Just One Month
By Dahr Jamail Monday, 17 March 2014 09:40
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xraymike79 said:
I was just looking at the artwork of one of my favorite artists, Richard Corben, who works in the comic book genre. I love the cover he did below. Click to enlarge it and read what is etched into the rubble of a memorial that a couple visiting aliens find on what is left of Earth…
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Tom said:
Oh man, Mike: I fondly remember a cover of this very comic, way back – around the time of Three Mile Island – that had a view from a kitchen where the cooling tower of the nuke plant was visible, mom serving a glowing dinner to her glowing family and one of them remarks “I feel funny.” Priceless.
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xraymike79 said:
LOL… Way back to 1979
Click and Click to enlarge.
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Tom said:
THAT’S IT!!
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Kevin Moore said:
According to Zero Hedge the music has ended in China and the scramble is on.
We have heard similar stories before, but since we all know the various Ponzi schemes are well overblown and there has been much talk of Chinese companies defaulting on bond payments it would be unwise to ignore this report:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-19/music-just-ended-wealthy-chinese-are-liquidating-offshore-luxury-homes-scramble-cash
Cash-strapped Chinese are scrambling to sell their luxury homes in Hong Kong, and some are knocking up to a fifth off the price for a quick sale, as a liquidity crunch looms on the mainland.
Said otherwise, what goes up is now rapidly coming down.
Wealthy Chinese were blamed for pushing up property prices in the former British territory, where they accounted for 43 percent of new luxury home sales in the third quarter of 2012, before a tax hike on foreign buyers was announced.
The rush to sell coincides with a forecast 10 percent drop in property prices this year as the tax increase and rising borrowing costs cool demand. At the same time, credit conditions in China have tightened. Earlier this week, the looming bankruptcy of a Chinese property developer owing 3.5 billion yuan ($565.25 million) heightened concerns that financial risk was spreading.
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Tom said:
Here’s a sensible explanation for the Ukraine take-over by Russia from Robert S.:
[quick quote so you get the gist]
Ukraine — The Breadbasket of Europe
Perhaps the irony is lost on Russia that the very fuels — oil, gas and coal — that it views as an economic strength are also the source of its increasingly marginal food security and the ongoing and growing devastation of its lands. But Russia, its strongman, and its corporate oligarchs likely haven’t overlooked the fact that Ukraine is one of the world’s largest food producers. In a world where food is becoming increasingly costly and scarce, this particular commodity may well be more important than even oil, gas, or coal.
Ukraine possesses 30% of the world’s remaining richest black soil. It regularly ranks within the top ten producers of both wheat and corn. It is the world’s top producer of sunflower oil. The reach of its agricultural exports extends to the UK, Europe, Japan, China and into Russia itself. If Russia has a food crisis, it will be to the Ukraine that it turns to first. Moreover, the current Russian dictator must see an imperative not to rely overmuch on the US or its other economic rivals for food.
So it is in this context — a one in which climate change is causing Russia to flood and burn, in which climate change is now beginning to take down global agricultural productivity, and in which the Ukraine could well be seen as the Iraq of world food production (one of the only countries with the ability to radically increase production) — that we must also view both the Ukrainian revolution for independence and the Russian armed invasion as a response.
Russia Already Taking Hold of Some of Ukraine’s Most Productive Farmland
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Tom said:
One more nightmare to add for now – how our pollution (especially nuclear now) is moving up the food chain and into our water supplies:
http://m.ctpost.com/local/article/Uranium-found-in-Stamford-well-water-5329586.php
Uranium found in Stamford well water
Stamford — Health officials are urging homeowners to test their drinking water after 70 percent of five dozen private wells sampled since the beginning of the year tested positive for uranium contamination.
Uranium is a naturally occurring element that can seep into drinking wells through nearby bedrock. People who are exposed to high levels of uranium for a sustained period of time are susceptible to kidney problems, said state Department of Public Health Epidemiologist Brian Toal.
“The primary health risk for uranium is potential damage to the kidney,” Toal said. “It’s really not a radioactive hazard, even though it’s a radioactive element. Therefore, it’s not considered a large cancer risk.”
Stamford, which has offered subsidized well-water testing for carcinogenic pesticides since March 2012, recently added heavy metals contaminants to the list. The Health Department has tested 60 private wells for arsenic and uranium so far this year; 42 samples contained uranium.
Fourteen wells, or about 23 percent of the five dozen tested, contained uranium contamination in concentrations at or above the recommended federal health limit of 30 micrograms per liter.
