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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

Author Archives: xraymike79

Evolutionary Dead-Ends

19 Monday Mar 2018

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

≈ 74 Comments

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6th Mass Extinction, Arctic Blue Ocean Event, Capitalism, Carl Sagan, Climate Change, Collapse of Civilizations, Donald Trump, Dr Charlie Veron, Ecological Overshoot, Elizabeth Kolbert, Herman Daly, Jared Diamond, Micro-Plastic Pollution, Noam Chomsky, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Stephen Boyden, Svante Arrhenius, Techno-Fix, U.S. National Climate Assessment, Wealth Inequality, William Rees

“It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.” ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

Have things improved since I wrote my last essay a year ago for this blog? Have we miraculously transformed our entire energy system into one that does not poison and degrade the natural world? Have we slowed the onslaught of plastic pollution choking the planet’s rivers, lakes, and oceans? Have we done anything meaningful to halt the deterioration of the planet’s biodiversity toward mass extinction? Has this global, hi-tech civilization done anything significant to avert its own demise? Despite a constant flow of warnings from the scientific community and even a letter signed by more than 20,000 scientists, the simple answer is no. We have failed to address the complexity of our rising population and a degrading environment. Yes, we are self-conscious and thus able to recognize the fact that we are destroying the only home we have, but will the end result differ much from a population overshoot of bacteria in a Petri dish? Dependent on a continuous stream of finite resources imported from across the globe, modern megacities contain the seeds of their own destruction and that of all other life forms upon which humanity depends for its survival. The exponential growth of modern civilization ensures that one of the next doubling times will produce an absolute increase in overshoot that tips the world into unavoidable collapse. Enough damage may well have already been done; we’re just waiting for inertia to catch up to the impacts.

2017 set a global record for the most skyscrapers built in a single year and 2018 is predicted to eclipse it. The fossil fuel energy spent to construct those concrete and steel buildings translates into a melting cryosphere. Not to mention the fact that the carbon footprint of some of the world’s biggest cities is 60% bigger than previously estimated. “Renewable energy” still only comprises a tiny fraction of global energy consumption and plans for a total transition will take decades, if it’s even possible. Any growth in ‘renewable energy’ has been offset by increased consumption of fossil fuels in the developing world. 2017 marked a new record high in CO2 emissions with 2018 set to break that record. Global CO2 emissions have yet to peak, and the UN has warned that we are on course for a 3C world. It doesn’t help that the current U.S. administration plans to cut funding for alternative energy R&D, with the Energy Department expecting no drop in the U.S. carbon footprint through 2050. Having embedded itself in the U.S. government over a century ago, the fossil fuel industry has consistently worked to block climate change action and undermine environmental laws. A UK shipping executive recently admitted his industry is guilty of doing the same to protect their bottom line. The utilities companies knew the dangers as well. Like most corporations, the viability of their business model depends on perpetuating an unsustainable way of life. With warnings ignored since the late 1800s starting with the work of Svante Arrhenius, it should be obvious by now that intelligence without sapience has produced deadly results. A new study finds “the most accurate climate change models predict the most alarming consequences.” The recently released U.S. National Climate Assessment has similar findings:

While climate models incorporate important climate processes that can be well quantified, they do not include all of the processes that can contribute to feedbacks (Ch. 2), compound extreme events, and abrupt and/or irreversible changes. For this reason, future changes outside the range projected by climate models cannot be ruled out (very high confidence). Moreover, the systematic tendency of climate models to underestimate temperature change during warm paleoclimates suggests that climate models are more likely to underestimate than to overestimate the amount of long-term future change (medium confidence). (Ch. 15)

In a new ominous research finding, the evil twin of climate change(ocean acidification) is threatening the base of the marine food chain by disrupting the production of phytoplankton. This is yet another positive feedback loop increasing the rate of global warming. Climate feedback loops and ice sheet modeling are two weak areas of climate science, which means many unpleasant surprises. This is why researchers are constantly astonished. Adaptation is not a luxury most organisms have at the present rates of change. Techno-fixes are but a pipe dream.

A diet reliant on animal agriculture is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gases, biodiversity loss, and oceanic dead zones, yet global per capita meat consumption is increasing rapidly in both developing and industrialized countries. Investments have been made to increase global plastic production by 40% over the next decade, even as all the world’s natural bodies of water become inundated with microplastics. Coca Cola alone produces 110 billion throwaway plastic bottles every year – an astounding 3,400 a second. Plastic waste from the military is another massive contributor that cannot be overstated. Half of all plastics have been made in just the last thirteen years. Over 90% of the so-called purified bottled water sold to the public has been shown to be contaminated with hundreds and even thousands of microplastic pieces. A byproduct of petroleum and the epitome of our throw-away society, plastics have truly become ubiquitous in the environment, entering the food chain at every level.

A study published last year pulls no punches by describing the mass extermination of billions of animals in recent decades as a “biological annihilation.” Extinction risks for many species are vastly underestimated. Insects, the base of the terrestrial food chain, are faring no better. With the steep loss of invertebrates, multiple studies indicate the world is “on course for an ecological Armageddon”. Trees are dying at an unprecedented rate from extreme weather events, portending profound effects to Earth’s carbon cycle. Coral bleaching events are now happening four times more frequently than a few decades ago. Dr Charlie Veron, a renowned scientist specializing in corals and reefs, said this last year:

“Half of all coral colonies on the Great Barrier Reef died over the past two years due to coral bleaching,’’ Dr Veron said.

“It’s going to be a horrible world. Young people now are going to curse the present generation for what we’ve done. We’ll have left them a planet in dire straits.’’

“Between a quarter and a third of all marine species have part of their life cycle in a coral reef. Taking away the reefs precipitates ecological collapse of the oceans. It’s happened twice in the past due to volcanoes releasing carbon dioxide and lava flows, but that was nothing like the amount of carbon dioxide being released now.’’

No one thought that ecosystems such as The Great Barrier Reef would be circling the drain this soon. How these changes are affecting flora and fauna as well as human societies is critical, but it’s like trying to predict the outcome of a high speed car crash as it’s happening. Hindsight is 20/20, but it only serves a purpose if you are still around to learn from it. Abrupt climate change is happening now and we’re not prepared for it. Fighting to protect the very life support system we all share, environmentalists are under attack worldwide and being murdered in record numbers. The problem of poaching is so bad that scientists are advising people to scrub all GPS data from their nature photos before publication to help protect endangered species from being ransacked. The voracious consumption and defilement of the planet continues unabated, despite clear signs the once-stable biosphere that enabled the establishment of human civilizations is quickly unraveling(Puerto Rico, Houston, never-ending wildfire seasons, melting Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, widespread glacial retreat, shrinking lakes, and many other signs of a destabilized climate). The following picture taken in Oregon last summer illustrates my point; seemingly oblivious to the massive wildfires raging in the background, a group of golfers continues playing a round…“We’re trading a habitable climate for a few generations of easy living.”

Climate change is just one of many factors in mankind’s planetary overshoot. We even have a day designated in recognition of our oversized ecological footprint which comes earlier every year, with nary a mention of it in official economic reports. As Herman Daly has explained, the global economic system treats the earth as a business in liquidation. The destruction of the natural world is enshrined in our positive economic indicators, i.e. rising GDP. And if need be, those numbers will be massaged to meet expectations. On a subconscious level, the growth imperative applies to all species including humans:

Humans share two behavioral traits with all other species that are critically important to (un)sustainability. Numerous experiments show that unless or until constrained by negative feedback (e.g., disease, starvation, self-pollution) the populations of all species:

• Expand to occupy all accessible habitats.

• Use all available resources.

Like mindless bacteria bent on their own success, humans are victims of their own DNA and ingenuity. Any civilization that develops energy harvesting technologies allowing for rapid population growth will generate entropy which will in turn almost certainly have strong feedback effects on the planet’s habitability. Our exponentially growing economy is on a collision course with an immovable ecosphere.

The end of the world is coming for the naked ape, not by a cabal of bankers or any sort of cockamamie conspiracy tale like chemtrails, but by us –the entire human race– and the economic system we have developed. We’ve become hostages to the complex structures and ever more intricate specialization of an economic system designed to exploit diminishing resources. Pollution and waste are of little concern for capitalism until they become a significant drain on overall profitability and new frontiers to exploit are exhausted. When profitability on a global scale is finally threatened by climate change, it will be far too late. The response will be militarized and authoritarian.

On a more insidious note, capitalism is driven by a deep instinctive drive to accumulate which was a very survival-positive compulsion during our several million years of evolving into Homo sapiens to overcome dry periods and other threats. Capitalism hits on this genetic proclivity, and when we get a clear opportunity to grab a big time accumulation, get rich and all, social good be damned. Our big and powerful cerebral cortex is hard-pressed to find a cure.

“I am rather pessimistic. The maladaptive assumptions of prevailing cultures are deeply ingrained. The notion that economic growth must take precedence over all other considerations and general ignorance of biological and ecological realities do not augur well for the future.” ~ Professor Stephen Boyden, human ecologist

In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond found that a common factor was the myopic and self-serving decision-making of elites who believed they could insulate themselves from the consequences of societal disasters. As the elites reaped the rewards, the resulting damage to everyone else built up over time until calamity struck. The grim reality is that history has proven such cycles of extreme wealth inequality have only been broken by catastrophes –plagues, revolutions, massive wars, and collapsed states. The U.S. has now reached a degree of wealth disparity unequaled in history:

Overall, the highest-ever historical Gini the researchers found was that of the ancient Old World (think Patrician Rome), which got a score of .59. While the degrees of inequality experienced by historical societies are quite high, the researchers note, they’re nowhere near as high as the Gini scores we’re seeing now…”it is safe to say that the degree of wealth inequality experienced by many households today is considerably higher than has been the norm over the last ten millennia,” the researchers write in their paper.

The crisis of civilization is planet-wide this time. We’ve turned a utopian world of plenty into a dystopian world of fascist-leaning governments, industrial disasters, collapsing ecosystems, and technological addiction. We have a Commander in Chief who tweets bizarre debunked conspiracies at 3 am, gets his intel briefings from right-wing TV shows, dismantles any remaining hindrances to unbridled capitalism, and doesn’t know the difference between weather and climate. Public discourse has been dumbed down to the level of Fox news talking points and tribal groupthink. Those who can discern actual ‘fake news’ from scientific fact are left to watch in horror as mainstream scientific projections continue to prove overly optimistic. Not only are regulations being cut left and right, they are not being enforced. Government science advisors are being purged and replaced with mouthpieces for industrial polluters. In fact, this administration is actively working to delegitimize and destroy government institutions. A sizable population of low information voters supports such actions, but it’s only to their own detriment. Although both major parties are under the sway of corporate power, Trump and company represent an exceptionally predatory class of people. The Union of Concerned Scientists is monitoring the current administration’s war on science and public health; their latest report is here:

The administration’s one-year record shows an unprecedented level of stalled and disbanded scientific advisory committees, cancelled meetings, and dismissed experts. The consequences for the health and safety of millions of Americans could be profound.

We live in an age of unparalleled technological advancement, while at the same time we turn a blind eye to the disintegrating natural world that gave birth to us, having forgotten that our destiny lies in our relationship with the earth. Like Icarus who, in his exuberance, ignored his father’s warnings and flew too close to the sun, modern man with his technology has ascended to great heights without heeding sound advice.

“We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.” ~ Carl Sagan

The Trumpocene: Darkness Gathers

22 Wednesday Feb 2017

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

≈ 44 Comments

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6th Mass Extinction, Automation, Biological Diversity, Capitalism, Carl Sagan, Climate Change Denial, Conspiracy Theorists, Coral Die-Off, Corporatocracy, Cyber-Warfare, Deforestation, Donald Trump, Endocrine Disruptors, Fairness Doctrine, Fake News, Free Market Ideologues, Gary Kasparov, Gaslighting, Martin Luther King, Michael E. Mann, Micro-Plastic Pollution, Ocean Acidification, Overthrow Project, Peak Net Energy, Rush Limbaugh, Slave Labor, Techno-Fix, The Global Elite, The Trump Wall, Trumpocene, TV Sensationalism

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” – Gary Kasparov

With each passing day, the mental stability of our narcissistic, megalomaniacal president is increasingly being called into question by those unnerved from his erratic behavior. The unhinged press conferences, comically embarrassing meetings with world leaders, and uncensored tweets reveal just how illiterate, delusional, and divisive America’s first reality TV president truly is, and the consequences won’t be confined to the imaginary world of a television screen. The irony is that the very news media networks whom the president disparages on a daily basis were instrumental in getting him elected, allowing Trump’s circus to hog the headlines in an ‘issues free’ campaign. Trump received $1.9 billion in free media coverage, 190 times as much as he paid for while the major networks made tons of revenue off Trump’s theatrics. Driving this symbiotic relationship is the fierce competition for ratings determining the advertising revenue and bottom line of these corporate-owned news networks. The media exploited Trump’s sensationalist behavior for profit, helping to drive his campaign to the top of this money-grubbing pyramid scheme. We are, as Neil Postman mused, amusing ourselves to death. Most of these networks are now busy trying to contain the monster they helped create. The other great irony is that America is getting a taste of its own medicine after having meddled in other country’s elections for decades; the CIA was one of the early developers of cyber warfare and is one of the world’s most ruthless practitioners of it.

Of the many Trump lies glossed over by corporate media, the most dangerous one is that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. The Trump administration is riddled with like-minded Flat-Earthers bent on dismantling the EPA and stoking fossil fuel consumption. In Trumpland, alternative facts are as valid as any empirical evidence. Scientists are being muzzled and the masses are being gaslighted. Conspiracy theories, hearsay, and pure fantasy have replaced meaningful public discourse. We have a demagogue working to blind everyone to what scientists are telling us and our own eyes can see. A civilization which cannot discern the truth cannot make rational decisions for the future, let alone the present. Trump’s kleptocracy will flourish in such an environment while repeating the mantra, “It’s all about the American people.”

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance” ~ Carl Sagan

The loss of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 was an important milestone in America’s decline towards a “post-truth” culture, paving the way for the “outrage industry” and talk radio demagogues like Rush Limbaugh. Twitter is the new bully pulpit for a tyrant-aspiring charlatan, and his antics serve as a useful tool for distracting the public from the right-wing agenda of extreme deregulation and privatization, otherwise known as the Overthrow Project. The biggest danger of wealth inequality is capture of the political system by the elites. This has already happened in America and abroad to the extent that there is now a new globalized elite who have more fealty towards each other than their country of origin, completely lacking positive feelings and loyalty towards their own native lands. The existing oligarchy is being strengthened at the expense of an already polarized and economically disenfranchised society. The Trump regime is corporatism on steroids.

As the famous saying goes, “There’s a sucker born every minute” and Trump is just the latest huckster to exploit them. His rhetoric appeals to people’s emotions and raises their dopamine levels, but facts have a tendency to get in the way of a good story. Trump’s base of supporters, however, appear immune to facts that contradict their leaders’s disinformation. One of his big campaign pledges was to bring back the manufacturing base of the U.S. and revive the Rust Belt, but this promise rings hollow in the age of techno-capitalism. Machines have taken over manufacturing and Trump’s protectionist policies will in all likelihood accelerate this process. AI promises to bring even more radical disruption to the job market:

At a time when the Trump administration is promising to make America great again by restoring old-school manufacturing jobs, AI researchers aren’t taking him too seriously. They know that these jobs are never coming back, thanks in no small part to their own research, which will eliminate so many other kinds of jobs in the years to come, as well…

In the US, the number of manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979 and has steadily decreased ever since. At the same time, manufacturing has steadily increased, with the US now producing more goods than any other country but China. Machines aren’t just taking the place of humans on the assembly line. They’re doing a better job. And all this before the coming wave of AI upends so many other sectors of the economy.

Trump’s fake stance on protecting American workers will not unwind decades of globalization, unrelenting automation, or the machinations of corporate capitalism. His promise to reignite the coal industry is yet more empty rhetoric; independent energy experts at BNEF dismantle his claim:

Coal power is just too costly and inflexible, explains BNEF: “Super-low-cost renewable power — what we are now calling ‘base-cost renewables’ — is going to force a revolution in the way power grids are designed, and the way they are regulated.”

When you add the revolution in cheap fracked gas — which Trump has pledged to double down on — it’s no surprise the country shut down over 40 gigawatts of coal-fired power stations since 2000…

It’s also being driven by a collapse in the export market, as countries from Europe to Asia also move away from coal because of its economic and human cost…

So Trump won’t be bringing back the domestic coal industry. And even if he could, he can’t bring back the jobs because it’s the coal industry itself that wiped out most of those jobs through productivity gains from “strip mines and machinery”…

Conveniently ignoring the harmful environmental impacts and the fact that illegal immigration has been on the decline for the past decade, the proposed Trump Wall is an expensive monument to xenophobia and misguided fears. No wall will prevent those determined to circumvent it, but if you listen to the engineers and experts who actually have experience working at the border, then it’s not a solid continuous wall(projected to take 16 years to complete) but a partial fence that would be more effective and feasible, and that’s if you believe that Americans will take the place of those millions of migrant farm workers who leave their homes every year to plant, cultivate, harvest, and pack America’s fruits, vegetables and nuts, in addition to the millions of other low-skilled and low-paying jobs that immigrants perform. Capitalism thrives on the back of cheap labor, but even these jobs are not safe from machines.

What kind of world is going to support all this labor-saving, hi-tech gadgetry when its creators are too short-sighted to maintain the habitability of the planet for their own descendants? There is no deus ex machina to prevent catastrophic collapse of the oceans nor is there one to stop catastrophic climate change. Industrial civilization is a one-hit wonder for which there are no solutions that scale up to the mountain of problems it has created. Dealing with the environmental costs of fossil fuels is the classic “prisoner’s dilemma” whereby the incentive to cheat for short-term economic gain prevents the cooperation needed by everyone. The economic, legal, and moral framework to tackle climate change simply does not exist. The invisible hand of the “free market” has turned into the boot of environmental catastrophe.

Primates, mankind’s closest biological cousins in the animal kingdom, are in steep decline because they have the “misfortune of being concentrated in areas rich in certain resources precious to their sapient but ravenous cousins.” Not even our fellow human beings can escape war and death when they live atop coveted resources, so what chance does any other species have?

“People have argued that we only have to worry about human-caused extinctions if we do something that causes the loss of 80 or 90 percent of species on the planet,” said UC Berkeley environmental scientist James W. Kirchner.

“Our analysis shows that even if the human impact is much smaller than that – 20 or 30 or even 50 percent of species – it’s still going to take 10 million years for the Earth to recover. That is well past the expected life span of the human species, or even of the genus Homo.” – Link

The study quoted above was from the year 2000 and has the usual hopeful spin:

“It is not preordained that high levels of human-caused extinction have to happen,” Kirchner said. “Our future depends on what we choose to do on a national and international level, as a society. Those decisions are critical because they will have very long-lasting consequences.”

Not surprisingly, we have failed to heed that advice. Scientists say our rampant road building has dissected the Earth’s land into 600,000 fragments too small to support significant wildlife. A new study covering 130 countries finds deforestation rises with incomes in developing economies and never reverses. This is particularly troubling because Africa is a developing continent with some of the world’s largest tracts of remaining undisturbed forests and biodiversity hotspots. Biodiversity loss is an existential threat comparable to climate change. The glaring warning from all these studies is that the Western way of life exported across the entire planet has brought us to a point of cataclysmic overshoot. Business-as-usual only exacerbates the crisis:

Real-world CO2 emissions have tracked the high end of earlier [IPCC] emissions scenarios, and until the currently wealthy countries can produce a large decline in their own emissions per capita, it is dubious to project that emissions per capita in the less developed countries will not continue on a trajectory up to the levels of currently wealthy countries…[The top 10% of the economically wealthy in the world produce almost as much total GHG emissions as the bottom 90% combined]… – Link

Trump peddles the false hope of regaining material wealth for a collapsing middle class with his slogan “Make America great again”, but after being elected, is giving more power and riches to those who have created this environmental and social catastrophe. Capitalism is, as Martin Luther King observed, “socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.” Nonetheless, in the bigger scheme of modern civilization’s looming collapse, the ‘Trumpocene’ amounts to nothing more than polishing the brass on the Titanic.

A time is coming when what we do to Earth is completely overshadowed by what Earth does to us. We have already condemned the planet to an ice-free Arctic and no amount of techno-fixes will return it to its former state. Were humans to disappear today from the Earth, the after-effects of our massive fossil fuel binge would reverberate for aeons. The last time there was an ice-free Arctic was during the Eemian period 125,000 years ago at the height of the last major interglacial period, but the CO2 levels of today are much higher now and causing the climate to change at a rate that is 170 times that of natural forces with much more warming to come. According to a new study, manmade global warming is replicating conditions that triggered an abrupt sea level rise of several meters in the ocean around Antarctica some 15,000 years ago. The damage done is irreversible not only on a human timescale or a civilizational time scale, but a species timescale. The total global carbon dioxide emissions load from the onset of the industrial revolution is enough to push the next ice age back by 100,000 years and only deep geologic time will significantly remediate the chemistry of a CO2-spiked atmosphere. The same is true for ocean acidification. The natural process of continental rock weathering to neutralize all of the CO2 from human activity that is entering the oceans would take hundreds of thousands of years. Plankton blooms, a key part of the entire marine food web and the biological carbon pump, are being disrupted by warming, acidifying oceans. The Great Barrier Reef is expected to be completely dead within the next two decades and 98% of all reefs around the world gone by mid century. The latest research indicates ocean acidification is much worse for corals that previously thought.

Manmade persistent organic pollutants(POPs) such as PCBs and flame retardants can be found in the most remote places on Earth such as the 36,000-foot-deep Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean where researchers tested crustaceans and found them to contain 50 times more POPs than crabs living in one of China’s most polluted rivers. Once these endocrine-disrupting compounds settle into the sediments, they can remain there for thousands of years before being disturbed and recirculated into the environment once again as a contaminant. Microplastics less than 5mm in size are ubiquitous in the environment, having been documented in the waters of both the Arctic and Antarctic and recently found on 73% of Britain’s beaches.

The irrational ramblings of a demagogue won’t change a shifting earth laying waste to a once rich ecosphere and grinding to dust the landmarks of modern man. Delusions and protestations have no bearing on the laws of chemistry and thermodynamics.

