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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

Category Archives: Capitalism

Ticking Off The Checklist For Mass Extinction

23 Thursday Jun 2022

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

≈ 38 Comments

Tags

Abrupt Climate Change, AMOC, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropocene Mass Extinction, Arctic Ice Melt, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, Blue Acceleration, Canfield Ocean, Capitalism, Carbon Dioxide, Climate Change, CO2, Cretaceous–Paleogene Extinction Event, Dr. Peter Ward, Fossil Fuel Dependency, Gerald Durrell, Great Acceleration, Gulf Stream, Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S), IPCC, Jet Stream, K-T Extinction, Loss of Biodiversity, Megadrought, Methane, Micro-Plastic Pollution, Nate Hagens, Nicholas P. Money, Ocean Acidification, PETM Extinction Event, Sea Level Rise, Social Media Algorithms, Widespread Ocean Anoxia

Nate Hagens’ recent interview of Professor Peter Ward, entitled “Oceans – What’s the Worst that Can Happen?”, serves as a good overview of mankind’s destruction of the marine biosphere and our road to extinction. The title is a rather rhetorical question because very bad things have happened, are already happening, and even worse things are unavoidable and on the horizon despite hopes that humans will run out of ways to extract the dirtiest and most inaccessible fossil fuel deposits. We have seen how inextricably linked economic growth is to rising fossil fuel consumption, no matter the mounting disasters happening before our eyes and the steady stream of dire warnings issued from the scientific community. The most current of such warnings came from the UN last month, and it states that escalating synergies between disasters, economic vulnerabilities and ecosystem failures are increasing the risk of a “global collapse” scenario. Such a catastrophic scenario appears all but inevitable. Constricting fossil fuel consumption is like squeezing a balloon. If one country stops consumption, another takes up the slack. For example, efforts to cripple Russia’s fossil fuel exports for their unwarranted invasion of Ukraine don’t appear to be very effective since China and India have simply stepped in and increased their purchases. Rising oil prices have also more than offset a decline in Russia’s export volumes. Perhaps an unintended consequence of those higher energy prices will be the ripple effect through the economy, making food unaffordable for large swaths of the globe and destabilizing governments.

Getting back to the Peter Ward interview, the professor states matter of factly, “Every time we get into a car, it’s putting more of those CO2 particles into the atmosphere. And if this isn’t collective suicide by Homo sapiens, I don’t know what is.” Unfortunately for us, humans have created an unsustainable civilization supporting billions of people while at the same time destroying the very foundation upon which that system is dependent. Humans are by far outperforming the carbon-spewing volcanoes of past mass extinctions. Nicholas Money, renowned mycologist and author of many books, recently wrote:

Decades ago, Gerald Durrell, the famous conservationist, recognized that “the human race is in the position of a man sawing off the tree branch he is sitting on.” Thirty years after Durrell’s death, the human population has increased by 2 billion and the damage has intensified. The branch will snap now whether we keep s(sourcewing or not.

The timeline for extinctions is not known, but, sooner or later, the disappearing mammals will be joined by the other groups of animals. Almost everything will be leaving the metaphorical ark, creeping down the gangplank into oblivion. Millions of other species, seen and unseen, including plants, seaweeds, and fungi will be leaving, too. The tiniest of organisms will inherit the planet, but great gulps of the microbial world will also disappear in the depths of this planetary holocaust…

Exact dates are not known, but mankind’s final fate can be seen scrawled upon the familiar checklist for mass extinctions which we are quickly ticking off, one by one. As Ward points out, every time there has been a major disruption in Earth’s delicate biogeochemical carbon cycle, there has been a mass extinction. Today that disruption is happening on a timescale much faster than at any time in the past, even faster than the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs. During the K-T extinction, the immediate impact of the asteroid killed only the large animals. It took thousands of years for the consequent climate change to kill off smaller organisms. Current trends are exponentially faster, not only with anthropogenic climate disruption incinerating the biosphere within a lifetime but also by a multi-pronged attack from other human activities such as chemical and plastic pollution, the global spread of invasive species, and humanity’s massive overdraw on the planet’s resources.

If one were to equate Earth’s geologic history to a calendar year, modern humans have been around for a mere 37 minutes while managing to consume 1/3rd of Earth’s natural resources in just the last 0.2 seconds. The biomass of wild mammals has fallen by 83% since prehistory and it is projected that by 2050 humans will have eliminated 38–46% of all biodiversity from the planet. 70% of the planet’s land area has been altered by humans, with 40% considered degraded. By 2050, an area of land the size of South America will be further degraded. Nearly all of the marine biosphere has been degraded. Now Modern man has set his sights on wringing the last dollar of profit from the already dying oceans in what is being heralded as the “Blue Acceleration”, a not-so-clever play of words on the Great Acceleration referring to the period starting around 1950 when measurements of humanity’s impact on the planet’s resources went hyperbolic:

As pressures on Earth’s land grow and terrestrial resources look increasingly exhausted, governments and corporations are seeing the next big wins on, in and under the high seas. Whether it is mineral exploration, shipping, energy, tourism, desalination, cable laying, bioprospecting or more, ocean-based industries are picking up speed fast.

This “blue acceleration” has many people worried…With the power to profit from remote ocean resources growing rapidly, and the laws that govern their exploitation less than clear, we risk a free-for-all in the deep. “Our society has been based on the degradation of nature, destruction of nature,” says marine ecologist Enric Sala…

The new plunge into the ocean has come about in part because technologies – from ocean drilling and offshore wind turbines to desalination plants and factory trawlers – have made it possible. “A lot of offshore industries were unthinkable even just a few decades ago,” says Jouffray.

And so it goes, Homo sapiens onward march of eating the seed corn and leaving a husk of a planet for future generations …if there are to be any.

Back to Peter Ward and that checklist for mass extinction…The second step after a large release of heat trapping gasses is that Earth’s poles will start warming up much faster than the rest of the globe, melting the polar icecaps and reducing the heat differential between the equator and higher latitudes. A recent study found that the Arctic is heating up as much as seven times faster than the global average. The Antarctic is warming four times faster than the global average. This diminishing heat differential between the higher latitudes and the equator leads to the third step which is that ocean currents and atmospheric jet streams slow down and become stagnant and swampish. As professor Ward points out, swamps have a lot of nasty, toxic aspects to them such as hydrogen sulfide. This has happened to the oceans many times in Earth’s history with deadly consequences, the most recent being the PETM extinction which was associated with the largest deep-sea mass extinction event in the last 93 million years. Less than 5% of sea creatures survived. The oceans became a poisonous and miasmic brew of acidification, hypoxia and sulfide gases. Deep ocean upwellings injected hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere, laying waste to plants and animals. This killer gas rose to the upper atmosphere and also attacked the ozone layer, allowing deadly ultraviolet radiation from the sun to amplify the destruction of plant and animal life. Fossil spores contained in strata from the PETM extinction show deformities consistent with damage from UV radiation. Major disruptions in the hydrologic cycle occurred with evidence of increased continental runoff. Land suffered extreme precipitation events. Dinoflagellates, tiny organisms that ooze toxins and create deadly algal blooms called ‘red tides’, flourished in the nearly 100°F surface water of the equator. Less than a third of the large animal species made it. Nearly all trees died. No ice existed on the planet during that time. Sea levels were around 300 feet higher than now.

Today we are pumping heat trapping gases into the atmosphere nine to tens times higher than during the PETM extinction. We are just four generations away from matching the chemical composition of the atmosphere that caused that die-off event. However, we are already seeing major changes in the Earth’s climate system that align with the third step toward a mass extinction. Proxy data (like coral data, ocean sediments, and land-based data) along with modern-day instrumentation show an intense weakening of the AMOC, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, in the past 200 years. And the Gulf Steam, a component of the AMOC, is also showing signs of collapse. We are in the process of turning off the global ocean conveyor belt that keeps the ocean oxygenated and helps regulate the Earth’s climate. Ocean acidity has increased about 30% from preindustrial times to the early 21st century, a pace faster than any known in Earth’s geologic past. The volume of anoxic ocean waters has quadrupled since the 1960s, and evidence suggests that temperature increases explain about 50% of oxygen loss in the upper 1000 meters of the ocean. Ocean stratification due to climate change has increased 18% in the top 150 meters of the oceans since 1960. Stratified ocean layers have a number of negative effects such as preventing the mixing and transport of heat, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nutrients to the lower depths of the oceans. It was only recently, November 2021, that a group of scientists issued a plea to governments for establishing a global monitoring system to track the loss of oxygen in the oceans causing dead zones:

“There is a pressing need to document and predict hypoxic episodes and hotspots of low oxygen in order to take protective actions for aquaculture, put in place precautionary measures for affected fisheries, and monitor the wellbeing of important fish stocks,” Limburg said.

“Without this understanding, we are in the dark about impacts that have large economic-ecological implications.”…

“These problems are getting worse because we are not solving the problems of nutrient run-off and our waters are continuing to warm.

Stalled Rossby waves in the Jet Stream linked to extreme weather events have increased significantly in the last twenty years. U.S. crop losses due to drought and flooding have trippled since 1995. Onward we march into oblivion.

Despite the horrors described thus far, what really scares Professor Ward is sea level rise. Ward believes that the volcano of mankind will sputter out before we reach the levels required for a full-fledged Canfield Ocean, and negative feedback loops in the climate system will pull Earth back from the brink. The “Canfield Ocean”, a sulfidic and partially oxic ocean, existed for more than 40% of Earth history, between the Archean and Ediacaran periods. It would take millennia to reach that state again, but humans are supercharging the process to get there by releasing into the ocean vast quantities of nutrients from agricultural fertilizer, soil erosion, industrial waste and sewage, in addition to the ever-growing release of CO2 and methane emissions. Humans have become a geologic force breaching most if not all of the planetary boundaries that make Earth hospitable for life. The mechanisms required for Earth to return to a dead, toxic planet may have already been irreversibly set into motion.

Getting back to Ward’s fear, the most recent report on sea level rise states that it is accelerating with an increase of one foot expected along U.S. coasts by 2050. And that is only if emissions are curbed now. Otherwise, expect up to 5 feet. The researchers say that one foot of SLR over the next three decades is equal to the total that occurred over the past century. Just one foot of vertical rise in sea level will swallow up 100 feet of shoreline if the slope is just 1% or more, a typical slope for most coastlines. To make matters worse, most coastal cities are sinking at a rate faster than the seas are rising. Thus within the next few decades, we could see several hundred feet of shoreline swallowed up along coasts of America and around the world, creating the largest human migration in history. Ward believes we’ll have six feet of sea level rise by 2080 which will destroy a big percentage of the world’s rice production, primarily through salinization. Rice is the number one food source for a majority of the world population today. Sea level rise alone could devastate global trade, not to mention the inevitable damage to ports from stronger storms. The latest IPCC report made it clear that parts of the planet are fast becoming uninhabitable:

Life in some locations on the planet is rapidly reaching the point where it will be too hot for the species that live there to survive, international climate experts said in a report Monday.

“With climate change, some parts of the planet will become uninhabitable,” said German scientist Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of Working Group II for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produced the report released in Berlin…

…Increased heat waves, droughts and floods are already exceeding plants’ and animals’ tolerance thresholds, driving mass mortalities in species such as trees and corals, according to the report…

…Sherilee Harper, a lead author on the North American chapter and an associate professor at the University of Alberta’s public health school, said she was personally struck by the effect climate change already is having on the “physical and mental health of many Americans.”

Peter Ward then brings up something I don’t remember hearing about global warming. The higher temperatures are disrupting the sperm fertility of organisms. Ward says it’s an existential threat to the amount of food we can produce. Recent studies show this to be true and the damage continues across generations:

…according to new research. New findings reveal that heatwaves damage sperm in insects – with negative impacts for fertility across generations. The research team say that male infertility during heatwaves could help to explain why climate change is having such an impact on species populations, including climate-related extinctions in recent years.

Nate and Peter then get into the societal ignorance preventing humans from addressing any serious problem, let alone the existential threat of anthropogenic climate disruption. Peter says, “How could we, as a species, take something as simple as masks and turn it into a political ploy where the level of ignorance will kill you, will kill you?!?” Nate then explains how social media algorithms are set up to highlight the most polarizing content in order to generate more user activity since their business model is based on user engagement. In order to keep users online, the social media platforms are also designed to be very addictive such as with the infinite scroll feature and the “like” button.

In 2017, Facebook’s former president, Sean Parker, said publicly that the company sought to consume users’ time as much as possible, and that the act was “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology”…”That means that we needed to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever… It’s a social validation feedback loop… You’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology…” – link

There is no fixing this dysfunctional social media ecosystem because it is operating exactly as intended. Our profit-driven economic system is rooted in inequality, exploitation, dispossession, and environmental destruction. And encouraging the public to turn off the horror show of climate chaos and biodiversity annihilation are essential for this system to continue. Exploiting tribal biases is a good way to keep the plebs fighting amongst themselves as the last dollar is extracted from a dying planet. Nate asks, “If we can’t have a discussion on what’s real or not with COVID, how are we going to have one about the ocean’s ecosystems and Earth systems and our collective future?” Indeed.

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Heads-Up! Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

26 Wednesday Jan 2022

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

≈ 321 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Adam McKay, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropogenic Mass Extinction, Arctic Ice Albedo, Arctic Ice Melt, Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Celebrity Worship, Chemical Pollution, Climate Change, Climate Change Feedback Loops, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Commercialization, Commodification of Nature, Cryosphere, Don't Look Up, Doomsday Preppers, Dr. Randall Mindy, Ecological Overshoot, Elon Musk, Fossil Fuel Industry, Global Forest Die-Off, Global Warming, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Interstellar Colonization, Janie Orlean, Jason Orlean, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Kate Dibiasky, Leonardo DiCaprio, Loss of Biodiversity, MAGA rallies, Mark Rylance, Meryl Streep, Persecution of Environmental Activists, Peter Isherwell, Planetary Boundaries, Prof Tim Garrett, Professor Harold R. Wanless, Sea Level Rise, Techno-Fix, Techno-Utopians, Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctic Ice Sheet Melt

“I’m telling you that we’re putting our kids onto a global school bus that will with 98% probability end in a deadly crash.” ~ Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director Emeritus of Potsdam Institute

I recently saw the movie ‘Don’t Look Up’ after avoiding it since its release and I must say, that movie mirrors the tragic state of our society to a T. When you see Dr. Randall Mindy (DiCaprio) finally losing his cool, raging against a shallow, celebrity-idolizing, commercialized society on some glib TV talk show, this was not a stretch for the actor (an ardent environmental activist) who simply had to replace the oncoming fictional comet with the asteroid of abrupt climate change currently bearing down on us. At first, no one will listen to the scientist’s warning, not even the President of the United States Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) who is more worried about her polling numbers and keeping her campaign contributors happy than being bothered by an existential threat to civilization. Once tech guru Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) plants a bug in the President’s ear about how the comet could be exploited for its trillions of dollars worth of rare earth minerals, then all bets are off for deflecting the oncoming catastrophe. The creepy Techno-Utopist Isherwell reflects our own society’s blind worship of technology and consumerism as the answer to all its ills, when in reality they are only further alienating us from the natural world that underpins our survival. Throughout the movie, there are beautiful clips of nature that briefly flash across the screen, reminding me of what we are losing in our ongoing sixth mass extinction. Modern man and the havoc he is wreaking on the planet is happening in a microsecond when viewed in geologic time scales, but humans have trouble seeing it because we live an ephemeral existence, easily inured to an ever impoverished world.

Labeling the comet’s collision course with Earth as mere fear-mongering, politicians and TV talking heads manage to politicize the threat amongst the population, hence the title of the movie. Throngs of mindless people attending political rallies while wearing trucker caps with the slogan ‘Don’t Look Up’ reminded me of scenes from the MAGA crowd in thrall to their grift-scheming conman. Those who speak too much about the reality of the approaching comet are ziptied, blinded with a hood over their head, hauled off to an undisclosed location, and compelled to stay quiet by the authorities. In our real world, a fate much worse than that awaits those who oppose fossil fuel companies, miners, loggers, and others who are destroying the planet. Only when the comet and its long tail become clearly visible in the sky do people take the threat seriously, but by then it is too late. Back to reality, there’s no indication that such a tipping point in public consciousness has changed our trajectory towards ecological disintegration and collapse of civilization. Near the end of the movie as the planet-killing comet is colliding with Earth, Dr. Mindy’s family and a few of his colleagues are holding hands at their last supper and Dr. Mindy says, “We really did have everything, didn’t we?” The same can be said of what we are losing in today’s unfolding anthropogenic mass extinction. A thousand species a day, each a product of eons of evolution and designed for a specific purpose, being permanently erased from this planet along with any sort of stable and predictable climate means we are trashing Eden and descending into the hellscape depicted in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. This most recent study confirms past warnings:

“Drastically increased rates of species extinctions and declining abundances of many animal and plant populations are well documented, yet some deny that these phenomena amount to mass extinction,” said Robert Cowie, lead author of the study, in a press release. “This denial is based on a highly biased assessment of the crisis which focuses on mammals and birds and ignores invertebrates, which of course constitute the great majority of biodiversity.”…“Dedicated conservation biologists and conservation agencies are doing what they can, focused mainly on threatened birds and mammals, among which some species may be saved from the extinction that would otherwise ensue,” the paper said. “But we are pessimistic about the fate of most of the Earth’s biodiversity, much of which is going to vanish without us ever knowing of its existence.”…The researchers write that it is crucial to fight against the crisis and manipulating it is an abrogation of moral responsibility.

