“For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn.”

02 Monday Dec 2013

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

≈ 80 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Arctic Ice Melt, Canfield Ocean, Capitalism, Climate Change, CO2 Emissions, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Droughts and Fire in Australia, Ecocide, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, Gary Bedford: Regional Environment Officer, Great Permian Extinction, Infinite Growth Paradigm, International Energy Agency (IEA), Jellyfish Plague, John Key: New Zealand Prime Minister, Kevin Moore, Mass Die Off, Methane Time Bomb, New Plymouth District Council (NPDC), Nuclear Radiation, Ocean Acidification, Overpopulation, Pathocracy, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Political Ponerology by Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Runaway Climate Change, The Elite 1%, Typhoon Haiyan

Despite mounting evidence of our grim reality, the world’s psychopathic leadership remains willfully deaf, dumb, and blind to the unfolding global ecocide and humanicide. A persistent sounding of the alarm by a tiny minority of the population only seems to have irritated and offended those in the elite class who are pressing the fossil-fueled industrial machine onward, full steam ahead. However, it’s not a cliff we are headed towards because surely the psychopaths would have hidden their parachutes underneath their business suits. There will be no Bottleneck for humans because we’re headed toward the black hole of extinction from which nobody gets out alive. Yes, they’ll be a few hangers-on for a brief period until there is only one lone straggler… and then darkness for the human species along with 99% of all other life. We’re doomed by a pathocracy:

…from Greek pathos, “feeling, pain, suffering”; and kratos, “rule”

A totalitarian form of government in which absolute political power is held by a psychopathic elite, and their effect on the people is such that the entire society is ruled and motivated by purely pathological values.

A pathocracy can take many forms and can insinuate itself covertly into any seemingly just system or ideology. As such it can masquerade under the guise of a democracy or theocracy as well as more openly oppressive regimes…

Kevin Moore, a frequent commenter on this site, has provided us with an excellent summation of current factors which clearly spell extinction for the “wise” ape. Certainly if a reasonable person in charge studies his list, they would want to turn this ill-fated ship around before it quite literally takes everyone down into a deep, watery grave. On the contrary, Kevin points out that they are “throwing the compass and fishing gear overboard” and “boring holes in the hull while distributing all the rations for immediate consumption.” I’m afraid those who have managed to work their way into political positions are forbidden from making any decisions jeopardizing business-as-usual; but as the memes go, there is no business on a dead planet nor is there a planet B. The least these politicians and corporate heads could do is be honest with their own children by telling them their future is not as important as the short-term profits to be had right now by ripping up the Earth’s last remaining resources and fouling the biosphere. If they cannot be truthful to their own offspring, how could we expect them to be forthright and unbiased with us?

At any rate and for posterity’s sake (however brief that may be), here is Kevin’s detailed and ‘hopium-free’ list:

Yesterday I sent out an email to a long list of people concerning the meeting I had with the local council’s climate change officer, during which I pointed out we are in the early stages of complete meltdown of planetary systems. And ‘nobody’ is at all bothered.

Here is what I sent as a summary of the meeting: .

I raised the following points with Colin Comber, New Plymouth District Council climate change officer, at our meeting on Friday, 29th November, 2013. On most points he had nothing to say.

1. The forcing factor for methane has been raised from 23 times CO2 to 34 times CO2. Even that multiplier understates the warming potential in the short term, and a figure of at least 100 times should be used for methane bursts.

2. Recent methane bursts in the East Siberian Sea have resulted in 2000ppb, which is equivalent to over 200ppm CO2 in the short-term, making the total global CO2 equivalence 600ppm (at least). The extraordinarily high concentration of greenhouse gases has resulted in rapid temperature increases in the Arctic (up around 1C since 2006, despite the huge amount of energy involved in melting ice.).

3. 2012 saw the lowest ever summer ice area.

4. The current Arctic ice area is hovering around two standard deviations below the historic average, but much of the ice is thin and new, making 2013 the lowest stable ice volume ever.

5. Atmospheric CO2 hit 400ppm earlier this year. It troughed at 393ppm (photosynthesis cycle) and is on its way up; it is anticipated to reach 403ppm April-May 2014.

6. The heat forcing of current atmospheric CO2 is equivalent to around 400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs being exploded every day.

7. The present level of atmospheric CO2 is 40% above the pre-industrial level and corresponds to a sea level 23 meters above current; the reason we don’t have an immediate sea level rise is the thermal lag of warming deep oceans and converting ice into water. Such a level of CO2 has not been experienced any time in the evolution of humans over the past 2 million years. Indeed, for much of our recent history the CO2 level was around 180ppm and there were thick ice sheets as far south as central England.

8. The IEA has announced we are on track for a rise in average temperature of 3.5oC by 2035. Such a temperature rise puts temperatures beyond anything experienced in human history and most of the Earth into an uninhabitable zone. Interestingly, NZ governments quote the IEA as the best source of information when it comes to energy but completely ignore the IEA when it comes to unwelcome information about climate. The IEA is talking about a runaway greenhouse gas situation.