Extinction is the End Game

10 Saturday Dec 2016

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

≈ 107 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Antarctic Ice Melt, Automation, Capitalism, Cargo Cults, Climate Refugees, Cognitive Dissonance, Donald Trump, Ecological Overshoot, Extinction of Man, Global Die-Off of Forests, Great Permian Extinction, Haber–Bosch Process, Hubris of Man, Jared Diamond, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, Mass Media Manipulation, Normalcy Bias, Nuclear War, Overpopulation, Planetary Tipping Points, Technosphere, The Global Elite, The Growth Imperative of Capitalism, The Invisible Hand of the Free Market, The Wealth Gap, Ugo Bardi

Civilizations are living organisms striving to survive and develop through predictable stages of birth, growth, maturation, decline and death. An often overlooked factor in the success or failure of civilizations are cultural memes—the knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors passed down from generation to generation. Cultural memes are a much more significant driver of human evolution than genetic evolution. Entire civilizations have been weeded out when their belief system proved maladaptive to a changing environment. One such cultural meme holding sway over today’s governments, institutions, and society is our economic system of capitalism. The pillars of capitalism represent a belief system so ingrained in today’s culture that they form a sort of cargo cult amongst its adherents. Cargo cults are any of the various Melanesian religious groups which focused on obtaining material wealth(manufactured Western goods that came on cargo ships) through magical thinking, religious rituals and practices. Today the term “cargo cult” is used to describe a wide variety of phenomena that involve superficial imitation of a process or system in order to fabricate a successful outcome without even the basic understanding of its mechanism.

The tenets of capitalism are ritually followed in the proclaimed belief that “a rising tide lifts all boats”, i.e. so-called improvements in the general economy will benefit all participants in that economy. Centuries of unbridled capitalism have demonstrated beyond any doubt that it does not lift all boats. A new study finds that half of Americans are “shut off from economic growth”. The rules of the game are so stacked against the masses that this week a professor said “only all-out thermonuclear war might fundamentally reset the existing distribution of resources.” Capitalism’s imperative for expansion, growing profit levels, and efficiency has ultimately dehumanized our culture. Not even when our basic life support systems are being torn asunder do the vast majority question the path we are on. We are all a captive audience to the system and those few dissident voices are snuffed out under the wheels of “progress”.

Truth be told, the corporate elite have long written off all those people living hand to mouth. Trump’s pick for Labor Secretary said, unlike workers, machines are “always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.” Massive global unemployment resulting from the automation revolution has not yet been addressed by governments. Roughly half of all jobs in the U.S. are at risk of automation and two-thirds in the developing countries. This is all coming at a time when humans are fast destroying the ecosystems underpinning the very foundation upon which human civilization has developed over thousands of years. Mass migration of climate refugees will only further destabilize governments, stoke ethnic and cultural tensions, and give rise to fascist political movements. No conspiracy is needed to exterminate the “useless eaters”, just allow mother nature to take its course and climate change will be killing billions by mid century. Those in military planning know this and periodically express their fear of what is coming, but business-as-usual rolls on.

Capitalism’s constant impetus to shift costs, risks, and burdens off industry and onto the environment and society carries on under the guise of “being more competitive”. It’s a way of externalizing costs to maximize profit and if these costs were truly taken into account, none of the world’s top industries would be profitable(Interestingly, the link to this study has been scrubbed from the internet). It’s the height of magical thinking to put so much faith in some mystical “invisible hand of the free market” to solve existential threats such as an ever-widening wealth gap and the wholesale destruction of planetary life-support systems. There is no benevolent “invisible hand” turning individual self-interest into the common good. The primary mandate of capitalism is to protect and grow capital. The “invisible hand” is just a bunch of people scrambling to make as much money as possible, not caring or oblivious to those they hurt in the process. Fuck the invisible hand of the market. The invisible hand of mother nature will punish those who squander Earth’s rich but finite resources.

it’s been clear for some time that we have past the point of no return, triggering multiple tipping points in Earth’s living systems. New findings are continually confirming scientists’ worst nightmares. A key glacier in the Antarctic that holds back 10 feet of sea level rise was just described as breaking apart from the inside out. In other grim news, the long feared carbon bomb has now been quantified and is projected to release the emissions equivalent of an industrial country like the U.S. in the next few decades, prompting researchers to say that “climate change may be considerably more rapid than we thought it was.” Biodiversity loss is another critical threshold we have breeched: “New research shows that local extinctions have already occurred in 47% of the 976 plant and animal species studied.” A new study also reveals that the planet’s tallest animal is facing extinction after its numbers have plummeted in recent years, with the ominous warning that “many species are slipping away before we can even describe them.” Forests are being wiped out by armies of invasive insects. Because of a rapidly changing climate and the vast scale of the problem, the idea that reforestation will somehow save us is a pipe dream. Those forests won’t stay healthy enough to serve as carbon sinks and besides, seven times Earth’s land area would need to be in cultivation in order to reduce the planet’s atmospheric CO2 level down to 350ppm.

Note that the Permian Mass extinction is estimated to have happened anywhere over the course of 200,000 years to 15 million years. The current 6th mass extinction is happening orders of magnitude faster due to a multitude of factors including deforestation, habitat fragmentation, chemical pollution, poaching, etc., making this current disaster very unique in Earth’s history:

The team of geologists and biologists say that our current extinction crisis is unique in Earth’s history due to four characteristics: the spread of non-native species around the world; a single species (us) taking over a significant percentage of the world’s primary production; human actions increasingly directing evolution; and the rise of something called the technosphere. – Link

Perhaps the fate of humans was written in stone once we stood upright and developed tools. To a large degree, modern technology has been an expression of the energy-dense hydrocarbon fuels we discovered and are not willingly giving up anytime soon. Once fossil fuels ignited the Industrial Revolution and the Haber–Bosch process unleashed the human population bomb, nothing could stop the deadly carbon consumption feedback loop, not even decades of scientific warnings.

From a throwback to our primate ancestors, modern humans have been hard-wired to ignore threats that are not immediate or local; global ecological overshoot(of which climate is just one aspect) is imperceptible to the real-time cognitive processing of humans and represents the ultimate under-the-radar threat able to undermine our reasoning and response:

Psychological concepts of how we view the world around us, including ‘creeping normalcy’ or ‘landscape amnesia’, block day-to-day comprehension of what accelerating human activities represent—whether it is human population, the number of dammed rivers, forest destruction, or the impact of motor car emissions in a timespan that is geologically brief. Creeping normalcy refers to slow trends concealed in noisy fluctuations that people get used to without comment, while landscape amnesia describes forgetting how different the landscape looked 20–50 years ago (Diamond 2005: 425).

In his study of how societies fail, biogeographer Jared Diamond calls global warming a pre-eminent example of a ‘slow trend concealed by wide up and down fluctuations’ (2005: 425). He likens the denial of climate change impacts by leading politicians, including former US president George W. Bush (and his contemporary John Howard in Australia), in the late 1990s and early 2000s to the elite of ‘the medieval Greenlanders [who] had similar difficulties recognizing that their climate was gradually becoming colder, and the Maya and Anasazi (in Central and North America) [who] had trouble discerning that theirs was becoming drier’ (2005: 425). – link

We evolved to react to imminent dangers, not slow-rolling and seemingly invisible catastrophes as an unintended consequence of our cushy lifestyle. From lofty corporate boardrooms to the filthy streets of skid row, the mass of humanity is following the same biological script of overshoot and collapse seen in every organism from bacteria to reindeer herds. Fossil fuels only enabled the destruction to multiply a million-fold, culminating in one final and spectacular explosion of human activity that will leave the planet nearly barren for eons.

Open-ended growth appears to be inherent in nature, all the way from the DNA to the arthropods to mammals, including humans. Open-ended growth is the psychology of a cancer cell. I am not sure I know of a species which has learnt how to limit its own growth. Unfortunately species which transcend their environmental resources can hardly survive – the final arbiter of the climate impasse will be nature itself. ~ Andrew Glikson, Earth and paleo-climate scientist, Australian National University

The beauty and wonder of this planet is being trashed by a naked ape whose cleverness in tool-building has far outstripped his ability to handle it in any restrained or judicious manner. Nature’s rich book of life is being pancaked into a cheap, crumpled comic book.

Add in the development of mass consumerism, planned obsolescence, and the hypnosis of corporate-sponsored TV and you have a passive, malleable population happily marching towards the slaughterhouse. It’s fitting, then, that the masses would be swindled by a megalomaniac bankruptcy artist who dabbled in Reality TV. Every one of Trump’s cabinet picks is a big middle finger in the faces of those who fell for his pseudo-populist rhetoric: billionaires, Wall Street sharks, Goldman Sachs alumni, and hardcore laissez-faire capitalists chomping at the bit to deregulate, monetize, and privatize every last bit of what remains. The allure of capitalism has always been that you’re just one lucky break away from becoming one of those fat cats, if only someone would give you a chance. A prescient observation by Ugo Bardi from earlier this year:

Trump is a symptom of the ongoing breakdown of the social pact…capitalizing on this breakdown by…playing on the attempt of the white (former) middle class to maintain at least some of its previous prosperity and privileges. Trump is…an unavoidable consequence of resource depletion. – Link

The bottom line is that a swing towards authoritarianism happens when resources become scarce. Climate change is simply a symptom of humans overshooting the planet’s carrying capacity. Free market ideologues are nearly always climate ‘skeptics’ because acknowledging the reality of human-induced climate change would be an admission that industry must be curtailed or controlled. Left-leaning people nearly always accept the science because it goes along with their criticisms of capitalism which externalizes social and environmental costs for the benefit of just a few at the top of the economic hierarchy. Thus we see parasitic Trump surrounding himself with right-wing, climate denying, fossil fuel corporatists and insiders who will be doing everything in their power to dismantle health and environmental regulations including privatizing social services which are barriers to capitalist expansion.

To be blunt, our chance of developing a sustainable culture passed us by a long time ago. People will try to adapt until they cannot, and myths will be created to explain away harsh realities. A dystopic future in all its horrific glory has arrived: baked-in biospheric collapse, the inherent and irreconcilable contradictions of techno-capitalism, a dysfunctional political system unable to come to terms with root causes, and the cognitive dissonance of the masses blind to the bigger picture. Our numbers are not a safeguard from extinction.

There is No ‘Easy’ Way to Avert the Collapse of Civilization

16 Wednesday Nov 2016

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

≈ 39 Comments

Tags

Antibiotic-Resistant Pathogens, Authoritarianism, Automation, Carrington Even, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Complexity Trap, Cyberwarfare, David Eagleman, Digital Dark Age, Donald Trump, Global Surveillance Network, Hyper-Nationalism, Jonathan Huebner, Joseph Tainter, Militarized Police Force, Net Energy and Societal Complexity, Peak Antibiotics, Peak Oil, Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization

Six years ago David Eagleman, a neuroscientist and American writer, delivered a lecture entitled ‘Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization’. I got the urge to review his advice and critique how well we have followed it. Below are his abbreviated steps along with my commentary on each one:

[1.] “Try not to cough on one another.”

Over the course of numerous microbe generations amounting to a small fraction of a single human lifetime, pathogens have mutated and adapted faster than the antibiotic defenses human’s have built. Through a combination of factors—medical, social and economic—our war on pathogens is being lost, and these superbugs could be the next global pandemic. The danger grows with mankind’s expanding ecological footprint: a rising world population, the widespread use of antibacterial drugs in humans and agriculture, the speed and intensity of an international transport system, and so on. As history has shown, pandemics have always been a consequence of humans breaking down the interface between man and Earth’s wilderness. A recent study highlights this fact:

Tackling antibiotic resistance on only one front is a waste of time because resistant genes are freely crossing environmental, agricultural and clinical boundaries, new research has shown.

Analysis of historic soil archives dating back to 1923 has revealed a clear parallel between the appearance of antibiotic resistance in medicine and similar antibiotic resistant genes detected over time in agricultural soils treated with animal manure…

…”Unless we reduce use and improve stewardship across all sectors — environmental, clinical and agricultural — we don’t stand a chance of reducing antibiotic resistance in the future.”

As of yet, humans are not heeding this advice in any coordinated manner as another new study reveals that antibiotic use and resistance is increasing globally while new antibiotics discoveries have nearly halted. China and India, for instance, have poor regulatory and environmental enforcement:

The NHS is buying drugs from pharmaceutical companies in India whose dirty production methods are fueling the rise of superbugs, write Andrew Wasley & Madlen Davies. There are no checks or regulations in place to stop this happening – even though the rapid growth in antibiotic resistant bacteria in India is spreading across the world, including to the UK and NHS hospitals… government-commissioned study found superbugs would kill more people than cancer by 2050 if no action is taken, and cited pollution in pharmaceutical supply chains as a major problem. – Link

“If you want to see where resistance is occurring in animals, look across the pond to China. They play by a whole different set of rules,” he[Dr. Larry Hollis] says. “Whenever a new antibiotic is developed, the Chinese see the patent filings, figure out how to make it, and without any regulatory structure, it goes straight to animals. By the time it’s available here, the antibiotic is already showing resistance.” – Link

India is a global center of antibiotic manufacture. 80% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients used by pharmaceutical companies worldwide, including the United States and Europe, are made in China. Following their manufacture, most of these ingredients are exported to India for processing and subsequent worldwide sale. The good manufacturing practices in China and India do not include environmental safeguards. “Unfortunately, environmental regulations are currently left up to national regulators, who are not inclined to do much. In India, the effluent discharge load of ciprofloxacin in 2007 was 45 kg per day – the amount consumed in Sweden, which has a population of 9 million, over 5 days,” said Dr. Gandra. – Link

Our hospitals can’t even keep track of how many people are dying from these superbugs. So it seems disease-carrying bacteria shall inherit the Earth, but truth be told, they have always been the dominant forms of life. A population of eight billion people provides a rich substrate for them to colonize and feed upon.

[2.] “Don’t lose things.”

In modern times there has been a large decline in hard-copy forms of record-keeping with ever more material being transferred onto digital formats, especially news reports and visual/auditory records, but the ephemeral nature of our digital media makes it prone to disappearing. Virtually all of the most useful and important artifacts of our time are digital and very little of it is intended to survive. Much of the 20th Century and beyond will be a vast gaping historical black hole except for the plastics, radiation and soot entering the geological record:

Digital information itself has all kinds of advantages. It can be read by machines, sorted and analyzed in massive quantities, and disseminated instantaneously. “Except when it goes, it really goes,” said Jason Scott, an archivist and historian for the Internet Archive. “It’s gone gone. A piece of paper can burn and you can still kind of get something from it. With a hard drive or a URL, when it’s gone, there is just zero recourse.”…

…If a sprawling Pulitzer Prize-nominated feature in one of the nation’s oldest newspapers can disappear from the web, anything can. “There are now no passive means of preserving digital information,” said Abby Rumsey, a writer and digital historian. In other words if you want to save something online, you have to decide to save it. Ephemerality is built into the very architecture of the web, which was intended to be a messaging system, not a library… – Link

The slow creep of technological obsolescence or a sudden cosmic disaster like a Carrington Event could usher in a ‘Digital Dark Age’, making any historical electronic documents unreadable. Google’s Vint Cerf says we’ve grown complacent in how media is stored. He warns that we may find ourselves lost in a bit-rot future unable to access important media documents, scientific data, etc., but leaving behind any kind of record on an overheated world could be a moot point if there’s no one left to read it.

[3.] “Tell each other faster.”

Communication speed has increased exponentially with technology but the infrastructure that supports it is very vulnerable. Aside from the growing threat of cyber-attack, it’s been documented that the most common cause of communication failure is due to the destruction of physical infrastructures. Roughly 200 undersea fiber optic cables link the world’s telecommunications, but they are “poorly armored, rarely patrolled and only occasionally monitored.” The possibility of human saboteurs is ever-present for landlines as well. These systems are usually the first sites to be targeted in wars and crackdowns by authoritarian governments.

Telecommunication infrastructure is also threatened by natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and severe weather which can sever cables and flood underground equipment. A study from a couple of years ago found an increase in severe weather has led to a doubling of major power outages across the country in the past decade.

Telling each other faster has not made one iota of a difference in preventing the unmitigated disaster of global warming and climate change. If after decades of climate conferences, libraries filled to the brim with studies and data, and now the imminent death of the largest organism on the planet—the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, we still cannot collectively take this existential threat seriously, then failure and death will be our just deserts.

[4.] “Mitigate tyranny.”

Hyper-nationalist movements are on the rise around the world, and they can be a precursor to authoritarianism. A country by country guide and analysis of fascism and the far right in Europe can be found here. Hyper-nationalism can lead to racism, vicious cycles of revenge, and genocide in which a segment of the population is scapegoated for society’s failures. With the appointment of Steven Bannon to Trumps’s presidential inner circle, the darkness of Trump’s worldview should be evident to most. Trump will soon have America’s militarized police forces at his behest and the world’s surveillance network at his fingertips, enabling him to act on his penchant for vindictiveness in far-reaching ways.

Trump won’t bring back coal because it would mean destroying the natural gas industry which has grown to displace the use of coal in recent years. Trump is going to learn how hard it is to change the dynamics of our energy system. Previous presidents have hit that same wall. Besides, automation is taking over all the blue-collar jobs of Trump’s supporters. All those “big league jobs” promised by Trump just went up in smoke:

…research shows that the automation of U.S. factories is a much bigger factor than foreign trade in the loss of factory jobs. A study at Ball State University’s Center for Business and Economic Research last year found that trade accounted for just 13 percent of America’s lost factory jobs. The vast majority of the lost jobs — 88 percent — were taken by robots and other homegrown factors that reduce factories’ need for human labor. – Link

[5.] “Get more brains involved in solving problems.”

Physicist Jonathan Huebner says in his study that rates of global innovations judged significant to human beings have been declining in recent decades, in fact it’s halved in the past hundred years. Joseph Tainter in his own study has come to a similar conclusion:

Over the last 40 years, the number of patents per inventor has decreased by 20% and the number of inventors per patent has increased by almost 50%. Although the quality of patents is unknown (it can not be measured quantitatively), it seems we nowadays get less bang for the buck compared to half a century ago. Larger, interdisciplinary research teams cost a lot more money as they need the support of administrative personnel and formal institutions. This decrease in productivity has been masked by the fact that the whole enterprise (research & development) has grown in absolute terms (i.e. more scientists and more money being poured into R&D). – Link

This decline in innovation is directly related to diminishing EROI of our energy resources and the limits of complexity. As Jonathan Miles said in Want Not, “This is our condition. We do not solve problems. We replace them with other problems.” The myriad of crises bearing down on us defies comprehension and certainly won’t be solved by applying more of the same techno-fix thinking.

[6.] “Try not to run out of energy.”

The EROI of fossil fuels, the master resource of industrial civilization, has been in decline for some time and a recent report sheds light on this:

A new peer-reviewed study led by the Institute of Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico has undertaken a comparative review of the EROI of all the major sources of energy that currently underpin industrial civilization—namely oil, gas, coal, and uranium.

Published in the journal Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, the scientists note that the EROI for fossil fuels has inexorably declined over a relatively short period of time: “Nowadays, the world average value EROI for hydrocarbons in the world has gone from a value of 35 to a value of 15 between 1960 and 1980.”

In other words, in just two decades, the total value of the energy being produced via fossil fuel extraction has plummeted by more than half. And it continues to decline… – Link

No other energy source has the energy density of fossil fuels and the existing alternative or “renewable” energy sources won’t power our current set of living arrangements. Although technology is extending the Fossil Fuel Age, running out of economically recoverable fossil fuels means a radical change in society, if such a thing as ‘society’ can persist in the aftermath of biospheric collapse. I suppose a seventh bullet point is in order and would say something along the lines of, “It’s an ill bird that fouls its own nest.”

Some Fun Facts for a Dystopic Future

02 Wednesday Nov 2016

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

≈ 60 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Abrupt Climate Change, Antarctic Ice Melt, Arctic Blue Ocean Event, Arctic Sea Ice Melt, Capitalism, Donald Trump, Dr. James Orbinski, Geoengineering, Greenland Ice Sheet Melt, Hillary Clinton, James Hansen, Mass Coral Bleaching, Overpopulation, Planetary Boundaries, Professor Harold R. Wanless, Sea Level Rise, Techno-Fix, The Great Barrier Reef, The Limits to Growth

“When you cannot feed your children, you will do anything, even if it means going to war. This is the reality of climate change.” ~ Dr. James Orbinski

80% of the world’s productive agricultural land is in river deltas which are vulnerable to flooding from storm and tidal surges as well as salt penetration inland –as much as 20 km in some cases. Just 1 meter(3.28ft) of sea level rise(SLR) would threaten one third of this food-producing land and render nearly all the barrier islands of the world uninhabitable. (Overly-)Conservative estimates from the IPCC in 2013 predicted 1m of SLR rise by 2100, but the last two decades have seen global sea level increase more than twice as fast as it did in the 20th Century and only recently have scientists realized the true rate of SLR has been grossly underestimated(here and here). James Hansen (et al) has argued all along that 5 meters of sea level rise by the end of the century is possible, taking decades to happen rather than centuries. They conclude that glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica will melt 10 times faster than previous consensus estimates. The last time CO2 levels were at 400ppm was during the Pliocene Era when sea level was 5 to 40m higher (16-131ft); unfortunately, Earth is warming 50 times faster than when it comes out of an ice age. Professor Harold R. Wanless who has studied the geologic sedimentary record says that we are in for a nasty surprise within this century:

Most of the models projecting future sea level rise assume a gradual acceleration of sea level rise through this century and beyond as ice melt gradually accelerates. Our knowledge of how sea level rose out of the past ice age paints a very different picture of sea level response to climate change. At the depth of the last ice age, about 18,000 years ago, sea level was some 420 feet below present level as ice was taken up by large continental ice sheets. Subsequent ice melt was not a gradual acceleration and then deceleration process. Rather it was a series of very rapid pulses of sea level rise followed by pauses. These rapid pulses of rise, from three to thirty feet, were fast enough to leave drowned reefs, sandy barrier islands, tidal inlet deltas, and other coastal deposits abandoned across the continental shelf. That is what happens when climate change warms enough to destabilize some ice sheet sector. It rapidly disintegrates, resulting in a rapid rise.

We are already witnessing the demise of the Great Barrier Reef, the oldest and largest living organism on the planet, which continues to suffer the lethal effects of a warming and acidifying ocean. We’ve destroyed the planet’s air conditioner in the Arctic and set the stage for an impending Blue Ocean Event where 24 hours a day of summer sunlight penetrating the uncovered dark Arctic waters will create another tipping point for runaway climate change. The Arctic climate is changing so fast science can barely keep track of what’s happening or predict global consequences. On top of this, nature’s carbon sinks have been severely weakened over the last few centuries, hindering the ability of the planet to absorb ever-increasing greenhouse gases. And these things are happening before a large destructive pulse of SLR hits the planet.