Of course the ones in charge, blinded by their greedy dream to profit from an oncoming disaster, surreptitiously escape Earth on a rocket ship, cryogenically preserved until they reach a distant Earth-like planet in the Goldilocks Zone of another solar system. This colonization of some other habitable planet by Earth-bound humans is a fetish amongst techno-optimists and futurists, but it is a pipe-dream not only because it is impossible due to basic biological constraints and technological infeasibility but also for the simple reason that if we cannot keep our house in order here on the planet that gave birth to us, we don’t deserve another chance. And for God’s sake, can Elon Musk stop ranting that humans have to get off Earth because all life will be snuffed out after the sun theoretically expands into a giant red star five billion years from now? Just as in the movie, our tech demigods will lead us over the cliff while planning their own getaway to a private underground bunker or second homes far away in some distant country. It is frightening to think that we are only seeing the beginning of this unfolding global ecological apocalypse that will affect every living thing on Earth. Nearly all past mass extinctions have occurred due to a disruption of the carbon cycle, only now it is happening at a rate of speed multiple times faster than previous ones and with humans serving as the architect of their own demise. In the last 500 million years, across 6 mass extinctions and the countless rise and fall of global temperatures and sea levels, the only time the climate changed faster was 66 million years ago when Earth got hit by a 10km asteroid that killed off 75% of all species. Mass extinction events turn freshwater bodies into toxic soup, and we’re seeing the same thing happen today. But fret not, technology will save us and stock prices are up this week, not to mention that our social media rankings are going gangbusters.

It has been said that when civilizations begin to die, they go insane. Perhaps Stoicism and Buddhism are the most useful philosophies in an age where the future is bleak and no one seems to be facing reality. After half a century of dire warnings from noted scientists, numerous Climate Action Inaction Summits (rigged to fail), revelations of decades-old climate studies from Fossil Fuel Corporations themselves proving all along that they knew, and worsening extreme weather events as well as the planet’s quickly disappearing cryosphere (what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic), here is where we stand today:

The world’s insatiable appetite for electricity is setting up a climate disaster

A report published Friday by the International Energy Agency found that global demand for electricity surged 6% in 2021, fueled by a colder winter and the dramatic economic rebound from the pandemic. That drove both prices and carbon emissions to new records.

The growth in demand was particularly intense in China, where it jumped by about 10%…

…Electricity generated by renewables grew by 6% globally last year, while coal-fired generation leaped 9% due to high demand and skyrocketing natural gas prices, which made it look like a more attractive option.

Carbon dioxide emissions from power generation rose 7% as a result, reaching an all-time high after declining the previous two years…

…The IEA found that emissions from the power sector will “remain around the same level from 2021 to 2024,” even though they need to decline “sharply” for the world to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the worst effects of climate change.

As physicist Tim Garrett has pointed out, “Any new energy source adds impetus to the conversion of raw resources into the stuff of civilization, accelerating growth and future demands for all energy types. Renewables add to the consumption, they do not replace.” Also, gains in energy efficiency are simply supplanted by more growth.

Keep in mind that even if we were to magically reduce our CO2 emissions overnight, the opposite of what is happening, we will never again see the climate we grew up in. It is never returning. Realize that the current level of CO2 equivalent GHGs already exceeds 500 ppm. The increased pace of extreme weather events we are now getting from climate change is shocking even those scientists who predicted it. The Arctic is greening with the treeline advancing northward 40 to 50 meters every year from what was once an annual increase of only a few centimeters. Adding yet another pernicious feedback loop to the climate crisis, beavers are moving into the warming Arctic in greater numbers and radically transforming the landscape with their dams, further accelerating the thaw of permafrost that releases methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A worrying new study shows Earth’s ability to reflect solar radiation is weakening — as the ocean is heating it is failing to generate clouds that reflect back sunlight. Astoundingly, half of that weakening has happened in the last four years:

“The albedo drop was such a surprise to us when we analyzed the last 3 years of data – many scientists hoped that a warmer Earth may lead to more clouds and higher albedo which would then help to moderate warming and balance the climate system But this shows the opposite is true”

If this trend of Earth dimming due to climate change continues, climate models will have to (once more) be significantly revised to include this additional net warming. We are headed for a Miocene climate during which the Antarctic ice volume was half of what it is today and the Arctic Ocean was ice-free in winter. Sea levels were 130 feet or higher and temperatures were about 5 to 8ºC warmer. Our ancestors were apes at that time. The European shoreline was 120 miles inland from today’s coast and dense swamp-forests resembling modern Louisiana clogged coasts and estuaries in Denmark and Germany. Nothing living in its region today is adapted to what will come. Remember those trees in the Pacific Northwest that sizzled in the heatwave of last year’s summer? A new study paints a dire picture for their future, as well as ours:

“By some estimates, it’s probably the largest scorch event in history,” Oregon State University researcher Christopher Still told OPB’s “Think Out Loud” on Monday. “I mean this is a new thing for us to be seeing on Earth, so it’s sort of a dubious milestone.”…

…“If this just keeps going, if these are happening every five or 10 years, it’s gonna be really grim I think for most of the forests of the Pacific Northwest.”

As the saying goes, “Lessons in life will be repeated until they are learned.” And so humans have yet to understand their place in the world, punch drunk on more than a century-long bacchanalia of fossil fuel burning. In the end, nature will put us in our place, and not in a good way. It is interesting to note that right around the peak of industrial civilization’s collapse, humans will have evidently lost their biological ability reproduce due to chemical pollution. We have saturated the Earth with so many and so much chemicals that we have breached another planetary boundary:

The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet now threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, scientists have said.

Plastics are of particularly high concern, they said, along with 350,000 synthetic chemicals including pesticides, industrial compounds and antibiotics. Plastic pollution is now found from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans, and some toxic chemicals, such as PCBs, are long-lasting and widespread.

The study concludes that chemical pollution has crossed a “planetary boundary”, the point at which human-made changes to the Earth push it outside the stable environment of the last 10,000 years.

“There has been a fiftyfold increase in the production of chemicals since 1950 and this is projected to triple again by 2050,” said Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) who was part of the study team. “The pace that societies are producing and releasing new chemicals into the environment is not consistent with staying within a safe operating space for humanity.”

Pfft!!! Just another fancy-schmancy warning by some pedantic scientists for the world to ignore. No need to worry, we can live in hermetically sealed bubbles that filter out all that nasty stuff, can’t we? All of our socializing and entertainment take place indoors on digital screens anyway, doesn’t it? But wait, there’s more. The Doomsday Glacier is coming for us. The Thwaites Glacier is the size of Florida and it is cracking apart on the surface and melting from below, loosening its anchor on the undersea mountain that holds it in place. If this glacier goes, it could unleash much more ice from the West Antarctic ice sheet that is held in place behind it, causing an immediate and catastrophic effect (10 feet) of sea level rise. One scientist says it could go within a few years. This development falls in line with what another expert, Professor Harold R. Wanless, had said years ago about sea level rise and climate change—that sea level rise does not happen in a gradual and linear fashion but rather as sudden, large pulses. I blogged about him six years ago, and what he said back then in the context of what is happening now gives me chills:

…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.

Just a couple years ago, a study of ancient ice in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet showed that multiple meters of sea level rise occurred from less than 2ºC of warming at the beginning of the last interglacial period. As we are once again witnessing today, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is highly sensitive to collapse from slight temperature increases.

Circling back to the movie I was discussing earlier, there is a scene in which junior astronomer and Ph.D. student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is with a group of disaffected youth who are discussing conspiracy theories regarding the global elite, and Dibiasky says in an exasperated voice, “You guys, the truth is way more depressing. They’re not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for.” Perhaps the truth is even more depressing than that. In the grand scheme of things, free will appears to be nothing more than a figment of our imagination. Like microbes proliferating in a Petri dish and dying off after overshooting their confines, humans are essentially replicating the same process albeit on a planetary scale. Evidently, we are biologically programmed to eventually crash and burn. Just as with all other species, humans have the imperative to expand their numbers, exploiting all resources until stopped by environmental constraints, and those limits to growth are fast approaching as we speak.

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Man In The Box

18 Sunday Jul 2021

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

≈ 87 Comments

Tags

Abrupt Climate Change, Aldous Huxley, Anthropocene Extinction, Atomization of Society, Chemical Pollution, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Dr. Peter Ward, Dystopic Future, Ecocide, Global Warming, Heat Dome, Loss of Biodiversity, Micro-Plastic Pollution, Ocean Acidification, Ocean Dead Zones, Pacific NW Heatwaves, Techno-Fix, Widespread Deoxygenation of Temperate Lakes, Widespread Ocean Anoxia

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”  ~ Aldous Huxley

The foundation beneath our house of cards is beginning to buckle and heave. For far too long, humans have poked the sleeping monster of abrupt climate change and it’s starting to awaken. Thus far, nearly a thousand deaths in British Columbia alone are likely attributable to hyperthermia caused by a persistent heat dome that has spiked temperatures to unprecedented levels. Take note that we are seeing these unreal temperature spikes at the end of a cooler La Nina cycle. When these heat domes form during the next warmer El Nino cycle, the results will be disastrous. We have now made such mass casualty events 150 times more likely with our heat-trapping gases which have doubled the earth’s energy imbalance in just the last 15 years. Over a billion sea creatures are estimated to have cooked to death off the western shores of Canada. “Eventually, we just won’t be able to sustain these populations of filter feeders on the shoreline to be anywhere near the extent that we’re used to,” says Chris Harley, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia. This will have massive effects up and down many ecological networks. Remember last year when Australia’s mega-fires killed or harmed 3 billion animals? I thought that horrific trauma would be mankind’s epiphany on climate change, but it’s clear that as long as there is a dollar to be made there will be justification for genocide and ecocide. The planet’s last remaining natural resources and biodiversity are being liquidated at breakneck speed in order to maintain the colossal enterprise of industrial civilization. 

Modern society is more connected than ever digitally, but not emotionally or intimately. Too fragmented and dysfunctional to save itself, we exist not as human beings but as consumers and statistical numbers on a spreadsheet. Thus it is easy to write off the millions of deaths from industrial pollution as a cost of doing business, especially when the rules of the game are written for shareholders far removed from the damage being wrought. Our suicidal march into the abyss seems to be preordained because we have paid no heed to an endless stream of dire scientific reports and warnings that span decades. Like the collapse of the Surfside apartment building in Miami where the residents lived oblivious to warnings signs from decades ago, the collapse of industrial civilization will follow a similar response to anthropogenic climate breakdown. At this late stage, techno-optimists still cling to the belief that somehow we can adapt and thrive in an inhospitable and deteriorating post-Holocene epoch. At the same time, disinformation and propaganda continue to be spread by those who are outright denying the growing existential threat. The end result is the same, no matter which side prevails. Humans can’t even agree on what is reality, so how could they possibly organize a coherent response in time:

There is no escape from this cage modern man has constructed for himself. As lead scientist Dr. Robert Rohde at @BerkeleyEarth points out, 78% of humanity’s energy systems are powered by fossil fuels as of 2020. Oil and gas took 90 years to displace coal as the main energy source, illustrating that transitions take a very long time and ‘renewables’ remain a small fraction of total energy consumed. Scientists are becoming increasingly unnerved:

“We should be alarmed because the IPCC models are just not good enough,” Dame Julia Slingo of the @metoffice says.

“The obvious acceleration of the breakdown of our stable climate simply confirms that – when it comes to the climate emergency – we are in deep, deep s***!” says UCL’s @ProfBillMcGuire. “Many in the climate science community would agree, in private if not in public.”

“It blows my mind that we could get the temperatures that we’re observing here in the Pacific north-west, especially on the west sides of the Cascades that have that proximity to the ocean, that it could get that hot for so many days in a row,” said Nick Bond, Washington state climatologist. “I would have been willing to guess something like that in the middle of the century, in the latter part of the century.”

“The extreme nature of the record, along with others, is a cause for real concern,” says veteran scientist Professor Sir Brian Hoskins. “What the climate models project for the future is what we would get if we are lucky. The models’ behaviour may be too conservative.”

As has been pointed out before, but which is still not accepted let alone understood by the vast majority, is that even if we employed techno-fixes such as Bill Gates’ Solar Radiation Management Company, it would not stop climate change’s evil twin, ocean acidification, which is threatening to collapse the entire marine ecosystem. A recent paper by marine biologists and environmental consultants has warned that human society faces extinction if nothing is done to reverse the destruction of the oceans:

Over the last 70 years since the 1950’s and the production of toxic forever chemicals and plastic, more than 50% of all marine life, including plants and animals under 1 mm in size, have been lost from the world’s oceans, and that decline continues at a rate of 1% year on year…Over the next 25 years, pH will continue to drop from pH8.04 to pH7.95, and carbonate-based life forms will simply dissolve. This will result with an estimated 80% to 90% loss of all remaining marine life when compared to the 1950’s. Becoming carbon neutral will not stop the pH from dropping to 7.95, and even in the unlikely event of the world achieving Net Zero by 2030 it will not stop the pH dropping to less than pH7.95. Coupled with the micro-plastic and toxic chemical stressors on marine life, the GOES team believe there will be a trophic cascade collapse of the entire marine ecosystem.

Adding to this warning is another recent study showing that freshwater lakes are losing oxygen at a rate 9.3 times that of the oceans:

That matters, because not only do we get much of our drinking water from lakes and use them for recreational activities, but they support an extensive variety of species. “These substantial declines in oxygen potentially threaten biodiversity, especially the more oxygen-sensitive species,”…Rose identified a second problem too: Deep water is becoming less clear because of a host of factors including erosion, algal growth, and fertilizer runoff from nearby agricultural fields and residential developments. Murkier waters make plants less likely to survive, which means less photosynthesis and less oxygen down below. And that, of course, is bad news for the lakes’ creatures. “Just like humans, every complex life form on the planet depends on oxygen,” Rose says. “In water, that’s in the dissolved form.”

There was a study a few years ago which concluded that deoxygenation of the world’s waters from a warming world is what really drove the end-Permian mass extinction. The lead author is quoted as saying:

“This study shows that we’re on that same road toward extinction, and the question is how far down it we go.”

Keep in mind that we don’t have to reach the same elevated levels of CO2 in past geologic extinction events for things to get really nasty, causing modern civilization to crumble. Remember also that the Anthropocene Extinction has multiple prongs such as chemical and plastic pollution, deforestation, and other manmade pressures on the environment that did not exist in Earth’s history. According to paleontologist Dr. Peter Ward, all major extinctions occurred when CO2 levels exceeded 1000ppm. Past extinction events took hundreds of thousands to millions of years to play out, but our current rate of change is 25,000 times faster than the last known event (Paleocene Thermal Extinction) which took a million years for CO2 to increase by 100ppm. We are on track to reach 1000ppm within a century, but we’ll never get there of our own volition because our civilization will be toast long before then; however, once tipping points in the climate system are breached, positive feedback loops will have been set in motion that will propel CO2 levels upward beyond our control. For instance, the Amazon is now emitting more carbon than it is absorbing. In an interview four years ago, Dr Ward gave this warning:

“…we really are going to have unintended consequences and much more rapid heating than even the models say — for the simple reason that the [IPCC] models are highly conservative, too conservative.”

You may be asking yourself when humans will finally wise up and end this madness. Henri L Vichier-Guerre, a reader of this blog, recently posted a quote from a very good book entitled Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change by Clive Hamilton in 2010:

…even with the most optimistic set of assumptions – the ending of deforestation, a halving of emissions associated with food production, global emissions peaking in 2020 and then falling by 3 per cent a year for a few decades – we have no chance of preventing emissions rising well above a number of critical tipping points that will spark uncontrollable climate change. The Earth’s climate would enter a chaotic era lasting thousands of years before natural processes eventually establish some sort of equilibrium. Whether human beings would still be a force on the planet, or even survive, is a moot point. One thing seems certain: there will be far fewer of us.

As Henri L Vichier-Guerre points out, none of those optimistic things have happened in the intervening years. On the contrary, the ecological destruction has accelerated and the chances of anyone at all surviving grows more remote with each passing year. Henri goes on to quote the following on why no one in any significant seat of power is talking about our impending doom:

Not everyone believes we should be completely forthright with the general public about the depths of our crisis, including many of those in our Government.

Because it’s far too late to do anything to mitigate the crisis.

Far too late to avoid a global environmental, ecological and economic catastrophe.

This may go some way to explaining why the general public is still not being told the truth by Governments around the world.

It may go some way to explaining why many of the super-rich have already set up lavish underground ‘doomsday bunkers’ where they and their families can bug out when the shit hits the fan.

We have plenty of bread and circus distractions to keep us preoccupied until the very end. Television did not get its name ‘The Boob Tube’ for nothing. Now we have the infinite scroll of websites to hypnotize and control the masses. Click that ‘Like’ button. Sophisticated social media algorithms feed you what you want to see and hear 24/7. Cognitive biases are reinforced and facts no longer matter in a world suffering from severe truth decay. Aldous Huxley’s vision of a world driven by absolute consumerism that sacrifices human values and controls the masses with a non-stop supply of diversions via mindless entertainment and sensorial stimulation has become a dystopic reality. Just as in his book, it’s all happening in broad daylight with the tacit acceptance of everyone as we watch the world burn.