9. Acidification of the oceans [due to absorption of anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere] is proceeding at an unprecedented rate, leading to stress of organisms dependent on bicarbonate cycle for shell formation. Industrial activity is altering the chemical and biological composition of the oceans at a rate faster than that of the great Permian Extinction Event which wiped out 95% of life on Earth. Continuation on the current path of burning fossil fuels will render the oceans uninhabitable to most existing marine species, and then wipe out most terrestrial species.

10. I was personally shocked to see millions of jellyfish on a local beach recently. Although my observation has no scientific significance it is indicative of the ‘death of the oceans’ I have been reading about; we are transforming the oceans back to some primeval form, similar to that of 600 million years ago, wiping out the species (turtles, sunfish etc.) that feed on jellyfish and loading the oceans with toxins. I had previously noted the paucity of sea life in rock pools compared to 30 years ago (this is presumably not from over-collection, since the beach has been designated a maritime protection zone).

11. Whereas the previous five mass extinction events (other than the one that wiped out dinosaurs) were due to natural volcanic activity, the present mass extinction event is due to industrial activity and emissions from industrial activity.

12. An unknown amount of radiation is leaking from the crippled Fukushima reactors into the Pacific Ocean. People on the west coast of the US are now extremely concerned, particularly since mass deaths of sea life are now being frequently reported.

13. Australia recently reported the highest ever October temperatures (corresponding with the earliest severe wildfires).

14. Typhoon Haiyan was the biggest storm ever to make landfall and resulted in unprecedented damage. This was due to extraordinarily hot sea water associated with ocean warming. An excellent essay on Nature Bats Last highlighted the fact that prior to the Second World War people in the region lived without the ‘benefits’ of civilization, and when storms smashed things up they just picked up the pieces and rebuilt their huts, got water from lakes and rivers, and went back to fishing from small boats: now they are unable to do any of that because all the natural, sustainable systems have been ruined or covered with concrete and asphalt, and industrial civilization resulted in a population explosion that resulted in far more victims than there would have been if development had not occurred.

15. If we imagine the Earth totally covered with industrial civilization (no land available for food production) it is clearly not sustainable. 90% covered by civilization is not sustainable. Nor is 80%. Not even 50% is sustainable. The current level of civilization utilises about 43% of the primary production of the Earth and has resulted in a 0.85C rise in average temperature. That 0.85C rise is already having catastrophic effects (meltdown of the Arctic, super-storms etc.)

16. The fact that we already have meltdown (lowest Arctic ice, extraordinary storms, death of corals etc.) at 0.85C above the long-term average indicates that we are already in overshoot with respect to population and resource consumption. Despite the fact that we have reached the meltdown stage, governments persist with policies predicated on increased population and increased resource use, which is completely insane. NPDC [New Plymouth District Council] advocates the same kind of insanity on a daily basis.

17. The previously proposed ‘safe’ level of temperature rise of 2C is not safe at all, and was only ever an arbitrary number. But climate specialists now admit that warming cannot be restricted to 2C anyway, and that we are on track for a 4C or 6C rise in average temperature, i.e. a largely uninhabitable planet in a matter of decades, probably by 2060, which would be within the normal lifespan of children living today. If the International Energy Agency is correct, the Earth will be largely uninhabitable by 2040.

18. Nothing whatsoever is being done to curtail emissions. International negotiations are a farce predicated on ‘kicking the can down the road’ for as long as possible. NPDC policy, mirroring that around the world, is geared to increasing CO2 emissions, via increased population, increased use of concrete, increased dependence on internal combustion engines, etc. I quoted the incident I had witnessed of two petrol-powered vehicles being used to deposit and level gravel on a path in Pukekura Park when one person with a wheelbarrow could have done the job (and 50 years ago that was how the job was done); meanwhile, the mulching machine in operation in the park prior to our meeting would have consumed more energy in a few hours than the electric bikes the council promotes would save in a year.

19. Extraction of conventional oil peaked over 2005 to 2008, and the economic system is now being propped up by desperation measures centered around fracking, deep-sea drilling, extraction from tar sands, etc. as well as consuming ever greater amounts of energy, such activities increase the emissions associated with fossil fuel extraction, thereby exacerbating the climate catastrophe.

20. We cannot look to John Key* or Jonathan Young** or Andrew Little*** for leadership on environmental issues: they are simply opportunists acting as agents of global corporations and money-lenders; they implement policies favourable to global corporations and money-lenders which entail trashing the environment, generally as quickly as possible.

21. Currently, NPDC is fully committed to destroying the futures of the young people living in the district and elsewhere via resource depletion and environmental collapse, as indicated by the huge display in the council foyer which announces that NPDC spends 2c of every dollar collected promoting economic growth. (Economic growth equates to increased resource consumption and increased emissions.)

22. The present economy has no future because of energy depletion and because it is increasing the level of pollution, both locally and globally. Continuation on the present path of searching for and burning fossil fuels results in an uninhabitable planet within decades. Drastically reducing fuel consumption leading to total abandonment of fossil fuels is the only sane option. (It may be too late for that, but it is still the only sane option.)