History has proven considerably worse than the Club of Rome’s projections. The original report made only passing reference to some of the most critical environmental problems of today. In response to this, the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified a set of nine ecological processes regulating land/ocean/atmosphere and their accompanying boundaries within which humans must stay to avoid biospheric collapse. In 2015, researchers found that four of these planetary boundaries had already been breached: biodiversity loss, damage to phosphorous and nitrogen cycles, climate change and land use. None of these critical boundaries were picked up by the original Limits to Growth report. We have destroyed the stability of the Holocene Epoch and continue to wreak havoc with every passing day. In other words, there are many other environmental crises too numerous to list that are coming to a head, and catastrophic sea level rise is just the icing on the burned cake. The last time Earth had such a disruptive species, cyanobacteria altered the atmosphere and killed off all the anaerobic life forms including itself. Ironically, oxygen was the byproduct of the cyanobacteria that proved lethal to those ancient lifeforms and paved the way for the rise of photosynthetic organisms. The cyanobacteria had a 500 million year run, but modern man has only been around for 0.01% of that time. Our large brain has made it possible for us to destroy ourselves in record time.

Global warming is happening 5,000 times faster than a major food source can adapt. As the global monoculture food system breaks down and leaves vulnerable Third World countries to fend for themselves, I expect the last remaining vertebrates to be hunted to extinction in short order while wealthy nations carry out land grabs in an effort to keep their citizens fed. Humans are pushing all other life off the planet; the ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ is not a metaphor.

So you would think that these stark facts laid out before us would be causing panic in the global markets and seats of power around the world because, clearly, no one is safe from this unfolding apocalypse. In what many call the ‘most powerful nation on Earth’, surely a leader must be on the verge of taking the helm of this sinking ship. In any rational world, they would be compelled to battle this planetary emergency with the war-time urgency it demands. In the election year of 2016 there are only two prospects in our corporatocracy, one of whom is so frightening that hundreds of the world’s scientists felt compelled to issue a warning against his possible election. The other candidate seems much more palatable on the surface, but her record and recent emails illustrate just how tortured her positions are on environmental issues. Anyone who has studied the numerous practices that make modern civilization truly unsustainable, the depths of corruption and waste in its global socio-economic system, and how predatory one has to be in order to survive and “succeed’ in it realizes in the end that it wouldn’t matter much who fills that figurehead position. Toeing the line of the dominant culture is a prerequisite for the job. That’s one reason why nations are building walls in response to climate change refugees and putting faith in unproven and unrealistic techno-fixes to save themselves while at the same time drilling for new oil, financing new coal plants, allowing climate goals for corporations to add up to only a quarter of the amount needed to limit warming to 2°C, and giving the shipping industry a pass on curbing its emissions(if shipping was a country it would be the world’s 8th biggest carbon polluter).

Meanwhile, CO2 levels continue to climb at breakneck speed and recent paleoclimate research indicates today’s greenhouse gas levels could produce a ‘game over’ warming of 7°C within our lifetime. We already have no carbon budget left for a 1.5°C warming limit from 2017 onwards. We’re betting our species’ future on vaporware, and no country on Earth is taking the 2°C climate target seriously. Celebrity breakups get more attention than real threats to the continuation of our species. Apocalypse tourism has become a ‘thing’.

The biosphere is collapsing under the weight of 7.5 billion people living off the combustion of a one time endowment of ancient carbon energy, from the factory-farmed produce they eat to the petroleum-based medical supplies that keep them alive. And global population growth may be accelerating at an even greater rate than recent predictions. As Germany has shown, “renewable energies” are nothing more than ‘fossil fuel extenders’ still wedded to fossil-fueled extraction processes for the production and maintenance of those technologies. It’s a shell game of sorts. Industrialized countries will say their carbon footprint has gone down without telling you they’ve moved their dirty industrial operations to Third World countries. Developing countries will make promises of “green growth” while their state-owned banks and companies expand fossil fuel production overseas. We’ve been fooling ourselves for a very long time about what is truly sustainable and will continue to do so as the system falls apart, geoengineering fixes are applied, interstellar space colonization fantasies are dreamed up, and wars are fought for what remains. Humans have constructed a reality incompatible with the well-being of the natural world and the stability of the biosphere, but we won’t be able to escape the rules of physics, chemistry, and biology. We’ve spent generations making the bed we’re going to be lying in, never realizing it’s also our death bed. Time is not on our side.

Most are not listening and our leaders are misleading, so it bears repeating: ‘The Oil Age’ made us all confident idiots with short attention spans. To both candidates: runaway, catastrophic climate change resulting in loss of habitat and mass starvation is our biggest threat.

 

Update 11-10-2016:

The proles have now elected a man who has put a climate science denier in charge of his EPA team, vowed to kill the Paris climate deal, end all efforts to help other countries deal with climate change, stop domestic climate action, reinvigorate coal, and zero out all climate science research & clean energy, but physics doesn’t really care who was elected.

The Stark Realities of Baked-In Catastrophes

02 Saturday Apr 2016

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

≈ 45 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropogenic Climate Change, Arctic Sea Ice Melt, Capitalism, Climate Change Denial, CO2 Emissions, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Economic Hitman, Environmental Collapse, Intensified Hydrologic Cycle, Mangled Jet Stream, Noam Chomsky, Sea Level Rise, Sustainability, Techno-Fix, The Unsustainability of Mega-Cities, Warren Buffett

Joe-Webb-Greetings-From-California

In a civilization gone mad with delusions of grandeur, we’re left with tatters of human sociability held together by rancid mythologies.

Despite human fossil fuel burning recently reported to be “flat”, CO2 levels have been on a tear for the last six months, reaching new worrying levels which have some wondering whether permafrost melt may be contributing to the unusually high spike if no decline happens soon. The giant holes in Siberia serve as an ominous sign. Considering that the current El Niño is contributing only 10% to what we are now seeing, runaway global warming may be accelerating worldwide. But don’t worry, Warren Buffett says climate change is no more of a problem than the Y2K bug and will be profitable through increased premiums and inflation.

Ever dire studies continue to reaffirm worst case scenarios, making clear to anyone paying attention that Earth in the next century will be unrecognizable from its current state. Basic planetary geography and atmospheric conditions will be altered through warming oceans and rising sea levels which are now increasing faster than at any time in the past 2800 years. On average, sea levels were between 50 and 82 feet higher the last time CO2 levels were at 400ppm. Glaciologist Jason Box expects ice melt from the West Antarctic to become the biggest contributor to sea level rise in the coming decades due to a feedback loop not in the climate models. CO2 levels have been increasing around 3ppm per year, a twentyfold increase since pre-industrial times when the highest recorded increase was 0.15 ppm per year. We’ve long since passed the tipping point of melting Arctic summer sea ice; 300-350 ppm of CO2 was the threshold for many parts of the climate. These changes are irreversible on a timescale of human civilizations. Even if all human industrial activity magically ceased today, the footprint man has already left will be felt for eons.

In our warming world, the hydrologic cycle is changing and creating extreme weather; crop-destroying droughts and floods are becoming more frequent. The Jet Stream is transforming into something different, becoming wavier with higher ridges and troughs prone to stagnating in the same region. As global temperatures rise over time, hotter air will be trapped under these layers of high pressure from a mangled Jet Stream, cooking everything to death. Rising winter temperatures are beginning to destroy the “winter chill” needed for many fruit and nut trees to properly blossom and produce maximally. Climate change is also disrupting flower pollination and pushing fish toward the North/South poles, robbing poorer countries at the equator of crucial food resources. In a new study, marine scientists are surprised to find a disturbing trend in the increasing numbers of a specific type of phytoplankton, coccolithophores, which have been “typically more abundant during Earth’s warm interglacial and high CO2 periods.”

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Homo sapiens have only been on the planet for the equivalent of a few seconds in geologic time but have managed to overwhelm and foul up all of earth’s natural processes and interdependencies, leaving a distinct layer in the sedimentary record. There is nothing modern humans do that is truly sustainable. Here are a few glaring examples:

  • Techno-fixes are built into the IPCC’s projections for maintaining a habitable planet for humans.
  • Money megacities spend for adapting to climate change is linked more to protecting valuable capital than vulnerable people (Capitalism is doing an outstanding job of converting the planet into dead dollars.)
  • Nuclear Power: “Even if there were no issues like meltdown or waste proliferation, the cost and time for planning, permitting, and constructing nuclear plants is prohibitive. The Arctic ice will already be gone.
  • Japan prime minister: We came within a “paper-thin margin” of nuclear disaster and the evacuation of 50 million people in 2011
  • Germany’s carbon dioxide emissions increased by an estimated 10 million tonnes from 2014 to 2015, in a blow to the country’s claims to climate leadership.
  • New study published in the journal Environmental Pollution shows that urban soil can emit up to 72% as much CO2 as fossil fuels burned within a city and at a rate of up to twice that of rural soils.
  • 90% of Indigenous in Brazil’s Amazon Suffer Mercury Poisoning: A new study shows that water and food sources for 19 Indigenous communities have been massively affected by illegal mining.
  • Satellite images suggest tropical forests from the Amazon to the Philippines are disappearing at a far more rapid pace than previously thought, a University of Maryland team of forest researchers say.
  • African elephants ‘killed faster than they are being born’
  • Desertification in China is a major problem for Beijing, as the country’s deserts are growing, threatening environmental, economic, and political stability.
  • The environment is now being destroyed by corporations in the name of green growth. Sham greenwashing projects are created, funded, and enforced by the IMF and World Bank.
  • Unknown continental-scale process is dumping phosphorus into streams and lakes across the U.S.
  • According to a new study, efforts to curtail world temps will almost surely fail: “A person living today uses about four times as much energy as a person did in the early 1900s.”
  • Greenpeace says China increasing coal-fired capacity: “There is a very rapid and accelerating net increase in coal-fired generating capacity”
  • UN envoy warns of environmental activist murder ‘epidemic’
  • Remember this headline from 2013?: Arctic methane release could cost economy $60 trillion -study. Our response was to go on a fracking binge which increased our methane emissions by some 30%.
  • While the resource intensity of GDP may be falling (less resources needed to produce 1$ worth of goods/services), the absolute decoupling of resource use, emissions, pollution, etc from GDP growth is the only thing that matters and that is not happening. If the world’s population continues to grow as projected and current lifestyles do not change, global resource consumption will increase anywhere from 2 to 5 times by 2050. It defies logic that a continually growing economy would be able to reduce its resource intensity down to near-zero to achieve a sustainable ecological footprint.
  • According to recent research, even if we converted 100% of farmland to reforestation projects it would only lower temperatures 0.45C by the end of the century. Converting half of global farmland to reforestation would result in just a 0.25C drop. Other recent studies have come to the same conclusion:

No amount of reafforestation or growing of new trees will ultimately off-set continuing CO2 emissions due to environmental constraints on plant growth and the large amounts of remaining fossil fuel reserves,” Mackey says. “Unfortunately there is no option but to cut fossil fuel emissions deeply as about a third of the CO2 stays in the atmosphere for 2 to 20 millennia.

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Relying on machines for answers to the existential problems of a species run amok with planet-destroying tools and weaponry is rather ironic and tragic. We’re locked-up inside a complexity trap of our own making. The human propensity for tool-building coupled with our discovery of fossil fuels has created a set of living arrangements in which we are now enslaved to those machines and tools. The globalized capitalist economy externalizes its destruction and atrocities, keeping the masses in a state of ignorance and denial. Our corporate overlords are not conscientious citizens, but mindless organizations whose sole purpose is to grow profits no matter the external damage done to society and the environment. Between the economic oil hitmen who ensure that profits flow smoothly and GOP politicians who openly espouse their science illiteracy, a hospitable climate for future humans seems remote. Hopeful delusions have given way to the stark reality of our predicament as scholars like Noam Chomsky who originally started his career fighting for a modicum of social justice have now set the bar at just the chance of human survival. Despite the best efforts of scientists, environmentalists, and activists, the wealthy countries most able to do something won’t “get it” until famine, disease, and war come to their country. All is being left for the almighty ‘free market’ to sort out at the same time that climate change, a conflict multiplier, ramps up.

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The sixth mass extinction gathers steam and climate inertia works to catch up to the catastrophic ecological collapse already baked-in. All the while, modern man engages in the spectacle of tribal politics(building walls, exuding military strength, recapturing past glories of their nation) and presidential candidates discuss the size of their penis.

For those who come to understand modern man’s predicament, it can either be the ultimate mind fuck or an epiphany that helps a person appreciate the fragility of life, the urgency of living in the here and now, and the grand cosmic joke of a global, hi-tech civilization that arose from the burning of ancient fossil remains only to have those fumes become a deadly curse, extinguishing any trace of our lofty accomplishments…

The fossil record, Plotnick points out, is much more durable than any human record.

“As humanity has evolved, our methods of recording information have become ever more ephemeral,” he said. “Clay tablets last longer than books. And who today can read an 8-inch floppy?” he shrugged. “If we put everything on electronic media, will those records exist in a million years? The fossils will.”
– Link

No One Gets Out Alive

02 Tuesday Feb 2016

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

≈ 52 Comments

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6th Mass Extinction, Alternative Energy, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, Authoritarianism, Big Oil Propaganda, Capitalism, Carbon Sequestration, Climate Chaos, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate Trade Agreements, Cryosphere, Ecocide, Ecological Collapse, Ecological Overshoot, Energy Bail-Outs, Eric Zencey, Exxon's Climate Cover-Up, Fascism, Financialization of the Economy, Geoengineering, Jeb Bush, Johan Rockstrom, Keeling Curve, Mass Die Off, Michael Mann, Oil Price Crash, Overly Conservative IPCC Estimates, Overpopulation, Peak Fish, Peak Oil, Philanthrocapitalism, Planetary Boundaries, Planetary Tipping Points, Plasticizing the Planet, Techno-Fix, Techno-Optimists, The Age of Oil, The Global Elite, Zika Virus

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As China’s appetite for resources wanes with the bursting of its real estate bubble and America’s shale oil boom fueled by easy credit comes to an end, floundering petrostates are beginning to queue up for bail-outs. Financialization appears to have exacerbated the collapse in oil prices. Of course none of this capitalist boom-bust cycle negates the fundamentals of peak oil; prices will swing upwards again in a few years as marginal producers get weeded out. After all, the world still consumes nearly three million gallons of oil per minute, and only a relatively thin margin separates surplus from a shortage. Most of our energy usage does not involve electricity which is what alternative energies like wind and solar produce. Electricity comprises just 18% of the total global energy consumption of which alternatives make up a tiny sliver. 250 new human beings are added to the planet every minute; each born into a world of depleting resources and mounting pollution; each scrambling to secure the necessities of life. The black stuff will remain the primary fuel supporting this growing population of a globalized technological civilization.

A recent study estimates that if we are serious about implementing alternative energies to satisfy the goals of the Paris climate accord, then upwards of 12 trillion dollars will have to be spent over the next 25 years. This price tag is an investment that is 75% more than current growth projections. At a time when governments have spent their last ammo pumping more electronic money into the economy to try to stimulate economic growth, the prospects of decarbonizing the entire global energy system appears daunting, especially considering the many shortcomings of alternative energies. Time constraints on a planet indifferent to our energy needs are also bearing down on us:

CO2 levels must now be kept below 405ppm(where we’ll be in under 3 years at current emission rate) to avoid 2C warming.

As the Keeling curve creeps irreversibly higher and the gap between rhetoric and reality widens, pipe dreams like geoengineering and carbon sequestration will become desperate Hail Marys for a species whose time is running out. The New York Times editorial by Piers Sellers, a NASA Earth Sciences director who has terminal cancer, perfectly sums up this techno-fix mindset: “…it will be up to the engineers and industrialists of the world to save us.” Keep calm, keep shopping, and await further instructions; the elites have it all under control. Jeb Bush’s recent comment that we should pin our hopes on “someone in a garage” fixing climate change illustrates the widespread delusion that technological innovation, good ol’ entrepreneurial spirit, and capitalist market-based solutions will be our saviours. Ironically, Jeb belongs to the political party hell-bent on defunding public education, a policy that would seem to make those plucky garage inventors even more implausible.

We cannot possibly rely on a system that profits from the very disaster it has helped to create, yet that is the dead-end feedback loop we are locked into. Mexico is a good example of how landscapes and communities are being carved up for alternative energy farms and carbon trading schemes that benefit only large corporations. Even philanthrocapitalism promotes the convenient myth that market forces and the whims of billionaires will solve systemic problems. The precautionary principle has been thrown out the window in the pursuit of short-term profits and power. We have only a vague inkling of nature’s rich complexity and interdependence. The scale of our ignorance is frightening considering our oversized impact.

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The truth of our predicament has been criminally concealed since the 1970s by the fossil fuel industry which all the while knew that an overheated Arctic would melt away, exposing fresh deposits of carbon for them to exploit. Unfortunately the bonanza they planned for has not materialized; melting permafrost wreaks havoc on infrastructure and exploration. The cryospheric regions of earth, key geographic features regulating the planet’s climate, were systematically dismantled within the geologic blink of an eye; such environmental changes are imperceptible to the real-time cognitive processing of humans, but in geological ‘deep time’ these events are cataclysmic and portend a dire future for humans. There are more signs that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is slowing down.

“We’re sitting on these planetary boundaries right now, argues Rockstrom, and if these systems flip from one stable state to another — if the Amazon tips into a savannah, if the Arctic loses its ice cover and instead of reflecting the sun’s rays starts absorbing them in water, if the glaciers all melt and cannot feed the rivers — nature will be fine, but we will not be.” ~ Johan Rockstrom, director of the Stockholm Resilience Center

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The time to avoid critical tipping points in those decades has passed. The projections from the IPCC were downplayed and underestimated in order to continue the destructive business-as-usual:

“…new scientific findings were more than twenty times as likely to support the ASC perspective [that disruption through AGW may be far worse than the IPCC has suggested] than the usual framing of the issue in the U.S. mass media. The findings indicate that…if reporters wish to discuss ‘‘both sides’’ of the climate issue, the scientifically legitimate ‘‘other side’’ is that, if anything, global climate disruption may prove to be significantly worse than has been suggested in scientific consensus estimates to date”.

We’re in the early throes of economic and ecological system failure; headlines grow more alarming each year:

Plastic is projected to outweigh fish in the world’s oceans by 2050. This may happen much sooner since it was just discovered the number of fish remaining in the ocean has been grossly overestimated. We only recycle 5-10% of plastics today and many are not recyclable. It’s cheaper for industry not to recycle and the quality of plastic is degraded when it is recycled. No international body exists that can hope to regulate dumping in the oceans. International ships dump freely without consequence. Unenforceable legislation is heroically passed in bodies of government from time to time, but it remains ineffective. Waste is also shipped across borders to more “business friendly” countries where waste can be cost-effectively dumped.

The warming Indian Ocean is becoming an ecological desert. According to new research, rising water temperatures over the last half century appear to have reduced phytoplankton numbers, threatening to cascade through the food chain and crash the ecosystem. Climate change has been implicated in a rash of recent animal die-offs across the planet. The changes are too abrupt for animals to adapt. Today’s build-up of atmospheric CO2 and other heat-trapping gases is much, much faster than past hyperthermal events. In fact, scientists now fear climate change is happening faster than it has in all of Earth’s history.

Hot days are occurring 145 times more often over the last 10 years than just a few decades ago. Unique World Heritage Sites are being destroyed by climate change. The latest one, an ancient Gondwana ecosystem in Tazmania, burned down to the ground from fires sparked by dry lightning strikes, a direct result of climate change. A warming planet is also providing a growing range of favorable places for mosquitoes, the bane of mankind, to spread pestilence and disease. Our interconnected world can fast-track their dissemination with the help of a single intercontinental plane flight. At the moment, the Zika virus is grabbing headlines with its explosive expansion. Scientists are on the verge of confirming that it has jumped to the common mosquito and the WHO recently declared it an international health emergency. Microcephaly appears to be just the tip of the iceberg for the fallout of this virus. Normal-appearing newborns are suffering ill effects as well. It is believed that the Zika virus was introduced into Brazil during the World Soccer Cup in 2014 when an influx of tourists visited cities throughout Brazil. The 2016 Olympics in Rio will provide a perfect vehicle for the worldwide distribution of Zika.

The refugees fleeing from the war-torn Middle East are only a foreshadowing of the mass exodus to come from regions racked by climate chaos. With ethnic, religious, racial and ideological tensions simmering, we can already see the welcome mats being pulled up in host countries. Recent studies have shown a loss of freedoms for citizens and rise in authoritarian governments around the world over the last decade; this trend tracks with our net energy descent, deregulation, rollback of environmental protection, and pursuit of corporate trade agreements. It also follows historic patterns:

“…history tells us that civilizations experiencing dramatic declines in their net energy uptake usually develop authoritarian political systems in an effort to stave off collapse, but then crash and disappear anyway.” ~Eric Zencey

Historically speaking, the elite are last to feel the effects of their hubristic decision-making, insulated as they are in their positions of wealth and power. Modern ideals and virtues of human rights, social justice, and a strong American middle class have all been aberrations of a civilization built atop a surfeit of energy.

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The disparity between MSM news and real world problems like climate change, pollution, growing wealth inequality, the unraveling food chain, etc. are breathtaking. Wrecking the biosphere and bringing on a mass extinction leaves no one unscathed or in any position to survive long-term. Secret plans of survival by the “elite” are simply another myth. The wealthy may be buying up tracts of land in remote areas, but they are perhaps more delusional than anyone else because of how their wealth insulates them from hard realities. Without all those just-in-time supply chains operating seamlessly across a stable planet, no one gets out alive.

Hollow Promises and Ugly Unspoken Realities

21 Monday Dec 2015

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

≈ 82 Comments

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"Make America Great Again", 6th Mass Extinction, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Capitalism, Celebrity Worship, Climate Refugees, Climate Sensitivity of Earth, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Comedian Tom Simmons, COP21, Corporate State, Deep State, Derrick Jensen, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Global Famine, Idolatry of Money, Interstellar Colonization, Mass Consumption, Mass Die Off, Mass Production, Mass shootings, meteorologist Eric Holthaus, Mike Lofgren, Military Industrial Complex, Neil Postman, Peak Oil, Plasticizing the Planet, Super El Niño, Techno-Fix, Technophelia, The Fossil Fuel Age, The Global Elite, War for Profit, War on Terror

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Another climate conference has once again come and gone, echoing hollow promises and ugly unspoken realities. I won’t waste anyone’s time analyzing the verbiage of this so-called agreement which failed to even mention the term fossil fuels, probably at the behest of those who financed the entire farce, i.e. the carbon-extraction companies. Suffice it to say that countries were approving fossil fuel exploration projects before the ink of the global climate agreement had fully dried. As long as corporations are able to push environmental and social costs off their balance sheets and onto the backs of the weak and defenseless, dirty coal will be burnt and the cheapest slave labor will be employed. Questioning root causes like our inherently unsustainable way of life is still very much taboo and will remain so even after our descendants are sifting through the wreckage. Sure, mainstream publications have expanded their coverage of man-made climate change and global warming, but these existential threats to life on Earth remain an enigma to the vast majority, a footnote in some obscure textbook.