“In Stamford, the percentage of wells that have been found over the (federal health) standard are quite high,” Toal said. “At the levels we’re seeing in well water, we would not expect to see people with overt kidney damage or problems. But if someone has a very high level, it’s a good recommendation for them to go see a doctor.”
Toal characterized “very high” uranium concentrations as 100 to 300 micrograms per liter. Several years ago, a private well in Newtown tested positive for uranium at levels exceeding 900 micrograms per liter.
The family of six had their kidney functions tested and one child demonstrated a “slight abnormality,” which went away after several months of drinking clean water, Toal said.
“In most instances (uranium poisoning) is reversible,” he said. “There’s a fairly simple test that can be done to check your kidney function. But for most people, we’d say just stop drinking the water and you’ll be fine.”
It’s not clear how widespread uranium contamination is statewide, Toal said. The state health department is coordinating water testing across 30 to 40 towns and expects to complete the study this fall.
“We get calls for isolated reports all over the state,” he said. “We think it occurs in pockets, and that it’s higher in some places than others, but we don’t have a complete picture yet.”
The Stamford Health Department has been sampling private drinking wells for two years, but only began offering arsenic and uranium testing Jan. 1.
“Even if you tested before for pesticides and volatile organic compounds, you need to test again,” said Director Anne Fountain. “You don’t know what you’re going to find until you test.”
So far arsenic, which was detected in the drinking water of 81 Weston homes last year, has only been found in one Stamford well, Health Laboratory Director Jim Federici said.
___________
note the blasé tone of the article – everything’s fine, nothing to see here, move along
Uranium poisoning is reversible, so don’t worry, drink up!
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Tom said:
oh, okay – here’s one that popped up today (happened yesterday, i’m SURE you saw it on the msm news):
http://planetark.org/enviro-news/item/71239
Sunoco oil pipeline leaks in Ohio nature preserve
A major oil pipeline owned by Sunoco Logistics Partners LP leaked thousands of gallons of crude oil into a nature preserve in southwest Ohio late on Monday.
Between 7,000 and 10,000 gallons (26,000-38,000 liters) of sweet crude leaked into the Oak Glen Nature Preserve about a quarter of a mile from the Great Miami River, according to early estimates from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
The leak, which occurred on a line operated by Mid-Valley Pipeline Co, a division of Sunoco, was discovered at 8:20 p.m. EDT on Monday (0020 GMT Tuesday). The company shut the line, which helped reduce the pressure of the leaking oil, an EPA spokeswoman said, but it was unclear if oil was still spewing from the pipe.
Some oil reached a wetland a mile away and on Tuesday, clean-up crews were preparing to vacuum the wetland, located 20 miles north of Cincinnati.
The oil did not appear to have reached the Great Miami River, though tests were still being completed, the EPA said.
“The extent of impact to the resource is currently unknown,” said a statement from the Great Parks of Hamilton County, which oversees the Oak Glen preserve. “The EPA is assessing the situation to determine appropriate action.”
Sunoco was not immediately available for comment.
The pipeline is part of Sunoco’s mid-west system that runs about 1,000 miles from Longview, Texas to Samaria, Michigan, providing crude oil to a number of refineries, primarily in the U.S. Midwest.
Flows along the Mid-Valley pipeline decreased overnight to around 163,000 barrels per day from an estimated 229,000 bpd, according to data provider Genscape. The pipeline has a capacity of 280,000 bpd, Genscape said.
The loss of a key supply route from the south hit physical crude oil prices in Texas, already pressured by ample supplies. West Texas Intermediate crude for delivery at Midland, Texas, fell $2.50 a barrel on Tuesday to $15 below U.S. oil futures. West Texas Sour fell $4.
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xraymike79 said:
The King of the world:
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xraymike79 said:
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Lidia17 said:
Mike, this is just one of the types of evidence that would seem to prove the thermodynamic explanations shared by Paul C. Whenever something makes me scratch my head, like “why did my mom’s hospice company ship meds—even common ones like an OTC laxative—15 pills at a time FedEx from New Jersey via Atlanta to Vermont? A whole FedEx pack for a bottle of 15 pills that would cost $0.75 from the local pharmacy?” When I plug in the possible solution: because it creates the most waste possible… Bingo! What used to not make any sense at all now makes *perfect* sense!
So, of course right in the midst of a decade or two of “green awareness” we decided that all coffee needs to generate extra plastic waste all of a sudden. Why? Because of the hidden imperative to create as much waste as possible as quickly as possible.