23. This is not a matter of priorities. Surely there can be no priority higher than ensuring the next generation has a habitable planet to live on. The system ignores the most important priority of all, and therefore the system is INSANE.

24. Everyone within the system pretends nothing is wrong and that the system has a future even when a modicum of rational thought indicates it doesn’t (infinite growth on a finite planet is mathematically impossible.)

25. The composition of the new council give us no reason for optimism and many reasons for extreme pessimism.

26. The main reason the general populace of the district continues to ‘behave badly’ -purchase and use oversized vehicles, cover land with concrete and asphalt, consume at unsustainable levels etc.- is because they are encouraged to by NPDC. The only message they get from the council is that everything is rosy (when the reverse is the case and we are mightily close to collapse).

27. The overuse of internal combustion engines is causing severe health problems globally and within the district. Coupled with consumption of junk food, mechanized transport is causing obesity and other diseases. Consumerism is generating a freak society, and each week that passes the ‘freak show’ becomes more bizarre.

28. There is a culture of ‘spend, spend, spend’ amongst council officers, with utterly ridiculous projects being undertaken. Apart from being totally unnecessary, these concrete and steel projects put additional CO2 into the atmosphere and bring forward abrupt climate change and an uninhabitable planet, are financially crippling the district, and pushing those on low fixed incomes ‘off the cliff’.

29. I pointed out that I spoke with Gary Bedford, regional environment officer, prior to returning to NP in 2006, and raised the matters of Peak Oil and Abrupt Climate Change; he ‘did not want to know’ and has done nothing whatsoever to protect the district. Indeed, he is on record as making absurd statements such as: “Climate change will be good for Taranaki.” I wish to have a follow-up session with him.

30. I have been proven right on practically everything I said in 2006 and subsequently to variously composed councils since 2006. Council officers have been proven consistently wrong. But it makes no difference how often council officers are proven wrong, nothing in the system changes and the insanity continues.

31. NPDC has been provided with the most accurate data and analysis available over many years (particularly my submission to the draft plan 2013), and NPDC has ignored it all. Hence, everything that matters has gotten worse and will continue to get worse by the day.

32. As far as I can establish, Colin Comber is the only council officer in a position to challenge the nonsense churned out by the bulk of the administration, in so far as all the policies advocated by senior council officers result in increased emissions and an ever faster meltdown of the global and local environment. I pointed out to him that he has ‘sat on his hands’ since our first meeting (around 6 years ago) and everything has gotten worse as a consequence.

Notes:

*John Key: NZ Prime Minister.

**Jonathan Young: MP for the city

***Andrew Little: List Labour MP for the city (MMP system).

Andre Judd: recently elected (October 2013) mayor of the city.

What is particularly interesting for me is that Jonathan Young, Andrew Little and Andrew Judd all have copies of my most recent book ‘The Easy Way’ (which details most of what is discussed on CoIC and NBL etc.) and that I had several sessions with Andrew Little on the content of TEW, and numerous sessions with Andrew Judd prior to his election.

Old habits die hard, but if you’re a smoker and you’ve got stage 3 cancer staring you in the face, the only two options are to radically change your behavior or die with your bad habits. We’ve already destroyed the Earth’s air conditioner which has altered the Jet Streams, unlocked the methane monster, and set off various other positive feedback loops ushering in a new normal of extreme weather. As a result, humans no longer enjoy a stable climate within which to cultivate food and can no longer depend on feshwater supply from seasonal snow melt. Yes, it’s rather a bit too late, but why keep digging when the hole you are in is already way too deep?

Corporate Occupied Planet

30 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil

≈ 39 Comments

Tags

'The Fifties' by David Halberstam, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Capitalist Modernity, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, David Halberstam, Dmitry Orlov, Doomsaying as a Growth Industry, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Harry Willis at Waldenswimmer, Inverted Totalitarianism, James Howard Kunstler, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Police State, Russell Brand, Security and Surveillance State, The Elite 1%

Once in a while in that vast nothingness of the internet I’ll happen across a blog from someone who has something of substance to say. I have also learned that Dmitry Orlov is likely discontinuing any more ‘collapsitarian’ blog posts. Probably not a good subject to dwell on when you have an infant son. In ‘Dmitry flicks it in‘, Harry Willis reminds us that America has been the epicenter of capitalism, always for sale to the highest bidder and now home to a new growth industry – Doomsaying:

[Excerpt]

“…David Halberstam’s book The Fifties was, I think, very enlightening in this regard. We are the home of the chain hotel (Holiday Inn), the chain restaurant (McDonald’s and all its followers), the Big Box stores (Wal-Mart, CostCo), the mega-hardware store (Home Depot, Lowe’s), the strip mall, the suburban housing tract, and most importantly, the concept that corporate power should be concentrated in huge holding companies that own very diverse and large businesses. On this latter point, whether Americans realize it or not, every meal they eat out, every processed food they buy at the market, every sundry (detergent, household necessities) they purchase wherever, every drug and almost everything else they routinely buy is sold to them by about 10 huge holding companies. And all communications are essentially owned by 6 large corporations, so everything you ingest with your ears and eyes is also owned by a corporate cartel.

