Capitalism, no matter what label is put on it such as “green” capitalism or “inclusive” capitalism, still has the self-destructive characteristics of capitalism embedded within it. The very recent PR campaign orchestrated by the financial elite of the world under the socially responsible-sounding title of “inclusive capitalism” is no exception:
Yesterday’s Conference on Inclusive Capitalism co-hosted by the City of London Corporation and EL Rothschild investment firm, brought together the people who control a third of the world’s liquid assets – the most powerful financial and business elites – to discuss the need for a more socially responsible form of capitalism that benefits everyone, not just a wealthy minority.
Leading financiers referred to statistics on rising global inequalities and the role of banks and corporations in marginalising the majority while accelerating systemic financial risk – vindicating the need for change.
While the self-reflective recognition by global capitalism’s leaders that business-as-usual cannot continue is welcome, sadly the event represented less a meaningful shift of direction than a barely transparent effort to rehabilitate a parasitical economic system on the brink of facing a global uprising.
Central to the proceedings was an undercurrent of elite fear that the increasing disenfranchisement of the vast majority of the planetary population under decades of capitalist business-as-usual could well be its own undoing….
Systemic Disorder has written a clear-minded essay explaining why nothing short of a complete paradigm shift away from capitalism’s inherent growth and profit-maximizing imperatives is needed to save mankind.
Green capitalism is destined to fail: You can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results. We can’t shop our way out of global warming nor are there technological magic wands that will save us. There is no alternative to a dramatic change in the organization of the global economy and consumption patterns.
Such a change will not come without costs — but the costs of doing nothing, of allowing global warming to precede is far greater. Therefore it is healthy to approach with a dose of skepticism the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that concludes the annual reduction in “consumption growth” on a global basis would be only 0.06 percent during the course of the 21st century. Almost nothing!
Wahiba Sands, Oman (Photo by Andries Oudshoorn)
The “Summary for Policymakers” supplement of the IPCC’s Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change report, a dense 33-page document…
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-Inclusive Capitalism
-Green Capitalism
-Jumbo Shrimp
-Creation Science
-Business Ethics
-Authentic Replica
-Compassionate Conservative
-Enhanced interrogation
-Clean Coal
-Sustainable Growth
-Etc Etc Etc
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– Inclusive Capitalism
– Green Capitalism
– Compassionate Fascism
– Democratic Totalitarianism
– etc., etc.
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This one is new to me. So much to learn about our self destruction and so little time.
MICRO-SECRETS AND MACRO-SECRETS
We discover another whole side to the fracking debate, with Dr. Yuri Gorby. He’s a microbiologist with a specialty in life deep underground. Gorby tells us fracking is dredging up organisms encased in the earth for the past hundreds of millions of years. Some of them have the potential to change chemistry and life on the surface in ways as yet unknown. It’s sounds like sci fi, but it’s truth-fi – and that’s just the start, as we explore the tiny world, including toxic rain.
http://www.ecoshock.info/2014/05/micro-secrets-and-macro-secrets.html
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Capitalism is a conspiracy to separate a fool from his money.
I’ve got several people helping me look for my straitjacket. lol
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We were told long ago. We didn’t listen.
Conservationist’s
Lament
By Kenneth Boulding
In: Man’s Role in
Changing the Face of the Earth, 1956
University of Chicago
Press, p. 1087
*******************************************************
The world is finite, resources are scarce,
Things are bad and will be worse.
Coal is burned and gas exploded,
Forests cut and soils eroded.
Wells are dry and air’s polluted,
Dust is blowing, trees uprooted,
Oil is going, ores depleted,
Drains receive what is excreted.
Land is sinking, seas are rising,
Man is far too enterprising,
Fire will rage with Man to fan it,
Soon we’ll have a plundered planet.
People breed like fertile rabbits,
People have disgusting habits.
Moral: The evolutionary plan went astray by evolving Man.
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The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world’s diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.
Some people try to solve the impossible equation with the myth of dematerialisation: the claim that as processes become more efficient and gadgets are miniaturised, we use, in aggregate, fewer materials. There is no sign that this is happening. Iron ore production has risen 180% in ten years(12). The trade body Forest Industries tell us that “global paper consumption is at a record high level and it will continue to grow.”(13) If, in the digital age, we won’t reduce even our consumption of paper, what hope is there for other commodities?
Look at the lives of the super-rich, who set the pace for global consumption. Are their yachts getting smaller? Their houses? Their artworks? Their purchase of rare woods, rare fish, rare stone? Those with the means buy ever bigger houses to store the growing stash of stuff they will not live long enough to use. By unremarked accretions, ever more of the surface of the planet is used to extract, manufacture and store things we don’t need. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that fantasies about the colonisation of space – which tell us we can export our problems instead of solving them – have resurfaced(14).