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Age of Annihilation

04 Friday Sep 2020

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

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Amazon Fires, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropocene Mass Extinction, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Coronavirus Pandemic, COVID-19, Greenland Ice Melt, Greenwashing, Heatwaves, Marine Heatwaves, MegaFires, Pyrocene, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Berry, Zoonotic Diseases

“We must now understand that our own well-being can be achieved only through the well-being of the entire natural world around us.” ~ Thomas Berry

As governments stared glass-eyed at what was unfolding in China earlier this year, the fragility of modern life’s interconnectedness was soon to be laid bare by a microscopic organism. Within a couple months of the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, airline travel from China had spread the novel virus to more than 60 countries. Despite decades of warnings about the inevitability of such an event, politicians had paid about as much lip service to preventing the next pandemic as they had to dealing with climate change. As has been warned by health experts, the best we can hope for is to blunt the effects of the COVID-19 disease on the global population; eradicating it will be futile. Something similar could be said of the legacy effects of our CO2 emissions which will haunt life on Earth for time immemorial.

A study from 2014 found the total number of infectious disease outbreaks has more than quadrupled between 1980 and 2010. Approximately 75% of all emerging infectious diseases originate from animals and chances for pandemics are increasing as humanity’s growing assault on the natural world disrupts what remains of the planet’s ecosystems. If you need further evidence that we are annihilating life on Earth, consider that the microscopic mite, among the oldest and most plentiful invertebrates on the planet and a keystone species in many ecosystems, is disappearing at least 1,000 times the natural rate. More novel zoonotic diseases will eventually be unleashed into the bloodstream of the globalized economy as corporations revive parasitic growth at the expense of a habitable planet. The coronavirus pandemic is a symptom of our unfolding Anthropocene Mass Extinction which is accelerating.

The current pandemic may well mark the beginning of the end for growth as we knew it. In the U.S. right now, there are 29 million unemployed and tens of thousands of small businesses that have closed during the pandemic will never reopen. In the Age of Environmental Breakdown, there can never be a return to normal. For the normal that industrial civilization has become accustomed to is the very thing ripping to pieces those white picket-fenced lives in suburbia. A Biden presidency may bring back some sense of sanity and order to those pursuing the illusion of the American Dream, but it won’t alter global civilization’s current trajectory toward an increasingly chaotic world of never-ending disasters. The synergistic effects of biodiversity collapse, climate change, and industrial pollution will act as a growing weight on the economy.

We just learned that Greenland’s ice sheets crossed a tipping point two decades ago and will never recover, as far as human timescales are concerned. Nothing will bring them back except another ice age, and humans have managed to erase the next one scheduled to have occurred some 50,000 years hence. 100,000 years will have past before the planet completely rids itself of the CO2 humans have loaded into the atmosphere. Second only to Antarctica in terms of ice volume, Greenland’s melt-off could eventually contribute 23 feet of global sea level rise. Antarctica’s ice sheets have also been found to be much more vulnerable to collapse than previously known, as rising atmospheric temperatures melt their surface and a warming ocean destabilizes them from below. Coastal erosion, flooding, and soil salinization from sea level rise are growing drags on the economy. About 40% of the global population lives near the coast and will account for the largest mass migration in human history. Indeed, billions of U.S. tax dollars are now being used in a new strategy to relocate entire neighborhoods from coastal regions persistently hit by flooding in recent years.

With the meltdown of the Earth’s cryosphere, we are witnessing a large-scale catastrophic disruption to a critical part of the Earth system under which all life has adapted. In particular, the relatively stable climate of the Holocene is what allowed for the development of agriculture and human civilization. We no longer live in that era; We have entered the chaos of the Anthropocene, a time of deadly climate disruption, social upheaval, mass extinction, and ultimately collapse of industrial civilization. With arctic amplification weakening jet streams, larger and more intense heat domes now form over geographic regions to help spark megafires, power grid blackouts, and heat-related deaths. In Phoenix AZ, a heatwave just obliterated a previous record of most days over 110°F (50 plus), and another record-breaking heatwave is on its way as I speak. California’s Death Valley just recorded the highest temperature on Earth since reliable records began. The six most recent years (2014-2019) and 2020 have been the hottest ever recorded, with each decade since 1980 being hotter than the previous.

The recent heatwave that thawed Siberia’s tundra, set it on fire, and caused an ecological disaster by collapsing a diesel fuel reservoir, could never have happened without the massive spike in CO2 emissions from mankind’s fossil-fuel binge. Summer wildfires in the Arctic set a record this year, emitting 34% more CO2 than in the prior year. Fires in the Amazon jungle are the worst in a decade. Wildfires in Arizona this year have already scarred more land than in the prior two years. Colorado just logged the biggest fire in its history and California’s wildfires are already on track to break records even though the fire season has just begun. Globally, wildfires have increased 13% over the prior record-breaking year of 2019. A more apt name for the Anthropocene might be the Pyrocene – Age of Fire.

Heatwaves aren’t just striking on land; they are also cooking the oceans. Increasingly severe and frequent marine heatwaves(MHWs) have surged by more than 50% in recent decades. Warming oceans help create more destructive and more frequent hurricanes and typhoons. They also threaten biodiversity and ecosystem function on a global scale. Scientists have observed that stony corals around the world are hunkering down into survival mode, exhibiting the same traits as they did prior to the last great extinction. Let that sink in for a moment…Yes, a relatively primitive organism with a rudimentary nervous system is actually preparing for a mass extinction while the so-called ‘Wise Ape’ blissfully carries on destroying his very own life-support systems.

“It was incredibly spooky to witness how corals are now exhibiting the same traits as they did at the last major extinction event,” said Professor David Gruber, a researcher and marine biologist with The Graduate Center, CUNY and Baruch College. “Corals seem to be preparing to jump across an extinction boundary, while we are putting our foot further on the pedal.”

Apparently, coral are not hampered by politics in their decision-making processes. These creatures of the primordial seas will likely outsurvive the Self-Absorbed Ape who has insulated himself in a technological cocoon of false security, oblivious to the harsh physical laws of nature indifferently working to take him down. Hell, scientists are now finding microplastics in every human tissue they examine, and the health effects are unknown. How’s that for forethought?

Scientists can issue warnings about our impending demise until they are blue in the face, and they have, but they and the public are at the mercy of economic, financial, and political forces beyond anyone’s power. Couple that with the fact that the average person on the street has a Trump-level of comprehension about these existential crises and is being bombarded on social media by fake news that plays on emotions and deep-rooted inter-group distrust. Cheap energy and the individualistic consumer culture have created an illusion of abundance and destroyed any sort of communal cooperation which was once the basis of everyday life. I’ve walked this Earth for over five decades and have seen a steady and continuous degradation of the natural world; corporate greenwashing is rampant. The growth in ‘green energy’ has not displaced fossil fuel fuel consumption to any great degree; fossil fuels still supply 84% of global energy consumption. Worse yet, just to maintain our current growth in energy consumption would require an unattainable expansion in alternative energies. If one connects all the dots on our current state, then there is no refuting this most clear-eyed of scientific assessments:

“Given the momentum in both the Earth and human systems, and the growing difference between the ‘reaction time’ needed to steer humanity towards a more sustainable future, and the ‘intervention time’ left to avert a range of catastrophes in both the physical climate system (e.g., melting of Arctic sea ice) and the biosphere (e.g., loss of the Great Barrier Reef), we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse.”

The end of the world is the ‘cha-ching’ of a cash register as the last vestiges of nature are converted to dollars. Lest we forget, 71% of global emissions come from just 100 companies and more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988 originated from 25 corporate and state-owned entities. While the ultra-wealthy reap the profits of a poisoned ecology, the rest of the world is left to take the brunt of consequences from a world that grows more dangerous by the day. Those living on the edge who lost their livelihood during this pandemic are the collateral damage of an out-of-control socio-economic system whose incompatibility with life on Earth becomes more evident with each passing year. There’s nowhere to escape for most people because, to one degree or another, we are all entrapped in this system. The immutable laws of biology, physics, and chemistry have set an expiration date on America’s non-negotiable way of life, ensuring that many more will soon fall victim to the short-term greed of capitalism. As Stephen Hawking warned, “Stupidity and greed will kill off humans.”

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The Apocalypse Will Not Be Televised

28 Tuesday Jan 2020

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

≈ 71 Comments

Tags

Abrupt Climate Change, Anthropocene Extinction, Australian Bushfires, Climate Change Denial, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Extinction of Man, Fossil Fuel Industry, Omnicide, Overpopulation, Rupert Murdoch

“3D visualization” of the Australian fires by Anthony Hearsey, compiled from NASA satellite data collected across the span of a month/an injured koala bear sits alone on the ‘apocalyptic’ Kangaroo Island

The year is 2020 and climate change-related disasters are in full swing while at the same time, the most influential country in the world is under the leadership of someone who calls scientists “foolish fortune tellers.” Australia, another country being led to its slaughter by the willfully and criminally ignorant, is literally going up in flames as we speak. Its rich millennia-old evolutionary legacy is disappearing before our eyes. The pictures of charred kangaroo corpses entangled in barbed wire fences and koala bears curled up in the fetal position as they tried to flee the fires are gut-wrenching and should be a wake-up call to our leaders. The platypus, another of the country’s iconic creatures, is dying off in drought-stricken cesspools. To make matters worse, recent heavy rains are causing massive fish kills as bushfire ash washes into rivers. More than a billion creatures(excluding frogs, insects, other invertebrates, or livestock) are estimated to have perished, and the wildlife that do manage to survive the country’s apocalyptic conditions are now at risk of starvation. Scientists fear these fires are causing the extinction of entire species of insects which play a vital role in “processing waste, pollination, providing nutrition for other species, and myriad other ecological functions.” While warming at twice the global rate from humanity’s fossil fuel binge, Australia continues to be the biggest net exporter of coal in the world, thus fueling its own conflagration.

The Australian mega-fires are not a one-off, but just the latest manifestation of an increasingly disrupted global climate system. Australia’s fate was predicted by scientists many years ago. The forever legacy of greenhouse gas emissions means the dust won’s settle in any time scale appreciable to humans. Sea levels will continue to rise for millennia, droughts and storms will grow in frequency and intensity, thousand-year rains will become common occurrences, entire ecosystems will unravel, and the human experiment will undoubtedly come to an end. To quote an Australian on Reddit:

This is what disturbs me about my countrymen. This is not just a one-off terrible event, this is a permanent step down, a large nail in our collective coffin. Long before we recover from this, we will suffer it again, and again. Those poor animals. Worse than being glorified, or not televised, our collapse is being looked at without seeing. It is misunderstood and denied.

For those not from here I’d say that one can’t overstate what is happening here, it is truly awful. We will never recover.

Australia’s annual fire season is only at its midpoint, yet the massive pulse of carbon from these bushfires is now estimated at 900 million tons —double the country’s annual emissions. As horrific as the fires have made life on land, what’s happening in Australia’s oceans out of site and mind is equally disturbing, but of course this is not confined to Australia. Scientists have found that a ‘heat blob’ in the north Pacific ocean killed a million seabirds and wiped out 100 million cod.

We are destroying the life support systems to which all creatures, including man, are dependent, yet it does not appear that any climate disaster no matter how catastrophic will alter mankind’s tragic path to extinction. Wiping out an entire continent’s flora and fauna does not register on the Stock Market. No number of five-alarm fire warnings planet Earth sends will be heeded by this cabon-fueled corporate kleptocracy which carries us all toward a very dark future. Why would we expect any differently from an economic paradigm that tolerates no disruption as it plunders the planet in search of the almighty dollar? A report from two years ago called Australia’s extinction crisis a “national disgrace” and described its institutions tasked with protecting threatened plants and animals as “broken”. We see today that nothing has changed to prevent Australia’s natural treasures from disappearing into the black void of the Anthropocene extinction, never to be seen or heard from again. In fact, current assessments show extinction rates are accelerating:

  • Nature is in ‘unprecedented’ decline. A substantial proportion of assessed species are threatened with extinction and overall trends are deteriorating, with extinction rates increasing sharply in the past century.
  • This decline is a direct result of human activity, the most devastating being changes in land and sea use, including natural habitat destruction.
  • Since 1980, greenhouse gas emissions have doubled, raising average global temperatures by at least 0.7 degrees Celsius. 75% of fossil fuel burning and anthropogenic CO2 emissions in the atmosphere has occurred since 1970; their effects are just beginning to be felt.
  • In the near future, climate change is expected to surpass the impacts of land and sea use change as well as other drivers(direct exploitation of organisms, pollution, invasive alien species).
  • Increased human population and per capita consumption is a key driver of the above.
  • By destroying the foundations of Earth’s interconnected web of life, we are threatening our own health and existence.

I am loath to repeat these numbers because no price can be placed on intact ecosystems, but the economic costs of this year’s fire season in Australia are estimated to be approaching $100 billion, the costliest natural disaster in that country’s history. And in the U.S., the last decade has been ‘unprecedented‘:

The U.S. billion-dollar disaster damage costs over the last decade (2010-2019) were also historically large, exceeding $800 billion from 119 separate billion-dollar events. After adjusting for inflation, the U.S. experienced more than twice the number of billion-dollar disasters during the 2010s than the 2000s decade: 119 versus 59…Clearly, the historically large U.S. losses from hurricanes and wildfires over the last few years have further skewed the total distribution of extreme weather costs. This increase reflects a combination of increased exposure, vulnerability and the fact the climate change is playing an increasing role in the frequency of some types of extremes that lead to billion-dollar disasters.

The finance industry is starting to see that climate change is an existential crisis, yet offer no alternative to their ideological stalemate of infinite growth on a finite planet. In fact, they believe that the personal sacrifices needed to halt greenhouse gas emissions will create a public backlash towards such efforts. In other words, business-as-usual will rule the day until the hard laws of physics, chemistry, and biology make our bubble economy impossible. We’re undergoing that process right now as anthropogenic climate disruption returns planet Earth to the chaotic climatic conditions of the Pleistocene —a time in which organized societies and agriculture will be impossible. Water shortages, degraded soils, and loss of pollinators will only compound the problem. No amount of accounting tricks will bring back the habitability of the planet.

Cheap and abundant fossil fuels have given us modern science and technology which have allowed humans to feel detached and independent from nature, but when this civilization inevitably collapses we will once again be at the mercy of the natural world. If we have destroyed the biosphere and set in motion a mass extinction event at a time when we strongly need to rely on nature, then our prospects for survival are very grim indeed! Yet another study released this week shows that Earth’s biodiversity is crashing under a perfect storm of global warming, extreme weather events, and human activity. Collapse of industrial civilization and its vast amount of specialization along with a simultaneous planet-wide ecological collapse can very easily lead to human extinction. It’s not hard to imagine a Third World War being ignited by deteriorating environmental conditions and resource depletion as nations fall under the sway of propaganda from demagogues inciting fear, hatred, and violence.

With Earth Overshoot Day arriving ever earlier each year, we have arrived at the last stage of global civilization’s doubling time. The next twenty years will be the final tick of the clock in which our mass resource extraction, consumption, and waste irreparably damage the planet’s regenerative abilities and life support systems. Decades of greenwashing, empty rhetoric, and regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry have brought us to this precipice:

As you can see, any mitigation efforts at this late date rely heavily on the fantasy of carbon capture with nonexistent technologies that, truthfully, will never scale up to the enormous problem. To some degree or another, we are all in denial of what is unfolding in our final century as we go about our daily lives within a set of living arrangements completely incompatible to the survival of our descendants. Everyone is riding the peak of industrial civilization as we watch the world fall apart on our smart phones and LED TVs. In the meantime, the nightly news drones on about hyperpartisan politics and economic growth. That barely a vague mention is made in the news cycle of the most important story in mankind’s history tells you all you need to know about who controls mass media and why the story of our imminent demise will remain buried.

Our fossil record will be comprised mainly of plastics, radioactive waste, and billions of human bones and that of our domesticated animals. The remnants of wild animals will be extremely rare since we have supplanted them with our livestock. All civilizations, especially complex ones, eventually collapse. Ours, like many before, will be undone by overshoot of the environment’s carrying capacity, albeit this time on a planetary scale and with no second chance for a do-over.

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Greta Thunberg Speaks the Horrific Truth of Humanity’s Fate

28 Saturday Sep 2019

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

≈ 42 Comments

Tags

Abrupt Climate Change, Anthropogenic Mass Extinction, Climate Refugees, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Coral Die-Off, Deforestation, Dr. Kevin Anderson, Ecological Overshoot, Exponential Growth, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Fossil Fuel Industry, Greta Thunberg, Hubris of Man, Hurricane Dorian, Jason Box, Keeling Curve, Methane Release from Thawing Permafrost, Micro-Plastic Pollution, Mid-Pliocene Era, Neil Adger, Nicholas P. Money, Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction, Rachel Warren, Resource Depletion, Sea Level Rise, The Great Dying, Will Steffan

When a 16-year-old girl named Greta Thunberg spoke with trembling anger of the unspeakable crimes today’s adults are committing against her and future generations, a chill ran down my spine. She will be alive to see the pulses of rapid sea level rise, the unraveling of industrial agriculture, the mass migration of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, and the disintegration of Earth’s biosphere. Today’s world with the ever-worsening breakdown of the biosphere is much more dangerous than during the Cold War when the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation hung in the air like the sword of Damocles, as expressed by President Kennedy: “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.” Not only does the threat of nuclear war persist, the sword of abrupt climate breakdown now looms ever larger as governments are rendered impotent.