I bought a Nikon CoolPix camera in Europe, and it came in a box about 8x10x4″. When I dropped the camera and broke it, I bought a new one in the US. It came in an identical 8x10x4″ box, which was then encased in a huge rigid molded plastic thing about 11″x17″. Why? Because! It creates more waste! This is the Prime Directive.
Not sure where I saw a link to a TED talk about Peak Sand by some Frenchman. The kicker at the end was the revelation that they take the bottles we throw away (instead of refilling) and grind them up to make “new” sand which they then put back on the beaches! Why? Because it uses the most energy conceivable, would seem a reasonable answer.
Even on these threads, which I’ve been following for a couple of years, all of a sudden the comments went from text, to text and embedded pictures, and now every third post has embedded video. I didn’t even realize this had become a “thing” out in the larger world and had attributed it to a few rude posters who were causing my computer to gag on their bandwidth and give me the repeated “YouTube embed” script errors which often crash my browser. I see four, five, and six “comments” in a row which are nothing but duelling videos. Already the Internet takes up 8% of US electricity supply, they say… and now this. We obviously cannot help ourselves.
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Kevin Moore said:
Lidia, I think you find that the imperative of most companies in the public arena is not to waste as much energy and resource as possible but is to minimise costs, particularly wage costs, and to appeal to public misconceptions.
Milk used to be sold in glass bottle. Someone had the bright idea that it was cheaper to sell milk in lined cardboard cartons. The cost of producing the cartons was lower than the cost of producing bottles and cleaning them. The environmental cost of landfills was externalised.
Then the price of internationally traded oil was manipulated downwards, making plastic bottles cheaper than cardboard. Since then general rises in energy costs have maintained the incentive to use plastic containers, despite oil prices having quadrupled. Some locations pay lip service to recycling because proper energy accounting is never done. It’s all financial. And if no one can make a buck out of recycling it comes to a stop. most recycling is dependent on clean, relatively homogenous materials being carefully segregated at source and kept segregated; that is almost never the case in the real world.
The other aspect is the herd behaviour of most humans. If buying a coffee in an-expanded-polystyrene cup is seen to be fashionable, people will pay $3 for coffee in an expanded-polystyrene cup, especially if the cup has the right logo on it.
Another aspect that drives this insane culture is the idea that ‘time is money’ and that everyone has to rush around frantically, spending practically every minute of the day doing business -the ‘on the run’ culture. Crappy food served up in wasteful packaging serves that culture.
And another aspect is the perception aspect. I occasionally buy muesli bars; noting the amount of space in the boxes I experimented and found that I could pack 12 bars into a 6-bar box. The packaging is clearly to create the perception of greater value than actually exists. As food prices rise the bars get smaller. But the boxes remain the same size.
The increase in truck size over recent decades has reduced the per-item cost of transport, and has facilitated massive increases in wastage of materials.
Paul Cherfurka has some good ideas but they get pushed beyond reason.
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xraymike79 said:
Yes, organisms do whatever they can to conserve energy when possible for themselves. If humans can sit while a hundred energy slaves do their bidding, that’s an offer they cannot refuse.
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Apneaman said:
Novelty plays a huge role in consumerism and companies know this. Consumers are easily bored and our craving for novelty keeps increasing. Whoever satisfies these cravings profits. Only lack of income or availability will stop it.
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Lidia17 said:
Kevin, with all respect that’s a superficial reading. See my response to B9K9 below.
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James said:
The Archdruid says that history matters, and in a way it does. Nothing new under the sun, right?
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
I left this comment. I doubt it will be “accepted” as it runs counter to the Archdruid’s anti-apocolyptic stance which could unsettle his adoring flock.
Once cancer begins and metastasizes, it’s difficult to eliminate. The previous civilizations you allude to were just tiny tumors that resolved because of local insufficiency of metabolic needs. However, many humans capable of reestablishing the cancer created new foci of growth. The discovery of fossil fuels and the tools necessary to use them has accelerated the growth of the malignancy and ability to derive “natural” foodstuffs from the ecosystem body. Now cachexia begins, but the cancer envisions geoengineering to maintain the near-corpse in a sufficient state for further consumption. What will death of the ecosystem mean from a human perspective? A loss of concentrated energy gradients such as fossil fuels, loss of soils and monocrops, loss of schooling ocean fish that could be hauled out in nets with high EROEI, loss of large herbivores that sustained us early on. There is no reason to believe that remaining humans will not still be growth-oriented, feeding upon any resource providing an EROEI high enough to justify the tools, information and behavior necessary to capture it. Eventually nothing remains but diffuse life too small or too sparsely distributed to justify human existence. Anything that can provide net energy will be utilized. Things are different this time, that exogenous source of juicier and tastier than oxblood oil has enabled cancerous growth that would have previously broken down for lack of net energy.