As the philosopher Michael Rowan points out, the inevitabilities of compound growth mean that if last year’s predicted global growth rate for 2014 (3.1%) is sustained, even if we were miraculously to reduce the consumption of raw materials by 90% we delay the inevitable by just 75 years(15). Efficiency solves nothing while growth continues.
The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth’s living systems are the overwhelming facts of our existence. As a result they are mentioned almost nowhere. They are the 21st Century’s great taboo, the subjects guaranteed to alienate your friends and neighbours. We live as if trapped inside a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame, fashion and the three dreary staples of middle class conversation: recipes, renovations and resorts. Anything but the topic that demands our attention.
Statements of the bleeding obvious, the outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated as exotic and unpardonable distractions, while the impossible proposition by which we live is regarded as so sane and normal and unremarkable that it isn’t worthy of mention. That’s how you measure the depth of this problem: by our inability even to discuss it.
More: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/05/28-0
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[youtube:www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY_1wLRMU5o]
A few humorous conspiracy theories pop up in this latest interview, such as chemtrails at about the 4 minute mark. Guy reacts with a disbelieving smile as if holding back laughter and says very diplomatically:
“Well, I would argue that we’ve been geoengineering since at least the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Every time you turn on the ignition of your automobile, you are geoengineering. We’re carrying out this massive experiment with the chemistry of the Earth’s atmosphere, and we’ve been carrying that out for a long time. Clive Hamilton in his latest book Earthmasters, which came out in April of 2013, did an analysis of sulphates. Industrial activity constantly puts sulphates into the air, into the atmosphere, and they are constantly falling out of course. What he points out is that when industrial activity stops and when within a few days all those sulphates fall out of the air, we’ll heat the planet by an additional 1.1 degrees centigrade over the current 0.85 degrees centigrade. So that takes us to 1.95 or we’ll just round it and say 2. Two is the political target and it’s never been a scientific target. It’s a political target, and it appears that even collapse of industrial civilization leads directly to 2C and the horrors attendant with that. So it’s pretty obvious at this point that even with collapse, we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.”
Guy also has an excellent answer for the question posed at about 22:57 which includes the crazy CT of aliens among us.
Very smooth handling by Guy in an interview conducted by someone who entertains some really far out conspiracy theories. The fact that conspiracy theorists are some of the few people who will listen to what Guy has to say is a pretty good indicator of how disconnected from reality the dominant culture is.
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Geo-engineering? It used to be called pollution, & it tends to be illegal.Every time someone opens a carbonated drink, he pollutes. Since Jacob Schweppes in 1783
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Published on May 28, 2014
Journalist Dahr Jamail & Professor Peter Wadhams say the resulting release of methane will lead to massive climate disruption, and that we have reached a point of no return.
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In response to Systemic Disorder commenter Palloy who thinks that peak oil will save mankind and that global warming “will not be as bad as +1.5°C.”
Palloy is overlooking the part that aerosols from industrial activity play in temporarily cooling the planet. James Hansen called this the Faustian Bargain:
…Human activity modifies the impact of the greenhouse effect by the release of airborne particulate pollutants known as aerosols. These include black-carbon soot, organic carbon, sulphates, nitrates, as well as dust from smoke, manufacturing, wind storms, and other sources. Aerosols have a net cooling effect because they reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the ground and they increase cloud cover. This is popularly known as “global dimming”, because the overall aerosol impact is to mask some of the warming effect of greenhouse gases.
Hansen’s new study estimates this aerosol “dimming” at 1.2 degrees (plus or minus 0.2°), much higher than previously figured. Aerosols are washed out of the atmosphere by rain on average every 10 days, so their cooling effect is only maintained because of continuing human pollution, the principal source of which is the burning of fossil fuels, which also cause a rise in carbon dioxide levels and global warming that lasts for many centuries…
The average global temperature rise thus far is about 0.85°C since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Once industrial activity ceases and its accompanying aerosols fall out of the atmosphere, the average global temp will jump to about 2°C, but it won’t simply stop there because Palloy forgets that there is a lag time involved with CO2 emissions. The effects we are feeling now were from our emissions 40 years ago:
…The estimate of 40 years for climate lag, the time between the cause (increasedgreenhouse gas emissions) and the effect (increased temperatures), has profound negative consequences for humanity. However, if governments can find the will to act, there are positive consequences as well.
With 40 years between cause and effect, it means that average temperatures of the last decade are a result of what we were thoughtlessly putting into the air in the 1960’s. It also means that the true impact of our emissions over the last decade will not be felt until the 2040’s. This thought should send a chill down your spine!…
This “committed warming” of past CO2 emissions whose effect will be manifested in the coming decades is about 0.6 degrees Celsius. If all industrial activity stopped right now, we would already be committed to 2.5°C, a global average temperature rise of nearly three times what we are currently experiencing. With all the drought, flooding, hurricanes, landslides, fires, and other manifestations of climate change that we are experiencing now, I shudder to think what the world will be like in 2050 and yet humans continue to burn coal and other fossil fuels at breakneck speed.