Scientists and the Red Cross recently warned the world is currently suffering at least one climate catastrophe per week and nearly two million people per week are needing humanitarian assistance. A UN global assessment confirms the planet is currently experiencing 2,500 conflicts over fossil fuel, water, food and land — conflicts directly related to the ongoing collapse of the earth’s biodiversity. No civilization in history has faced a complete reshuffling of the planet’s biosphere, let alone the ecological armageddon brought on by a Pandora’s box of pollutants from industrial civilization. Microplastics are literally raining from the sky. Irrevocably out-of-step with the natural world, modern civilization is destroying its host ecosystem by altering the geochemistry of the planet. A mass extinction event unlike any in Earth’s history is underway. Even if a small fraction of the global population survives this overshoot, it will take 10 million years for biodiversity to bounce back. Since atmospheric CO2 will ultimately be drawn down through a very slow natural process called sedimentation, the Earth will not reach pre-industrial CO2 levels again for more than 100,000 years. The last time CO2 levels were this high was 3 millions years ago during the Pliocene when temperatures were 3-4°C(5-7°F) higher globally than today, and sea levels were 15-20 meters(50-65 feet) higher. It was too warm for glacial ice sheets to even exist in the northern hemisphere.

At 412 ppm and rising, experts said temperature rises of 3-4C are likely now locked in.

What does any honest scientist have to say about mankind’s prospects in a 4°C world:

“There is a widespread view that a +4ºC future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond adaptation, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems and has a high probability of not being stable.”
Professor Kevin Anderson, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (Video, 58:00)

“We have already observed impacts of climate change on agriculture. We have assessed the amount of climate change we can adapt to. There’s a lot we can’t adapt to even at 2C. At 4C the impacts are very high and we cannot adapt to them.”
Rachel Warren, University of East Anglia

“There is a growing sense of panic in those who really understand what a 4°C world might be like.”
Prof. Will Steffan, Director of the Australian National University Climate Change Institute

“Thinking through the implications of 4 degrees of warming shows that the impacts are so significant that the only real adaptation strategy is to avoid that at all cost because of the pain and suffering that is going to cost.”
Prof. Neil Adger, University of Exeter

“…there is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible. A 4°C world is likely to be one in which communities, cities and countries would experience severe disruptions, damage, and dislocation, with many of these risks spread unequally. It is likely that the poor will suffer most and the global community could become more fractured, and unequal than today. The projected 4°C warming simply must not be allowed to occur.”
World Bank report (2012) Turn down the heat: why a 4°C warmer world must be avoided

“If we don’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions and ultimately stabilize CO2 — and we also have to draw down a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere. If we don’t achieve that, there’s no real prospect for a stable society or even a governable society…”
Jason Box, Prof in glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland 

People are completely oblivious to our dependence on the complex adaptive systems that allow humans to exist and persist. To be clear, when the global temperature rises by 4°C within this century it will be faster than the blink of a geological eye, and we, along with 80% or more of the planet’s species are finished. 96% of all marine species and more than two-thirds of terrestrial species perished during the Great Dying at the Permian-Triassic interface. Global mean temperature at that time rose an estimated 5-8°C over a timespan of 3,000-20,000 years. A 4°C rise over just two centuries will be a rate of warming 15 to 100 times faster than that past extinction event. At this speed of warming, regions would experience temperature spikes of 10-15 degrees above normal in some months. Ecosystems would implode and the services they provide that sustain us would be obliterated. Virtually every vertebrate species on Earth would disappear, along with most plants and many invertebrates.

At just 1°C of warming we are already seeing major ecosystems such as coral reefs unraveling. Hurricanes so powerful that they require a new category now barrel across the Atlantic ocean and completely decimate islands; the cataclysmic Storms of our Grandchildren that Hansen warned about have only just begun. Arctic permafrost melt has already exceeded 2090 projections. It was economist William Nordhaus that set the 2°C warming target in 1975, not scientists. What did he get for this dangerous speculation, divorced from empirics? The Nobel, naturally. These days he is saying 3.5°C is just fine. John Kerry says we cannot leave the climate emergency in the hands of the neanderthals in power, but I dare say that anyone promoting mainstream economic theory is guilty of omnicide. Capitalism’s “extractivism” has turned the entire planet into a sacrifice zone.

Grand Bahama island before/after Hurricane Dorian made landfall, Sept 1, 2019

Humanity has essentially documented its own demise for the last half century while the Keeling curve inexorably rises faster than ever. As MIT Prof Daniel Rothman says, “When carbon levels in the atmosphere spike dramatically, the web of life collapses.” We are now seeing a record 10ppm of CO2 rise every four years and have have failed to curb emissions growth let alone move towards any sort of carbon neutral world. Alternative energies remain a sliver of total global energy consumption. In fact, “the annual increase in global energy use is greater than the increase in renewable energy, meaning fossil fuel use continues to grow.”

The rise of political ‘populism’ and the election of reactionary politicians in the U.S. and abroad has thrown yet another monkey wrench into any possibility of tackling the climate crisis. The demagogic Trump administration is simply burying any scientific evidence and ignoring its government’s own research on such things as the recent surge in climate refugees from Latin America due to climate-induced food insecurity. Russia and Brazil have both encouraged and precipitated the wildfire infernos raging in their countries. The catastrophe unfolding in the Amazon is a direct result of President Bolsonaro’s neoliberal policies designed to plunder the Amazon much like Trump’s dismantling of the EPA and deregulation of corporations. Both ignore the science of climate change and the reality of ecological collapse. In the case of Russia’s Putin, it was a cold economic calculus: “If the cost of putting out these remote fires is greater than the profit that could be made from selling the timber, they can decide to let it burn.”

And then there’s the global debt bomb of $250 trillion waiting to explode, not to mention the $200-250 trillion global carbon debt which increases by 16 trillion every year. Meanwhile, banks are quietly shielding themselves from climate catastrophe at taxpayers’ expense by shifting risky coastal mortgages off their books and onto the federal government’s Fannie and Freddie programs. Just as the U.S. government is leaving vulnerable countries to fend for themselves, so are private institutions unloading the risks onto the public. For those at the very top of our economic pyramid scheme who control public policy, dwindling resources will be kept first and foremost for them while everyone else is treated as collateral damage. This dereliction of responsibility, this cutting and running, is how the deteriorating conditions of the world are being handled. Throughout history, society’s elite have shown the same arrogance and hubris in the face of impending calamity. For example, the Fall of the Roman Empire:

If you read the chronicles of the early 5th century AD, you get the impression of total mayhem, with barbarian armies crisscrossing Europe and few, if any, Roman nobles and commanders trying to defend the Empire. Most of them seemed to be maneuvering to find a safe place where they could find safety for themselves. We don’t know what was the final destiny of Rutilius Namatianus but, since he had the time to finish his poem, we may imagine that he could build himself a castle in Southern France and his descendants may have become feudal lords. But not everyone made it. For instance, Paulinus of Pella, another rich Roman, contemporary of Namatianus, desperately tried to hold on his possessions in Europe, eventually considering himself happy just for having been able of surviving to old age.

We see a pattern here: when the rich Romans saw that things were going really out of control, they scrambled to save themselves while, at the same time, denying that things were so bad as they looked. We can see that clearly in Namatianus’ poem: he never ever hints that Rome was doomed. At most, he says, it was a temporary setback and soon Rome will be great again.

Thunberg’s speech alluded to such behavior by the polluting nations:

For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight. You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.

Yes, Greta, they are evil; they have access to every expert on the seriousness of the crisis and they are building walls and saving their own skin while continuing business-as-usual. Lest we forget, the fossil fuel industry’s own scientists accurately predicted the life-threatening effects of its product decades ago and not only did they do nothing to stop it, they funded and orchestrated a vast network of climate denial propaganda which continues to this day and have raced to exploit even more fossil fuels from the melting Arctic. When you consider that billions of people are going to die as a result, their actions become by far the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed. Make no mistake, our society is trading a livable planet for an unsustainable way of life that is irreparably depleting finite resources and altering the earth for eons, making it uninhabitable for organized human societies. Each day of business-as-usual further degrades the planet’s biodiversity.

“As the temperature rises, the patricians will seek refuge as polar migrants, or set sail on heavily armed ocean liners. Millions more will live in underground cities, anywhere to escape the sun. Dazzling reports of new methods for sopping up the gigatons of carbon dioxide will create ripples of enthusiasm and then fade in the next news cycle. Fisheries and agriculture will collapse, drugs will provide little solace, and everyone will curl up in a foetal position in the end, like the ash-entombed victims at Pompeii, whimpering in the inescapable heat. The likelihood of this outcome increases as the years pass and the smoke rises.”
~ Nicholas P. Money, THE SELFISH APE: Human Nature and Our Path to Extinction

"The latest climate simulation models are projecting temperature increases of up to 7°C by the end of this century. Unless you have a magical faith in technology, then that level of temperature rise signifies the potential end of our species…"https://t.co/kdldvQXGCa pic.twitter.com/a5DUZOXOG9

— xraymike79 (@xraymike79) November 2, 2019

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Weekend Funnies for the Depressed Collapsitarian #11

14 Friday Jun 2019

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Ecological Overshoot

≈ 30 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Climate Breakdown, Extreme Weather Events, Fossil Fuel Industry, Greta Thunberg, Techno-Fix, Technocapitalism, The Anthropocene Age

It’s been a while since I’ve published one of these dark humor posts, but I think that as the catastrophic flooding, heat waves, and other extreme weather events continue to multiply and intensify and as more and more people start losing their minds, all we can do is laugh at the absurdity of our self-inflicted predicament. As has been said many times before, the Anthropocene carbon spike is just one of many symptoms from an overpopulated technocapitalist-driven world chasing too few resources, whether it be wild fish, potable water, rare earth minerals, or arable land. No one is putting the breaks on this race towards the abyss because no one is truly in charge, except for the cold and amoral calculator of corporate profits and stock market returns. In an age of “worse than expected” and “faster than anticipated”, the true cost of environmental collapse cannot be fully appreciated because humans have never existed in a world that is 500ppm CO2e and accelerating. One thing is certain —most of Earth’s mass extinctions were caused by a disruption in the carbon cycle which happened slowly over a much longer time span compared to today and without all the other human-forced pressures on the planet. All the technological advances and creature comforts we value today came at a rising environmental cost which is now impossible to repay since we have essentially ‘sold the farm’ in terms of the stability of the Holocene and the biochemistry of the planet. There’s no techno-fixing our way out of this mess. We didn’t build a durable civilization; we built a superficial and fleeting one blinded by delusions of technological grandeur and human superiority. So as we all slowly arrive at the fifth stage of grief, here’s a toast to humans before the party ends…

And this cartoon is becoming more accurate as time passes and oil executives mourn for the loss of future profits…

Earth will be fine. Humans?…not so much 🤣

No need to plan for retirement, the beach will come to you…

I’m sure Greta Thunberg would have something to say…

Do as I say, not as I do…

And lastly…

A Final Warning to Planet Earth

15,364 scientists from 184 countries issue a ‘warning to humanity’ and present a radical agenda to protect planet Earth. We, the billions of people believing in human exceptionalism, categorically reject this agenda and issue in return a stark warning to planet Earth…We officially summon planet Earth to abandon its intransigent attitude and accept the inevitable: an extension of its biological and physical limits. Should planet Earth stick with its hardline ideological stance, it needs to be aware that mankind will never compromise and that we will seek a second planet. The universe is like our ambition: limitless…

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Evolutionary Dead-Ends

19 Monday Mar 2018

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

≈ 95 Comments

Tags

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

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Sic Transit Imperium

02 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by darbikrash in Capitalism, Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation

≈ 55 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Neoliberal Capitalism

…. The passing of empire.

The dank and musty allure of 19th century opium dens beckoned to those weak of will and lustful for escape. An opioid fuel of sorts, nature’s stock for an addiction that consumed its adherents in exchange for a state of nonchalant bliss, a temporary reprieve from the thousand paper cuts of life.

Experienced practioners knew to employ the buddy system, in advance soliciting a disinterested friend to come collect the user after 12 hours or so, sternly instructed to ignore any pleas to the contrary, and to extract the user from the den and the throes of opioid delirium, forcibly if necessary. Failure to do so might mean the will for a voluntary exit could well evaporate after a few days, and any exit might be feet first in a pine box.

An early example of the addictive effects of nature’s stock upon humans.

Amid much fanfare and production, the scientists of our society engage us in cultural clashes where arguments pertaining to climate change rage on, point and counterpoint, endless minutiae and technical details debated and argued. Advocates and denialists in full combat, in a battle of data against superstition that has lasted the ages and will never resolve.

Exactly as the instigators intended.

What is missing from these credentialed technical arguments are more basic questions, such as Why? Or How?

Why did our culture take up an addiction to fossil fuels, and How did this happen?

Human ecology professor, Andreas Malm has taken to addressing these two overarching questions in his book “Fossil Capital” which I shall review here.

“Fossil Capital” deviates from the typical climate change discussion as he strives to understand the onset and dependency of fossil fuels from a Marxist perspective. I must admit I was somewhat skeptical, orthodox Marxism is notoriously lax in addressing the largest threat to our planet, seemingly content to lather about in worker exploitation and revolts that never seem to happen.

However, the author reminds us that the core construct of Marx’s magnum opus is based on the philosophy of social relations, if anything, Capital shows us the dialectic relationship between capital, the political economy, and society at large. It shows us how capitalist property relations impacts workers, and how workers impact capital, leading ultimately to Malm’s staggering conclusion- that our addiction to fossil fuels, the resulting present day climate impact, and the onset and general adoption of fossil fuels was not due to technology, not due to scarcity of existing organic resources, and importantly, not due to intrinsic and supposedly dormant human tendencies to plunder the planet.

With academic rigor, Andreas Malm answers the Why and How, as he traces the onset of fossil fuels into general usage, and in so doing discovers that a very small group of men in a very small part of the world, belonging to an even smaller class of participants, are wholly, totally, and irrefutably responsible.

Malm finds that those responsible belong to the Capitalist class of 19th century England.

He explains this by animating Marx’s discoveries of property relations and the laws of motion of Capitalist production. He takes the dry, tedious text of Marx and shows how it fits chapter and verse with the 19th century ascension of the Industrial Revolution.

Fortunately for Malm, 19th century England is one of the most thoroughly documented periods and he find much empirical support for his thesis. The records are quite clear, voluminous data is available for parsing and analysis and he takes full advantage to make his case.

“Fossil Capital” starts with a debunking of the two prevailing mainstream theories as to how we evolved into a fossil fuel economy. The first, the so-called “Elizabethan leap” contains the more common bourgeoisie understanding of how 16th Europe migrated from burning wood for heat and cooking, to the use of coal. The superficial explanation is that wood was a declining resource experiencing scarcity in England and Continental Europe, and the migration to coal was an entirely natural progression to a more dense and efficient energy source.

There are a couple of problems with this, not the least of which is that coal did not make any significant inroads into energy consumption (in England anyway) until the late 18th century, so there is the small matter of a 200 year discrepancy.

But Malm considers even this to be a red herring, he suggests that the use of either wood or coal for heating and cooking purposes (the dominant uses in this time period) is really not a very interesting story, in his words this is a “proto-fossil fuel” economy, the real story begins when these fuels are used for purposes other than cooking and heating.

As all of this late 18th century stuff was taking place in England, to supplement the superficial, the theories of Ricardo, Malthus, and our dear friend Adam Smith all get roped into contributing to this explanation. Ricardo, as he posits that the available land for photosynthesis (the main vehicle for organic fuel production) is insufficient to support an exponential expansion of energy in the soon to occur industrial revolution. Malthus, with his converging and exponential population growth, needs to preserve at least some arable land for food instead of fuel production, and of course, Smith for his division of labor theories.

The author calls this first explanation the “Ricardo-Malthusian” theory, which seeks to explain the evolutionary and entirely “necessary” conversion from wood to coal because of insufficient land mass, and a geometrically expanding population with arithmetically expanding food production. As the organic economy of pre-industrial England is in effect dependent on plants (photosynthesis) for energy production, these arguments might make some sense.

A review of the historical data reveals some troubling problems with the Ricardo-Malthusian explanation. First of all, the use of organic fuels such as wood for cooking and heating cannot explain the explosion of energy expansion in 19th century England. Between 1800 and 1870 the population of England grew by 160%, yet energy consumption grew by some 4,000%.

Next, these theories were applied after the fact, using a modern interpretation (within the last century) to explain what is now a self evident problem, but this is less than convincing as no one in 19th century Britain sat down with quill and ink and forecast the energy demands of the forthcoming industrial revolution, concluding that we must switch to a coal economy toute de suite.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Malm finds no evidence of scarcity of either arable land for wood production, or of wood as a commodity as seen by market forces, e.g. there were no price spikes in this time period that would indicate a shortage, or of pending scarcity. Now there are plenty of papers and scholarly opinions that conclude that large scale shortages were present in this time period, but Malm disagrees.

Malm theorizes with some justification, that if there were resource limits to organic energy production (wood) in this time period there would be at least some price anomalies- he found none.

What then? What could be the cause for a several thousand percent increase in energy consumption- and a paradigm shift away from an organic energy economy to one wholly sustained by fossil fuels?

The genesis can be found in James Watt’s 1784 patent of the steam engine.

Knowledge of the nature of the phase change of water when boiled, and the resulting energy release had been known for centuries. What Watt had done with his steam engine patents was to harness this effect in a self contained boiler, converting steam pressure into smooth, rotative motion. This system converted the choppy, erratic motion of a steam piston into a spinning wheel, which could then be used to power other machines through belt drive connections.

Machines which would soon be called “means of production”.