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Lidia17 said:
Great comment! No, he won’t like it one bit. Glad you posted it here, too.
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Kevin Moore said:
I never bother with the crap Archdruid churns out but did quickly scan the item you linked.
Missing: the fact that geochemical change is occurring at around ten times the rate that occurred in previous mass extinction events.
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Apneaman said:
Yes, the wizard is very controlling. Reminds me of Saruman
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James said:
The Archdruid accepted the comment and this is his reply:
“James, it’s always easy to blame “human nature,” that inkblot pattern onto which so many ideologies have been projected, for our current situation. At the end of the day, though, it’s just one more excuse for inaction, and so doesn’t interest me.”
Any organism of size could have become cancerous if a confluence of key traits had evolved. Our predicament is clearly one of “human nature” and the nature of complex adaptive systems. I havn’t worked with inkblots but the NASA photos of city lights at night are very instructive. I have no ideology, only a whole gamut of observations that implicate mankind and civilization as an “escaped” and evolving malignant growth. Not only observations, but direct evidence from molecular and cellular biology.
If malignant cells could only talk they would tell you how special they are, how growth is good, how they can’t help themselves, how much they intend to grow in the coming year, how the damnable natural killer cells (environmentalists) are always getting in the way of a good thing. All the while, the body from which the cancer escaped for its temporary growth binge is growing weaker and weaker as the tumor burden gets larger and larger.
I wish there could be something magically special about man and his civilizations, it’s not all bad being a cancer, while it lasts. You can pat yourself on the back and tell each other how superior and special you are, for a while. Then the truth comes home to roost (black swans) and the goose gets cooked.
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Kevin Moore said:
California:
Farther south, a disappointing water year continued, with warm, dry weather quickly negating the benefits of the precipitation from February and early March across California and the Great Basin. Most notably, Extreme Drought (D3) returned to coastal areas north of San Francisco as well as the Sierra Nevada; over the past two weeks, precipitation deficits in these areas have averaged two inches or more. Water-year (Since October 1, 2013) precipitation has averaged less than half of normal over most of California, and locally less than 30 percent of normal in the state’s D4 (Exceptional Drought) area. Severe Drought (D2) expanded across southern Nevada, where water-year precipitation has averaged 40 to 60 percent of normal.
In the Four Corners region, changes to this week’s drought depiction were confined to western portions of the region. Across western Arizona, Severe Drought (D2) expanded as water-year precipitation totals continued to drop well below half of normal (locally less than 30 percent of normal). In northern Arizona, precipitation over the past 90 days has averaged less than 25 percent of normal. Meanwhile, SNOTEL data from southwestern Utah indicated the Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) is currently in the 12th percentile or lower, with water-year precipitation totals averaging 25 to 40 percent of normal; this data was used to depict the newly-expanded D2 in the southwestern quarter of the state.
http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
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B9K9 said:
Lidia is correct when she surmises that expanding net energy consumption is the base-line imperative of all living creatures. The reason it appears to conflict with typical core production objectives of achieving subsequent lower input costs is due to ignoring the net benefits derived by both producers and consumers by increasing waste.
OK, let’s step back a little and examine this statement a little closer. If living creatures are motivated, no, compelled to search, acquire & consume (SAC) energy tokens, then they would naturally be constantly looking not only for new sources, but also the means to differentiate their SAC cycle to thereby gain an advantage vis-a-vis their competition.
So, our star player, the living consumer, is constantly on the search for new sources of inputs. But long before he was human, he was a fish; and as anyone who fishes can attest, fish cannot resist certain lures that mimic their primary food source(s).
Fast forward 500 million year or so, and the same instinctive reaction to potentially new sources of food/energy, delivered at a net lower cost of acquisition, still prove irresistible to H Sapiens. Thus, the K-cup.
However, in order to actually deliver these kinds of expanded waste products, producers need to be able to achieve a net gain on investment. That’s why, while they may focus on driving direct cost inputs lower, it’s only to the extent that surplus profits can be generated via price mechanisms to the consumer.