Now we get to the even more insidious aspects of anthropogenic climate change that very few comprehend. Dozens of self-reinforcing feedback loops have already been triggered, but we’ll discuss only one in the loss of our planet’s air conditioners, the Arctic and Antarctic:
(1) An increase in temperature decreases the area covered by sea ice as it melts leaving a larger area of exposed ocean.
(2) This decreases the reflection of sunlight as ice is far more reflective than the newly exposed ocean.
(3) Reduced reflection increases the area’s absorption of heat from the sun.
(4) This increases the temperature of the area, amplifying the original increase in temperature mentioned in (1).
A recent study calculated that the loss of Arctic ice reflectivity from 1979 to 2011 added an amplifying feedback to human warming equivalent to 25% of the heat captured by CO2 emissions during that same time.
Thus, we can see that the world is changing quickly into an environment that may well be outside the habitability of humans. The timing of human near-term extinction is likely academic.
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This was a beautiful planet,for awhile.
I’m sorry I was in a coma so long & now it’s too late to wake up.
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Global warming is toxic for world’s seafood industries, say researchers
A new report warns that climate change will cause massive harm to the seafood production across the globe.
http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/global-warming-is-toxic-for-worlds-seafood-industries-say-researchers/
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Global CO2 to Reach Extremely Dangerous Peak Near 402 PPM for 2014, Methane Levels Ramp Ominously Higher
During 2014, human CO2 forcing continued its long march toward ever-more dangerous and climate-damaging levels. By the peak month of May, global CO2 had ranged well above the 400 parts per million threshold, catapulting Earth at raging velocity toward climate and atmospheric states not seen in at least 3 million years.
According to May readings from the Mauna Loa Observatory, the more volatile hourly measures jumped as high as 404 parts per million while daily and weekly averages tended to settle between 401.4 and 402.3 parts per million. Given these trends, overall CO2 levels for May of 2014 are likely to peak at near or just below the astronomical 402 ppm threshold.
http://robertscribbler.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/enough-heat-forcing-to-melt-a-third-of-earths-ice-global-co2-to-reach-extremely-dangerous-peak-near-402-ppm-for-2014-methane-levels-ramp-ominously-higher/?mc_cid=0063a685ee&mc_eid=f0754ee742
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After the housing crash and subsequent “poorification” of more people, where else do people turn but the new idiot box, namely the World Wide Web? It’s quite something to behold when people lose there jobs, homes, health, environment, and communities to be blogged to by the same finance and investor entities who are waging the war to begin with. This is traditionally called gate keeping, and the blogs urged public scorn for Banks, for mostly misleading purposes. So called economically sophisticated blogs consciously refuse to present important facts, producing instead a consumable torrent of superfluous gossip. A place to grow your own vegetables,to protect the environment and harvest rainwater is prevented by investors who need land for their own profit. Public parks and open spaces are next. There is little rational defense of capitalism to be read anywhere, the ideas were dead decades ago.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Species of plants and animals are becoming extinct at least 1,000 times faster than they did before humans arrived on the scene, and the world is on the brink of a sixth great extinction, a new study says.
The study looks at past and present rates of extinction and finds a lower rate in the past than scientists had thought. Species are now disappearing from Earth about 10 times faster than biologists had believed, said study lead author noted biologist Stuart Pimm of Duke University.
“We are on the verge of the sixth extinction,” Pimm said from research at the Dry Tortugas. “Whether we avoid it or not will depend on our actions.”
The work, published Thursday by the journal Science, was hailed as a landmark study by outside experts.
Pimm’s study focused on the rate, not the number, of species disappearing from Earth. It calculated a “death rate” of how many species become extinct each year out of 1 million species.
More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/29/sixth-great-extinction-species-disappearing_n_5412571.html
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We need to talk about growth. (And we need to do the sums as well.)
In my opinion, the greatest scandal of philosophy is that, while all around us the world of nature perishes – and not just the world of nature alone – philosophers continue to talk,sometimes cleverly and sometimes not, about the question of whether the world exists. Karl Popper, Two Faces of Common Sense
1. Why should we talk about growth?
Growth is a big issue, and getting bigger all the time, but not one that yet generates serious discussion in the community. Nor has it been the subject of mainstream political critique. That economic growth is good is a view unchallenged by any major political party in Australia, with the exception of the Greens – and more than anything else it is their questioning of growth that has seen the major parties condemn the Greens as a fringe political movement.
No doubt there are deep philosophical – or at least ideological – reasons for this, but the problem might also be explained by our simple failure to understand the mathematics of growth. This has been persuasively argued by the US based investment advisor Jeremy Grantham, in a paper Time to Wake Up: Days of abundant resources and falling prices are over forever.
More: http://persuademe.com.au/need-talk-growth-need-sums-well/
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