Retailers on the East Coast talk about a crisis for winter clothing sales because the weather has been too unseasonably warm to attract buyers, but nary a mention of man’s role in influencing these abnormal events, such as a super El Niño amplified by global warming. As the developed world continues to roll the climate chaos dice, we now face a higher chance of turbo-charged El Niños every 4 to 12 years and all the destruction that they bring —mass coral bleaching events, die-offs of marine mammals, record flooding and drought, crop failure and famine, refugee crises, etc. This year’s El Niño is on track to becoming the strongest on record with meteorologist Eric Holthaus exclaiming, “Our planet’s climate has undergone a step-change this year.”:

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This climate “step-change” may also be indicative of a considerable underestimation of the Earth’s climate sensitivity. What should be painfully obvious by now is that the carbon footprint for everyone will have to decrease dramatically and quickly in order to slow emissions. In other words, the world’s richest will have to radically alter their lifestyles. That’s never going to happen in any variant of capitalism, a system so entrenched that it is inconceivable to imagine anything substantially different taking its place. Instead we get things like corporate greenwashing, carbon trading, decades of climate conferences, First World offshoring of manufacturing emissions into the Third World, and out-and-out fraud like the VW auto emissions scandal. The problem has been identified for nearly half a century, yet we continue to deceive ourselves with half-baked solutions and hypocritical indignation. The inertia of the system is simply too great and the dominant culture has a tendency to kill the messenger of bad news, so there is a strong incentive to sugarcoat things, but a deus ex machina is nowhere on the horizon. We’ll only change in response to the hard realities from an increasingly inhospitable planet. Sunken costs and material incentives built into our socio-economic system prevent radical change and fetishize the myth of the easy techno-fix, a yet-to-be-invented technology that will magically sustain modern civilization while at the same time keep the wolves of ecological collapse at bay. Even more delusional, a prominent tech magnate has urged humanity to pursue interstellar colonization before we render the Earth uninhabitable, but as an internet commenter quipped, “A post-nuclear war, global warming-baked and hyper polluted Earth will still be paradise compared to Mars.” Some technophiles admit the future actually looks rather grim:

…But the most worrisome threats are not merely anthropogenic, they’re technogenic. They arise from the fact that advanced technologies are (a) dual-use in nature, meaning that they can be employed for both benevolent and nefarious purposes; (b) becoming more powerful, thereby enabling humans to manipulate and rearrange the physical world in new ways; and (c) in some cases, becoming more accessible to small groups, including, at the limit, single individuals…

Just as technology is not neutral, so too is the economic system driving this technology. The institution of capitalism, which has been copied and exported all over the world since WW II, has established widespread acceptance for the condition of mass production, mass consumption, and waste at an ever accelerating rate, pushing the world deeper and deeper into ecological crisis. For example, the ubiquity of plastics now exhibits itself as microscopic pieces on every beach in the world and in our dinner with trillions more pieces in the oceans than previously thought. Scientists estimate that nearly all sea birds will be ingesting some sort of plastic by 2050. In spite of this growing evidence of a plasticised planet, the production of plastics has only increased while recycling remains an effort in futility:

For more than 50 years, global production of plastic has continued to rise. Some 299 million tons of plastics were produced in 2013, representing a 3.9 percent increase over 2012’s output. With a market driven by consumerism and convenience, along with the comparatively low price of plastic materials, demand for plastic is growing. Recovery and recycling, however, remain insufficient, and millions of tons of plastics end up in landfills and oceans each year – link

There’s no going back from this global complexity trap we’ve built around ourselves. All those bits of plastic will end up in the sedimentary layer of the Anthropocene along with elevated concentrations of CO2, radionuclides from nuclear fallout and waste, as well as novel metals and pollutants never before seen. Once underway, mass extinctions cannot be reversed, especially when driven by over seven billion pleasure-seeking, individualistic “consumers”. Materialism and greed, we are told, are natural human instincts, and they are all too eagerly rewarded by an economic system which reduces everything to a financial object and monetizes every aspect of the natural world. Today’s environmentalism is, as Derrick Jensen pointed out, similar to the palliative care given to prisoners in Nazi Germany death camps. The emaciated ecological ghosts of so many species are right before us, yet nearly everyone is blind to the unfolding catastrophe of the 6th mass extinction:

…we lose a huge chunk of the world’s diversity that will never come back. We lose the potential for communication with other lifeforms, with the only remaining ones eventually whittled down to domesticated animals or weed species that thrive in civilized man’s destructive footsteps. The conversation of life itself is turning into small talk, but the only recognition that seems to be made by this culture is how [biodiversity loss] “reduces carbon storage”. How trees and animals can provide “ecosystem services”, as if they existed for nothing more than to continue the existence of the mad king ape. – pathofraven

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Yes, we are pretty far gone when a four minute comedy routine makes more sense than anything broadcasted on the evening news. Corporate mass media-controlled public debates have degenerated into infomercial sound bites. In a society where success is measured by the key metrics of money and profit, it should be no surprise that a wealthy, xenophobic businessman is able to garner mass appeal by hogging publicity and playing on the fears and base desires of the populus. “Make America Great Again” is a catchy slogan for a society ignorant of the collapsing world around them and oblivious to the over-consumptive, profligate way of life that is proving to be their undoing. For a celebrity-obsessed culture whose world is falling apart, the next logical choice for its leader would seem to be a reality TV show star who says he can restore the illusion of the American dream and build a great wall to keep all the riff-raff out.

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A fascist right-wing administration might just provide that extra push that takes us all over the edge into collapse. With the Presidency largely serving as a figurehead position for the Deep State, I’m not convinced a different candidate would make a measurable difference in the grand scheme of things anyway. Our “democracy” is, after all, just one more illusion in a bread-and-circus election cycle:

“Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.” – Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

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So while terrorism takes center stage in the overstretched Empire of Amnesia, remember this simple fact: 303 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks worldwide in the last decade while 320,523 Americans were killed because of gun violence in that same time period. Random mass shootings, capitalism’s “free market” genocides, the disruption of the Holocene’s stable climate regime by anthropogenic climate disruption, tipping points in the earth’s biosphere, terminal industrial disease, and many other things come to mind that pose a much bigger danger to the average American, but the War on Terror, conceived as open-ended, serves as a conveniently omnipresent boogieman for jerking the chain of the taxpayer and justifying the growth of an intrusive security state. What better way to control the masses as the wheels continue coming off the global economy and the biosphere becomes evermore threadbare. The rich will retreat into their luxury spider holes until the coast is clear.

And you thought Greece had a problem?

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

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

≈ 255 Comments

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American Empire, China Ghost Cities, Climate Change, Decline of Detroit, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Fiat Money, Greece, Industrial Revolution, Infinite Growth Paradigm, Money = Energy, Norman Pagett, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Roman Empire, Saudi Arabia Skyscraper Bubble, Sectarianism, The End of More

Author: Norman Pagett (The End of More)

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While we might think of money as supporting our economy, only energy can support the solvency of a nation, and only surplus energy can fulfill the aspirations of its rulers and the desires of its citizens. Until the advent of the industrial revolution, and in particular the universal availability of cheap oil, that energy could only come from territory that could produce sufficient food and other essentials for any level of civilized living. We might ‘demand’ that our leaders provide new hospitals, schools, roads and all the other things that make life comfortable, but without the necessary surplus energy to do it, it is impossible. No political posturing or promises or taxation can change that.

Most deny it, but we live in an energy economy, not a money economy. Without the continually increasing forward thrust of energy input, no economy can exist in the context that we have become used to.

Not just the Greeks, but those charged with governing every nation on Earth, have lost sight of the fundamental law of collective survival: if a nation doesn’t produce enough indigenous surplus energy to support the demands of its people, they must beg, buy, borrow or steal it from somewhere else, or face eventual collapse and starvation until their numbers reach a sustainable level.

Our lifestyle support system has been based on that premise since prehistory. Nomadic tribesmen, probably in the region of present day Iraq, had the bright idea of fixing borders around land, then growing their food supply instead of chasing after it. Fences and borders meant land could be owned and given value that could be measured in energy terms.

What we know as civilization is based on that simple concept. Land and its potential energy became capital, and our genetic forces ensured it was exploited to the full. Primitive farmers knew nothing of calorific values, or capitalism; only that too little food meant starvation, sufficient food averted famines, and surplus food offered prosperity. No one wanted to starve, few were content with sufficient, so the drive for surplus became relentless. It still is; only the scale has changed, it has become the profit motive in everything we do. Everybody wants a payrise, few refuse one. We are all capitalists, we differ only by a matter of scale.

Enclosed land needed strong control and the will to fight for it. Strength prevailed while weakness went under as resource competition ebbed and flowed across tribal territories. If land produced enough spare food and other necessary commodities, it was possible to equip and feed an army, and use it to occupy more territory. In that way collective energy could rapidly roll up small territories into a nation or an empire, create warlords and kings, and give credence to gods who were invariably on the winning side.

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Possession of land and what it produces is the hidden support of what we now understand as our economy and the viability of our infrastructure. Conflict makes that economy even more profitable and one that is built on power and aggression provides the potential for endless resource warfare, whether bloody or political. In 1941 Germany invaded Greece using the bloody version. In 2015 Greece is experiencing the political version. As a small weak country Greece lacks the resource strength to resist.

The more land that could be held and ruled, the more food-energy could be produced. Surplus energy that came in the form of meat and grain and timber was too big to carry around, so tokens of gold and silver became an accepted measure of energy value.

Different civilisations arose and used different monetary systems, but all broadly followed the pattern we are locked into now: those who controlled the land controlled the energy that supported the prevalent economy, whether primitive or sophisticated, warlike or peaceful. With sufficient surplus and a big enough labour force held in some kind of serfdom or dependency, tokenized energy could be diverted to pay for the construction of cities, castles and cathedrals. While the labour of men to build them, the allegiance of soldiers to guard them, and the faith of priests to pray over them might be bought with gold and silver, the system depended on a supply of food and basic commodities well above subsistence level, ultimately provided by the heat of the sun. That’s why the great early civilisations and empires began in the warm tropical and sub tropical regions of the world. And why Eskimos did not field armies, build cities, or inflict the hysteria of mass religion on themselves; they didn’t get enough sunshine to provide the energy resources.

That gave rise to the factors we still live with today: warm productive stable land sustains a bigger healthier population. People eat and procreate, need more sustenance, and demand that their leaders provide it, so the thrust of constant expansion is inevitable in order to feed them. This was as true for small farming settlements between the Tigris and the Euphrates, as it was for the Roman Empire. It was the force that drove the European industrial powers outwards to carve up Africa, the Americas and the Far East to give a privileged section of humanity a prosperity that has been unique in our history. Those of us who enjoy those privileges have lost sight of where they came from, and how fragile they are.

Consequently we are still locked into the same energy-hungry capitalist dynamic, only now we believe that money has not only been substituted for the energy that created it, it has replaced it. In most people’s minds, the illusion of money has supplanted tangible, hard resources. Energy is no longer regarded as necessary to sustain prosperity; we can print it, or better still, make it appear electronically.

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Who needs oil? Keynesian economics says that perpetual growth will come through passing bits of coloured paper or plastic from hand to hand at an ever-faster rate.

The leaders of every advanced industrial nation are driven to promise this kind of ‘growth’ to their people, for no better reason than because there has always been growth, so our future will be growth driven too; they and we know no other way. We believe the lie that money itself has taken on an intrinsic worth of its own.

The Greeks fiddled their accounts, joined the EU and accepted the common currency of the Euro and the collective certainty of the money-driven nature of growth, at a time when oil was $25 a barrel. With oil so cheap, any concern about indigenous energy sources was irrelevant. They had a world class (oil dependent) shipbuilding and sea transport industry, and (oil dependent) tourism was booming. In the late 90s, when oil had fallen to $18 a barrel, they borrowed $11 billion to buy still more energy to burn in order to stage the 2004 Olympic games. Greek prosperity depended on infinite supplies of hydrocarbon fuel, but they followed the common belief in infinite money.

When the price of oil peaked in 2008, the crash was inevitable. The certainty that money represented wealth was destroyed by the price of oil, but they borrowed billions more to try to prove it hadn’t. Any reason was better than reality: that you can’t run a cheap energy economy on expensive energy.

The latest clutch of Greek politicos got themselves voted into office because they told the Greek people what they wanted to hear: that prosperity could be voted into office, as if the availability of indigenous energy within their borders was a matter of political choice. Alexis Tsipras believed the Keynesian fantasy and convinced himself that borrowed money put into endless circulation will generate wealth and ‘growth’. $11 billion spent on the now derelict Olympic stadium should have served as a warning, but it didn’t.

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More ‘bailouts’ have been agreed; the Greeks will now settle back into their soporific lifestyle and the headline writers will find something more newsworthy. But the hammer of reality has only been lifted temporarily from the anvil of their economy. In a year or so, when the Greeks have spent their latest loan, it will crash down again, harder.

The Greeks are not money-bankrupt, they are energy-bankrupt.

But so is every other nation, to a greater or lesser degree. Saudi Arabia is in a worse state of energy bankruptcy than the poverty stricken Greeks, they just don’t know it yet.

A century ago, Greece had a population of around 5 million, and had only partially freed itself from control by the Ottoman Empire. Despite wars, revolution, hyperinflation and foreign occupation during the 20th century, it remained poor but largely self sufficient as a pastoral country. During that period, the population doubled, due in a large extent to reclaiming Turkish held territories in the early 20th century. In a worst-case scenario, if Greece defaults on its debts, and drops out of the EU and the European currency, 11 million Greeks will be left to feed themselves at a very basic level. They will have no choice but to fall back on a more primitive lifestyle, forgo the luxuries bought by oil consumption and live on the energy sources within their own borders. When they do that, their energy bankruptcy will disappear.

100 years ago, Arabia had a population of 1.5 million, and was also a region of the Ottoman Empire. The term Saudi had not been prefixed to it and the Gulf States did not exist. Their people were basically nomadic, with no concept of national identity, or civilization approaching the Greek level. Though under nominal control of the Turks, they were effectively protected by their hostile desert. Living was primitive, but like the Greeks, self sufficient on their terms.

Then in 1938 oil was found in Arabia, now the population is over 30 million. The current excesses of Saudi Arabia are too familiar to need recounting here. We’ve all watched the Saudis use their oil to build unsustainable cities in deserts, where previously there had been none. They have used their oil to suck finite water out of aquifers and desalinate seawater to maintain the fantasy of endless prosperity. They buy in every conceivable luxury and try to outdo each other with meaningless towers of vanity that they see as expressions of wealth and status. They build because they can, believing the economic nonsense that spending energy-based tokens, i.e. money, creates profit and wealth. Just like the vanity of the Greek Olympic venues, the glittering towers of Riyadh and Mecca and Jeddah are seen as a source of commercial prosperity that will deliver and provide cashflow long after the oilflow has dried up.

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As the Greeks discovered when the energy flow stopped going into their arenas, they began to disintegrate. Without constant energy input, money embedded in concrete, glass and steel can only show a return if more money (energy) is constantly added to resist the ultimate certainty of entropy. No one has pointed out that while Saudi towers may be designed to last 100 years, the oil-energy that supports them will run out in less than 30, maybe as few as 20 years. (It has been suggested that Saudi might become an oil importer by 2030, though exactly where the imported oil will come from, or how it might be paid for, is not clear). Then the towers will start to fall apart just as the Saudi economy will fall apart because the oil-energy they use to fuel such vanities is borrowed from their own future. And they will have no means of repaying it; their creditors are not foreign bankers, but their own young and dispossessed. They will violently reject the certainty of a life as goat herders and camel traders if only for the reason that they wouldn’t know how.

Just like the Greeks they will demand that the lifestyle they know carries on unimpeded by the reality of energy shortage. They will try to borrow money to maintain it, with the same result. Bankruptcy on the Saudi scale will make the Greek version look like a small bank overdraft. Unlike Greece, the desert is hostile to human life at the current Saudi density, and needs constant input of food, water and air conditioning to survive 50o C summer heat.

11 million Greeks can feed themselves from their own land. 30 or 40 million Saudis are going to have to face the brutal truth that they can’t. The Saudis currently produce about 10 million barrels of oil a day, and they have to use one third of that to keep themselves alive and in the luxury they think they need. They have created an artificial existence entirely dependent on trading oil for food, and face a future of actual starvation, because there will not be sufficient surplus food energy available anywhere in the world to prevent it once the oil has gone. At current rates of growth their population is projected to reach 60 million by 2050 so between now and then a sudden and catastrophic end to the oil-excess is certain. That life-subsidy of one barrel of oil in three will rapidly disappear, with Saudi using constantly depleting oil to buy food at constantly increasing prices in a race to stay alive. Unemployable young men face a non-future where their luxurious privileges are stripped away by forces beyond their control and understanding. With the oilwells sucked dry, the US fleet will sail away from Bahrain, and discontent will manifest itself into riot. In perhaps only 10 or 15 years, Saudi Arabia as a viable nation will not have sufficient indigenous energy to prevent collapse. There will be nowhere to buy, beg, borrow or steal it from, and no oil for export. Which is where Greece is right now.

Since the oilwealth kicked in and the population exploded, Saudi now has a youth bulge in their population. 37% are under 14, 51% are under 25. Already the unemployment rate in the 16 to 29 age range is reported as 29%, possibly much higher. Of those with graduate level jobs, most have been absorbed by the public sector, with Shias being actively discriminated against by the dominant Sunnis. Jobs requiring technical skills are filled by foreign workers. Effectively this means that virtually all wages and unemployment benefits are paid out of oil revenues. This is where violent unrest will come from when the oil flow begins to dry up. Already Saudi has paid out $billions in freebies to pacify their unemployable young men, while maintaining the unreality of gasoline at 16c a liter, effectively using oil to subsidise itself.

With its oil wealth diminishing, Saudi is a ticking time bomb, split by religious factions and sectarianism, confined by repression at a medieval level and surrounded by religious zealots who see infidel industry being supported by the holy oil that rightfully belongs in the land of the prophet. Compared to that, Greece is an oasis of tranquility.

Masked Sunni gunmen pose for a photo during a patrol outside the city of Falluja April 28, 2014. Iraqi soldiers say they have been trapped in and around the western city of Ramadi. They say they have run low on tank shells, lack aerial cover and armoured vehicles, and have been hit by high casualties and desertion rates. In March and April, ISIL seized a dam in Fallujah, flooded farmland on the outskirts of Baghdad in Abu Ghraib, and drained offshoots of the Euphrates river; the Iraqi government evacuated the main prison for Sunni detainees in Abu Ghraib because of the ongoing clashes; and militants, thought to be from ISIL, bombed the country's oil pipeline to Turkey.  REUTERS/Stringer (IRAQ - Tags: CIVIL UNREST POLITICS CONFLICT) - RTR3MZIX

For a different energy/economy collapse scenario, move on to China.

There, energy is being locked into unusable real estate on a truly colossal scale, concentrated on building cities in places where there are no people to live in them. City after city is being constructed right across the country, creating an illusion of ‘Gross Domestic Product’, where officials can only achieve recognition by the rate at which infrastructure is built. A building without people in it is disregarded as irrelevant. 6 million people enter the Chinese job market every year. Construction creates employment, GDP means everything and urbanization targets must be reached.

Employment is the biggest thing for well-being. The government must not slacken on this for one moment … For us, stable growth is mainly for the sake of maintaining employment. Prime Minister Li Keqiang, November 2013

If an apartment block or shopping mall costs $10 million to build, then that is the ‘value’ of the building on the ledger of national prosperity. If it stands empty for years, the ‘value’ is somehow retained. In China, the motivation is different to that in Saudi Arabia or Greece, but there is the same determination to spend money on projects that are intended to deliver infinite commercial prosperity based on the imagined value of the building itself.

They are building dozens of fully functioning cities on the assumption that workers will show up to fill them. But of course those workers will need food as well as ongoing and permanent employment, which isn’t going to be there, so the ghost cities will not have the means to exist. The cities are where people are supposed to live, the countryside is where food is supposed to be produced.

OB-ZA324_0924gh_G_20130924011534

But both need vast quantities of oil to function. At the current rate of growth of around 8% a year, by 2035 China will (in theory) be using the same volume of oil currently consumed in the world now. That won’t happen of course, because the world oil supply is the same for China as it is for Saudi Arabia, twenty years, maybe much less, no matter how much they buy in and hoard. The Chinese desperation for oil will become critical, just as Saudi exports begin to become unavailable. As supply tightens, so conflict over it will increase, thus restricting supply still further until conflict brings oil production to a virtual standstill. But the Chinese ‘ghost cities’, just like Saudi towers, are intended to last a hundred years.

The figures don’t add up; it’s arithmetic too frightening for most to contemplate. China is dependent on its ever increasing production system to generate new jobs. That drives suicidal pollution and insatiable resource consumption because like capitalist governments everywhere, growth must be prioritized over the environment. Growth without oil is impossible so while the ghost cities of China have a value according to government statistics, they produce nothing; and until they do, will have no value at all. Even if some workers do manage to occupy parts of the ghost cities, without oil there won’t be sufficient power to keep them functioning. Under the inflexible second law of thermodynamics, without constant energy input, entropy takes over and buildings begin to deteriorate from the moment they are completed.

Detroit has followed a different path to bankruptcy.

Detroit Ruins

Ruins at the abandoned Packard Automotive Plant (September 4, 2013 in Detroit, Michigan) serve as canvas for graffiti artists. 78,000 abandoned buildings are strewn across Detroit’s 142 square miles.

Whatever the causes of Detroit’s demise, and there can be said to be many, the overall picture is one of declining energy input. People moved out and no longer spent money on making the city a viable entity. The car plants closed, removing the need for people to be there, the loss of inhabitants removed their collective energy, and the city began to fall apart. The result is unequivocal: remove energy input, and any artifice declines, decays and collapses at an accelerating rate.

Detroit is a bankrupt microcosm of the USA: a nation of 330 million people built entirely on the capitalist system needing infinite expansion, drawing on finite energy borrowed from a future that is unsustainable.