These huge companies are multinational in character, with much of their business (and payroll) located overseas. They are nominally American, but the sinking mass of the American middle and lower classes here are more or less of marginal relevance to them, and only to the extent that Americans form part of their customer base. The American booboisie needs to be manipulated because the U.S.A. is still nominally a democracy, de jure, although de facto it is what Sheldon Wolin calls an “inverted totalitarian state,” one where the government is owned by Big Business. We are not going to “vote” our way out of this situation, as Russell Brand, among numerous others (including Dmitry Orlov, most definitely) seems to get.

America is a corporate headquarters and tax haven which executes its business plans by means of a huge standing army, which does not often just stand around. We got this way because (a) power always tends to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands, even in a liberal democracy, since as money aggregates it can get rid of legal impediments such as high taxation and anti-trust laws, and (b) because America was the most innovative and naturally-blessed (our peerless real estate) nation on Earth. We also benefitted mightily from intellectual immigration to this country, made possible by the double-digit IQs in charge of Nazi Germany.

I don’t think the United States is going to collapse in the sense that the Collapsarian community talks and writes about. For one thing, the emphasis is too much on Peak Oil. I’ve written before that I think Peak Oil represents a kind of deus ex machina for anti-American wish fulfillment. Some sensitive souls, such as James Kunstler, Dmitry Orlov and many others, are so appalled by the grisly ugliness of the American crapscape, with its chain everything and grotesque proliferation of hideous suburban grids, that they long for some way to predict confidently that it must fall of its own weight. That’s where Peak Oil comes in: you posit that an economy runs on cheap energy, especially petroleum in the American economy, and this gives you a means of assuring everyone that it will all be over soon and an anodyne vision of Norman Rockwell’s neighborhoods will materialize peacefully out of the formless void.

No, I don’t think so. The lower 90% of the American populace has no way to go but down, until it reaches a rough parity with the hard-working masses in Asia who, after all, have many of the same employers as the Americans. The American multi-nationals are indifferent to the fate of their so-called “countrymen,” indifferent to the environment (mountain top removal, fracking, pesticide and fertilizer flushes into the Gulf and oceans, plastic waste, soil erosion, CO2 emissions) and essentially react only when conditions become so dire that the American “platform” is threatened. We’re inflating bubbles again through money printing to retard this natural contraction, and when the bubbles pop (again), we’ll have nother “crisis” which will in fact simply be another step-phase down after the gooey soap is cleaned up. I think that’s how we’ll get there, in a ratchet fashion. We will even adapt to oil high prices, as in fact Americans have done since the 2008 financial crisis began. Americans drive 3% fewer miles now per year than they did 5 years ago, despite increases in population and the “recovery.” Gasoline usage is way down, as people shift to fuel-efficient cars and just leave the car keys on the table in the hallway. Or by the oil can fire under the bridge.

The dramatic immiseration of the American people (thanks, Rob Urie) since 2008 has made catastrophe prediction and doomsaying one of America’s chief growth industries, and many, many writers and speakers have gotten in on the act. But it’s not especially lucrative. Owning one of the Big Corporations is better for that, so the doomsayers drop out and flick it in. It’s always nice to go over to Mom’s house.”

Economic and cultural coercion are readily apparent in our society. And if those don’t work, the corporate state also has policies of overt force – military and law enforcement. You could call this arrangement an ‘open air prison’ or the more apt phrase for America would be ‘inverted totalitarianism’ in which the prisoners aren’t fully aware of their own shackles, transfixed as they are by mass media manipulation, the consumer culture, and the trappings of our high-energy way of life. Is there any wonder that a post apocalyptic scenario holds a certain amount of perverse romanticism for those yearning to escape capitalist modernity?

Living Double Lives

25 Monday Nov 2013

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

≈ 35 Comments

Tags

Amazon Deforestation, Claude Combes, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, Infinite Growth Paradigm, L’Art d’Être Parasite, Mass Media Manipulation, Overpopulation, Religious Extremism, Resource Wars, Society of Spectacle, Superorganism, The Compulsive Explainer, War for Profit

Amazon deforestation:

“The parasite, as any other living thing, aims to reproduce as much as possible, and therefore, exploiting its environment as much as possible. This does not mean that the further exploitation of the host will help to achieve reproductive success of the parasite.”
~ Claude Combes, L’Art d’Être Parasite (loosely translated from french)

The question has been propounded and answered numerous times: “Are we (humans) any smarter than yeast?” The reluctant answer is usually, “No, not really.” Sure, yeast (pl.) possess no consciousness or awareness so far as we can tell, but that may not be a good measure of smarts, it turns out. The salient point of comparison is that yeast consume their environment/habitat/medium until it’s overpopulated and depleted, at which point they die en masse. We’re doing the very same, though it’s taking a long time and we’re not quite done yet. Maybe ionizing radiation from nuclear Armageddon of one sort or another (who’s still watching Fukushima?) will get us before we destroy our own habitat with pollution and anthropogenic climate change (not that nuclear fallout isn’t also destroying our habitat), maybe not. Identical result either way.