With twice the BTU’s and half the volumetric density of wood, coal was the perfect fuel to propel the steam engine into mainstream use. In the period of 1800-1870, the vast majority of all coal burned was used to power steam engines, and the largest use of steam engines was in the production of cotton.

And here is where it gets really interesting.

In 19th century in Britain, the economy was all about the production of cotton. By 1870, cotton accounted for nearly 40% of the UK GDP. So cotton was a big deal, not just in sheer numbers, but in the rapid adoption of Capitalist modes of production in the industrial scale up of this commodity. In 1780, it took approximately 600 man hours to process a single bale of cotton, with the invention of the cotton gin (1793), this dropped to around 12 man hours per bale. Adding to the efficiencies, the spinning jenny (1764) and Richard Arkwright’s water frame (1768) which was designed to be powered by water flow- all represented an ushering in of a crude form of machine age- centered around cotton production.

Significantly, the main competitive fuel to coal in the early 19th century was water power. It wasn’t even close, by far water power was the first choice of any and all sources of rotative power. The reasons were simple and compelling- it did not cost anything to run. Water flow was free. Any fuel that burned, be it wood or coal, had a cost associated with it and factory owners did not want to pay when water was readily available and free for the taking.

Water was clean, reusable, quiet, and put forth no emissions. And it was cheap. So why then would anyone want to abandon this cheap and abundant energy source and switch to the dirtier, and far more expensive coal?

Well initially anyway, no one did. But as the production of cotton began to scale, and as Britain shed its mercantilist mode of production for Capitalist tendencies, issues of property and social relations began to rear their ugly heads.

Another consideration was that the use of water flow was by its very nature collective. No one owns the water, and if other mill owners shared the same water source for their own mills, which was common, there could be a conflict between users of the same resource.

So as Malm describes it, the problems began to originate from the spatial attributes of the water mills, they were by necessity located near water sources, which meant that they were generally not near urban centers, and generally located in rural or countryside locations. So it became difficult to attract and keep labor at these semi-remote locations. There was little external infrastructure, often no towns or support resources for life, however short it might be, outside of the factory mills. And retaining labor once so located was also difficult as they might just run off, converting to a ruthless and grueling factory pace of 16-18 hours days, 6 days a week was a difficult adjustment from an agrarian lifestyle which marked the previous way of life.

So the ascendant Industrial revolution began to experience labor strife, it was to become acute, perhaps more acute than any time in modern history, as large numbers of people migrated from agrarian lifestyles to a wage labor supported factory life- they did not make the change with open arms.

The mill owners quickly came up with a brilliant solution as the realties of Capitalist property relations began to settle in. It seemed that the local orphanages were full to brimming with abandoned and runaway children from all walks of life, and surely, the mill owners would be doing all a tremendous favor to “rescue” these misfits and delinquents from their stultifying existence, unshackling them for a vigorous and meditative visit to the British countryside, where they might partake in fresh air and healthy exercise.

For around 20 years.

Ever the social liberals, the headmasters of the orphanages insisted that room and board be offered to each child, and perhaps an hour per week of study so as to insure that some level of education be maintained.

Other than that, they were happy to see them go.

 

To support this newfound labor pool, the Capitalist mill owners often had to construct at their own expense a compound, buildings to house workers, eating halls, etc. in effect all the necessities of a labor camp.

There were still more problems. Not all workers were children of course- most were not. Some of the labor classifications, such as spinners were highly skilled and these in-demand workers began to demand high wages. If a group of spinners left a mill, they could cripple production and the prospects for replacement staff was not good- given the remote locales of the water mills. As the water mills became more widespread throughout Britain, child labor also grew. Soon, the moral prospect of working young orphans 16 hours a day began to wear on society as a whole, and a bitter struggle for reformed labor laws ensued lasting throughout most of the first half of the 19th century. A brief listing:

-The Cotton Mills and Factories Act of 1819. Limited employment to children age 9 or older, children aged 9-12 could not work more than 12 hours per day.

– The Cotton Mills Regulation Act 1825. Limited work hours to 10 hours on Sat, added a one hour lunch break. The mill owners were having problems with inconsistent water flow, so they needed “make up” time, e.g. extra hours during the day when workers could be forced to work longer to make up for poor flow or equipment failures. This Act accommodated these conditions by imposing limits as to how many hours could be worked and how late they could be enforced, typically no later than 11:00 PM.

– Labor in Cotton Mills Act of 1831. Extended the 12 hour day limit to anyone under 18, no night work allowed for minor children.

– Numerous legislation passed between 1831-1867 essentially limiting children, and ultimately most adults to no more than 10 hours a day of work.

One might wonder why it took 50-60 years to resolve which seems like a simple issue of social justice, using children for indentured labor. The answer is twofold, first, the capitalist class put enormous pressure on British parliament to refrain from interfering with any regulations that might impede production, the “compromise” was a highly publicized effort to address the children, as the lawmakers understood that the optics of defending this egregious practice was not going to stand, so they made much of these paltry reliefs specific to child labor. The other reason was that of male suffrage. Incredibly, throughout the 19th century, men without property ownership simply could not vote. This held until the early 20th century, indeed until the 1918 Representation of the People act, which removed the restriction of property ownership and allowed all men (and some women) the right to vote.

All of these acts and legislations were bitterly opposed by the Capitalist class- but none more vigorously than the provision allowing mill owners to work extra hours if the water flow fell off during a production day, or if equipment broke. This provision allowed the mill owner to enforce a labor effort not just by the clock, but to make sure that this labor product could be productively deployed when all the conditions of production were operational- which they often weren’t. So if you were signed up for a 12-16 hour day, and water flow dropped off midday so as to deny production, you had to stay at the mill and make the time up when the water flow returned.

A typical workday might be 16 hours. And in this workday we are reminded of Marx’s principle of abstract surplus value, which says that the workday is organized to first cover the cost to reproduce the worker, then additional hours are used to provide surplus value to the Capitalist. That’s how we get to 16 hour days. 10 hours in this example to reproduce (cover costs) and 6 hours for surplus.

But when forced by regulations to limit the workday to 10 hours, with limited ability for make up time, we have a big problem as now we have to ask where does the surplus value come from?

And the answer is that it comes from intensification of production, e.g. with speeding up the machinery. This now gives us relative surplus value, so named as the surplus is now recovered by extending backward into the workday, by working faster we can reproduce the workers cost in 8 hours and get the same surplus as before in 10 hours total.

But we have to run the machines and the people faster to achieve this result.

And as it turns out, it is pretty easy to speed up a steam engine, not so much for a water wheel. And in fact according to Malm, the sum of these attributes outlines the fundamental reason for the shift to fossil fuels- they were infinitely more tolerant to the demands of the Capitalist class than renewable resources, even though they cost more.

Steam engines could be placed conveniently next to coal mines, or to even greater advantage in the middle of population centers where there was not scarcity of labor. If a crew of experienced spinners up and quit, a replacement crew could be assembled without too much trouble. Also, population centers did not need the infrastructure build out for living quarters for example, that the water mills needed, it already existed.

And this is exactly what happened, despite the more attractive cost model of renewable energy resources, the labor relations outcome was disastrous for the water mill owners and the shift to coal powered steam engines proved unstoppable. By 1840, the battle between water power and coal was largely over, coal fueled steam engines had made significant headway into the sphere of production. This however, was no panacea, labor revolts and labor strikes grew to epic proportions, as capitalists tried to lower wages, with roving bands of strikers marauding through the cities destroying the hated steam engines as Capitalist property owners reduced wages to increase profits.

In 1842 one of the largest strikes ever was assembled, involving some 500,000 striking workers. They took to destroying steam engines, many by pulling the plugs on the pressure vessel rendering the engines useless. The phrase “pulling the plug” is still in common use today and stems from this calamitous riot in Britain.

Soon after, intentionally damaging steam engines became a crime punishable by death in Britain.

Interestingly, the word ‘Power’ in the English language has two meanings, one meaning, the noun, describes ‘…the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events…’

The other usage is as a verb, “…..to supply (a device) with mechanical or electrical energy….’

In no other language does this word share this duality. This is instructive, as it became apparent that those that controlled the power, indeed had social power. We can still see evidence of this today in modern politics.

If Malm had been unkind to the Ricardo-Malthusian explanation for the onset of fossil fuels, he is not particularly generous to the more contemporary Anthropocene narrative. Malm’s objection with this movement is not necessarily to deny the labeling of this as an ecological epoch, rather, he takes issue with the notion that somehow man was intrinsically and irreversibly responsible as a species for the onset of fossil fuel usage and the resulting climate change.

He argues that early man’s mastery of fire does not necessarily implicate humans as destined to destroy the planet, he makes the rather succinct point that ownership of steam engines, and the resulting adoption of coal to feed these engines, was specific to a very small class of people, namely, wealthy white guys involved in the Capitalist mode of production. An average wage laborer did not own a steam engine in the 19th Century, why would she? The Capitalist class acted directly to divert an organic economy that was already successful and underway with renewable hydro power to an economy that relied on fossil fuels, specifically to avoid the untenable social relations present in using a collective energy resource like water power. The Capitalist must own not just the means of production, but the fuel sources as well.

Beyond this Malm ventures into some truly interesting commentary, he discusses in some detail the need for constant exponential expansion intrinsic to Capitalism, and makes a most interesting observation about this expansion from the perspective of fossil fuels.

To do this, he discusses the time honored theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which is the primary failure mechanism of Capitalism in orthodox Marxism. The rate of profit tends to fall, as the organic composition of constant capital to variable capital changes. In plain English, this means that as machines and automation replace people, the profits left for the Capitalist decline. This is because if labor is the source of all value, as labor content declines, so does surplus value.

But this “tendency” is not a hard and fast rule, there are ways that this “tendency” can be mitigated, indeed, the Capitalism of today goes to great pains to deflect these tendencies- largely through State interventions. However, we do know that as more machines are created to replace or accelerate human labor, more fossil fuels will be used to power them- just as it did in 19th century Britain.

Malm suggests that this energy consumption component of value production is a hard and fast rule- not a tendency, and that as the composition of constant Capital increases, the consumption of fossil fuels must also increase- exponentially. He expresses this as an increased carbon content per unit of production. This would suggest a death spiral related to fossil fuel use, unstoppable and with no known restraint under the laws of motion of a Capitalist economy.

To the notion that man as a species is intrinsically responsible and destined to destroy the planet, his view is that if we all are responsible, then no one is responsible. By this he suggests that if all are guilty, then no one can be deposed or held accountable.

And this narrative is starting to sound vaguely familiar, yes, blame the working class and the poor for societies woes, and for good measure be sure to inflict the greatest amount of retribution and payback amongst those least responsible.

This is a time honored strategy unique to class structure. A secondary outcome is the blaming of workers for global warming through consumption.

Malm makes a solid case using historical reconstruction and a Marxist framework to unveil the unity between energy and exploitation. He suggests that the need for exploitation within the Capitalist mode of production is largely the driver towards unfettered fossil fuel consumption. Another thrust, which he is covering in a new book, is the notion that the nexus to petroleum energy was in direct response to the crippling coal miner’s strikes.

So it is not surprising then that we see similar characteristics in our current bourgeoisie government in the persona of Trump. We see the ascension of energy moguls to the levers of power for exactly the same reasons, with exactly the same objectives that were there in 19th century Britain.

The current era Capitalist class is deeply concerned with the declining rate of profit, despite the mitigating influence of neo-liberal expansion. They reflexively return to tried and true restorative strategies, central to this is an expansion of fossil fuel production and simultaneous relaxation of regulations- of which we see abundant evidence that this is underway.

If there is an area of weakness in Malm’s work, it is in his explanation of why man is not acting in his own best interests. While I find his rejection of the culpability of man as a species gratifying, it is hard to connect the dots between the Plug Riots of 1842 and a similar modern day Black Friday mob descending like locusts on a Wal Mart sale. There really is no coherent explanation offered to connect the dots between these disparate behaviors, and it really is one of the more important questions of our time.

Perhaps a narrative that revolves around addiction, and its close companion denial is more appropriate.

Overall in his wrap up to include modern times, Malm is not hopeful for any relief from the fossil fuel madness or any meaningful redress to climate change. He points out that sunk capital costs in coal fired plants, refineries, and other capital intensive investments are unlikely to be unwound until they are fully amortized. Once paid for, there is little motivation to sunset them as after all, they are paid up and can then contribute to supra-profits. The modern day Capitalist class does not make these kind of massive investments without a priori policy assurances from the State- which they actively seek and receive.

In the end Malm accomplishes a great deal with his book, the approach of leaving aside pure science and using tools of sociology to examine causality is very effective. It will be interesting to see where he takes this thread in his upcoming book, continuing with a similar framework around petroleum fuels.

It is more likely that we will find coal a source of sunlight, than sunlight a competitor of coal.

William Stanley Jevons 1860

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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

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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.

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Who really pulls the strings?:

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

Preserving the Status Quo

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

A Kabuki Play

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

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  • Techno-Fix – Dr. Michael Huesemann interview
  • The Age of Stupid
  • The Big Fix
  • The Century Of The Self
  • The Chomsky Videos
  • The Coming Famine
  • The Corporation : The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
  • The Crash Course
  • The Crisis of Civilization : Full Movie
  • The Day the Earth Nearly Died
  • The Domino Effect – Overpopulation
  • The False Solutions of Green Energy – Wilbert & Foley (PIELC 2014)
  • The Flaw
  • The Fuck-it Point
  • The Long Emergency
  • The Man who Quit Money
  • The Methane Ticking Time Bomb has Struck Again…..
  • The Myth of Capitalism with Michael Parenti
  • The Myth of Sustainability – Guy McPherson
  • The Myth of the Liberal Media: The Propaganda Model of News
  • The Ordinary Madness of Charles Bukowski
  • The Overview Effect
  • The Permian–Triassic Extinction Event [FULL VIDEO]
  • The Planet by Johan Söderberg
  • The Power Principle: (Full Length Documentary)
  • The Secure & the Dispossessed: How the Military and Corporations are Shaping a Climate-Changed World
  • The Shock Doctrine 2009
  • The Sixth Extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert)
  • The Twin Sides of the Fossil Fuel Coin – Guy McPherson
  • There's No Tomorrow (peak oil, energy, growth & the future)
  • Threads (Nuclear War)
  • Tom Murphy: Growth has an Expiration Date
  • TOXIC: AMAZON – FULL LENGTH
  • Up & Coming Liquid Fuel Crisis by Tom Murphy
  • VICE Documentaries
  • What A Way To Go: Life at the end of Empire
  • Who's Afraid Of Machiavelli?

Notes and Documents

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

RSS 3 Quarkes Daily

  • 3 Quarks Daily has moved! April 29, 2018
  • polixeni papapetrou (1960 - 2018) April 29, 2018

RSS A Closer Look

  • Cookies August 17, 2025
  • The structure of this blog November 4, 2024
  • Emergency care and hospitalizations higher among cannabis users, study finds June 30, 2022

RSS A Prosperous Way Down

  • A really inconvenient truth August 25, 2019
  • Energy ethics for survival of people in nature June 23, 2018

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

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RSS Aljazeera

  • Not just guns and abortion: How US top court could reshape rules July 1, 2022
  • Germany, Nigeria sign accord for return of looted Benin Bronzes July 1, 2022
  • Environmental groups press leaders as UN Ocean Conference ends July 1, 2022
  • India bans 19 single-use plastic items to combat pollution July 1, 2022
  • Thousands rally in Sudan day after 9 killed during protests July 1, 2022

RSS Aljazeera – Opinion

  • Not just guns and abortion: How US top court could reshape rules July 1, 2022
  • Germany, Nigeria sign accord for return of looted Benin Bronzes July 1, 2022
  • Environmental groups press leaders as UN Ocean Conference ends July 1, 2022
  • India bans 19 single-use plastic items to combat pollution July 1, 2022
  • Thousands rally in Sudan day after 9 killed during protests July 1, 2022
  • US conservatives vow harsh restrictions to curtail abortion pills July 1, 2022
  • Simone Biles, Steve Jobs to receive highest US civilian honour July 1, 2022

RSS All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go

  • Jesse Jackson on poverty September 17, 2020
  • Quote of the day September 12, 2020
  • Voting and the ‘rule by law’ September 12, 2020
  • Wendy Brown on neoliberalism and democracy September 7, 2020
  • Thomas Ferguson discusses our situation September 7, 2020
  • This way doth dictatorship lie September 1, 2020

RSS Alternative Radio

  • [Frank Smyth] The NRA Unmasked June 30, 2022

RSS AlterNet

  • Study: Maternal mortality would increase 24 percent under federal abortion ban July 1, 2022
  • Dr. Oz ‘distances himself’ from Donald Trump in a blatant 'general election rebrand': report July 1, 2022
  • Democrats facing a Donald Trump conundrum heading into 2024 July 1, 2022
  • Ex-FBI official: Messages sent to Cassidy Hutchinson were an 'attempt to intimidate a witness' July 1, 2022

RSS Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

  • How the great British getaway became a holiday from hell July 1, 2022
  • China snubs Boeing to strike huge new deal with Airbus July 1, 2022
  • Female doctor unable to book BA flights as 'title and gender do not match' July 1, 2022
  • Germany to bail out UK power station owner as Putin squeezes gas supplies June 30, 2022
  • BT workers to strike for first time since Thatcher privatisation June 30, 2022