America differs little from the disaster scenarios of Saudi Arabia and China. Finite water is being relentlessly pumped out of depleting aquifers, and finite hydrocarbon is being turned into fertilizer to produce food while cities are forced to grow in hostile deserts. The products of Detroit and cheap fuel allowed suburban sprawl to spread 50 miles out from city hubs across the nation because food and water could be delivered, sewage disposed of and climate altered to personal taste. Declining oil supply will render suburbia hostile to modern living as we know it; the local environment may look different, but the effect on human existence will be the same as the excesses of Saudi or China.

Saudi Arabia, China and America are examples of what our future is going to be. But every nation is promising itself a prosperous future while borrowing from it at an ever-increasing rate, making certain that it cannot exist.

The input of oil into national economics has not exempted humanity from the laws of physics. The trappings of civilization have not altered our fundamental rule of existence: whether your station in life is humble or exalted, if you don’t produce food from the earth on a personal basis, your life depends on someone, no matter how many stages removed, converting sunlight into food on your behalf. Not only that, it must be sold at a price you can afford within a stable environment. Essentially, civilization is just that. Remove it and most will starve while those with enough personal resilience will have no option but to revert to hunter gathering or even scavenging, because what we call civilization is as fragile as the oil it sits on. For the millions of homeless people living on the streets in our ‘civilised’ cities, civilization is over. For them there is little hope of a return to prosperity, with a good job, a warm home and security.

History shows that a radically destabilized environment results in war, famine, disease and death. Any one of those four can and will exacerbate the other three.

Our civilization is becoming increasingly unstable, and right now the four horsemen are getting restless.

In one hundred years time, would you prefer to be living in the United States, China, Saudi Arabia…..or Greece?

The End of the Oil Age.

02 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by xraymike79 in Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil

≈ 224 Comments

Tags

Adolf Hitler, consum, Consumer Culture, Cornucopianism, Demagogue, Euro Crisis, Food Insecurity, Fossil Fuel Dependency, Industrial Revolution, Infinite Growth Paradigm, Joseph Tainter, Military Industrial Complex, Native American Genocide, Norman Pagett, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Religious Fanaticism, Resource Wars, Scottish Secession, Slavery, Sykes and Picot, Techno-Optimists, Tensions in the South China Sea, The Age of Oil, The End of More, The Resource Curse, The Third Reich, Vladimir Putin, War for Profit, World War I, World War II

Author: Norman Pagett (The End of More)

imageedit_5_4307012774

But how can we define an oil age? It has been about 150 years since the first deep oilwells were sunk, and just over 200 years since the viable steam engine was developed. The two are linked, because the steam engine made deep drilling of oilwells possible and gave us access to a hundred million years worth of fossilized sunlight. Perhaps we have not strictly had an oil age, but rather the first and only age where we enjoy vast amounts of surplus energy that we have extracted from hydrocarbon fuels, of which oil is the most energy dense. It has brought us material wealth, and the means to indulge in wholesale killing of each other and all other species. It gave excesses of food and a population that consumed that food and grew to five or six times the sustainable level of the planet. In the timespan of human existence, the ascendance of modern industrialised man has been a short flash of light and heat that has briefly lifted us out of the mire of the middle ages, but at a considerable cost to the environment.

Our mistake has been to think of that elevation as both divine and permanent. That certainty of permanence explains the mad scramble to come up with ‘alternatives’ and ‘renewables’ in the last decade or two. Something to keep current politicians in office and the masses pacified. It is important that we accept the seductive indoctrination that prayers will be answered and technology will continue to deliver all that can be imagined. The majority have come to believe in the economics of cornucopianism, where wishing for something will make it happen, while ignoring the reality that everything we have is derived from finite hydrocarbon fuels. If we spend enough money, alternatives will always be found to sustain our lifestyle. They won’t of course, and the conflicts that have been fought over oil are proof that they won’t. The pivot of world oil economy is Saudi Arabia, (the concept of ‘Saudi America’ is too ludicrous for discussion here), but that fantasy land of sand dunes and tall towers is being encircled by fanatics who know that when the jugular of global oil is cut, the industrial complexity of the developed west will die.

When (not if) that happens, we might be lucky to hold onto an existence akin to that of the 14th century, which is what the religious zealots want to inflict on all of us. If we’re unlucky, then we must expect something that will be much darker and as yet inadmissible to modern minds that do not have the scope to deal with its implications. That infers an unpleasant imagery of pre-history that we prefer to ignore. Understandably, most think the same way; this is why we cling to the comforting promise of ‘infinite growth’. The alternative is just too awful. Instead we have been encouraged to believe that we can do without oil and not only still run around on wheels, but have a purpose for doing so. And by some means yet to be invented, keep our wings as well.

Our oil age will not end through lack of it, but by fighting over what’s left. So choose your luck‐factor and take that thought where you will, you are on your own with it. Many reasons are given for starting wars, but ultimately there is only one: the pursuit of (energy) resources. Human greed drove improvements in weaponry, and the means of destruction and acquisition became more deadly over thousands of years even though there was more than enough for everyone. The input of oil was the game changer of warfare; history over the last century has shown that conflict was not diminished, but amplified, by the prosperity and technology created by oil. Since the 1860s when black gold gushed from the earth, the economic and political thinking of the pre‐oil era was seamlessly grafted onto the industrial potential of the 19th century, thereby enabling Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Vanderbilt and many others to accumulate fabulous wealth. Their business acumen was undeniable, but none of it could have been brought into existence without energy-rich oil. The use of fossil fuels in our military machines industrialised our methods of killing while at the same time becoming synonymous with progress and commerce. War became a business, the purpose of which was the acquisition of more energy in the pursuit of profit. Battlefield deaths on an industrial scale were an unlisted debit on balance sheets.

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WWI started with the muscle power of horses and ended with tanks, demonstrating the murderous scope of mechanized warfare. Recognizing the critical value of oil and its sources, leaders carved up the Middle East to ensure its supply. An exercise in map making in the 1920s by the English and French civil servants Sykes and Picot set the scene for carnage that has raged throughout the Middle East ever since. Arbitrary lines in the sand were drawn, artificial oil states in the Persian Gulf region were created without regard to tribal affiliations, and a quarrelsome orphan Israel was dumped into the lap of unwilling Bedouins. As the quantity of oil there became apparent, all the major nations were drawn into the race for it because those who controlled this key resource were certain to subjugate those who did not.

The critical nature of oil made WWII inevitable. To sustain their empires, the Germans and Japanese slaughtered their way across Europe and Asia in a grab for resources, primarily oil. They promised infinite prosperity and their peoples cheered them on while deaths elsewhere were being counted in millions. With most of the world’s known oil supplies in the hands of his enemies, Adolf Hitler knew he had to have the oilfields of southern Russia and the Middle East to sustain his war machine. He failed, and his dream of a ‘Greater Germany’ collapsed not because of inferior soldiers but because there was insufficient energy input to sustain his plan for world domination. Hitler’s perception of infinite growth in his ‘thousand year Reich’ mirrors our present-day view of ‘permanent affluence’: vast quantities of oil had to be burned to sustain his fantasy. In our desperate scramble for ever-diminishing energy resources, we are in the same mad race to perpetuate the delusion of infinite economic growth. The oil pendulum has swung the other way with roughly 85% of world oil now outside the borders of the USA and Canada in countries not always of a friendly disposition. And just like the Fuhrer, political leaders of today are promising that which is beyond their means to provide. To mask this reality, they have invaded oil-producing nations in the name of ‘freedom’, claiming ‘victories’ which have left only wreckage and simmering animosity behind. So too did Hitler spread a similar line of propaganda that he was liberating other nations from the threat of communism. The second world war that left Europe and Japan flattened in 1945 might be seen as history, but it was just the first of many oil wars, and the politics of it were a side issue. WWII serves as a grim reminder of how violent and destructive humans can be in their ruthless pursuit of energy resources. Hitler’s own ‘oil age’ lasted just twelve years, and it set the pattern for the world oil age that is now in terminal decline.

Hitler

Don’t be deceived by the democratic righteousness that defeated Hitler’s fascism. 150 years earlier the American empire was created with the same kind of energy grab. The European immigrant peoples who forced their way across America from the 1700s onwards needed resources on which to survive and to sustain the prosperity of an expanding nation just as the Germans and the Japanese did in 1940. The native inhabitants of the American continent were in the way of civilization and progress; their subjugation was a precursor to what happened later in Europe and Asia. Expansive prairies had to be cleared to convert the energy locked in grain and meat to feed the invaders and provide negotiable currency. This self-perpetuating process went into overdrive with the discovery of oil, and the ultimate conversion of that oil into more food resources and hardware added to the wealth of the growing nation. An expanding population needed employment, and the raw energy from oil, coal, and gas supplied it. America and the rest of the industrialised world had the means to build bigger, better, faster machines in endless succession, and created the most powerful country on earth. Everybody was going to be rich, forever. The universal law of consumption was relentless: more demanded more.

Meat and grain grew with relatively little human intervention, but other crops needed to be worked with human muscle. So the slave trade came into being. Slavery might be given many unpleasant names, but essentially it is the acquisition of one energy form to convert it into another for profit. Buy and feed the slave, use slave labour to do work, sell the product of that work. By the time the slave is worn out, several more will have been produced. This was simple economics by 18th century standards but the human consequences were again horrific, costing more millions of lives. It also brought on the American civil war where the slave‐muscled South was overwhelmed by the industrialised muscle that drove the armies of the North.

All the European empires forged out of so-called ‘empty lands’ across the world followed a similar pattern of resource acquisition and an absolute disregard for weaker peoples. It is an unpleasantness that we choose to ignore, but it confirms the killing force that drives us to acquire and convert energy to our own use. The seemingly limitless amount of oil and its energy density appeared to be the answer to all our labour problems. Oil became our ultimate slave. Or so we thought.

We now have maybe 20 years worth of usable oil left. There are certainly no more than 30, perhaps as little as 10. If one of the crazy sects running loose in the Middle East managed to get hold of a nuclear device, setting it off on the Gharwar oilfield of Saudi Arabia, it would be endgame overnight. That is perhaps too bleak a prospect, but we should not discount that notion entirely.

Burning oil field, Ahmadi Oil Fields, Kuwait, 1991, Phaidon, Iconic Images, final book_iconic

Before our oil to food arrangement, the planet supported something over one billion people. We now have over seven billion, and the mothers of the next two billion are alive now and approaching the age of reproduction. Preachers, scientists and politicians will not stop the basic human function of eating and procreation, so if unchecked nine billion people will be here by 2040/50, and set to go on rising after that. Every new arrival expects to be fed, watered, clothed and housed, but by no stretch of the imagination will the global food system be able to feed that number let alone sustain them with what would be expected by way of the most basic material comfort. No one dares to stand up and make the rather obvious point that we are not going to reach 9 billion. Something has to give, and that giving is going to be very unpleasant.

In the first decade of the 21st century, numerous wars have been fought over oil, and are being fought now. Wars are fought over resources because on nature’s terms, gentle contentedness is not a good strategy for survival; we are collectively powerless against genetic forces that dictate our lives no matter how much we protest otherwise. Downsized to whatever level, nature will ultimately force the choice of survival or death, and the outcome will be of no consequence other than to you and yours. To expect humankind to change within a single generation is stretching credibility beyond breaking point. Those who look forward to a life of bucolic bliss in a downsized oil‐less world might do well to think about that. Whether killing and butchering an animal to eat it, or invading another nation to secure oil supplies, we must appropriate energy sources to facilitate survival. You may think there’s a choice about doing that, but there isn’t, other than in the matter of scale. Whether paying a butcher to cut and wrap your steak, or paying soldiers to invade Iraq, securing sufficient energy to live is what we have to do to survive.

war&oil.0

For the moment, nature keeps us supplied with oil, and we’ve pulled off the neat trick of converting it directly into food. Not knowing when our oil is finished and our food supply will run out is the little teaser for the early 21st century. Right now, most people think that food comes from supermarket shelves and freezers, which is just as well. The food trucks moving around the country are basically mobile warehouses, delivering food just in time for it to be consumed. When the realization dawns that the food trucks have stopped, the food held in stock by retailers will be stripped bare in hours. The oil age for everyone will have come to an end.

But oil carries man’s destiny in far more subtle ways than food supplies. It holds nations together. The USA is a vast territory of disparate peoples and ideas, held together by a common bond of prosperity and a basic consensus that government and law generally works for the good of all. And the inhabitants of empires are always convinced that theirs is permanent and protected by gods. That definition would apply to many large nations to a greater or lesser degree. But the bonds that hold it together, godly or otherwise, are entirely subject to availability of affordable oil. Empires (and the USA is an empire) remain whole so long as the means exists to maintain them. Oil has become that means.

Without oil, the nation will begin its decline into disparate regions. Without interconnecting transport, the United States of America cannot remain united. The force necessary to prevent a breakup will not be there, so within a decade (probably far less) of oil supply failure, the USA will cease to exist. The cracks are already there along linguistic, economic, racial, political and geographic lines. Even now it would be possible to take a pretty good guess at where those regions will split off.

This will be denied and resisted of course, but armies and police forces have power only as long as their fuel lasts. They will be unable to prevent secession in whatever form it takes. It might just be that Washington will come to govern not much more than the original colonies. Given a suitably deranged political leader and prayers to the right god, fully armed groups are ready to believe that the ‘American Dream’ can be restored. Such demagoguery sets the stage for years of regional violence over the basics of life, particularly food and water. The horror of it will be justified by warped views of right and wrong, clinging to a denial mentality magnified beyond any imagining by the privation that an oil-less society will bring.

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This scenario is not exclusive to the USA. The British Empire was built on coal. When the coal was gone the empire faded away. Then in the 80s and 90s the UK became awash with cheap oil from the North Sea, and everyone was reasonably prosperous, particularly Scotland. Now the oil surplus has gone, and the UK is in decline again as a net importer. The ‘oil prosperity’ is fading away. Scotland is losing its main source of income and wants to secede from the United Kingdom, convinced that independence will somehow restore their wealth. Things will get very unpleasant when they realize that an independent Scotland will eventually be reduced to the economic level of Greece. The link between oil and the ability to eat is clear. The UK has to import 40% of its food, and much of the rest depends on oil to produce it, which also has to be imported. It is the end of the UK’s oil age, but few admit to it being the end of a food age as well. The same problem is being revealed in the current fiasco of the European union, but a little more advanced than the USA and UK. Oil-fueled prosperity is falling dramatically in the poorer southern countries. Greece, Spain and Portugal and a swathe of smaller nations have to import all their oil which only worked when oil was cheap. Now it’s expensive, and they are facing bankruptcy. 50 years of ‘unity’ is dissolving like a mirage in the face of the difficulties that smaller states are suffering. Without cheap oil, their economies cannot function, and so are disintegrating. United Europe needs oil to stay united just as the USA does. Russia’s oil dependent economy is crumbling, and Putin is having to make threatening postures to divert attention from his problems. His oil age is ending in a different way and yet we cannot tell if his posturing is just that, but a shortage of resources in the past has invariably brought conflict.

Move to the Far East and the nations around the South China Sea are all threatening one another, again the focus of the argument being the oil and gas fields of the region. They all know that without oil they cannot survive, and are prepared to fight for every last drop of the stuff, no matter what the cost. As a measure of what the dispute is about, the volume of oil in question is 11 billion barrels. One billion barrels is less than a month of world consumption. They are preparing to fight over the last dregs in confirmation of man’s desperation over oil shortages. Eventually, this problem will hit every nation and individual on earth as our oil‐crutch is kicked away. And with the oil age fading into history for us all, there will be no shortage of violent resistance to this inconvenient truth.

Will technological innovation save us?…

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  • Manufacturing Consent
  • Modern Black Death – The Next Pandemic – BBC Horizon
  • Nate Hagens – Limits to Growth: Where We Are and What to Do About It
  • Noam Chomsky – Propaganda & Control of the Public Mind
  • Obey
  • Ocean Acidification
  • Ocean Acidification in Earth's Past: Insights to the Future – James Zachos
  • Oil, Smoke & Mirrors
  • Peak mining & implications for natural resource management
  • Permian – Triassic Mayhem: Earth's Largest Mass Extinction
  • Peter Ward Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps
  • Peter Ward The Medea Hypothesis II
  • Peter Ward: The Medea Hypothesis I
  • Photographing the Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima
  • Pirate Television: Financializing America with Randy Mandell
  • Professor Al Bartlett – Arithmetic, Population and Energy
  • Professor Kevin Anderson: Real Clothes for the Emperor – Facing Climate Change
  • Rick Wolff // A Cure for Capitalism
  • Six degrees could change the world
  • Somewhere In New Mexico Before The End Of Time
  • Submedia TV
  • Surplus: Terrorized Into Being Consumers
  • Surviving Progress
  • Techno Fix – Why Technology Won’t Save Us Or the Environment
  • Techno-Fix – Dr. Michael Huesemann interview
  • The Age of Stupid
  • The Big Fix
  • The Century Of The Self, Part I
  • The Century of the Self, Part II
  • The Century of the Self, Part III
  • The Century of the Self, Part IV
  • The Chomsky Videos
  • The Coming Famine
  • The Corporation : The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
  • The Crash Course
  • The Crisis of Civilization : Full Movie
  • The Day the Earth Nearly Died
  • The Domino Effect – Overpopulation
  • The False Solutions of Green Energy – Wilbert & Foley (PIELC 2014)
  • The Flaw
  • The Fuck-it Point
  • The Long Emergency
  • The Man who Quit Money
  • The Methane Ticking Time Bomb has Struck Again…..
  • The Myth of Capitalism with Michael Parenti
  • The Myth of Sustainability – Guy McPherson
  • The Myth of the Liberal Media: The Propaganda Model of News
  • The Ordinary Madness of Charles Bukowski
  • The Overview Effect
  • The Permian–Triassic Extinction Event [FULL VIDEO]
  • The Planet by Johan Söderberg
  • The Power Principle: (Full Length Documentary)
  • The Secure & the Dispossessed: How the Military and Corporations are Shaping a Climate-Changed World
  • The Shock Doctrine 2009
  • The Sixth Extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert)
  • The Twin Sides of the Fossil Fuel Coin – Guy McPherson
  • There's No Tomorrow (peak oil, energy, growth & the future)
  • Threads (Nuclear War)
  • Tom Murphy: Growth has an Expiration Date
  • TOXIC: AMAZON – FULL LENGTH
  • Up & Coming Liquid Fuel Crisis by Tom Murphy
  • VICE Documentaries
  • What A Way To Go: Life at the end of Empire
  • Who's Afraid Of Machiavelli?