A master narrative to explain everything eludes us. True believers are probably content with the idea that god’s will reigns supreme and that, in all his benevolence, he will ~~continue to~~ provide. That’s a comforting fable many have chased into their graves. Those of us bent toward a system of belief based more on evidence see a different future, not so much potential as inevitable.

I realized recently that many of us live double lives: (1) the one we present to our families, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, employers, etc. who have not yet countenanced the idea of collapse honestly for a variety of reasons and (2) the one we sense deep down and are compelled out of a mixture of grief, horror, despair, and commiseration to share in venues like this one. But there’s another kind of dual life that interests me: the life of the body vs. the life of the mind.

Living in Our Bodies

I’ve written before about satiety signals, which basically says that, like yeast, we can’t stop the habit of endless, needless, mindless consumption. We’re insatiable. From there, it may be worth noting the five basic life functions (recycling content from this post):

growth — living beings grow and develop
respiration — they breathe and respire
reproduction — they reproduce offspring
nutrition — they eat food
excretion — they eliminate wastes from the body

A more fully elaborated list goes like this:

obtaining and changing materials into forms an organism can use
taking in food from the environment
breakdown of complex food materials into forms the organism can use
elimination of indigestible material
process by which substances are taken into the cells of an organism
process by which materials are distributed (moved) throughout the organism
release of chemical energy from certain nutrients
chemical combination of simple substances to form complex substances
incorporation of materials into the body of an organism
increase in size
process by which cells become specialized for specific functions
removal of metabolic wastes
process by which organisms maintain a stable internal environment
process by which organisms produce new organisms of their own kind
the sum total of all the chemical reactions occurring within the cells of an organism

We live to eat, reproduce, and eventually die — all basic functions of the body. In our current ‘Age of Abundance’, those of use hanging out on computers probably have our life-preserving bodily needs met and aren’t scrambling to stave off dehydration and starvation the way those living at the edges do. We easily forget, then, that our bodies fail rather quickly without continued inputs: in a couple minutes without air, in a few days without water, and in a few weeks without food. Thus, when fed and clothed and housed satisfactorily (not that we stop consuming there), we easily lose touch with the life of the body and believe — mistakenly, comically, tragically, take your pick — that we can live in our heads.

Living in Our Heads

As a social species, humans also have certain psychosocial needs that must be met. Failures tend not to be as immediately obvious as when bodily needs go unmet, but results are no less dramatic: individuals run off the rails (drug- and alcohol-related self-destruction, psychosis, violent rampages, suicide, etc.) and societies (if you recognize human collectives as a superorganism) become embroiled in madness. When exactly society/civilization first went mad is probably a matter of opinion (some might suggest, for instance, the French Terror), but in the modern industrial era, I suggest that World War One is the conflict that broke us psychologically. We’ve never really recovered. Follow-on wars (World War Two, the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Afghanistan and Iraq (undeclared), and the so-called War on Terror) have all consumed the energies and economies of the world’s superpowers without entirely clear benefits, except perhaps for WWII, which at least ended the Holocaust and for a time stopped Fascism.

Wholesomeness is not a term one could use fairly to describe the attributes of modern American culture, not anymore (if indeed ever). We now live in a Society of Spectacle, and electronics in particular enable omnipresent connection to a firehose-style information feed: pure, indiscriminate volume pointed at everyone all the time. And if ever there were an embodiment of a bottomless pit, an insatiable appetite, our consumption of information is it. Seriously, how many broadcast and cable channels are there, all competing at the juvenile game of made-you-look? Even those of us here at Collapse have what might be called a “spectacular” view of the proceedings.

The Compulsive Explainer has an interesting albeit brief post called “Information Overload as an Addiction” suggesting that our preoccupation with entertainment, especially the electronic sorts (radio, cinema, television, Internet), is for the masses equivalent to giving away one’s mind. Information insatiability has become an addiction, and like political junkies, the media-saturated middle mind of the masses cannot perceive reality through what’s projected by the media at the bidding of cultural, corporate, and political leaders who would keep us calmed and buying. Instead, we live (temporarily) within a giant fiction, a phantasmagoria if you will, nearly a virtual reality, from which there is scarcely an escape even for those who can see the bubble (always from the inside, of course — after all, we’re on computers). While the story continues to be spun, our attention is riveted and our compliance coerced. But never fear: the life of the body will triumph eventually, though only in the negative sense.