In summary, consumers are compelled to react to new packaging that fools the core drivers. They are willing to spend increased marginal tokens of wealth if the net cost is actually lower – in real energy dissipated terms. Likewise, producers will design, package and market goods that appeal to these instincts, and will incur additional costs to the point that they can be recovered through higher prices.
For those who think there are certain individuals, industries and organizations who are brainwashing people against their will, and are thus to blame for our global calamity, I would suggest perhaps studying human nature a little closer. While it may appear they are initiating the development of superfluous goods, they are in actuality reacting to hard-wired imperatives.
U is right that someone had to sign the papers authorizing the construction of nuke facilities. What he’s ignoring, or refusing to consider, is that there are thousands, no, make that millions, that would gladly sign those papers for any who objected, all in order to achieve their own personal comfort delivered via the promise of a “good paying job”.
And why does the job exist? Because people – everyone, you, me & the great unwashed – want to have a hot dinner, a cold beer and some entertainment, whether it’s a TV or a light to read a book.
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Lidia17 said:
Indeed, B9.. the fact that a complex society has the capacity to abstract away energy costs and pollution costs so cleverly paves the way for increased consumption and waste. (A small tribe in a localized area would never fall for the “K-cup”.) This is why—to ulvfugl’s dismay—I see the explanatory value of the theories of self-organizing systems, referenced by Meadows but still continuing to be explored. I think he understands these well enough, but his human pride and self-regard drives him to object.
Looking at monetary incentives for the situations I described only serves to reinforce my point… invoking the perfect fool’s bargain, because money does not represent wealth, instead its opposite: debt. And this is environmental debt, as all debts are. If something “makes money” for an entity, all it does is increase that entity’s debt vis à vis our natural system/environment.
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B9K9 said:
Here’s a simple conceptual model: assume 1 electrical power plant and an absolutely set, fixed population and consumption profile
Question: how long would it take to consume the earth’s primary energy resources (coal, oil, gas & uranium) to fuel the electrical needs of the people? Answer: who knows, but it’s definitely less than infinity.
The point is, even under maximum efficiency and -0- growth, resource depletion would still be experienced given a long enough time frame. Hence, the ZH tag, “on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”
But, to make things a little more interesting, how about we enter a simple 1% population growth rate factor, along with a (initially, tiny) marginal increase in net consumption per capita. You know, sort of like, “60 degrees is nice, but no one will notice if I set the thermostat to 61”. (Yes, womankind, I’m looking at you. LOL)
Well, everyone here is more than well versed in Bartlett, so we all know where this eventually leads: population overshoot, resource depletion and environmental degradation. And so it goes.
However, for some reason, perhaps as a manifestation of past personal experiences, we have a certain cadre that seems to be convinced that some kind of cabal of privateers is manipulating poor, innocent clueless proles in order to achieve their own, selfish nefarious ends.
Aye carumba! To that, I say, get a haircut, put on some decent clothes, and go mix & associate with your fellow man. What you’ll find is an insecure, worried individual simply trying to put food on his family’s table and keep a roof over their heads.
No one is going to step away from this trajectory – it simply does NOT resonate on any meaningful basis to our core drivers. To place or deflect blame against some supposed boogie men is no different than ancient people creating a anthology of mythical creatures to help explain unknown phenomena.
We were launched on our current path at the inception of the Big bang. We’re unique only in that we get to experience the terminus. Big whoop. Doesn’t make us special, just places us in the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time
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Kevin Moore said:
‘However, for some reason, perhaps as a manifestation of past personal experiences, we have a certain cadre that seems to be convinced that some kind of cabal of privateers is manipulating poor, innocent clueless proles in order to achieve their own, selfish nefarious ends.
Aye carumba! To that, I say, get a haircut, put on some decent clothes, and go mix & associate with your fellow man. What you’ll find is an insecure, worried individual simply trying to put food on his family’s table and keep a roof over their heads.’
I have to disagree completely. In fact I’d go as far as saying that’s a load of bollocks.
New Zealand was specifically established as colony of Britain, with the specific objective of looting the place and transferring the proceeds into the hands of a very tiny minority. The same applied to the USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa etc.
The government of NZ now acts on behalf of global corporations, money-lenders and opportunists, and attacks to commons incessantly in order to deliver bounty to the aforementioned.