Notes and Documents

  • 'Conspiracy Theories' and Clandestine Politics
  • 'Green Energy' is a Myth
  • 10 Things to Know About Wall Street's Rapacious Attack on America
  • 8 reasons why we need to rethink the management of phosphorus resources in the global food system
  • American Empire and Killing Hope – The Essays of William Blum
  • An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for US National Security
  • An Anarchist FAQ Webpage
  • An Inconvenient Truth: Does Responsible Consumption Benefit Corporations More Than Society?
  • Animal Minds and the Foible of Human Exceptionalism
  • Averting Collapse: 6 Steps
  • Below Crush Debt
  • Beyond Growth or Beyond Capitalism? A Reprise
  • Book review of Turchin’s “Secular Cycles” and “War & Peace & War”
  • BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED
  • Burning Energy to Keep Cool: The Hidden Energy Crisis in Saudi Arabia
  • Capitalism's Ideological Crutches
  • Carbon Trade Watch
  • Carmageddon and Karl Marx
  • Carmaggedon or Rational Discourse?
  • Charles Eisenstein Essays
  • Chatham House: Sustainable Energy Security
  • Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis (2012)
  • Climate Change Infographics
  • Climate Change is Simple – We Do Something or We're Screwed
  • Climate Change: Just the Facts.
  • Climate World
  • Consistency in American Foreign Policy
  • Contemporary & Global Human Problems ~ Capitalism, Globalisation, and The Victims of Progress
  • Could the 'Black Death' Strike Again?
  • Dangerous Climate Warming: Myth & Reality
  • David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D.
  • Dennis Meadows: “There is nothing that we can do”
  • Desert
  • DieOff.org
  • Dinosaur, We
  • Dispelling myths about oil
  • Dr. Steven Best – Writings
  • Drill, Baby, Drill
  • Ecoglobe: Requiem
  • Economic Research – Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
  • Edward Morbius
  • Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) for photovoltaic solar systems in regions of moderate insolation
  • English version of German military peak oil study
  • Entropy and Economics
  • Eric R. Pianka: The Vanishing Book of Life on Earth
  • Fire and Water (Nuclear Power)
  • Fleeing Babylon
  • FRACKING GONE WRONG: FINDING A BETTER WAY
  • Fracking: Series on the Eagle Ford Shale
  • Getting to the Nearest Star? Not in Our Lifetimes…If Ever!
  • Gleanings for an Understanding of the Endgame
  • Global Drought Monitor
  • Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism
  • Global Warming & Climate Change Myths
  • Globalization and the Emergence of a Transnational Oligarchy
  • Green Capitalism: the God that Failed
  • Green Capitalism: The God That Failed (Updated)
  • Hirsch Report
  • How a Culture Dies
  • How Many Gigatons of Carbon Dioxide?
  • How to Avoid Population Overshoot and Collapse
  • Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind
  • Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future
  • Intentional Ignorance
  • Interview with Jay Hanson
  • Is Global Collapse Imminent?
  • Jason W. Moore: Essays
  • Johnny Reb's Freethought Website
  • Julian Cribb
  • Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II – Part I by William Blum
  • Le Monde interview with Dr Robert Hirsch from September 2010
  • Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
  • Life Begins at 40 : Awakening from the Matrix
  • Living Dangerously: Stories of Climate Change
  • Living for the Moment while Devaluing the Future
  • Lloyd's adds its voice to dire 'peak oil' warnings
  • Looking Back on the 'Limits to Growth'
  • Michael E. Mann
  • Mysterious Siberian Crater Found at "End of the World" May Portend Methane Climate Catastrophe
  • NATURAL CAPITAL AT RISK: THE TOP 100 EXTERNALITIES OF BUSINESS
  • Natural Law
  • Natural Way of Farming Masanobu – Fukuoka Green Philosophy
  • Net Energy and The Economy
  • NOAA & U.S. Geological Survey Interactive Sea Level Rise Map (up to 25 ft)
  • NOAA Interactive Sea Level Rise Map
  • Noam Chomsky on human extinction: The corporate elite are actively courting disaster
  • Oil and gas industry using military psyops techniques to reduce opposition to fracking
  • OilCrash.com
  • On Human Nature
  • OVERSHOOT LOOP: Evolution Under The Maximum Power Principle
  • Partnership for Civil Justice
  • Peak Coal
  • Peak Energy, Climate Change, and the Collapse of Global Civilization
  • Peak Oil – A Turning Point for Mankind by Dr. Colin J. Campbell
  • Peak Oil Australia
  • Peter H. Gleick : Has the U.S. Passed the Point of Peak Water?
  • Peter H. Gleick: Water Scarcity Issues
  • Planetary Hospice: Rebirthing Planet Earth
  • Policy Makers Slow to Take Peak Oil Action
  • Portland Peak Oil Task Force
  • Power Point Presentation on “Corporate Globalization, Corporate Power, Free Trade, Mega Trade Agreements and the Negative Impacts of TPP” by Janet M Eaton, PhD
  • Power Shift Away From Green Illusions
  • Primitivism
  • Problem Solving: Complexity, History, Sustainability
  • Professor Charles Hall
  • Renewable energy – Hope or hype?
  • RENEWABLE ENERGY – THE ARGUMENT AGAINST ITS CAPACITY TO SUSTAIN AN ENERGY-INTENSIVE SOCIETY
  • Richard Reese on 'Near Term Extinction'
  • Saudi Arabia May Become Oil Importer by 2030
  • Searching for a Miracle: 'Net Energy' Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society
  • Secular Cycles, Chapter 1
  • Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
  • Stephanie McMillan's 'Capitalism Must Die'
  • Study by Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Fleming at the U.S. Army War College
  • TED talks – a recipe for civilisational disaster
  • The Anarchist Library
  • The Authoritarian Personality
  • The Bichler & Nitzan Archives
  • The climate threat: What our children can expect
  • The Collapse of Complex Societies
  • The Coming Reality of Sea Level Rise: Too Fast Too Soon
  • The Consumer Trap
  • The Current Mass Extinction
  • The Damage of Current Human Activities Without Precedent in Past 'Mass Extinction' Fossil Records.
  • The Discovery of Global Warming
  • The End of Growth
  • The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
  • The evolution and psychology of self-deception
  • The Free Press
  • The Future of Ice Sheets and Sea Ice: Between Reversible Retreat and Unstoppable Loss
  • The Gore Vidal Pages
  • The Great Oil Swindle
  • The human brain is in Denial.
  • The Human Nature of Unsustainability
  • The Idiot's Guide To Buying A Congressman
  • The Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & U.S. Policy
  • The Limits to Growth (PDF scanned version)
  • The Loss of Biodiversity: a Dangerous Game
  • The Meritocracy Myth
  • The moral environment on Wall Street is pathological — money rules all
  • The Myth of the 1970′s Global Cooling Consensus
  • The myth of US self-sufficiency in crude oil
  • THE NEED FOR A NEW ECONOMIC SYSTEM: "…he feared that human society is headed for a crash."
  • The Network of Global Corporate Control
  • The New Middle Ages
  • The physics of long-run global economic growth
  • THE POPULATION PROBLEM AND SOCIALISM
  • The Power Elite
  • The Principle of Imminent Collapse
  • The Science of Apocalypse
  • The Story of P(ee)
  • The Temptation of The Technofix (The Quest for “New Nature”)
  • There Is No "Green" Energy
  • Thomas Homer-Dixon
  • Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar Photovoltaics
  • Tipping Towards the Unknown
  • Too many bodies? The return and disavowal of the population question
  • Trade-Off: Financial system supply-chain cross contagion – a study in global systemic collapse
  • Twenty Premises on Industrial Civilization from Derrick Jensen
  • Underminers: A Practical Guide to Radical Change
  • US military warns oil output may dip causing massive shortages by 2015
  • Wake Up Amerika!
  • We Are All Madoffs
  • Wealth and Inequality – Pareto, Gini and Contingency
  • What Evolution Is?
  • Who Rules America: An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%
  • Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power
  • Why shale gas won’t end our energy woes
  • Why Space Opera Won't Fly
  • Why won't planting trees stop global warming?
  • Zygmunt Bauman

RSS 3 Quarkes Daily

  • Intellectual Blame
  • Procedural Thriller

RSS A Closer Look

  • Media bias chart March 15, 2019
  • 10 Journalism Brands Where You Find Real Facts Rather Than Alternative Facts March 10, 2019
  • Snopes' Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors, updated 7/9/2017 July 12, 2018

RSS A Prosperous Way Down

  • Don’t come around here no more October 15, 2017
  • Systems thinking and the narrative of climate change July 21, 2017

RSS Adam Curtis Blog

  • SAVE YOUR KISSES FOR ME November 30, 2012
  • WHILE THE BAND PLAYED ON November 14, 2012
  • HE'S BEHIND YOU October 21, 2012

RSS Adam Vs The Man

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RSS AdBusters

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RSS Against the Grain

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Aljazeera

  • Tapped phone calls further reveal Golden Dawn’s police ties April 24, 2018
  • Qatar-Gulf crisis: All latest updates April 24, 2018
  • Kuwait: Not resolving GCC crisis is destructive to region April 24, 2018
  • Iran to Trump: Stay in nuclear deal or 'face severe consequences' April 24, 2018
  • Indonesia: Setya Novanto sentenced to 15 years for corruption April 24, 2018

RSS Aljazeera – Opinion

  • Kuwait: Not resolving GCC crisis is destructive to region April 24, 2018
  • Iran to Trump: Stay in nuclear deal or 'face severe consequences' April 24, 2018
  • Indonesia: Setya Novanto sentenced to 15 years for corruption April 24, 2018
  • Armenia soldiers join anti-government protests in Yerevan April 24, 2018
  • China: Arson suspect arrested in karaoke bar fire that killed 18 April 24, 2018
  • Angola sacks army chief and spy boss in latest anti-graft move April 24, 2018
  • Anti-sexual harassment message resounds in Africa April 24, 2018

RSS All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go

  • Trump. He’s famous, you know February 28, 2017
  • Just saying February 6, 2017
  • Hate, and its antidote February 6, 2017
  • Melissa McCarthy slaps Spicer and Trump February 5, 2017
  • Deutschland zweiter, den Vereinigten Staatem zuerst February 5, 2017
  • The chaos February 3, 2017

RSS Alternative Radio

  • [David Cay Johnston] Trump: The Age of Mendacity April 19, 2018

RSS AlterNet

  • A History Professor Explains Why Trump's Presidency Appears to Be Reaching Its End April 23, 2018
  • Robert Reich Takes American CEOs to Task for Their 'Shameful Silence' on Trump April 23, 2018
  • Watch Trump Accuser Corroborate Stormy Daniels' Story in Live Appearance with Prominent Feminist Lawyer April 23, 2018
  • Trump's Pick to Lead VA is Beset by Misconduct Allegations Including 'Excessive Drinking' and a 'Hostile Work Environment': CBS April 24, 2018

RSS Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

  • General Electric to trial world’s largest wind turbines in the UK April 24, 2018
  • How 'white van man' affects our daily lives April 23, 2018
  • TSB customers still struggling to access accounts as online banking problems enter fifth day April 24, 2018
  • Anglo American to take £287m profit hit from cracked pipeline in Brazil April 24, 2018
  • GKN splurged more than £100m on deal fees in run-up to Melrose takeover April 24, 2018

RSS Anarchist News

  • Interview: The Sparrows’ Nest archive April 23, 2018
  • What's new with LBC - Spring 2018 April 23, 2018
  • TOTW - When should a project end? April 23, 2018
  • Violence as a Way of Life April 22, 2018
  • Montreal’s 13th Annual Anarchist Theatre Festival April 22, 2018

RSS Antony Loewenstein

  • Challenging those self-serving media narratives since 9/11 April 22, 2018
  • Disaster Capitalism and the drug war in north-east Britain April 22, 2018
  • Disaster Capitalism film premieres in the US at Columbia University April 22, 2018

RSS Apocadocs

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Arctic Emergency Institute

  • Declining Summer Sea Ice Threatens More than Arctic Wildlife August 25, 2012

RSS Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG)

  • AMEG Strategic Plan December 8, 2012
  • Breaking the Chain November 27, 2012
  • AMEG Policy Brief September 23, 2012
  • The biggest story of all time September 1, 2012

RSS Arctic News

  • Mars Today - A 'Business-As-Usual' Model for Earth Tomorrow April 22, 2018
  • Heat Storm April 17, 2018
  • How much warmer is it now? April 2, 2018

RSS Arctic Sea Ice

  • PIOMAS April 2018 April 5, 2018
  • Bering goes extreme March 27, 2018
  • The 2018 melting season has started March 23, 2018
  • PIOMAS March 2018 March 6, 2018
  • Talk about unprecedented February 26, 2018

RSS Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis

  • 2018 winter Arctic sea ice: Bering down April 4, 2018
  • Arctic sea ice maximum at second lowest in the satellite record March 23, 2018
  • A warm approach to the equinox March 6, 2018

RSS Around the Coast Mountains

  • The name’s Mark… Mark BC March 18, 2014
  • Packrafting / Fatbiking Buntzen Lake March 3, 2014
  • My New Surly Pugsley Fatbike Build February 11, 2014

RSS Arthur Silber

  • Horribly, Desperately Ill April 18, 2018
  • THIS IS SERIOUS, and a Proposal March 5, 2018
  • No More Hoorays for Hollywood March 4, 2018
  • Help, Please March 2, 2018

RSS Arundhati Roy

  • An exclusive extract from Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness May 27, 2017
  • Edward Snowden meets Arundhati Roy and John Cusack: ‘He was small and lithe, like a house cat’ November 28, 2015

RSS Arundhati Roy Says

  • A perfect day for democracy February 9, 2013
  • Arundhati Roy speaks about the issue of rape in India December 22, 2012
  • We Call This Progress December 17, 2012

RSS ASPO – USA

  • Kinder Morgan Canada Ltd wants to almost triple the capacity of its Trans Mountain pipeline April 23, 2018
  • Peak Oil Review – 23 April 2018 April 23, 2018
  • The natural gas market dynamics in North America April 16, 2018
  • Peak Oil Review – 16 April 2018 April 16, 2018
  • The state of underinvestment in oil exploration and discoveries April 9, 2018
  • Peak Oil Review – 9 April 2018 April 9, 2018
  • Green Car Congress on SUV registrations in Europe in February 2018 April 2, 2018
  • Peak Oil Review – 2 April 2018 April 2, 2018
  • CEO of EOG Resources on the future of US Shale & Research Physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab in New Jersey on Nuclear Fusion Reactors March 26, 2018
  • Peak Oil Review – 26 Mar 2018 March 26, 2018

RSS Avedon’s Sideshow

  • The boundaries in between April 14, 2018
  • You're gonna reap just what you sow March 30, 2018
  • Don't stay too long March 19, 2018

RSS Bad Astronomy

  • The Daily Show’s Roy Wood Jr. Knows Exactly How Moonlight Won Best Picture: “Peak Blackness”
  • All Good Things
  • Shaking the Fabric of Reality

RSS Barbara Ehrenreich

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS BBC: Science & Environment

  • Environment prize goes to Flint water activist April 23, 2018
  • Rotten egg gas around planet Uranus April 23, 2018
  • Climate change: Michael Bloomberg pledges $4.5m for Paris deal April 23, 2018

RSS Big Picture Agriculture

  • A New Zealand Architect's Strawbale House April 24, 2018
  • Global Food and Agriculture Photos April 22, 2018 April 22, 2018
  • Wales Farm Auction 1950 April 19, 2018
  • How Does a Silk Farm Make Silk? April 17, 2018
  • Global Food and Agriculture Photos April 15, 2018 April 15, 2018

RSS Bill Moyers

  • Additions to Our Trump-Russia Timelines April 18, 2018
  • Interactive Timeline: Everything We Know About Russia and President Trump April 18, 2018
  • A Timeline: Everything We Know So Far About the Comey Firing (in One Place) April 9, 2018

RSS Bit Tooth Energy

  • Waterjetting 37e - Using Cavitation to disintegrate rock November 18, 2015
  • Waterjetting 37d - Underground Drilling with Waterjets November 16, 2015
  • Waterjetting 37c - A Drilling Diversion October 14, 2015

RSS Bizarro Blog

  • The Waiting Room March 25, 2018
  • Mistaken Email Alert This Morning March 23, 2018
  • Tall Tail Tales March 18, 2018
  • Dangerous Crops March 11, 2018

RSS Brane Space

  • Students Make Voices Heard Again - As Communities Around The Country Pass Stricter Gun Laws April 23, 2018
  • An Ominous Omen For Earth Day 2018 April 20, 2018

RSS Brave New World

  • Tbilisi, Georgia — The City Where (Almost) Everyone Owns a Hotel April 14, 2018
  • South Sudan: “Fragile” State Ravaged by Famine and War March 19, 2018
  • Turkey Coup Attempt: Propaganda Beats Journalism July 18, 2016
  • Muhammad Ali: An American Muslim June 4, 2016

RSS Breaking the Set

  • Abby Martin Breaks the Set One Last Time February 28, 2015
  • Never Stop Breaking the Set! February 28, 2015
  • Cuba Part III: The Evolution of Revolution February 27, 2015
  • Cuba Part II: Ebola Solidarity & Castro’s Daughter on Gay Rights February 26, 2015
  • Why Are Americans Getting Their Medical Degrees in Cuba? February 26, 2015

RSS Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  • Enough is enough: holding users of chemical weapons accountable April 23, 2018
  • How do we control dangerous biological research? April 12, 2018
  • New pathogen research rules: Gain of function, loss of clarity February 26, 2018

RSS Business Insider

  • THE INTERNET OF THINGS 2018 REPORT: How the IoT is evolving to reach the mainstream with businesses and consumers April 24, 2018
  • China reportedly stonewalls investigation into rape, suicide case and silences #MeToo activist April 24, 2018
  • A body-positive activist says fitness tips from Instagram stars like Kayla Itsines will only leave you frustrated — here's why April 24, 2018
  • Apple's purchase of Shazam has regulators worried about music streaming competition April 24, 2018
  • THE MOBILE PAYMENTS REPORT: Key strategies that wallet providers can implement to break from disappointing growth April 24, 2018
  • Facebook finally reveals the long-secret rules for what exactly will get you banned from the social network (FB) April 24, 2018
  • Trump's revenge: US oil floods European market, hurting OPEC and Russia April 24, 2018
  • Iran's Rouhani warns Trump he'll 'face severe consequences' if he exits the Iran deal April 24, 2018
  • Somber Kim Jong Un visits Chinese embassy after bus crash in North Korea kills 32 Chinese April 24, 2018
  • An Australian defense official reportedly confirmed China's desire for increased military presence the South Pacific April 24, 2018

RSS C-Realm

  • Automation and SJWs: A Conversation with James Howard Kunstler February 12, 2016
  • It's official. The Age of Limits gathering is on hiatus January 22, 2015
  • Three Conferences in Three Weeks June 13, 2014

RSS Cagle: Premium Cartoon News

  • Trump and Reagan Revolution April 23, 2018
  • US policy on Cuba April 23, 2018
  • EU rule breakers April 23, 2018
  • Cuban leadership April 23, 2018
  • Turkey & EU membership April 23, 2018
  • Brazil’s democracy April 23, 2018

RSS Cassandra’s Legacy

  • The road to the Seneca Cliff is paved with evil intentions. How to destroy the world's forests April 23, 2018
  • Photovoltaics? Who in the world would want to spend money on such a silly idea? April 21, 2018
  • If you can't see it, it can kill you. Propaganda, for instance. April 17, 2018
  • Are our leaders mad, stupid, or evil? Or all the three things together? April 14, 2018
  • False Flag Operations: How Common Are They? April 13, 2018

RSS Censored News

  • LIVE Border Patrol Agent Found Not Guilty of Murdering Teen -- Crowd Blocking Street in Tucson April 24, 2018
  • Counting Coup at the United Nations April 23, 2018
  • Mohawk Nation News 'AFN Eye for an Eye Psychos' April 23, 2018

RSS Center For Biological Diversity

  • Court Tosses Out Trump Administration’s Suspension of Higher Penalties for Automakers' Fuel-efficiency Violations April 23, 2018
  • Study: California’s Shasta Salamanders More Endangered Than Once Thought April 23, 2018
  • Sportsmen, Conservationists, Patagonia Run Full-page Ad Against Fracking in Nevada's Ruby Mountains April 23, 2018

RSS Center for Investigative Journalism

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RSS Center for Economic & Policy Research

  • The Irresponsibility of Fiscal Responsibility April 23, 2018
  • Harvard Teaches Us That Hedge Fund Managers Get Rich Even When They Mess Up April 16, 2018
  • New York State's Big Middle Finger to the Republican Tax Plan April 9, 2018
  • Wall Street Is Trying to Embezzle Puerto Rico’s Hurricane Relief Money April 8, 2018

RSS Charles Eisenstein’s Blog

  • Das Zeitalter, in dem wir einander brauchen November 20, 2017
  • Charles Eisenstein zu Gast bei Oprah Winfrey: “Super Soul Sunday” – 16. Juli 2017 November 20, 2017

RSS Chomsky

  • The Kind of Anarchism I Believe in, and What's Wrong with Libertarians June 9, 2013
  • Upcoming speaking event in Boston with Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, and Jeremy Scahill April 19, 2013

RSS Chris Hedges

  • Pompeo Squeaks By in Senate Committee Vote April 24, 2018

RSS Class Warfare Blog

  • Capitalism: A Conservative Christian Religion April 22, 2018
  • The Role of Religion in Society in a Nutshell April 22, 2018

RSS Cliff Schecter

  • Tapped phone calls further reveal Golden Dawn’s police ties April 24, 2018
  • Qatar-Gulf crisis: All latest updates April 24, 2018
  • Kuwait: Not resolving GCC crisis is destructive to region April 24, 2018
  • Iran to Trump: Stay in nuclear deal or 'face severe consequences' April 24, 2018
  • Indonesia: Setya Novanto sentenced to 15 years for corruption April 24, 2018
  • Armenia soldiers join anti-government protests in Yerevan April 24, 2018

RSS Climate and Capitalism

  • Hugo Blanco on the indigenous struggle for land in Peru April 22, 2018
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, April 2018, Part 2 April 18, 2018
  • Five Revolutions: How bacteria created the biosphere and caused the first climate crisis April 17, 2018
  • Where’s the ‘eco’ in ecomodernism? April 16, 2018
  • Project Life: Cuba’s action plan prepares for climate change April 13, 2018
  • Why we are marching for science April 12, 2018

RSS Climate Central

  • Sea Level Stakes for the Caribbean, in Pictures
  • The 10 Most Important U.S. Climate Stories in 2017
  • Antarctic Modeling Pushes Up Sea-Level Rise Projections
  • How Smoke From California’s Fires is Harming the Most Vulnerable

RSS Climate Change: The Next Generation

  • Algae, Impurities Darken Greenland Ice Sheet And Increases Melting April 8, 2018
  • Zack Labe: Gif of temperature anomalies by latitude and year (1951-1980 baseline) February 13, 2018
  • Ted Glick: Helping in Puerto Rico February 12, 2018

RSS Climate Citizen

  • Guest Post: What's your heatwave plan? January 27, 2018
  • March for climate justice in Bonn at COP23 calls for end to coal November 5, 2017
  • Australia and coal at Bonn Climate conference #COP23 November 4, 2017

RSS Climate Code Red

  • 1.5°C of warming is closer than we imagine, just a decade away April 4, 2018
  • What is happening in the Arctic is now beyond words, so here are the pictures February 25, 2018
  • Do we have the capability to reverse global warming within a meaningful timeframe? February 11, 2018

RSS Climate Connections

  • Climate Connections Update February 5, 2015
  • CIC’s environmental and social justice photography contest open for entries January 9, 2015
  • FBI Harassing Activists in Pacific Northwest January 7, 2015

RSS Climate Denial Crock of the Week

  • Willie Nelson on Greenhouse Gases April 23, 2018
  • This Bud Really is for You. 100 Percent Renewable Beer April 23, 2018
  • The Case of the Misleading Massive Wind Turbines April 23, 2018

RSS Climate Progress

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RSS Climate Snapshot

  • "Carbon tsunami" lead by Enbridge Northern Gateway takes aim at BC June 18, 2014
  • BC's tar sands? Thirteen proposed LNG projects equivalent to 13 times current BC emissions June 9, 2014
  • Car Carbon series: cool new animation, plus the jaw-dropping impact it left out May 13, 2014
  • Climate change fuels both California's record drought and "polar vortex" storms May 6, 2014

RSS ClimateSight

  • I am an Almost-Doctor! February 27, 2018
  • Interview at Forecast February 21, 2018
  • At the library February 13, 2018

RSS Club Orlov

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RSS ClusterFuck Nation

  • Stop and Assess April 23, 2018
  • Whirling Whirling April 20, 2018

RSS Cocktailhag – FDL

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RSS Colin Tudge

  • Let's not bet the farm | Colin Tudge April 3, 2013
  • Why the world needs a renaissance of small farming | Colin Tudge September 18, 2012

RSS Common Dreams: News

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RSS Consortium News

  • Tribute to Robert Parry in Berkeley on May 19 April 24, 2018
  • Israelis Continue to Open Fire on Gaza Protestors: An Eyewitness Account April 23, 2018
  • On Earth Day: Environmental Activism is Spreading April 22, 2018

RSS Consumer Energy Report

  • Notice: New R-Squared Is rrapier.com June 3, 2017
  • Contact Information And Blog Migration Update May 19, 2017
  • Guest Post: Offshore Wind Power Cost Update April 20, 2017
  • The Peak Oil Estimate You Won’t Believe: A Tale Of Two Sigmoids March 28, 2017

RSS Corp Watch

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RSS CorrenteWire

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RSS CorrenteWire – Quick Hits

  • War loving Democrats and Republicans pushing for bombing Syria, while Trump goes full stupid on Syria and nutjob Bolton starts his new gig April 10, 2018
  • Loss of Community August 23, 2017

RSS Counter Currents

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RSS CounterPunch

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RSS Crooked Timber

  • GMI + JG = paid work as a choice for all April 23, 2018
  • Superstitious April 23, 2018
  • Sunday photoblogging: sculpture of divers, Oslo April 22, 2018
  • What’s in a name? April 21, 2018

RSS Crooks and Liars

  • Open Thread - Dance Off! April 24, 2018
  • C&L's Late Nite Music Club With The Cavern Of Anti-Matter April 24, 2018
  • Sarah Huckabee Sanders Stumbles On Her Lie About Trump's 'Breeding' Reference (UPDATED) April 23, 2018
  • Macron Chides Trump: 'You Don't Make Trade War With Your Ally' April 23, 2018