Disillusioned in Dismayland

09 Saturday Nov 2013

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

≈ 157 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Globalization, Gross Inequality, Idiocracy, Inverted Totalitarianism, Jeff Gillette, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Police State, Poverty, Privatization, Regulatory Capture, The Elite 1%, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit

Capitalism has, throughout its history, built itself off the backs of the weak through dispossession, slavery, colonialism, technology and military power. Protecting the capitalist system into the 21st century, U.S. military served as the all-powerful proxy force of the global corporate elite. In the waning days of modern-day civilization, transnational corporations found even more ways to amass power and squeeze out every last penny from the Earth to the gods of capital. In the name of ‘free trade’, secretive agreements with alphabet soup-acronyms like TTP and TPIP were concocted to protect and expand profits as well as investor returns at the expense of all else, including the sovereignty of nations and the very habitability of the planet. Corporations became the new kings and queens, tsars and tsaritsas, bishops and popes. The last grab for what was left could now be done more swiftly while circumventing the laws of nations.

“…Capitalism has an inbuilt wondrous capacity of resurrection and regeneration; though this is capacity of a kind shared with parasites – organisms that feed on other organisms, belonging to other species. After a complete or near-complete exhaustion of one host organism, a parasite tends and manages to find another, that would supply it with life juices for a successive, albeit also limited, stretch of time.

A hundred years ago Rosa Luxemburg grasped that secret of the eerie, phoenix-like ability of capitalism to rise, repeatedly, from the ashes; an ability that leaves behind a track of devastation – the history of capitalism is marked by the graves of living organisms sucked of their life juices to exhaustion…” ~ Zygmunt Bauman

In a world of finite resources controlled by a tiny capitalist class, there would eventually only be two classes remaining – the über-wealthy or global elite and the vast underclass of disposable workers who eked out a subsistence existence. The wealth of society continued to be funneled upwards to the corporate overlords by way of deregulation, privatization, low or nonexistent tax rates, control of the legal system, and the cutting away of any last scraps of a social safety net.

Preoccupied by their digital screen devices and satiated on mass-produced junk food, the plebs never really noticed they were living in an open-air prison. In the meantime, the walls of a police state rose up to protect the sociopathic elite. As long as the ‘consumers’ were kept in a continual state of ‘amusement madness’ and on the treadmill of work exhaustion, there would be no time for contemplating the reality of climate change, the ever-widening wealth gap, the rise of a corporate fascist state, or the disappearance of the natural world.

“Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.”
~ J. B. Priestley

This Ponzi scheme economy was so entrenched in the psyche of the general populace that essentially none questioned its validity, even in the face of increasingly chaotic weather and rising seas, mountains of toxic waste, lifeless oceans, epidemic industrial disease, and grotesque wealth maldistribution. The right to seek profit trumped the health and safety of humans, the stability of the environment, and the legal recourse of governments on behalf of their citizens. National borders were effectively erased and a global corporatocracy now ruled the planet. Ironically, the one world government feared by so many right-wing conspiracists had become reality without any protest from them.

Acid rain and erratic weather, the unintended consequences of half-baked geoengineering fixes, forced most food production into industrial greenhouses. Due to the chemical pollution levels in the environment, all water had to be treated before it was used for anything, and gas masks became ‘everyday outdoor wear’ like hats and umbrellas. Most stayed indoors to escape such hazards, immersing themselves in the artificial environments of virtual reality software. Zoos became the only sanctuaries for wildlife, their sperm safely kept frozen for the day humans might want to de-extinctify them. National parks were privatized and plastered with corporate logos. The ranks of the homeless and destitute swelled, but most soon found themselves living inside the cell of a private, for-profit prison where they toiled away as cheap labor contracted by the corporations. Such crises were always looked upon as business opportunities, a niche to fill in the profit-seeking mind of homo economicus. Commodification and commercialization of everything became completely normalized.

Taken to the extreme and turned into a rigid belief system, all ideologies can become dangerous. When the ethics of a society bow to laissez-faire capitalism, life in the U$A becomes a cruel joke:

War for profit (the world’s largest war machine eating up half of every tax dollar)
Healthcare for profit (the most expensive and least effective healthcare in the industrialized world)
Imprisonment for profit (most incarcerated individuals per capita in the world)
Higher education for profit ($1.2 trillion student debt and counting)
Corporate welfare (one of the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the developed world and subsidies for the giant transnational corporations costing the average American family $6,000 or more per year)
U.S. Now leading the world into climate chaos with unconventional oil & gas production (expensive extraction of dirty, low EROEI sources)
Corporate-controlled media (just 6 corporations own 90% of the media)
Corporate-controlled government (lobbying dollars just keep increasing)
Permanent quantitative easing (endless money printing did not work)
Gross wealth disparity (highest income gap of any developed country)

Need I go further? The day that the movie ‘Idiocracy’ is looked upon as genius and prophetic, civilization will have become a parody of itself. I think that day has arrived.