The local council (NPDC) is a law unto itself and does not comply with central government regulations. I was speaking with one of the few honest councillors we have about this very topic jut a couple of hours ago. The CEO, Barbara McKerrow, (on about $350,000 a year -what a struggle she must have putting food on the table!) is in constant breach of the Local Government Acts 2002 and 2012, but the local MP, Jonathan Young, will do nothing about it because the is part of the same cabal of ‘criminals’ who are running the show and are obtaining short-term benefits from status quo arrangements. He has placed both the CEO and a senior council officer ‘on notice’ for lying and deceiving, but in practice is powerless because TPTB behind the curtain will always close ranks to protect their chosen looting and polluting agents (unless they step seriously out of line).
NPDC has recently released its so-called plan for the future, and as always been the case, it is akin to a tourism brochure with a few unsubstantiated and unsubstantiatable items of mumbo jumbo in it, and primarily consists of a pack of lies geared to maintaining current rorts.
There is no ‘victim of history’, ‘victim of genetic programming’, ‘victim of the system’ about it. The CEO and her cohort deliberately lie to and manipulate the genral populace in order to maintain short-term benefits for themselves and their ‘masters’, and will not countenance anything remotely connected with reality.
By the way, my suspicions about the sudden departure 18 months ago of an honest council offer were confirmed today.
At the top it’s all corruption and lies.
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Apneaman said:
Yesterday it was
“In other words, it’s not merely sufficient to ‘win’; no, you must also deny your adversaries any comfort/solace as well. Since this is the core objective driving all class struggles, what strategies and tactics should be employed to increase the odds of success of those pursuing these endeavors?
Well, this is where it begins to get interesting; what if, just say, you’re able to run the system into the wall at maximum full speed, all the while preparing your own safe haven? Now, wouldn’t the impact cause such shock to possible competition that it could, in all probability, render them incapable of any defense and thus create easy marks to be picked off at leisure?”
Today it’s
“What you’ll find is an insecure, worried individual simply trying to put food on his family’s table and keep a roof over their heads.”
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Kevin Moore said:
Theoretical arguments about energy gradients and energy/resource dissipation run into severe problems in the real world.
Take peacocks, for instance; the males of the species pea need to find extraordinary quantities of additional food above that required to build a basic body in order to produce outlandishly large feathers, just to impress females and obtain mating opportunities……. the real imperative of all organisms which reproduce sexually, of course. Apart form the increase in energy consumption growing, operating and dragging around a massive tail, the encumbered male is vulnerable to predation and parasite attack. Pheasants are similar. All birds spend a lot of time looking for food and eating because they have to maintain a high body temperature.
Human females are encumbered with ‘useless’ permanent breasts for most of their lives, something to waste energy maintaining and carrying around. Indeed, oversized permanent breasts are a distinguishing feature of humans. losing hair was a ‘ridiculous’ evolutionary trend unless we consider than humans went through a semi-aquatic stage and needed to move quickly through water. (Other features support the aquatic theory.)
Contrast those energy wasters with a barnacle, for instance, which sits on a rock and waits for its food to arrive, spreads it gametes and zygotes via currents, and never attempts to raise or lower its temperature (and is incapable of ever doing so). And there are bacteria that operate at close to zero Celsius, not wasting a scrap of energy.
What I find interesting is that humans naturally tend to conserve energy and resources -as exemplified by the thrifty societies that prevailed prior to Bernays. his ‘great achievement was to persuade the masses to abandon their instinctive behaviours. As we [here] know, the manipulation of the masses by corporations and their spin-doctors was purely in order to stimulate consumption, something which went against the grain and had to be changed!
And now we have mindless consumers spread across the world.
One of the most interesting documentaries I have seen with respect to all this is the Light Bulb Conspiracy, which documents how the life of light bulbs was progressively shortened in order to maintain consumption. Whereas manufacturers spent much time and effort developing long-lasting bulbs, the cartel that evolved in the early 1900s required manufacturers to develop bulbs with much shorter lives.
In eastern Europe after WW2 the paradigm was completely opposite of that in the west. Consumer products were required to have as long a life as possible, i.e. minimise resource and energy inputs, because there was collective thinking, rather than the individualistic, exploitative thinking that predominates in much of the USA.
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Lidia17 said:
“some kind of cabal of privateers is manipulating poor, innocent clueless proles in order to achieve their own, selfish nefarious ends.”
Well, that too. One does not preclude the other.
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ulvfugl said:
@ Lidia, B9K9, others,
Thanks for thoughts, but no, you are all wrong, stuck in old outdated stuff, but I don’t have time to correct your mistakes here now, I am TOO BUSY, so you will have to wait 🙂
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