RSS Cryptome

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RSS Culture Change

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RSS Dahr Jamail

  • Self-Immolation as the World Burns: An Earth Day Report April 22, 2018
  • The Alchemy of Disarmament: Transforming Guns Into Shovels to Plant Trees April 16, 2018

RSS Daily Kos

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RSS Daily Kos Comics

  • Cartoon: Waffle House shooting April 23, 2018
  • Cartoon: A matter of perspective April 23, 2018
  • Cartoon: Coffee sensitivity training April 20, 2018
  • Cartoon: Cohen & Cohn, Fixers-At-Law April 20, 2018
  • Cartoon: Need a fixer for your sex secret? 'Get Cohen on the phone!' April 19, 2018
  • Cartoon: Trump scandal overdrive April 18, 2018

RSS Damn the Matrix

  • The Collapse of Saudi Arabia is Inevitable April 23, 2018
  • EARTH DAY AND THE HOCKEY STICK: A SINGULAR MESSAGE April 22, 2018

RSS Dan Hagen

  • Fox Is Fiction, Not Fact April 17, 2018
  • Fox News Judgment April 10, 2018

RSS Dangerous Intersection

  • It’s Time to Clean Up Missouri Politics: About the CLEAN MISSOURI Ballot Initiative April 20, 2018
  • Jeffrey Sachs Traces U.S. Syria Mistakes from Trump back to Obama April 20, 2018
  • Research Tools – the Beginning of a Collection April 19, 2018

RSS Dark Ages America

  • Twelve Years On April 12, 2018
  • Turkeys out of Control! March 31, 2018
  • Turkeys on the March! March 23, 2018
  • 326 March 9, 2018

RSS David Bollier

  • Some Recent Interviews about the Commons April 10, 2018
  • Now Underway, a Neocolonial Land Grab on Barbuda March 16, 2018
  • The Commons Transition Primer Demystifies and Delights January 8, 2018

RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – National Memo)

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RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – Tax Analysts)

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RSS David Harvey

  • “Marx’s Refusal of the Labour Theory of Value” by David Harvey March 14, 2018
  • Video: Marx for the 21st Century with David Harvey February 8, 2018
  • The Intercept: David Harvey on Trump, Wall Street, and Debt Peonage January 22, 2018

RSS David Hilfiker

  • Welcome August 4, 2011

RSS David McNally

  • My top Five Films and Novels of 2017 January 3, 2018
  • Of Hegel and Bernie Sanders March 14, 2017

RSS David Roberts

  • Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck June 5, 2015
  • Please support Grist April 10, 2015
  • There’s an emerging right-wing divide on climate denial. Here’s what it means (and doesn’t) April 8, 2015

RSS Death by Car: Capitalism’s Drive to Carmageddon

  • A Day in the Life April 8, 2018
  • Guns and Cars March 24, 2018
  • How We Kill Our Children February 27, 2018
  • Untitled February 1, 2018
  • Subsidized Oxymorons January 19, 2018

RSS Decline of the Empire

  • The Best Kept Secret On Earth
  • Adventures In Flatland — Part IV

RSS Deep Green Resistence News Service

  • Where’s the “Eco” in Ecomodernism? April 23, 2018
  • Buffalo Activist’s Relief Fund April 22, 2018
  • India: A Changing Landscape for the Bonda Highlanders April 21, 2018
  • Dignified Resistance in Malaysia April 20, 2018

RSS Deepak Tripathi’s Diary

  • The United Kingdom in 2017: Divided, Scandalised and Lost December 21, 2017
  • Sex, Lies and Incompetence: Britain’s Ruling Establishment in Crisis November 17, 2017

RSS Democratic Underground

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RSS Democratic Underground – Breaking News

  • Wilmington Trust criminal trial closing arguments April 24, 2018
  • Colombia extradites former paramilitary warlord to the United States April 24, 2018
  • US builds drone base in Niger, crossroads of extremism fight April 24, 2018
  • Former Florida congressmen mull bipartisan gubernatorial run: report April 24, 2018
  • Mistrial announced for U.S. border agent linked to teenager's fatal shooting April 24, 2018
  • White House says it's confident in Ronny Jackson ahead of confirmation hearing April 24, 2018
  • Gretchen Carlson, a #MeToo trailblazer, will make TV return April 24, 2018
  • Poll: Coal baron Blankenship fading in W.Va. Senate primary April 24, 2018
  • Toronto Killer Van Attack Suspect Named As Alek Minassian April 24, 2018
  • U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn should be kept off the 2018 ballot, Colorado Supreme Court rules April 24, 2018

RSS Democratic Underground – Good Reads

  • How merchants use Facebook to flood Amazon with fake reviews April 24, 2018
  • Dems: Pruitts Phone Booth Useless And Sweep For Bugs In His Office Improper April 23, 2018
  • Trump Increasingly Using Cell Phone To Bypass Kellys Authority April 23, 2018
  • Rod Rosenstein Makes a Timely Supreme Court Appearance. April 23, 2018
  • "U.S. Seeks Long Jail Term For Yahoo Hacker, Sending Message Of Deterrence' To FSB"/Wendy Siegelman April 23, 2018
  • Trump Administration Wants to Shut Door on Abused Women April 23, 2018
  • Mueller Guides Us Through the Swamp April 23, 2018
  • Dear leaders, You failed us. It's your responsibility to protect the youth. April 22, 2018
  • America's reluctant septuagenarian workforce April 22, 2018
  • BTRTN: Cohen and Syria, Comey and Korea, Chaos and Hysteria April 22, 2018

RSS Democracy Now

  • How Black Students Helped Lead the 1968 Columbia U. Strike Against Militarism & Racism 50 Years Ago April 23, 2018
  • Headlines for April 23, 2018 April 23, 2018
  • Earth Day 2018: Ending Plastic Pollution in the Oceans, Land & Our Bodies April 20, 2018
  • Dilma Rousseff: The Rise of Brazil's Far Right Threatens Democratic Gains Since End of Dictatorship April 20, 2018
  • Dilma Rousseff: Lula's Imprisonment Is Part of a Coup Corroding Brazil's Democratic Institutions April 20, 2018
  • Headlines for April 20, 2018 April 20, 2018
  • Stunning Investigation Confirms Black Mothers and Babies in the U.S. Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis April 19, 2018
  • Former Gitmo Prisoner Moazzam Begg Explains How Torture & U.S.-Run Prisons Helped Give Birth to ISIS April 19, 2018
  • Rashid Khalidi: Ending the Proxy Wars in Syria Is Key to De-escalating Deadly Conflict April 19, 2018
  • Moazzam Begg on Syria: A No-Fly Zone Is Needed Around Idlib to Prevent "Unprecedented" Massacre April 19, 2018

RSS Derrick Jensen

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RSS Desdemona Despair

  • Great Barrier Reef saw huge losses from 2016 heatwave – “The study paints a bleak picture of the sheer extent of coral loss on the Great Barrier Reef” April 22, 2018
  • World’s biggest seafood companies must address deadly ghost fishing gear – At least 640,000 tons of ghost gear are added to oceans every year April 22, 2018
  • Murders of Peru indigenous leader and Canadian under investigation April 22, 2018
  • Ocean plastic predicted to triple within a decade April 22, 2018
  • Great pacific garbage patch growing exponentially – “The amount of hazardous microplastics is set to increase more than tenfold, if left to fragment” April 22, 2018
  • Global warming will hit poorer countries first – “Population expansion will place more people in locations where emergent changes to future heat extremes are exceptionally severe” April 22, 2018

RSS Desertification

  • Untitled December 10, 2017
  • Temporary closure of this blog July 27, 2017
  • Taking resilient food security to scale means supporting innovation among millions of farmers over millions of hectares July 16, 2017
  • Key insights from the 17th Meeting of the GCF Board in Songdo, Korea July 16, 2017
  • Number of people needing humanitarian assistance on the rise July 16, 2017

RSS deSmog Blog

  • UK Climate Diplomacy Staff Cut Again as Post-Brexit Links to Trump and US Deniers Strengthen November 24, 2016
  • 8 Years After BP Oil Spill, Sick Cleanup Workers Still Waiting for Day in Court April 23, 2018
  • Market Forces Are Driving a Clean Energy Revolution in the US April 21, 2018

RSS Digbys Blog

  • Crippled America is great again and yet nothing has changed April 24, 2018
  • Hello? Is this Donald? April 23, 2018
  • He could win again April 23, 2018
  • Two Moscow nights ... April 23, 2018
  • Little Donnie Trump, king of the world April 23, 2018
  • Oh God. They're going to try to re-run the 2016 campaign April 23, 2018

RSS Disinfo – Ecology

  • The Alchemical Ecology Of The Secret Commonwealth: A Solution To The UFO Enigma April 12, 2018
  • Good King Crab: An Arctic Shaman’s Death Song February 25, 2018
  • Invasion of the earthworms, mapped and analyzed April 22, 2015
  • “People often ask me, ‘How can you be so stupid and still proclaim yourself a communist?’” — Slavoj Žižek January 30, 2015
  • Toxoplasmosis: how feral cats kill wildlife without lifting a paw October 6, 2014

RSS Dispatches from the Underclass

  • Unauthorized Disclosure — Episode 21: People’s Movement Must Be More Outspoken On Wars June 21, 2017
  • Interview With Abby Martin And Michael Prysner On Venezuelan Opposition & Attacks On Journalism June 12, 2017
  • An Essential And Critical Conversation On Trump’s Hasty Decision To Attack Syria April 9, 2017
  • Interview With Mark Ames: The Unending Baffling Frenzy Over Trump, Putin, And Russia March 27, 2017
  • Interview With Patrick Cockburn: Islamic State And The Ongoing Wars In The Middle East March 23, 2017

RSS Dissent Magazine

  • A Dismal Report Card on Global Inequality April 20, 2018
  • Belabored Podcast #149: Voices from the Labor Notes Conference 2018 April 20, 2018
  • Spring 2018 April 18, 2018
  • Disembowel Enoch Powell April 18, 2018

RSS Dissident Voice

  • How Yulia and Sergei Skripal (and their cat) Saved the World! April 24, 2018
  • Is the U.S. Government Evil? You Tell Me April 24, 2018
  • Chemical Madness! April 23, 2018
  • Earth Day: Conflict Over The Future Of The Planet April 23, 2018
  • Fox in the Hen House: Why Interest Rates Are Rising April 23, 2018
  • Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts April 23, 2018
  • Dear Salafist Wahhabist Apologists April 23, 2018
  • Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela April 23, 2018

RSS Do the Math

  • Eclipsed, Lately September 11, 2017

RSS Dollars & Sense Blog

  • Is The US Hypocritical To Criticize Russian Election Meddling? March 27, 2018
  • New Issue! Plus: Regional economic disparities and Hillary Clinton’s Unfortunate Remarks March 15, 2018
  • Re-theorizing the Welfare State and the Political Economy of Neoliberalism’s War Against It March 9, 2018
  • Event: Finding Truth in Police Killings of Young Black Men February 27, 2018
  • Worst Case Economics January 22, 2018
  • The Democrats Confront Monopoly November 20, 2017

RSS Doug Stanhope

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RSS Douglas Rushkoff

  • Cannabis: Stealth Goddess April 19, 2018
  • Team Human: A Sourdough, Solar-Powered Baker b/w An Artificial Intelligence Artist April 4, 2018
  • Team Human: Live at Gray Area Night Two: Erik Davis, Josette Melchor, and Lauren McCarthy March 23, 2018

RSS Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

  • Washington Tyranny April 24, 2018
  • How Our Government Lies To Us April 19, 2018

RSS Dredd Blog

  • Ents & The Entities Become Nomadic - 3 April 23, 2018
  • Follow The Immunity - 4 April 20, 2018
  • Pole Dancing In The Lab - 2 April 19, 2018
  • The Shapeshifters of Bullshitistan - 14 April 17, 2018

RSS Ear to the Ground – Truth Dig

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RSS Early Warning

  • The Wake-Up Call from David Buckel April 16, 2018
  • US Carbon Emissions December 11, 2017
  • Are Winters Getting Warmer in Ithaca, NY? January 6, 2014

RSS Earth First

  • “UNC Dildo-Boy” accosts homophobic preacher, releases anti-technology declaration March 2, 2014
  • Subpoena caps bad week for fossil fuel March 2, 2014
  • Less Than 60 Hours Left to Support Indigenous Land Defenders! February 18, 2014

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

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RSS Earth Observatory: Image of the Day

  • Sun Sends an Early Earth Day Greeting April 24, 2018
  • A Clear View of Scottish Highlands April 23, 2018
  • Mountains in the Sky April 22, 2018

RSS Earth Observatory: Natural Hazards

  • Late Spring Snow in the Upper Midwest April 20, 2018
  • NASA Mapping Hurricane Damage to Everglades April 19, 2018

RSS Earth Policy Institute Blog

  • Data Highlight - Wind Power Beats Nuclear Again in China
  • Data Highlight - Plastic Bag Bans or Fees Cover 49 Million Americans
  • Plan B Update - Fossil Fuel Development in the Arctic is a Bad Investment

RSS Ecocide Alert

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RSS Ecohuman World

  • Our mission November 23, 2016
  • Ecohumanist society and ecology November 23, 2016

RSS Eco-Shock News

  • 50 BLOG TOPICS AND PROMPTS FOR TEACHERS October 26, 2017

RSS Ecological Headstand

  • For the Abolition of the Wages System! June 18, 2015
  • The Incredible Shrinking Blog June 9, 2015
  • Keynes "hadn't got round to it" May 25, 2015
  • Napoleon Solow and the Phantom Mechanism May 20, 2015

RSS Ecological Sociology

  • Commons Enabling Infrastucture August 31, 2013
  • A Short History of Progress: Book Review August 26, 2013
  • Foucault, Power, Truth and Ecology August 14, 2013

RSS Economic Hardship Reporting Project

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RSS Economic Undertow

  • Hit and Run … April 11, 2018
  • Another Year, Another Set of Last Year’s Problems January 21, 2018
  • Shades of 1928 December 7, 2017

RSS EcoWorldView

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RSS Empire Burlesque

  • Pulling Strings But Losing the Thread: All Day Permanent Red April 23, 2018
  • Art News for an Age of Goonery April 15, 2018

RSS Empirical Magazine

  • From the Empirical Archives: Genius or Folly? August 30, 2013
  • From the Empirical Archives: Nights Such as These August 29, 2013
  • From the Empirical Archives: Second Time Foster Child August 28, 2013

RSS EmptyWheel

  • Continuance in MalwareTech’s Case
  • Counterintelligence versus Criminal: George Papadopoulos
  • What Happened To The Cultural Elites: Entertainment Workers

RSS End of More

  • You won’t like downsizing February 17, 2016
  • Enough is enough November 11, 2014
  • New names for tropical storms August 28, 2013
  • The dominant species on Earth. March 25, 2013

RSS Energy Balance

  • Roman concrete, for durable, eco-friendly construction – applications for tidal power generation, and protection against sea level rise. April 21, 2018
  • Providing Good Nutrition on Home Soil - Back to the Future? April 1, 2018
  • Burn Out: The Endgame for Fossil Fuels. Dieter Helm. February 11, 2018
  • US withdrawal from the COP21 Paris Climate Change Agreement, and its possible implications. February 8, 2018
  • Global Greenhouse Gas Concentrations Highest in 800,000 Years: World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) Report. November 8, 2017
  • The 2016 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Awarded for: “The Design and Synthesis of Molecular Machines.” October 10, 2016

RSS Environment & Food Justice

  • Guest Earth Day Post | Linda Black Elk - Earth Day Message April 22, 2018
  • Monsanto in Mexico | Breaking News: Mexican Supreme Court Upholds Lower Court Ban on Transgenic Corn May 12, 2017
  • Indigenous Agroecology and Foodways | Selected Clips from the Joint 2016 Meeting of the Agrarian Trust and Biodynamics Association May 1, 2017

RSS Envisionation Blog

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RSS Extraenvironmentalist Blog and Podcasts

  • [ Episode #95 // Economy of Things ] January 28, 2017
  • [ Episode #94 // Rocking the Google Bus ] October 25, 2016
  • [ Episode #93 // Climate Agreements ] September 5, 2016

RSS ExtraEnvironmentalist’s Videos

  • [ Rick Wolff // A Cure for Capitalism ]
    Professor Rick Wolff explains why growth has become a focus of our modern political system. He describes how inequality is created by the way our enterprises are organized. Because a significant portion of our lives are at work, how would our society look if democratic businesses became the new normal? What would be the environmental and social implications […]
  • [ Firefly Gathering ]
    The Firefly Gathering offers a wide range of classes for adults and children on primitive skills, permaculture, nature connection, and eco-homesteading that are designed to be able to be applied to enhance everyday life. The gathering gathers a bevy of inspiring, amazing people. Besides classes it offers evening entertainment, basic infrastructure, and on-si […]

RSS Facts for Working People

  • Korean Peninsula in Historic Peace Talks April 23, 2018
  • Israeli Jew Talks to Young Palestinians in Gaza April 23, 2018
  • Marx 200: Carney, Bowles and Varoufakis April 23, 2018

RSS Fair: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

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RSS Fairewinds

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RSS Fairfax Climate Watch

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RSS Farooque Chowdhury’s Diary

  • The disinformation campaign on Venezuela September 1, 2017
  • Bangladesh Liberation War Exposed A Neocolonial State’s Failure December 16, 2015
  • DIGNITY OF TEACHERS AND AN ADMISSION TEST : THE EDUCATION MARKET EXHIBITS ………. September 23, 2015

RSS Feasta

  • Celebrating Feasta’s 20th anniversary April 17, 2018
  • Cursed to live in interesting times April 17, 2018
  • From Ivory Tower to global problem solver – aligning academia to the Sustainable Development Goals April 13, 2018

RSS FireDogLake

  • Community Investment, Safety Without Cops: Good Kids Mad City Organizes Against Gun Violence April 23, 2018
  • Senate Proposal To Constrain Trump’s War Making Would Actually Expand Perpetual War April 23, 2018
  • Alice Bag’s Punk Rock Connects Protest History To Trump Era April 20, 2018
  • Freelance Journalists: Open Call For Submissions In May April 20, 2018

RSS Fish Out of Water

  • A Mexican Immigrant Saved the World March 1, 2018
  • Czech Snowboarder Ester Ledecka Borrows Skis for Super-G Has Best Reaction to Impossible Olympic Win February 18, 2018
  • Polar vortex splits, record high heat into polar stratosphere, record low arctic sea ice February 12, 2018
  • Dow Drops 1033 More After Trump/GOP Budget Revealed. Investors Fear High Inflation, Low Growth. February 8, 2018
  • Dow Down 1,175 points. Yellen-Obama Era of Stability Over. Markets fear inflation from tax cut. February 5, 2018
  • U.S. Plans More Options for Nuclear War January 10, 2018

RSS Foreign Confidential

  • Celebrating the Legacy of George F. Kennan, Containment's Father February 20, 2018
  • Was the Cold War Inevitable? February 20, 2018
  • Understanding the Realist View of International Relations February 20, 2018
  • Once Upon a Time in America, Incredibly, Foreign Policy Was a Serious TV Topic: Vintage Video of Politcal Realist Hans Morgenthau February 16, 2018

RSS FracTracker

  • New map available showing Upper Appalachian gas storage wells April 11, 2018
  • Can Californians Escape Oil and Gas Pollution? April 11, 2018
  • Shell Pipeline: Not Quite the “Good Neighbor” April 2, 2018

RSS George Monbiot (Alternet)

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RSS George Monbiot (Official Home Page)

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RSS Get Real List: Chris Nelder

  • My new gig December 5, 2015
  • Announcing the Energy Transition Show October 14, 2015
  • Guest appearance on The Energy Gang podcast May 14, 2015

RSS Gil Smart

  • Gil Smart right on development February 8, 2015
  • With Gil Smart on guns, the NRA January 19, 2015
  • Gil Smart makes sense May 19, 2014
  • Right on, Gil Smart February 17, 2014

RSS Glen Ford – Black Agenda Report

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RSS Global Guerrillas

  • How the EU could change the world through Data Asylum April 19, 2018
  • Moral Warfare: Packetizing Shame April 17, 2018
  • A Clash of Three Decision Making Systems: Fascism, Communism, and Democracy April 16, 2018

RSS Global Occupy News

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RSS Global Oneness Project

  • In Celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. January 11, 2018

RSS Global Research

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RSS Global Research CA

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RSS Global Research TV

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RSS Gonzalo Lira

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RSS Green is the New Red

  • Trump Supporter Promises Legislation to Label Protest as “Economic Terrorism” November 22, 2016
  • Violence against environmentalists is now at an all-time high July 8, 2016
  • “To Build a Fire”: New Split EP With “Old Lines” and Will Potter June 13, 2016
  • “It changes who you are—forever. What you do with that change is what defines who you are.” April 28, 2016
  • Exclusive: New Virtual Reality Investigation Goes Inside Factory Farms April 13, 2016
  • New Sticker — Animal Rights Activists Must “Join or Die” February 22, 2016
  • “Truth and Power” TV series features Will Potter on “eco-terrorism,” ag-gag laws, and investigative journalism February 15, 2016
  • This woman rowed straight into a hurricane. And you should too. February 11, 2016
  • 6 Lessons From How the FBI and Media Treat Militia Groups January 12, 2016
  • Here’s How One Activist Convinced the FBI to Leave Him Alone December 7, 2015

RSS Green on Huffington Post

  • Andrew Cuomo Faces A Big Test On Climate Change. He’s Already Failed Twice. April 23, 2018
  • Man Who Survived Bear Attack Gets Bitten By A Shark April 23, 2018
  • Scott Pruitt's Public Service Mostly Involves Serving Himself April 23, 2018
  • How To Find Beauty Products That Aren’t Totally Killing The Planet April 23, 2018
  • Even In Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt Had Expensive Taste When It Came To Office Decor April 23, 2018
  • Tennessee Shooting Suspect Arrested Last Year At White House April 23, 2018
  • Michael Bloomberg Contributes $4.5 Million For Paris Climate Deal After Trump Bails April 23, 2018
  • Trump Celebrates Earth Day By Praising Rollback Of Environmental Protections April 22, 2018

RSS Greenpeace Blogs

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RSS Greg Palast

  • KPFA Presents The Bay Area Premiere of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case Of The Stolen Election April 18, 2018
  • Palast with ACLU Kansas Announces Legal Attack on Trump Double-Voter Claims and Purges April 6, 2018