Citizen 3-141-592-653-5

03 Sunday Nov 2013

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

≈ 58 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Homeland Security, Inverted Totalitarianism, Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, NSA Spying, Overpopulation, Patrice Ayme, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Police State, Resource Wars, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, Tadeusz (Tad) Patzek, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, War for Profit, War on Terror

They were called ‘consumers’. Their every behavior became just another stream of data to be tracked, recorded, quantified, and analyzed by corporations for their vast, profit-seeking conveyor belt of production, distribution and marketing to a sea of mouths. The machine was global and its hungry tentacles wrapped the Earth. Wherever it turned its covetous eyes, the Earth shook and its creatures large and small fled for cover. Government and corporate rule were fully enmeshed and the birth of a worldwide surveillance state was born. All mass communication systems were controlled and grassroot uprisings within the Empire’s homeland could be cut off at the knees before they ever gained traction. Protection of the homeland from terrorism was the initial excuse by which the fascist state expanded its power. Knowledge is power; foreign countries and governments could be manipulated from a distance. Privacy was a quaint relic of a bygone era. With the awareness that Big Brother was watching, few voiced their true opinions. The charade of democracy played on as the consumers retreated into their fabricated world of digital screens and commercialization.

“[Citizens became] one-dimensional idiots; consuming pointlessly, obsessing about lifestyle, gawping at celebrities, gazing blankly at moronic TV game shows, forever grasping towards the next, vacuous, artificial ‘want’ created by Global Gobble Corporation.” ~ Philip Mirowski

The captains of industry were happy with their scheme of manipulating markets, printing fiat money, continuously uprooting industry to cheaper labor pools abroad, keeping well oiled the wheels of the military industrial complex by waging war-for-profit wherever possible, and ravaging the Earth for every last bit of ancient carbon and minerals. Vast sums of money were spent on public relations and greenwashing in order to ensure the unwashed masses would stay ignorant and subservient to the looting and destruction of society and the environment. The elite were quickly turning the Earth into a death trap for all living things, and few noticed or cared. As long as cheap, mass produced, nutrient-poor food was on tap to fill the stomachs of the teeming masses, revolt and bloodshed were averted. The elite, however, could see the writing on the wall. Plans were drawn up to use force when the inevitable time arose that fuel, food, and water became scarce. The heavy stick of Empire so often used to smash swarthy radicals abroad would, in due time, be turned inward on the homeland.

“The Will To Extermination is the very core of the Dark Side. It has been ignored at humanity’s own peril.” ~ Patrice Ayme

“Our technological abilities have made us tremendously successful animals, but also tremendously dangerous ones, glorified apes with nuclear capabilities. We tend to overexploit or destroy our resources, drastically modify or pollute our environments, overpopulate the planet, and wage war on our fellow inhabitants, all of which threaten our long-term viability as a species. Is self-induced extinction the ultimate fate of intelligent, tool-using organisms like ourselves? Are we smart, but not smart enough?”
~ Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth

“This is what I recently learned from my friend, Professor Bill Rees:
During individual development, repeated sensory experiences and cultural norms literally shape the human brain’s synaptic circuitry in patterns that reflect and embed those experiences. Patterned thinking acquires a physical presence in the brain.
Subsequently, people seek out compatible experiences and, “when faced with information that does not agree with their [preformed] internal structures, they deny, discredit, reinterpret or forget that information.”
(Brain and Culture, Bruce E. Wexler, The MIT Press, 2006).
Most people are genuinely unable to face the truth. Based on this premise, most if not all human civilizations have been built.
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error…”
(Gustave le Bon, 1896).
~ Tadeusz (Tad) Patzek

It Only Happens in the Movies

29 Tuesday Oct 2013

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

≈ 85 Comments

Tags

Arctic Ice Melt, Capitalism, Charlie Smith, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Eric Schlosser, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Geoengineering, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Natalia Shakhova, Normalcy Bias, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Peter Wadhams, Regulatory Capture, Resource Wars, Robert Callaghan, Runaway Climate Change, Simon Hasleton, Sunken Costs, Techno-Optimists, The Convergence of Crisis

In spite of their own economic and scientific data overwhelmingly pointing towards a very bleak future, the experts in their various chosen fields appear to be happy-faced optimists about the world our descendants will inherit. So says columnist Charlie Smith:

He concludes his essay with the following remarks:

“…I confess that I’m troubled by all the optimism I encounter from leading thinkers on inequality, climate change, overpopulation, and oil depletion.

Adding up all the variables, I’ve concluded that more global food shortages and increased famine are inevitable. Despite this, our premier plans to build a new bridge to Delta that will result in the loss of some of Canada’s finest farmland.

Having a cheery disposition may make someone sound more pleasant in radio and television interviews.

It might even enhance a person’s likelihood of obtaining book contracts, becoming a media or entertainment executive, or getting elected to high public office.

But it has a way of sugar-coating problems, diminishing the sense of urgency that we should all be feeling about these crises.”

The apocalypse has been commodified as a Hollywood thriller to be viewed in the comfort of a movie theater or living room sofa. Faith in technology, normalcy bias, sunken costs, and the mass propaganda of vested interests are just a few of the human blinders preventing any change from the status quo. To say that there is no future for the human species would be to admit that we are all living in a fictitious construct whose time is quickly running out. Who openly discusses such things in their place of work? I would wager to say that the answer is zero. In his essay ‘The Convergence of Crisis‘, Simon Hasleton writes:

“…There is, also, a sense in which denial should be seen as a psychological defense operating on the personal level. AGW presents an immense challenge to our lives: to our health and safety and the survival of our grandchildren, and their grandchildren. How will we handle it, when the water fails or the crops fail and the food reserves are empty as the population passes the nine million mark? When when Amsterdam or Kolkata are inundated? When (as in Texas) temperature pushes into the high 30s, for weeks on end? This is the future AGW promises. And there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about it, so we blank it out, or prefer the trivia of the tabloids, or retreat into a blinkered concentration on the immediacy of everyday concerns….”