RSS Anarchist News

  • Responsibility claim for the 28/5 clashes as a sign of solidarity with the hunger striker G. Michailidis July 1, 2022
  • Brenton Lengel Annihilates "Anarcho-Capitalism" and “Libertarianism”!! June 30, 2022
  • Anarchists Under Attack on a Global Scale June 30, 2022
  • Letter from prison from Ivan, “Solidarity means attack” June 29, 2022
  • Anarchism in Bolivia June 29, 2022

RSS Antony Loewenstein

  • Interview with Slovakian intellectual Martin Poliacik on the drug war and Ukraine June 26, 2022
  • TRT World debate on the drug war and legalising all drugs June 4, 2022
  • Challenging the power of Murdoch May 31, 2022

RSS Apocadocs

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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

  • Arctic sea ice June 2022 - why the situation is so dangerous June 21, 2022
  • Cataclysmic Alignment June 5, 2022
  • Carbon dioxide reaches another record high May 16, 2022

RSS Arctic Sea Ice

  • PIOMAS December 2019 December 17, 2019
  • PIOMAS November 2019 November 13, 2019
  • PIOMAS October 2019 October 14, 2019
  • PIOMAS September 2019 September 16, 2019
  • PIOMAS August 2019 August 7, 2019

RSS Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis

  • On the high side of low June 6, 2022
  • Springtime in the Arctic May 3, 2022
  • Spring in fits and starts April 5, 2022

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

  • Moving Interruptus, and Why Hospitals Suck July 1, 2019
  • Crisis May 16, 2019
  • How Many Damn Fucking Times Do I Have to Explain This? May 15, 2019
  • So Close, Yet So Far April 7, 2019

RSS Arundhati Roy

  • This is no ordinary spying. Our most intimate selves are now exposed | Arundhati Roy July 26, 2021
  • ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe – podcast May 7, 2021

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

  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 27 June 2022 June 27, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 20 June 2022 June 22, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 13 June 2022 June 14, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 6 June 2022 June 7, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 1 June 2022 June 2, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 23 May 2022 May 24, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 16 May 2022 May 16, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 9 May 2022 May 9, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 2 May 2022 May 2, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 25 April 2022 April 25, 2022

RSS Avedon’s Sideshow

  • The clerk has woken up from sleep, his eyes are droopy June 30, 2022
  • Stay out of the way of the blood-stained bandit June 18, 2022
  • I don't know how I'm gonna do it May 31, 2022

RSS Bad Astronomy

  • The Jan. 6 Hearings Are a TV Hit With an Unexpected Main Character
  • The Biden-McConnell Deal to Make an Anti-Abortion Advocate a Federal Judge Is Still On
  • If It Weren’t for George W. Bush, We Might Still Have Roe

RSS Barbara Ehrenreich

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RSS BBC: Science & Environment

  • Supreme Court limits Biden's power to cut emissions June 30, 2022
  • New map of ancient trees an opportunity for conservation June 30, 2022
  • Climate change: UK government told to insulate more homes June 28, 2022

RSS Big Picture Agriculture

  • BIG PICTURE AGRICULTURE'S LATEST NEWS February 26, 2022
  • How to Stay Informed About Agriculture, Food, and Farming Issues October 15, 2019
  • Dr. Walter Falcon's 2019 Iowa Farm Report September 11, 2019
  • Agriculture Reading Picks October 31, 2018
  • The Merits of Amaranth October 30, 2018

RSS Bill Moyers

  • Trump-Russia-Ukraine Timeline April 12, 2022
  • Insurrection Timeline March 13, 2022
  • Juneteenth: America’s Other Independence Day April 20, 2021

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

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RSS Brane Space

  • Supreme Court's Reich Ideologues Again Prove They Are Worth Contempt July 1, 2022
  • Is There A 'Quantum Measurement Problem'? No - Provided One Adopts A Statistical Perspective July 1, 2022

RSS Brave New World

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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

  • Interview: Chris Thorpe aims to give theatergoers an “emotional explosion” over nuclear weapons July 1, 2022
  • Good, bad, ugly, relieved: Reactions to the Supreme Court decision on the EPA and climate change July 1, 2022
  • How disagreements over Russia’s nuclear threats could derail the NPT Review Conference July 1, 2022

RSS Business Insider

  • Former defense secretary James Mattis rips Putin's 'pathetic' military performance in Ukraine: 'We're watching Russia wither before our eyes' July 1, 2022
  • Investors should short the US stock market as recessionary fears become self-fulfilling, investment research firm says July 1, 2022
  • Some McDonald's franchisees are abandoning dollar drinks as inflation eats away at profits July 1, 2022
  • Wimbledon 2022 continues with Rafael Nadal's quest for a grand slam — here's how to live-stream every match July 1, 2022
  • I tried Taco Bell's viral new 'giant Cheez-It' menu. It's definitely the next cult classic. July 1, 2022
  • The 16 best early Prime Day 2022 deals to shop right now ahead of June 12 and 13 July 1, 2022
  • What is Android System WebView? How to disable the software or troubleshoot it July 1, 2022
  • The Supreme Court just made it harder to combat the climate crisis. Top tech firms say that's bad for business and the planet. July 1, 2022
  • How Wall Street firms from Goldman Sachs to JPMorgan are responding to the end of Roe v. Wade July 1, 2022
  • Larry Summers warns a recession sparked by a self-fulfilling process is looking more likely now July 1, 2022

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

  • Democrats want to raid Medicare to pay for Obamacare – again
 July 1, 2022
  • After Roe, there’s no time to party July 1, 2022
  • Top Ten Cartoons, July 1, 2022 July 1, 2022
  • KBJ in SCOTUS MAGA Cave June 30, 2022
  • Israeli coalition June 30, 2022
  • FOX News strategy June 30, 2022

RSS Cassandra’s Legacy

  • Cassandra is Dead. Long Live Cassandra! April 15, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect": The Collapse of Saudi Arabia's Water Supply April 12, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect" April 5, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest post on "The Seneca Effect" April 1, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's latest post on "The Seneca Effect" March 29, 2021

RSS Censored News

  • Lakota Nick Estes 'The Age of the Water Protector and Climate Chaos' Bioneers video June 29, 2022
  • Big Mountain's John Benally Passes to Spirit World June 27, 2022
  • Sacred Water: Nikki Tulley journeys home to Blue Gap June 26, 2022

RSS Center For Biological Diversity

  • Mexican Gray Wolf Rule Finalized to Eliminate Population Cap June 30, 2022
  • Lawsuit Seeks to Protect Crucial Grizzly Habitat in Montana’s Oldest Forests June 30, 2022
  • Fisheries Service Finalizes Protections Against Three Pesticides Harming Salmon, Orcas June 30, 2022

RSS Center for Investigative Journalism

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RSS Center for Economic & Policy Research

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RSS Charles Eisenstein’s Blog

  • Peace-building March 25, 2022
  • FASCHISMUS UND DAS ANTIFESTIVAL November 16, 2021

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

  • Imagining A New World on the Other Side of the Pandemic March 20, 2020

RSS Class Warfare Blog

  • The Toxicity of the Concept of a Chosen People June 29, 2022
  • If We Held the Senate . . . June 26, 2022

RSS Cliff Schecter

  • Not just guns and abortion: How US top court could reshape rules July 1, 2022
  • Germany, Nigeria sign accord for return of looted Benin Bronzes July 1, 2022
  • Environmental groups press leaders as UN Ocean Conference ends July 1, 2022
  • India bans 19 single-use plastic items to combat pollution July 1, 2022
  • Thousands rally in Sudan day after 9 killed during protests July 1, 2022
  • US conservatives vow harsh restrictions to curtail abortion pills July 1, 2022

RSS Climate and Capitalism

  • Indigenous organizations in Peru declare state of emergency June 24, 2022
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, June 2022 June 9, 2022
  • A forgotten revolutionary: Thomas Spence on saving the commons June 4, 2022
  • Greenhouse gases trapped 49% more heat in 2021 than in 1990 May 25, 2022
  • A major advance in defining the Anthropocene May 20, 2022
  • Climate change indicators set records May 18, 2022

RSS Climate Central

  • The looming threat for Maine’s iconic potato industry
  • Ellis Island, lighthouses among historic NJ sites flooding as seas rise
  • Still rare in Iowa, electric car powers Des Moines family’s home during blackouts
  • Storied Maine ski resort bets future on reining in high costs of warmer winters

RSS Climate Change: The Next Generation

  • Historic Greenland ice sheet rainfall unraveled May 30, 2022
  • Flip Flop: Why Variations in Earth's Magnetic Field Aren't Causing Today's Climate Change February 22, 2022
  • Let's call climate change deniers what they really are: CLIMATE LIARS! May 9, 2021

RSS Climate Citizen

  • Australia votes for climate action in 2022 Federal election May 23, 2022
  • Carbon Credits & Offsets | Honest Government Ad April 16, 2022
  • Climate consideration case not to be appealed to High Court, but Students vow to keep pushing for climate action April 12, 2022

RSS Climate Code Red

  • Defence agencies ‘accelerating’ risk of ‘Hothouse Earth’, US military study warns June 26, 2022
  • Philip Sutton, pioneer climate and environmental activist June 21, 2022
  • Model-based net-zero scenarios, including those of the IPCC, aren’t worth the paper they are written on, say leading economists June 9, 2022

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

  • Chilean Reservoir Turning to Desert July 1, 2022
  • More Responses to SCOTUS-ocolypse July 1, 2022
  • In Ladakh, Solutions to Climate Change Draw Controversy July 1, 2022

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

  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia (Part 2) March 23, 2021
  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia. March 11, 2021
  • Talking, typing, and the social model of disability July 22, 2020

RSS Club Orlov

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RSS ClusterFuck Nation

  • Independence Day July 1, 2022
  • The Time of Our Time June 27, 2022

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

  • Assange Makes Final Appeal Against US Extradition July 1, 2022
  • NARAL Pro-Choice Endorses Fetterman—Who Vows to End Senate Filibuster to Protect Abortion Rights July 1, 2022
  • Texas Panel Denounced Over Attempt to Rebrand Slavery as 'Involuntary Relocation' July 1, 2022
  • 'Blatantly Partisan': NC Green Party Candidate Slams State Dems for Denying Ballot Petition July 1, 2022
  • 'We Will Fight! We Will Win!': Nearly 200 Abortion Rights Defenders Arrested in DC July 1, 2022

RSS Consortium News

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RSS Consumer Energy Report

  • Where The US Got Its Oil in 2013? June 23, 2014
  • Top 10 Oil Producers in 2013 – Leading Oil Producing Countries June 20, 2014
  • Where The US Gets Its Oil From? You’ll Be Surprised September 29, 2012
  • World Sets New Oil Production and Consumption Records July 10, 2012

RSS Corp Watch

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RSS CorrenteWire

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RSS CorrenteWire – Quick Hits

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RSS CounterPunch

  • Less Freedom, More Money: Tony Blair’s Vaccine Passport June 14, 2021
  • The U.S. Dares to Criticize Israel October 3, 2014
  • Gaza – Betrayed In Thought and Deed August 5, 2014
  • Boeing Workers Take a Stand & Take the Heat December 31, 2013
  • Bank Corruption Down Under December 31, 2013
  • Europe’s Deadly Transition From Social Democracy to Oligarchy December 9, 2011
  • Seeing in the Dark December 29, 2007
  • The Sham of Homeland Security December 29, 2007
  • What We Can Not See December 29, 2007
  • Beauty from the Heart of Texas December 29, 2007

RSS Crooked Timber

  • Ousmane Sembène, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu July 1, 2022
  • Roe vs Wade Open Thread June 27, 2022
  • Sunday photoblogging: swift June 26, 2022
  • Would Democratic Socialism be Better? June 26, 2022

RSS Crooks and Liars

  • Radio Station Plays RATM 'Killing In The Name' On Repeat After Host Firings July 1, 2022
  • Trump Allies Float That He's Too Fat To Grab Steering Wheels July 1, 2022
  • Marge Goes All In On Latest Wacko Conspiracy Theory July 1, 2022
  • Tucker, On Foreign Soil! Claims Biden Is Arresting Political Opponents July 1, 2022

RSS Cryptome

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RSS Culture Change

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RSS Dahr Jamail

  • For a Worse Tomorrow November 18, 2021
  • Covid-19’s Not Through With Us Yet September 21, 2021

RSS Daily Kos Comics

  • Cartoon: Pre-born patriots July 1, 2022
  • Cartoon: Death on the highway June 30, 2022
  • Cartoon: The tale of the pregnant gun June 30, 2022
  • Cartoon: Mark of the Beast June 29, 2022
  • Cartoon: Roe overturned June 29, 2022
  • Cartoon: 'No woke 4 U' June 28, 2022

RSS Damn the Matrix

  • In the eye of the Perfect Storm June 7, 2022
  • Nate Hagens chats with Simon Michaux May 18, 2022

RSS Dan Hagen

  • The Forest Knows No Fear June 29, 2022
  • Parking in the Park June 1, 2022

RSS Dangerous Intersection

  • Camille Paglia on Transgender July 1, 2022
  • Sizing Up Strangers July 1, 2022
  • CNN Delivers the Economic “News” July 1, 2022

RSS Dark Ages America

  • What is the female of "doofus"? June 9, 2022
  • 453 May 18, 2022
  • Doomer Optimism April 26, 2022
  • The Sadness of War April 18, 2022

RSS David Bollier

  • A "Blue Commons" Agenda to Stop the Plunder of Our Oceans June 30, 2022
  • Celebrate World Localization Day! June 20, 2022
  • Dr. Stephan Harding on Gaia Alchemy and the Animate Earth May 27, 2022

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

  • The ABC of Contemporary Capital | Session 13 May 4, 2022
  • The ABC of Contemporary Capital | Session 12 April 27, 2022
  • The ABC of Contemporary Capital | Session 11 April 18, 2022

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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

  • “Infusion truck”. Anger explodes. If you forget, you’ll get attacked again June 27, 2022
  • Seoul Metropolitan Police Commission’s Measures to Prevent Traffic Accidents with Personal Mobile Devices June 21, 2022
  • Prevention of Traffic Accidents by ‘Crossroads Notification’ in Gwangjin-gu, Seoul June 15, 2022
  • a ten-car crash bus driver June 7, 2022
  • Seoul National University signs a business agreement with the Seoul headquarters of the Korea Transportation Safety Authority to reduce traffic accidents in Seoul June 1, 2022

RSS Decline of the Empire

  • Defending Reality
  • Fascism And The Uniparty

RSS Deep Green Resistence News Service

  • Shock Doctrine: Mining Companies used the Pandemic for Profit July 1, 2022
  • Victory! Activists Force California to Cancel Planned Redwood Logging June 27, 2022
  • A Debate on Collapse: Noam Chomsky, Max Wilbert, and Miguel Fuentes June 25, 2022
  • Serbian Environmentalists Have Defeated the World’s 2nd Largest Mining Company June 20, 2022

RSS Deepak Tripathi’s Diary

  • Afghanistan Awaits Uncertain Future After US Withdrawal July 7, 2021
  • UK’s Brexit Maze October 29, 2019

RSS Democratic Underground

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RSS Democratic Underground – Breaking News

  • Russian prosecutors call first witnesses in case against Brittney Griner July 1, 2022
  • Simone Biles, Megan Rapinoe, Gabby Giffords and Denzel Washington among Medal of Freedom awardees July 1, 2022
  • Region 28 Wins Injunction Against Arizona Cannabis Dispensary, Ordering Reinstatement of Fired Union July 1, 2022
  • Democratic Rep. Judy Chu Arrested At Abortion Rights Protest Outside U.S. Capitol July 1, 2022
  • Abortion, women's rights grow as priorities: AP-NORC poll July 1, 2022
  • Cheney defends Trump criticism and January 6 committee work in Wyoming debate July 1, 2022
  • California Wildfire Burns More Than 900 Acres and Prompts Evacuations July 1, 2022
  • Russian missiles kill at least 19 in Ukraine's Odesa region July 1, 2022
  • New Zealand declares US far-right Proud Boys and the Base terrorist groups July 1, 2022
  • Cassidy Hutchinson testimony set audience record for a daytime Jan. 6 hearing July 1, 2022

RSS Democratic Underground – Good Reads

  • LTE: Clarence Thomas has an agenda. Isn't that judicial activism? July 1, 2022
  • Americans' Views On Abortion Are Pretty Stagnant. Their Views On The Supreme Court Are Not. July 1, 2022
  • Russia's antisemitism aimed at Ukraine's Zelenskyy is just the Kremlin variant July 1, 2022
  • Child care key to fixing the U.S. labor shortage July 1, 2022
  • Abortion rights activists can make points viscerally July 1, 2022
  • Schwab: May it please the court; because the rest of us aren't July 1, 2022
  • Stop Calling It An Attempted Coup July 1, 2022
  • E.P.A. Ruling Is Milestone in Long Pushback to Regulation of Business July 1, 2022
  • Supreme Court ends on a low note: Why we should now be more frightened for their next term July 1, 2022
  • Meat, monopolies, mega farms: how the US food system fuels climate crisis July 1, 2022