RSS Gregor Macdonald

  • Oil Fall: Part One, California ICE January 21, 2018

RSS Grinning Planet

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RSS Grist

  • Say hello to more solar panels, Sunshine State homeowners! April 23, 2018
  • At least one Sinclair station has been trying to cast doubt on climate science. April 23, 2018
  • The Goldman Prize missed the black heroes of Flint — just like the media did April 23, 2018
  • Lyft pledges to cancel out the carbon from your next ride April 20, 2018

RSS Growth Busters

  • Green Cars, Coffee and Kitchen Scraps April 20, 2018
  • Small is Beautiful After All April 3, 2018
  • Would You Eat a Bug to Save the Planet? March 1, 2018
  • Trashing the Planet is Macho January 13, 2018

RSS Guernica Mag

  • What Sharp Teeth You Have April 23, 2018
  • Striving for Purpose April 19, 2018
  • John Chiara, and California’s Beauty and Terror April 18, 2018
  • Fahrenheit 2017 April 18, 2018

RSS Guy McPherson’s Blog

  • The Reality Report April 22, 2018
  • Why I Live Where I Do April 22, 2018

RSS Health After Oil

  • Public Health’s Response to Decline: Loyalty to the 1% December 15, 2014

RSS Hot Topic: Global Warming and the Future of New Zealand

  • Anthropogenic climate change is real: pithy post-punk anthem for the Trump generation December 9, 2017
  • Why (and how) cheaper solar power, batteries, electric and autonomous vehicles are going to change our world over the next 5 years September 16, 2017
  • At last it can be revealed: climate change researcher describes challenge of pulling off worldwide global warming conspiracy September 10, 2017

RSS How to Save the World

  • All The Things I Thought I Knew April 18, 2018
  • Links of the Quarter: March 2018 March 16, 2018
  • What Happens in Vagus… March 13, 2018

RSS I am Not a Number

  • Coercive Control In The Workplace January 17, 2018
  • Neoliberal identity politics has failed and has to be replaced with class politics January 6, 2018
  • Higher Ground? November 17, 2017

RSS I Cite

  • Kurt Andersen Can't Read September 7, 2017
  • the political problem of "and" April 25, 2017
  • Lenin: Capitalism and Female Labor (1913) March 25, 2017
  • Response to Luke Mergner March 24, 2017
  • Civil war and free speech March 4, 2017

RSS Iamronen

  • Allergic response reflected in Breath? April 23, 2018
  • Christopher Alexander – A Freedom Inducing World April 15, 2018
  • Christopher Alexander – The Stress Reservoir April 15, 2018
  • Christopher Alexander – Freedom of the Spirit April 14, 2018
  • Christopher Alexander – More of a Person April 11, 2018

RSS Ian Welsh

  • Assange, Wikileaks and Shooting the Messenger April 21, 2018

RSS Idea Explorer

  • Timelines February 23, 2018
  • Failed Responsibility August 20, 2017
  • Avoiding Harm: A Primer August 15, 2017
  • Diminished Futures July 29, 2017
  • Declaration of War June 2, 2017

RSS Idea Explorer – Big Pic Explorer

  • Survival of the Realists May 9, 2015
  • Last Years May 3, 2015
  • Accelerating extinction risk from climate change May 1, 2015

RSS Idea Explorer: Land of Conscience

  • Beyond the Rabbit Hole November 5, 2017
  • No Winners August 14, 2017
  • Terms of Derision March 30, 2017

RSS If You Love This Planet – Helen Caldicott

  • Steven Starr, Bruce Gagnon and William Hartung at the Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction symposium April 18, 2017
  • Dr. Helen Caldicott, Ted Postol, Max Tegmark and Alan Robock at The Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction symposium June 23, 2016
  • Dr. Caldicott’s October 2014 speech: The Ukraine Crisis, Is Nuclear Conflict Likely? February 17, 2015
  • Dr. Helen Caldicott interviewed by Bob Herbert about her latest book, “Loving This Planet” December 28, 2012

RSS Indybay Features

  • Governor Brown, Please Step Up
  • Community Control Over Police Surveillance Spreads
  • Hunger Strike Underway at Santa Clara County Jails
  • U.S. Missile Strikes on Syria Ignite Bay Area Demonstrations

RSS Indybay Newswire

  • The West refused to support Azerbaijani opposition at the last moment
  • Vehicular Profiteering Downtown Will Punish the Poor and Drive Away Customers
  • Homeless regulations will affect People's Park community
  • IMF and World Bank Meet on 10-Year Anniversary of Financial Crisis
  • The Market is a Universal Totalitarian Religion

RSS Information Clearing House

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RSS Inside Left – The OFFICIAL Anti-Olympics Blog™

  • ITV's Coverage of the 1973 Ryder Cup August 22, 2017
  • "Primitive, Revolting and Obscene" – Roller Derby on ITV, 1966-67 August 3, 2017

RSS Institute for Public Accuracy

  • From WikiLeaks to Whistleblowers: “Assault on Truth Telling” April 23, 2018
  • AUMF “Reform”: Codifying Perpetual War? April 19, 2018
  • Syria Attack: Seeing Through the Propaganda April 17, 2018
  • Claims about Syria Attack “Unraveling” April 16, 2018
  • Syria Bombing “Illegal,” Likely to “Prolong” Syrian War April 14, 2018
  • * Inspectors in Syria * Resisting Illegal Orders April 13, 2018

RSS International Debt Observatory

  • ¿Qué recortes tiene que hacer España para cumplir las exigencias de la UE? October 17, 2016
  • ¿Qué ocurre con la deuda pública en España? October 17, 2016

RSS io9

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RSS iWatch: Global Muckraking

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RSS Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer Blog

  • Five Things We Need to Know About the “Fiscal Cliff” December 10, 2012
  • Wasteful Pentagon Spending and Costly Wars Hurting Minnesota Communities November 6, 2012

RSS Jacobin

  • The Democrats and the Deficit Con April 23, 2018
  • The Infiltrator and the Movement April 23, 2018
  • It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World April 22, 2018
  • The Kinder Scout Mass Trespass April 21, 2018
  • The “Smart Imperialism” Crowd April 20, 2018
  • Turning the War in Our Favor April 20, 2018

RSS Jeremy Scahill

  • Arundhati Roy: “I Need to Know the Place Where I Stand and Why I Stand There” April 17, 2018

RSS Jill Stein

  • Occupy Inauguration November 21, 2016
  • Farmer's Market on Sundays June 25, 2013

RSS Joe Bageant

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RSS John Cook Video Uploads

  • Consensus on consensus: summary of studies into scientific consensus on climate change May 5, 2017
  • Science communication & responding to misinformation in the post truth era March 1, 2017
  • John Cook vs Stephan Lewandowsky December 19, 2016
  • John Cook vs Dana Nuccitelli December 7, 2016

RSS John Hively

  • The New York Times Lies In Waging War Against The Middle Class with Disinformation April 22, 2018
  • President Donald Trump Aids the Bush Administration’s Complete Hive of Scum, Villainy, Treason in the Republican Party’s War Against Truth and Honesty April 17, 2018

RSS John Pilger

  • ABORIGINAL PEOPLE HAVE A RIGHT TO PROTEST THE COMMONWEALTH GAMES AS STOLEN WEALTH

RSS John Perkins

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RSS John W. Whitehead

  • The Titanic Sails At Dawn: Warning Signs Point To Danger Ahead In 2017 January 10, 2017

RSS John Zerzan: Anarchy Radio

  • Anarchy Radio 04 17 2018 April 18, 2018
  • Anarchy Radio 04 10 2018 April 12, 2018
  • Anarchy Radio 04.03.2018 April 4, 2018

RSS Jonathan Turley

  • A Higher Priority: The Investigation of James Comey Raises Serious Questions Over His Leaking Of FBI Material April 24, 2018
  • “I’m A Nice Guy”: Accused Felon Goes On Rampage With Machete And Threatens To Put Housemate’s Head On Spear April 24, 2018
  • Erdogan Takes A Hostage: Authoritarian Turkish Leader Demands U.S. Turn Over Dissident In Exchange For American Pastor April 23, 2018
  • McCabe Resumes Call For Donations As Prosecutors Review Possible Criminal Charges Against Him April 23, 2018

RSS Karl Grossman

  • I've switched from this site to my website -- www.karlgrossman.com -- for my blog. November 29, 2015
  • The End of Police Raids -- at Long Last -- on Gays of Fire Island July 1, 2015
  • "Fire Island Was Paradise,Truly Paradise" June 21, 2015
  • My First Big Story June 1, 2015
  • Disaster Waiting to Happen at Indian Point May 12, 2015

RSS Karl North Eco-Intelligence

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RSS Kate Ausburn

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RSS Keith Farnish

  • Uprooting Civilization (Part 2) May 7, 2014
  • Uprooting Civilization (Part 1) February 21, 2014
  • The Problem With…Conspiracy Theories January 7, 2014

RSS Knight Science Journalism – MIT

  • In the Fate of the Delta Smelt, Warnings of Conservation Gone Wrong April 23, 2018
  • With New NASA Administrator, Legislators Sense Trouble Ahead April 20, 2018
  • Chain Reaction: How a Soviet A-Bomb Test Led the U.S. Into Climate Science April 20, 2018
  • GM Food Labels Could Burden Low-Income Consumers April 19, 2018
  • Speaking of Evolution, in Non-Threatening Tones April 19, 2018

RSS Kulture Critic

  • Embodiment, Ecstasy, Emptiness February 17, 2018

RSS Kunstler Cast

  • John B. McLemore Email to JHK: Huffing gas fumes in shittown alabama June 1, 2017
  • Release: S-Town Podcast Prequel: KunstlerCast Ready for Binge Listening May 31, 2017
  • KunstlerCast: S-Town May 31, 2017
  • James Howard Kunstler on John B. McLemore of S-Town May 31, 2017
  • Transcript: KunstlerCast: S-Town May 31, 2017

RSS Kurt Kobb

  • The global village and the surveillance society April 22, 2018

RSS Lack of Environment

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RSS Law and Disorder

  • Law and Disorder April 23, 2018 April 23, 2018
  • Law and Disorder April 16, 2018 April 16, 2018
  • Law and Disorder April 9, 2018 April 9, 2018

RSS Le Monde diplomatique – English edition

  • Authoritarianism as usual
  • A tale of American hubris
  • A new age of sea power?
  • Can the Internet be saved?
  • Could the Cold War return with a vengeance?

RSS Le Monde diplomatique – Open Page

  • Authoritarianism as usual
  • Sylvie Laurent on recovering the true legacy of Martin Luther King
  • A tale of American hubris
  • A new age of sea power?
  • Can the Internet be saved?

RSS Leaving Babylon

  • Too many people too much! March 18, 2018

RSS Lee Camp

  • Iran Drops The Dollar – Just As Iraq & Libya Did Before We Bombed Them April 23, 2018
  • Common Censored #3 – A.I. Armageddon, Thought Crimes & More April 23, 2018
  • [FULL EPISODE] Bombing Covers Up Reality, MSNBC Lies & More April 21, 2018
  • CNN Attacks Jimmy Dore In Article About Nazis & Pedophiles! April 20, 2018
  • LEAKED: Goldman Sachs Note Says Curing Diseases Is Bad For Business! April 20, 2018
  • BREAKING: Israeli-Born Natalie Portman Says She Won’t Accept “Jewish Nobel” In Israel Due To Recent Events April 20, 2018

RSS Lee Fang

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RSS Les Leopold

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RSS Life Itself

  • A Very Brief History of Humans August 18, 2017
  • Is It Just Idiocracy? June 2, 2017
  • Now What?! February 25, 2017

RSS Limited, Inc.

  • out of the woods - Dante, Rousseau, Marx April 23, 2018
  • Marx in the theater of power April 22, 2018
  • The barcelona trip April 21, 2018

RSS Link TV – Earth Focus

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RSS Low-Tech Magazine

  • How Much Energy Do We Need? January 24, 2018
  • Bedazzled by Energy Efficiency January 9, 2018
  • How to Run the Economy on the Weather September 21, 2017

RSS LRB Blog

  • A Load of Ballokis April 23, 2018
  • Call and Check April 23, 2018
  • Enoch Powell’s Altered World April 20, 2018
  • Trump v. the Law April 18, 2018
  • On the March for Science April 16, 2018

RSS Luis J. Rodriguez

  • New Year's Message 2017: Regeneration in a time of crisis January 1, 2017
  • Los Angeles Poets and the Temper of Our Times December 14, 2016
  • From an Indigenous Mind: Four Connections December 14, 2016

RSS Mabinogogiblog

  • A solution to gang warfare: Green Wage Subsidy April 13, 2018
  • What is the cause of knife crime and other violence on out streets? April 12, 2018
  • Don't Even Think to Take my Power from Me April 8, 2018
  • Poem: Passageway April 3, 2018

RSS Manicore – Accueil

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RSS Marginal Revolution

  • In case you have not been watching (the D.C. public school system) April 24, 2018
  • The new economics of Tanzanian blogging April 24, 2018
  • Monday assorted links April 23, 2018

RSS Mark Biskeborn – Underground Essays

  • Kafkaesque November 11, 2014
  • Larry Summers Still Living Large April 9, 2013
  • War and Corruption Deficits: Insects and Leviathans January 21, 2013
  • Breaking News: Lt. Col. Shaffer Accuses Former CIA Dir. Tenet December 29, 2012

RSS Mark Fiore

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RSS Mark Lynas

  • 5 April 2018 – Seeds of Science published in the UK! April 5, 2018
  • Mark Lynas – Speech to the Oxford Farming Conference 2018 January 5, 2018
  • Oxitec expands production of GMO mosquito October 26, 2017
  • Is feedlot beef better for the environment? September 18, 2017
  • Experts find climate-skeptic and anti-GMO studies are scientifically flawed September 18, 2017

RSS Martin Wolf

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RSS Matt Bruenig

  • Trump NLRB Smashed Google Guy February 17, 2018
  • Neoliberals Used to Refer to Themselves as New Democrats December 22, 2017
  • Alabama Part II December 16, 2017

RSS Matt Taibbi

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RSS Matt Wuerker

  • Cartoon: Freedom of speech is absolute, but... April 30, 2015
  • Cartoon: Clinton Inc April 23, 2015
  • Cartoon: Reince's Women Issues April 16, 2015
  • Cartoon: The way to win April 9, 2015
  • No Cake for you! April 2, 2015

RSS Max Keiser

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RSS Media Lens

  • Killing Mosquitoes: The Latest Gaza Massacres, Pro-Israel Media Bias And The Weapon Of ‘Antisemitism’ April 9, 2018
  • No Spirit Of Liberty – The Salisbury Case, Corbyn And The Need For Dissent March 21, 2018
  • 'Follow Your Bliss' - The Tweet That Brought Corporate Journalism To The Brink Of A Nervous Breakthrough March 7, 2018

RSS Media Matters – Environment

  • Former Sinclair TV reporter: “Anything that went against anything that corporate wanted was just shot down.”
  • Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has appeared on Fox News four times more than on the other major TV networks combined
  • Don't believe the right-wing lie that auto fuel-economy standards make cars more dangerous

RSS Media Matters – Everything

  • CNN's Jason Miller claims Trump's racist "breeding concept" tweet actually meant "breeding contempt"
  • Tucker Carlson defends Nazi-sympathizer Milo Yiannopoulos after he was heckled out of a bar
  • Tucker Carlson guest: "Multiculturalism lets you decide which side of the war you want to be on, whether you want to be on the home team, or the away team"

RSS Media Roots

  • Cambridge Analytica Private Mercenaries, Blue Planet, Waco & Jones/Stone/Neocon Alliance April 3, 2018
  • Russian Elections, Novichok Spy Poisoning & Trump Saudi Worship March 28, 2018
  • Life Sentences for Charity Work – Free the 5! March 26, 2018

RSS Methane Hydrates

  • Joint New Zealand - German 3D survey reveals massive seabed gas hydrate and methane system May 12, 2014
  • Noctilucent clouds: further confirmation of large methane releases December 10, 2013
  • Earthquake M6.7 hits Sea of Okhotsk October 2, 2013

RSS Michael Hudson

  • Ho Hum – More Trade Threats April 13, 2018
  • Palatial Credit: Origins of Money and Interest April 6, 2018
  • High Cost Economy April 6, 2018

RSS Michael Miller – Viewpoint

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RSS Michael Parenti

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RSS Mike Philbin – Free Planet

  • Star Citizen - IFS or Intentional Flight System - theblindmanshandsout control prototype April 17, 2018
  • Star Citizen - ILM or Internal Lighting Model - too many fake Hollywood-pop lights April 17, 2018
  • Ancient Architects - Stonehenge - were the stones always there? April 16, 2018

RSS Mondoweiss

  • ‘Youtube’ removes video tribute to Yaser Murtaja and other Gaza victims as ‘sensational’ incitement April 23, 2018
  • Emergency statement: Gaza protests and Israel’s military response April 23, 2018

RSS Mons Angelorum: Deadly Serious 3

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RSS Mons Angelorum: Waiting for Good Weather

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RSS Mother Jones

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RSS MR Zine

  • Yoshie Furuhashi, "After MRZine" January 1, 2017
  • Louis Allday, "Controlling the Narrative on Syria" December 14, 2016
  • Marta Harnecker, "Fidel, Today and Forever" December 11, 2016
  • Prabhat Patnaik, "Developing 'Infrastructure'" December 9, 2016
  • Susie Day, "Forward Ever, Normal Never: Taking Down Donald Trump" December 6, 2016
  • Samir Amin, "The Election of Donald Trump" December 1, 2016

RSS Musings on Iraq

  • Number Of Displaced Continues To Drop In Iraq April 23, 2018
  • This Day In Iraqi History – Apr 23 April 23, 2018
  • Musings On Iraq In The News April 22, 2018

RSS Nafeez Ahmed

  • IDF's Gaza assault is to control Palestinian gas, avert Israeli energy crisis | Nafeez Ahmed July 9, 2014
  • World Bank and UN carbon offset scheme 'complicit' in genocidal land grabs - NGOs | Nafeez Ahmed July 3, 2014
  • The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy | Nafeez Ahmed June 19, 2014
  • Iraq blowback: Isis rise manufactured by insatiable oil addiction June 16, 2014

RSS Naked Capitalism

  • Bill Mitchell: QE Failed in Japan April 24, 2018
  • Gaius Publius: How the Democrats Could, and Probably Will, Blow 2020 April 24, 2018
  • 2:00PM Water Cooler 4/23/2018 April 23, 2018
  • Plastics Pollution Policies– “Bold” or Pathetic? April 23, 2018
  • Links 4/23/18 April 23, 2018

RSS Naomi Klein

  • The Battle for Paradise March 20, 2018
  • VIDEO: Naomi Klein and Jeremy Corbyn Discuss How to Get The World We Want July 14, 2017

RSS Naomi Klein – Guardian.UK

  • A new shock doctrine: in a world of crisis, morality can still win | Naomi Klein September 28, 2017
  • Naomi Klein: how power profits from disaster – podcast July 21, 2017

RSS Nature Protects, As She is Protected

  • No Name Calling Please, Give Us Evidence Which Proves GM Crops Are Safe March 30, 2017
  • Let’s Be Honest About Genetically Modified Crops March 9, 2017

RSS Navdanya’s Diary

  • Dr Vandana Shiva submits objection to Bayer-Monsanto Merger January 20, 2018
  • Glyphosate and Arsenic: a Deadly Cocktail January 9, 2018
  • Gene drive extinction technology is a war against the planet and biodiversity December 10, 2017

RSS New Internationalist

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RSS New Left Project

  • Farewell from NLP
  • The Four Maladies of Global Capitalism
  • Hostility and Dissent: Resisting Anti-immigrant Messaging

RSS New World Notes

  • American Food April 10, 2018
  • How 'The System' Causes Addiction April 3, 2018
  • The Second Coming March 27, 2018

RSS News Junkie Post

  • Human Trafficking from Haiti to Chile March 8, 2018
  • Seven Years of Killing Fields in Syria: An Imbroglio of Proxy Wars February 22, 2018
  • Haiti on this Earthquake Anniversary Still Pays the Price for Having Fought Slavery January 13, 2018
  • One Year of Demonetization’s Failure in India November 7, 2017
  • Saudi Arabia: Mirage of Reform in Wahhabism’s Absolute Monarchy November 3, 2017
  • Climate Change: SOS for Humanity’s Survival August 8, 2017

RSS NOAA: Monthly State of the Climate Report

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RSS Notes from the Aboveground

  • On Inequality July 27, 2015
  • Shameless is as shameless does July 21, 2015

RSS NYT Examiner

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RSS Occupy.com

  • How the Public Banking Movement Hacked Cannabis Banking April 23, 2018
  • Robert Reich: Should You Vote for a Third Party? (Video) April 23, 2018
  • Earth Day: Conflict Over the Future of the Planet April 23, 2018
  • National School Walkout on April 20 kicks off the next wave of gun control activism April 20, 2018
  • French Railway Strikes Spread As Workers and Students Protest New Labor Laws April 20, 2018
  • How Europe's 'Breakthrough' Privacy Law Takes on Facebook and Google April 20, 2018
  • UK Unites in Protests in response to aggressive western intervention in Syria April 19, 2018
  • Act Out! [157] - Capitalism vs. Mental Health, The SS “Light” and Zuck Testifies to His Employees April 18, 2018

RSS Occupy las Vegas

  • Studien bestätigen die Wirkung October 8, 2017
  • Bewegung bei Kindern September 8, 2017

RSS Occupy Wall Street

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RSS Oddity Central

  • 12-Year-Old Australian Boy Fights with His Mother, Steals Her Credit Cards and Flies to Bali for 4-Day Vacation April 23, 2018
  • Brazilian Mayor Photoshopped in Photo Inspecting Construction Work Becomes Internet Meme April 23, 2018
  • Members of Indonesian Sea Nomad Tribe Can Stay Underwater for Up to 13 Minutes at a Time, Thanks to Their Unusually Large Spleens April 23, 2018
  • English Village Has Been Rising By 2 Cm Every Year, And No One Knows Why April 20, 2018
  • Man Claims That Eating Only Fruit for Eight Years Has Made Him Superhuman April 20, 2018
  • Indian Minister Ridiculed For Claiming That Ancient Indians Had Access to Internet April 20, 2018

RSS Of Two Minds

  • Connecting the Dots of Big Data, Soaring Corporate Profits and Trade Wars April 23, 2018
  • The War between Public Pensioners and Tax Donkeys Is Heating Up April 20, 2018