RSS Democracy Now

  • Meet the Dutch Doctor Helping Expand Abortion Access by Mailing Safe & Legal Pills Worldwide July 1, 2022
  • San Antonio Organizer: U.S. Immigration Policy Is to Blame for Deaths of 53 in Smuggling Tragedy July 1, 2022
  • In Radical Ruling, Supreme Court Limits EPA's Power to Cut Carbon Emissions & Combat Climate Crisis July 1, 2022
  • Headlines for July 1, 2022 July 1, 2022
  • Flint Residents Outraged as Charges Dropped in Deadly Water Scandal That Poisoned Majority-Black City June 30, 2022
  • ACLU's David Cole: Supreme Court Conservatives Imposing "Truly Radical Ideology" on U.S. Population June 30, 2022
  • Anatol Lieven on NATO Expansion & What a Ukraine Peace Settlement Could Look Like June 30, 2022
  • Headlines for June 30, 2022 June 30, 2022
  • After Jan. 6, Meadows & Giuliani Sought Pardons; Cheney Says Trump Allies Tampering with Witnesses June 29, 2022
  • "Hang Mike Pence!" As Armed Mob Threatens VP on Jan. 6, Witness Says Trump "Thinks Mike Deserves It" June 29, 2022

RSS Derrick Jensen

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RSS Desdemona Despair

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RSS Desertification

  • FAMILY GARDENS IN ALGERIA – Part 1 July 1, 2022
  • Family gardens in Algeria – Part 2 July 1, 2022
  • Reboisement au Burkina Faso – Partie 1 July 1, 2022
  • Reforestation in Burkina Faso – Part 1 July 1, 2022
  • Drought, desertification – Mideast worsening in satellite images June 30, 2022

RSS deSmog Blog

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RSS Digbys Blog

  • Untitled January 12, 2020
  • They can save the world by @BloggersRUs January 12, 2020
  • Just drifting: R.I.P. Buck Henry By Dennis Hartley January 12, 2020
  • It looks like he wants to take Iraq's oil money January 12, 2020
  • Untitled January 11, 2020
  • Let's not forget who worked with Suleimani's IRGC January 11, 2020

RSS Disinfo – Ecology

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RSS Dispatches from the Underclass

  • US & Europe Are Victims Of Their Own Sanctions On Russia & China, w/ Arnaud Bertrand June 23, 2022
  • Crypto: Revolutionary or a Scam? A View From the Left, w/ Tom Redshaw June 23, 2022
  • Europe’s Path to Self-Destruction: Following U.S. as Global Order Comes Apart, w/ Vijay Prashad June 23, 2022
  • Lebanon’s Elections Amid Economic Collapse, Foreign Interference & Resistance, w/ Jamal Ghosn June 23, 2022
  • Subscribe to The Rania Khalek Show on Callin! May 27, 2022

RSS Dissent Magazine

  • A Cold Drink of Objectivity July 1, 2022
  • Know Your Enemy: Overturning June 30, 2022
  • Who Segregated America? June 29, 2022
  • Build a Better Internet June 27, 2022

RSS Dissident Voice

  • Open Letter to the BBC: Please Stop Your Disinformation Campaign on Nicaragua July 1, 2022
  • Turkey Once More Betrays the East June 30, 2022
  • Palestinians “Are Not Animals in a Zoo”: On Kanafani and the Need to Redefine the Role of the “Victim Intellectual” June 30, 2022
  • Convenient Omissions: The Ukraine-EU Candidacy Show June 30, 2022
  • Russia Challenges Western Accusations at UN Security Council June 30, 2022
  • Severodonetsk: Deciphering News of the War in Ukraine June 29, 2022
  • Liberal Racism Rears Its Ugly Head (Again) June 29, 2022
  • Declare Your Independence from Tyranny, America June 29, 2022

RSS Do the Math

  • Shedding our Fossil Fuel Suit June 21, 2022

RSS Dollars & Sense Blog

  • Debt Relief for Whom? Part II June 11, 2022
  • Debt Relief for Whom? June 1, 2022
  • 2022 Annual Labor Issue May 25, 2022
  • The Last Tour Guide to Leave Cuba April 16, 2022
  • New Issue! March 31, 2022
  • Ukraine: What Will Be Done and What Should Be Done? February 26, 2022

RSS Doug Stanhope

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RSS Douglas Rushkoff

  • Survival of the Richest May 9, 2022
  • Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires May 9, 2022
  • Rise to the Occasion May 4, 2022

RSS Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

  • Greg Hunter of USA Watchdog Interviews PCR on the Approaching War with Russia July 1, 2022
  • Russian De-nazification of Ukraine Goal Abandoned by the Kremlin July 1, 2022

RSS Dredd Blog

  • Good Nomenclature: A Matter of Life and Death - 3 June 28, 2022
  • On The Origin of the Genes of Viruses - 18 June 23, 2022
  • On The Origin Of The Home Of COVID-19 - 31 June 21, 2022
  • Appendix Gene Analysis June 21, 2022

RSS Ear to the Ground – Truth Dig

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RSS Early Warning

  • New York Not Close to Exiting Lockdown April 17, 2020
  • Is New York Containing Covid? April 8, 2020
  • New York vs Italy March 23, 2020

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

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RSS Earth Observatory: Natural Hazards

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RSS Earth Policy Institute Blog

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

RSS Ecocide Alert

  • What You Need to Know About a Sportsbook June 30, 2022

RSS Ecohuman World

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

RSS Eco-Shock News

  • Radio Ecoshock: Extreme Heat #2: How It Kills (replay) June 30, 2022

RSS Ecological Headstand

  • Dilke, Chapman, and Dahlberg Pop-ups May 15, 2021
  • 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

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 Ecologise

  • Charles Eisenstein: The Coronation May 16, 2020
  • Visakhapatnam gas leak accident: A preliminary modelling study May 15, 2020
  • The electric car must fail March 30, 2020
  • Economy and ecology are now in conflict; it’s time to integrate them with wisdom March 27, 2020
  • War, mismanagement and climate change: Iraq’s environment on the brink March 20, 2020
  • Big Farms make Big Flu: The deadly connection between industrial farming and pandemics March 17, 2020
  • The Songs of Trees: Stories From Nature’s Great Connectors March 13, 2020
  • Charles Hugh Smith: Could Covid-19 overwhelm us in the months ahead? March 10, 2020
  • Just like the economy, India’s forests too are thriving only on paper March 7, 2020
  • New Zealand’s ‘well-being budget’ and the unnecessary evil of economic growth March 4, 2020

RSS Economic Hardship Reporting Project

  • Utah helped landlords, not renters. How that’s changing. June 30, 2022
  • Traumatic Pregnancies Are Awful. Dobbs Will Make That So Much Worse. June 24, 2022
  • EHRP Wins Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists June 24, 2022
  • When Innocence Isn’t Enough June 23, 2022
  • What Are Other Names for Juneteenth? The U.S. Is Betraying the Spirit of ‘Jubilee Day’ June 17, 2022
  • EHRP Earns Excellence in Financial Journalism Award June 17, 2022

RSS Economic Undertow

  • The Death of Economics June 9, 2021
  • Cars and More Cars … March 22, 2021
  • Repost From 2015: Pied Piper of Dumb Money January 26, 2021

RSS EcoWorldView

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RSS Empire Burlesque

  • Generation of Vipers: The Original Sin and Continuous Crimes of America’s Involvement in Afghanistan August 17, 2021
  • Reich and Reality: Culture Wars of the Conquerors August 10, 2021

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

  • Amid Claims of Witness Tampering, Revisiting Peter Navarro’s Alleged Contempt
  • The Men Disputing Cassidy Hutchinson’s Retelling of Trump’s SUV Lunge Got Warnings about Plans to Flood the Capitol
  • Something Stinks about Kentucky but It’s a Complex Stink

RSS End of More

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RSS Energy Balance

  • “Reading Hydro” – Microhydropower on the River Thames at Caversham Weir (Reading, UK). May 17, 2022
  • “Four Meals From Anarchy” – We Must Grow More Food Locally. April 23, 2022
  • Russia-Ukraine War and the Changing Energy Landscape. March 16, 2022
  • Confronting the Changing Climate: COP26 - Scientists’ Warnings into Action, from Local to Global. November 14, 2021
  • The Energy Crisis and the Climate Crisis. October 4, 2021
  • IPCC Climate Report Signals “Code Red” for Humanity, but the reality is so much worse. August 15, 2021

RSS Environment & Food Justice

  • National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Statement on the Climate Crisis October 31, 2019
  • La Lucha por La Sierra | Scion of Texas Oil Barons Seeks to Overturn Historic Use Rights to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant August 30, 2018
  • Biopiracy in Mexico | Foundation stealing wild beehives in Yucatán June 14, 2018

RSS Envisionation Blog

  • Sunny Morgan: Cancel the debt… take your knee off the neck of the Global South! June 15, 2022
  • Dr John Cobb | Campaign for a Living Earth Movement June 13, 2022
  • No. 1 Climate vulnerable wine region, Alentejo, focuses on true sustainability June 1, 2022
  • Problems Monetising Soil Carbon With Offsets | Professor Kevin Anderson June 1, 2022

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

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RSS ExtraGeographic

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RSS Facts for Working People

  • Jack Rasmus: THE ANATOMY OF INFLATION July 1, 2022
  • Books: USA on the road to civil war June 30, 2022
  • Wave of Strikes Ahead as British Workers Fight Back June 28, 2022

RSS Fair: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

  • Mass Shooters’ Most Common Trait—Their Gender—Gets Little Press Attention June 30, 2022
  • Misogyny, Theocracy and Other Missing Issues in Post-Roe Coverage June 30, 2022
  • Depp/Heard Verdict a Loss for Violence Survivors—and a Free Press June 29, 2022

RSS Fairewinds

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RSS Fairfax Climate Watch

  • The Day 2 Antigen Test When Travelling From The UK  November 19, 2021
  • Steps Towards Reducing Clinical Trials Footprint August 31, 2021
  • What Are CDISC Standards And Why Does It Matter? August 30, 2021

RSS Farooque Chowdhury’s Diary

  • Road rage faces student spirit August 4, 2018
  • Fires within the Arctic Circle July 28, 2018
  • A Facebook post on quota mobilisation July 14, 2018

RSS Feasta

  • Podcast: supporting nature’s connections July 1, 2022
  • Podcast: The theory and practice of Communities of Practice May 31, 2022
  • Wellbeing Economy Alliance Talk: the climate as a commons May 18, 2022

RSS FireDogLake

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RSS Fish Out of Water

  • East Coast Bomb Tomorrow - Atlantic Ocean Current Shift Blowing up Coastal Storms: Climate Brief March 11, 2022
  • Russians attack and Seize Ukrainian Nuclear power plant, Major Nuclear Accident possible March 4, 2022
  • Polar Vortex is splitting now bringing on severe mid-continent storms & Atlantic bomb cyclones March 2, 2022
  • Climate Brief: A very deadly tornado season is likely this spring starting in March February 4, 2022
  • Record heat ahead of historic storms & winds late today in Iowa, Minnesota & Wisconsin December 15, 2021
  • COP-26 Abandons 1.5 C Target, Sticks with Big Net Zero Lie, but Hope is Rising out of the Ashes November 10, 2021

RSS Foreign Confidential

  • Film History: the French New Wave July 2, 2021
  • Nine Beautiful Places to Visit in Slovenia July 2, 2021
  • Top 10 European Islands to Visit July 2, 2021
  • Little Europe: the Amazing Microstates July 2, 2021

RSS FracTracker

  • An Insider Take on the Appalachian Hydrogen & CCUS Conference June 23, 2022
  • Does Hydrogen Have a Role in our Energy Future? June 21, 2022
  • Oil and Gas Brine in Ohio May 13, 2022

RSS George Monbiot (Alternet)

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RSS George Monbiot (Official Home Page)

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RSS Get Real List: Chris Nelder

  • Moving on… July 9, 2021
  • My new gig December 5, 2015
  • Announcing the Energy Transition Show October 14, 2015

RSS Gil Smart

  • With Gil Smart on guns, the NRA January 19, 2015
  • Gil Smart right on development February 8, 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

  • The Long Night is Coming January 4, 2019
  • Disruption, Drones, and Big Airports December 20, 2018

RSS Global Occupy News

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RSS Global Oneness Project

  • Farewell RSS Feeds May 18, 2022

RSS Global Research

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RSS Global Research CA

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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

  • SCOTUS Leaves Dwindling Paths For Biden's Climate Mission July 1, 2022
  • 'Tiger King' Star Charged With Animal Trafficking, Money Laundering July 1, 2022
  • 2 Orcas Have Been Hunting Great White Sharks And Eating Their Organs July 1, 2022
  • Kill The Filibuster To Save The Planet, Says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez June 30, 2022
  • Supreme Court Sharply Limits Regulation Of Carbon Emissions June 30, 2022
  • Scott Pruitt, Trump’s Disgraced Former EPA Chief, Gets Crushed In Senate Primary June 29, 2022
  • Famous Same-Sex Flamingo Couple Has 'Amicable' Breakup At Denver Zoo June 28, 2022
  • John Oliver Calls Out Developer's 'Monumentally Stupid' Reaction To Drought June 27, 2022

RSS Greenpeace Blogs

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RSS Greg Palast

  • Proud Boys indicted for Seditious Conspiracy June 7, 2022
  • Warrior on two fronts May 30, 2022

RSS Gregor Macdonald

  • Oil Fall December 31, 2018

RSS Grinning Planet

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RSS Grist

  • California passes nation’s toughest plastic reduction bill July 1, 2022
  • The Supreme Court’s climate decision came out of a decades-long campaign to kneecap regulation June 30, 2022
  • The Supreme Court’s EPA decision could have been much, much worse June 30, 2022
  • Green energy jobs are on the rise as fossil fuel companies lose workers June 30, 2022

RSS Growth Busters

  • Paul Ehrlich on The Limits to Growth June 1, 2022
  • Chickens are Coming Home to Roost May 11, 2022
  • Paul Ehrlich, Unfiltered (Special Earth Day Episode) April 19, 2022
  • Obsessive-Compulsive’s Guide to Cutting Your Carbon Footprint March 30, 2022

RSS Guernica Mag

  • La Otra Historia June 30, 2022
  • If I Say My Body Is Asian Does This Poem Disappear June 29, 2022
  • Secret Solitary June 28, 2022
  • Ketamine June 23, 2022

RSS Guy McPherson’s Blog

  • Weekly Hubris Essay, July 2020 July 1, 2022
  • Science Update: Why Investors Suddenly Care About Saving the Environment June 30, 2022

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

  • Postcards from La La Land #132: time warps and twaddle June 7, 2018
  • The final cut: crank paper on NZ temperature record gets its rebuttal – warming continues unabated May 2, 2018
  • Anthropogenic climate change is real: pithy post-punk anthem for the Trump generation December 9, 2017

RSS How to Save the World

  • The Way It Is June 27, 2022
  • Manifestly, an Imagined Conversation June 22, 2022
  • The Implosion of the Left June 18, 2022

RSS I am Not a Number

  • THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE? May 19, 2022
  • Alt-Right conspiracy theories are obviously true… except they are not. January 24, 2022
  • The civil war in the LP was NEVER about antisemitism. November 20, 2020

RSS I Cite

  • "Feudalism Lives on in the Delta" -- Ray Sprigle August 17, 2020
  • Critical Theory and Climate Change 2 April 2, 2020
  • Critical Theory and Climate Change 1 March 23, 2020
  • Untitled July 18, 2019
  • America's obsession with rooting out communism is making a comeback September 25, 2018

RSS Iamronen

  • Ancient Greek Metaphysical Damage June 11, 2022
  • How Electricity Actually Works May 22, 2022
  • Born to fight May 8, 2022
  • The Art Of Life May 7, 2022
  • Celebration and … the Sacred? April 13, 2022

RSS Ian Welsh

  • Norway and Finland Sell Their Souls For NATO Membership July 1, 2022

RSS Idea Explorer

  • Learning As We Go October 29, 2021
  • Values and Responsibilities March 11, 2021
  • Habitat Loss November 9, 2020
  • Marginal Hope August 24, 2020
  • A Pandemic-Altered Future April 15, 2020

RSS Idea Explorer – Big Pic Explorer

  • Consumption Drop November 25, 2020
  • Habitat Loss November 9, 2020
  • General Update February 24, 2020

RSS Idea Explorer: Land of Conscience

  • Remembrance September 22, 2021
  • Seeking Miracles July 15, 2021
  • Emergence May 3, 2021

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

  • Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade!
  • America: Civilian Gun Massacre Capital of the World
  • The Supreme Court Intends to Overturn Roe v. Wade
  • St. Mary's Sunday Mass Disrupted, Catholic Patriarchy Denounced

RSS Indybay Newswire

  • Negotiating at last and The Russian-American Friendship
  • Online events with Kate Raworth, Vandana Shiva, Jeremy Corbyn, Yanis Varoufakis & others
  • There is no alternative to ceasefire negotiations / The rebel within us
  • Jidwaaq Clan and its Lack of Political and Social Representation
  • On People's Park, Democracy, and Politics

RSS Information Clearing House

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RSS Inside Left – The OFFICIAL Anti-Olympics Blog™

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RSS Institute for Public Accuracy

  • Report: Trump Era Covid Strategy “Likely Resulted in Many Deaths” June 30, 2022
  • Migrants Dead in Trailer “Predictable” June 30, 2022
  • Maxwell Sentenced to 20 Years for Conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein: Will Powerful Men be Held Accountable? June 30, 2022
  • Michigan Supreme Court Uses “Star Chamber” to Kill Flint Water Charges Against Officials June 29, 2022
  • Covid Behind Bars Project Finds Failure of Geriatric Parole Reform June 28, 2022
  • Blinded by “Russiaphobia” June 28, 2022

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  • 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

  • Australia’s New Union for Retail and Fast-Food Workers Is Rebuilding Militancy July 1, 2022
  • Rising Interest Rates Will Make Canada’s Housing Crisis Even Worse July 1, 2022
  • The Democrats Are Telling Voters That Roe v. Wade Is Still Intact July 1, 2022
  • How the Democrats Traded the New Deal for Neoliberalism July 1, 2022
  • I Got Fired for Unionizing at Starbucks. And I’d Do It Again. July 1, 2022
  • France’s Revived Left Can Stop Emmanuel Macron in His Tracks July 1, 2022

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  • But What About Hamas’s Rockets? May 14, 2021

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RSS John Cook Video Uploads

  • The Science of Cranky Uncle Part 3: Fighting Misinformation with Critical Thinking December 29, 2021
  • The Science of Cranky Uncle Part 2: Inoculation Theory December 21, 2021
  • The Science of Cranky Uncle Part 1: Why We Can't Ignore Misinformation December 14, 2021
  • Climate misinformation: Will Happer on CO2 being plant food January 24, 2021

RSS John Hively

  • The War Over Global Warming is Class Warfare on Many Fronts July 24, 2021
  • How the Billionaires Corporate News Media Have Been Used to Brainwash Us May 1, 2021

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  • WAR IN EUROPE AND THE RISE OF RAW PROPAGANDA

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RSS John Zerzan: Anarchy Radio

  • Anarchy Radio 06 28 2022 June 29, 2022
  • Anarchy Radio 06 21 2022 June 22, 2022
  • Noam Chomsky Is Wrong About Anarcho Primitivism June 15, 2022

RSS Jonathan Turley

  • Presidential Protection or Abduction: Why Secret Service Wrong for all the Right Reasons on Jan. 6 July 1, 2022
  • Former Trump White House Counsel Subpoenaed by J6 Committee June 30, 2022
  • Key Witnesses Challenge Bombshell Allegations of Key Witness Before the 1/6 Committee June 30, 2022
  • “Star Chamber Comeback”: Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel Loses Flint Water Cases in Spectacular Fashion June 29, 2022

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

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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

  • The Tracker Now Lives Here … November 1, 2015
  • A farewell post: Three reasons why good science writing is worth defending. January 6, 2015
  • Globe story on non-invasive prenatal testing offers murky argument. December 31, 2014
  • (UPDATED/2*) What Ho? A 2014 List of Lists of best, worst, or otherwisest in 2014 December 30, 2014
  • Cancer & poverty: When a reporter’s journey becomes part of the story. December 23, 2014

RSS Kulture Critic

  • In the Folds of the Flesh: Philosophic Reflections on Touch November 6, 2021

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

  • Weaponization of GMO technology? Obscure federal commission uncovers the danger June 26, 2022

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  • Law and Disorder June 27, 2022 June 27, 2022
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  • Consider the croissant: a history of food fraud June 28, 2022
  • Fragmented Yemen June 28, 2022
  • Ukraine's logistical crisis June 28, 2022
  • Tensions and blackmail over Western Sahara June 28, 2022
  • Migrants still risk their lives to reach England June 28, 2022

RSS Leaving Babylon

  • Even Iran is laughing at us November 9, 2020

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RSS Life Itself

  • Bad Karma April 9, 2022
  • Hope Dies Last March 10, 2022
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RSS Limited, Inc.

  • Dred Scott returns, motherfuckers June 30, 2022
  • Back to Normal Fails June 28, 2022
  • I don't love my country June 24, 2022

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RSS Low-Tech Magazine

  • How to Build a Practical Household Bike Generator March 7, 2022
  • The Revenge of the Hot Water Bottle January 21, 2022
  • The Printed Website: Volume III & The Comments December 2, 2021

RSS LRB Blog

  • The Weather in Istanbul July 1, 2022
  • Small Claims, Large Disputes June 30, 2022
  • Ragbag Powergrab June 29, 2022
  • Failure to Protect June 28, 2022
  • In Victoria Square June 27, 2022

RSS Luis J. Rodriguez

  • Help Luis J. Rodriguez become California governor January 5, 2022
  • Stand Firm on Election Day November 3, 2020
  • 50th Anniversary of Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War August 31, 2020

RSS Mabinogogiblog

  • Letter to QUNO 1.5 April 8, 2022
  • Preventing a repetition of the Ukraine tragedy April 3, 2022
  • Solving the Chimpanzee Problem that led to the invasion of Ukraine February 24, 2022
  • Examining the Covid claims of Dr Robert Malone February 5, 2022

RSS Manicore – Accueil

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RSS Marginal Revolution

  • Friday assorted links July 1, 2022
  • Institutional Review Boards Should be Curtailed July 1, 2022
  • Scottish Enlightenment vs. Irish Enlightenment July 1, 2022

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

  • Clock is ticking in race to slow carbon dioxide emissions, scientists warn January 13, 2022
  • COP26: Crunch time for the climate October 29, 2021
  • COP26 climate change summit: Here’s what each degree of global warming would mean for the planet October 25, 2021
  • Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature October 20, 2021
  • Forget net zero – let’s have a ‘fossil freedom day’ October 20, 2021

RSS Martin Wolf

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RSS Matt Bruenig

  • The Origins of the Recent DEI-Infused Liberal Politics Stuff June 29, 2022
  • Federalist ULP Ends In Big Let Down May 22, 2022
  • Reactions to the Alito Opinion May 4, 2022

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

  • Don’t Extradite Assange June 22, 2022
  • If You Are Dancing To Save The World, Your Dance Is Destroyed June 14, 2022
  • ‘Damned Fun’ – ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ And The Military-Entertainment Complex June 7, 2022

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RSS Media Matters – Everything

  • Fox guest on possible troop withdrawal from Afghanistan: "The solution is more blood, sweat, and tears" 
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RSS Media Roots

  • Media Roots Radio: How Billionaire Military Industrial Complex Tech Giant Elon Musk Will Save Free Speech April 24, 2022
  • Empire Files Podcast: A Russian Anti-War Perspective on Ukraine April 21, 2022
  • Peter Joseph on Abby Martin’s New Podcast DOSED April 13, 2022

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

  • The Fed’s Austerity Program to Reduce Wages June 20, 2022
  • An Autobiographical on Economic Rent and Exploitation June 18, 2022
  • Pepe Escobar on ‘the ultimate handbook’ June 10, 2022

RSS Michael Miller – Viewpoint

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RSS Mike Philbin – Free Planet

  • STAR CITIZEN - HALF A BILLION DOLLARS - TEN YEARS AND COUNTING September 1, 2021
  • ELECTRO-BULLET: reinterpreting a classic... August 28, 2021
  • LAST OF THE CATHEDRA available in trade paperback from Amazon. October 24, 2020

RSS Mondoweiss

  • Tom Friedman normalizes apartheid in the ‘New York Times’ June 30, 2022
  • Israel’s vicious response to Ben and Jerry– ‘antisemites’– is a wakeup call for American Jews June 30, 2022

RSS Mons Angelorum: Deadly Serious 3

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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

  • This Day In Iraqi History - Jun 30 Gen Razzaq launched attempted coup vs Pres Arif June 30, 2022
  • Review Volatile Landscape, Iraq and Its Insurgent Movements June 29, 2022
  • This Day In Iraqi History - Jun 29 Nouri mosque in Mosul liberated where IS’s Baghdadi declared the caliphate Iraqi forces claimed Mosul freed but fighting continued June 29, 2022

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

  • 2:00PM Water Cooler 7/1/2022 July 1, 2022
  • How to Get Rid of Medical Debt — Or Avoid It in the First Place July 1, 2022
  • Links 7/1/2022 July 1, 2022
  • Turkey Is Now Suffering From Hyper-Inflation, At Least According to Spanish Bank, BBVA July 1, 2022
  • Michael Hudson: A Depression Is Coming July 1, 2022

RSS Naomi Klein

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RSS Naomi Klein – Guardian.UK

  • Naomi Klein: how big tech helps India target climate activists March 4, 2021
  • We were told Joe Biden was the 'safe choice'. But it was risky to offer so little | Naomi Klein November 8, 2020

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

  • Food for health: the right to health is to live healthy lives June 3, 2020
  • Making peace with the Earth. 600 organisations urge a sustainable new start April 24, 2020
  • The Seed War March 20, 2020

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RSS New World Notes

  • Observations on Work June 20, 2021
  • The GOP and the Dems: Hypocrisy and Betrayal June 13, 2021
  • Can Technology Save Us? June 8, 2021

RSS News Junkie Post

  • Forget Wars on Covid and Terror: War on Climate Collapse Is the Only War of Necessity for Human Survival August 22, 2021
  • Covid Fear Management Policies: Distractions from and Tests for Looming Climate Collapse August 4, 2021
  • France Neoliberal Macron: Vanguard of a Covid Global Corporate Dictatorship? July 24, 2021
  • Magic Woman of Haiti’s Mountains July 18, 2021
  • Afghanistan War Outcome: Hope for Sovereign Nations Fighting the Scourge of Neocolonial Imperialism July 17, 2021
  • Afghanistan: Deadly Costs of a War for Profit Won by the Taliban July 9, 2021

RSS NOAA: Monthly State of the Climate Report

  • May 2022 Monthly National Climate Report

RSS Notes from the Aboveground

  • On Inequality July 27, 2015
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RSS Occupy.com

  • Green New Deal XVII: Climate Litigation Is One Track To a Just Green Future July 1, 2022
  • ​​GREEN NEW DEAL XVI: Undoing Neoliberalism's Spell and Reclaiming Common Sense June 3, 2022
  • The Rise and (Not So Fast) Fall of Londongrad March 18, 2022
  • How Students Struggling to Get Educated in Kashmir Came Up With Collective Solutions During the Pandemic March 10, 2022
  • Reckoning with Britain’s Cost-of-Living Crisis: Causes and Solutions January 28, 2022
  • GND 15: Chile's Popular Political Revolution Offers Lessons Far Beyond its Shoreline January 28, 2022
  • The Threat of Republican Fascism, Part II: The War on Fair Elections January 6, 2022
  • How India’s Farmers Achieved Victory After a Yearlong Protest December 17, 2021

RSS Occupy las Vegas

  • Crypto Boom Alternativen April 22, 2022
  • Stortingen en opnames bij Bitcoin Revolution December 25, 2021
  • Alternativen zu PC Health Advisor October 21, 2021

RSS Occupy Wall Street

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RSS Oddity Central

  • Car-jitsu – The Goofy Contact Sport Only Practiced in Cars June 30, 2022
  • Man Sets Fire to Church Because His Wife Kept Donating to It June 30, 2022
  • Tattoo Artist Creates the World’s Most Amazing Gaming and Comic-Inspired Tattoos June 29, 2022
  • Man Makes His Face Available as Stock Image, Becomes Known as the “Worst Person You Know” June 29, 2022
  • iPhone Spends 10 Months on Bottom of River, Still Works June 28, 2022
  • Mexican Mountain Road Requires Drivers to Drive on the Wrong Side of the Road June 28, 2022

RSS Of Two Minds

  • The Most Valuable Form of Money Nobody's Seen--Yet July 1, 2022
  • Why the Housing Bubble Bust Is Baked In June 29, 2022
  • The Age of Discord June 27, 2022

RSS One Penny Sheet

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RSS One Struggle – South Florida

  • They Snatch Our Rights – We Bite Back! June 26, 2022
  • DeSantis and the Florida Fasc June 6, 2022
  • We Scream for Change and They Respond by Supporting the Status Quo March 29, 2022
  • We Must Take Our Cities Back from the Bourgeoisie! February 10, 2022

RSS Orion Magazine

  • Five Questions for Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of How Strange a Season March 29, 2022
  • 17 Poetry Collections to read during Women’s History Month March 23, 2022
  • Orion Staff Recommends: What We’re Reading, Watching, and Doing This Month March 8, 2022

RSS Our Finite World

  • A Few Insights Based on CDC Data Regarding COVID and its Vaccines June 10, 2022
  • Is the debt bubble supporting the world economy in danger of collapsing? May 17, 2022
  • The world has a major crude oil problem; expect conflict ahead April 21, 2022

RSS Pando Daily

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RSS Paul Haeder

  • How Many Concussions from Capitalists Can Americans Take? June 27, 2022
  • Out with the Old, In with the New June 23, 2022
  • Before there was Man, God or Satan Was Woman then Father June 19, 2022

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RSS PBD – Progressive Blog Digest

  • 46 January 21, 2021
  • HIS LEGACY January 20, 2021
  • THE END GAME January 19, 2021

RSS PeakOil.com News

  • The World Is Failing In Both Energy Affordability And Climate Goals June 26, 2022
  • Why we must nationalize Big Oil June 25, 2022
  • The Gas Inflation Crisis Is Far From Over – Where Will Prices Finally Stop? June 25, 2022

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RSS People Before Profit Blog

  • "Blacklisted Again" Michael Berkowitz on "Trumbo" by Norman Markowitz December 10, 2015
  • A Corrected and Updated Version of The "Madness" of Donald Trump by Norman Markowitz December 9, 2015
  • The "Madness" of Donald Trump by Norman Markowitz December 8, 2015

RSS Phlegm

  • "we fight each other while it devours us" Belgium June 2017 December 1, 2017
  • West Didsbury Manchester. May 2017 December 1, 2017
  • Dulwich picture gallery. April 25th 2017 December 1, 2017

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RSS Political Violence @ a Glance

  • Make Love Not War June 27, 2022
  • Can Russia “Export” Its Conspiracy Theories? June 22, 2022
  • Civilian Collaboration and Reprisals Behind Ukraine’s Front Lines June 21, 2022

RSS Popular Resistance

  • Lithuania’s Brinkmanship July 1, 2022
  • There are Hungry People. There are Hungry People July 1, 2022
  • Democrats Exposed By the End of Roe v. Wade July 1, 2022
  • Economist Michael Hudson on inflation and Fed plan to cut wages: A depression is coming July 1, 2022

RSS PRN with Danny Schechter

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RSS ProPublica

  • Google Allowed a Sanctioned Russian Ad Company to Harvest User Data for Months July 1, 2022
  • How We Fight Back When Officials Resist Releasing Information You Have a Right to Know June 30, 2022
  • Congress Investigates Portable Generator Manufacturers Following Carbon Monoxide Deaths June 29, 2022
  • The Other Cancel Culture: How a Public University Is Bowing to a Conservative Crusade June 29, 2022
  • Army Corps of Engineers to Order New Study of Grain Elevator That Could Harm Black Heritage Sites June 28, 2022

RSS Project Censored

  • Whistleblowers June 30, 2022
  • The Misconceptions, Corporatization, and Radical Roots of Pride June 20, 2022
  • Going Remote June 14, 2022

RSS Public Intelligence

  • (U//FOUO) DHS Bulletin: Domestic Violent Extremist Activity Likely in Response to US Supreme Court Decision on Abortion
  • 2022 Bilderberg Meeting Participant List
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Reference Aid: 3-D Printed Plastic Weapons, Equipment, and Materials
  • (U//FOUO) Central Florida Intelligence Exchange Bulletin: Literary Propaganda Used To Drive Violent Extremist Narratives Towards the U.S. Government and Law Enforcement
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Bulletin: Moscow’s Invasion of Ukraine Impeding Reach of Russian State Media in the West
  • DHS Public-Private Analytic Exchange Program Report: Combatting Targeted Disinformation Campaigns A Whole-of-Society Issue Part Two August 2021
  • DHS Public-Private Analytic Exchange Program Report: Combatting Targeted Disinformation Campaigns A Whole-of-Society Issue October 2019
  • Department of Energy Cybersecurity and Digital Components Supply Chain Deep Dive Assessment
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Bulletin: Warning of Potential for Cyber Attacks Targeting the United States in the Event of a Russian Invasion of Ukraine
  • (U//LES) Nevada High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Bulletin: Dark Web and Cryptocurrency What to Look for During a Search Warrant

RSS Pulse

  • A Protest for Ukraine free of Dogma and Cynicism March 2, 2022
  • Dismantling Hindutva with Islamophobia? February 19, 2022
  • Of UnStating the Stated, and the Silences in its Wake February 10, 2022
  • Tunisia and the Spectre of Authoritarianism July 15, 2021

RSS Quartz

  • How the Sony Walkman changed everything July 1, 2022
  • Unilever isn’t displaying leadership by selling Ben & Jerry’s in Israel—just avoidance July 1, 2022
  • In an EV world, Europe’s automakers are even more reliant on China July 1, 2022
  • New York City is trying to reduce subway crime by harassing beloved station musicians July 1, 2022
  • 🌍 SCOTUS curbs EPA July 1, 2022
  • Byju’s wants to buy an American startup—but does it have the funds? July 1, 2022
  • A bunch of men are about to make a fortune on Plan B June 30, 2022
  • The Supreme Court stopped just short of killing the regulatory state June 30, 2022
  • Elon Musk’s 9-day Twitter silence is unusually long for him June 30, 2022
  • Abortion bans will make pregnancies in the US even more dangerous June 30, 2022

RSS Question Everything

  • Happy Summer Solstice, Goodbye and Thanks for All the Fish June 20, 2021
  • Hope for a Pleasant Vernal Equinox March 20, 2021
  • Starting a New Blog: Rethinking Everything December 31, 2020

RSS R-Squared Energy

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RSS Rabett Run

  • Give a Man a Solar Lamp May 29, 2022
  • Eli Rabett's Simple Plan to Relieve the Burdens of Student Loans May 29, 2022
  • Dr Valerie Masson-Delmotte on the WGIII report Part 2 Know your nomenclature April 5, 2022