There is no escaping the capitalist system which now encompasses the entire world. Who is stopping the Brazilians from clearing the Amazon just as America and Europe slashed and burned their own virgin forests to make way for cities, highways, railroads, farms, etc.? Who is stopping China from burning through the world’s remaining fossil fuel? This is how industrial civilization defines “progress”. Our next step is to try to control the climate through seeding the atmosphere and other geoengineering experiments. Aside from nuclear weapons and their evil counterpart, nuclear energy, I can’t imagine a more dangerous and hubristic scheme. Charlie Smith has an article on that subject as well, entitled ‘Eric Schlosser raises alarm in Vancouver about nuclear weapons and nuclear power‘:

“…Schlosser also told the audience that his research into nuclear weapons has strengthened his opposition to nuclear energy. He cited the research of Charles Perrow, who examined the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear-power plant in 1979.

This helped Schlosser understand how a seemingly minor event—a dropped socket in a missile silo in Damascus, Arkansas in 1980—nearly caused an explosion that could have killed millions of people.

“These are complex technological systems,” Schlosser said. “Again and again, we find ourselves inadequate to manage them.“

His biggest concern is that the waste from nuclear reactors remains deadly for tens of thousands of years. He said that it’s “highly irresponsible for us to be creating poisons that future generations might suffer from“.

There has never been a central storage facility created in the United States, which means that the waste remains at the nuclear-reactor sites.

“And these reactor sites were never designed to store nuclear waste in the way it’s being stored,” he said. “They are huge targets, potential targets, for terrorists. But they are also at enormous risk in a natural disaster, in earthquakes, things like that. And a lot of these nuclear reactors are near large urban areas…”

He didn’t mention that all nuclear plants are built on the shores of lakes, rivers, and oceans in order to satisfy their cooling water needs. Not such a great idea in a future that includes the ravages of climate chaos – sea level rise, shrinking and flooding rivers, and violent storms. Sea level rise will also increase the damage from earthquakes as this 2014 study for the city of Berkley, CA mentions:

“…Like regions across the globe, the San Francisco Bay Area is experiencing and will continue to increasingly experience the impacts of the changing climate. By 2100, average temperatures in the San Francisco Bay Area will increase up to 11° F. In 2100, Berkeley will have 6-10 additional heat waves each year, which will disproportionately impact the elderly, children under five, and the low-income community members.

Climate change will also cause additional extreme rainfall events, which will lead to more flooding. San Francisco Bay sea-levels will rise up to 55” by 2100, impacting infrastructure and community members in west Berkeley. Climate change impacts will also exacerbate the natural hazards of concern outlined in this plan. Rising sea levels will increase Berkeley’s exposure to earthquake liquefaction, tsunami inundation, and flooding. Increases in precipitation and severe storms will make flooding more frequent, and will increase the landslide risk in the hills. California’s water security will be reduced, and drought will become a more persistent issue….”

How does San Francisco adapt to an 11°F increase in average temperature? It doesn’t. It will be a ghost city by then; the human population will have crashed and be well on its way to the black void of extinction. The city officials of Berkley have not figured that out yet since climate change is a newly added threat to their plans:

“…Climate change is a newly-introduced hazard of concern for the 2014 plan. The climate change section describes the anticipated impacts to Berkeley from climate change. It also outlines how climate change exacerbates other hazards identified in this plan. The City discusses potential impacts from sea-level rise on Berkeley’s western coast, and maps areas in Berkeley that are vulnerable in 55-inch sea-level rise…”

Modern industrial civilization with its exploding human population is protected from the laws of nature only for as long as resources are plentiful and the climate remains stable. Technology cannot be created and supported without inexpensive and highly concentrated energy. Technology is simply a byproduct of human ingenuity and energy expenditure. For over four billion years everything on Earth has evolved and adapted, most recently under the benevolence of the Holocene climate. The current climate catastrophe is a manmade disruption that is several orders of magnitude greater than the average rate of change over the last 300 millenia.

The primary problem with most ‘news’ today is that its filtered through corporate gatekeepers. Another problem with the ‘news’ is that its fragmented and does not connect all the dots to give a person the full picture. As Neil Postman said, “The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on a page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page.” So let’s connect some dots, courtesy of Robert Callaghan:

FUN WITH NUMBERS:
The acidity of the oceans will more than double in the next 40 years. This rate is 10 times faster than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine life occurred. It is also faster than during 4 of earth’s biggest mass extinction events during the last 300 hundred million years — faster than even the great Permian mass extinction event where 95% of life on earth vanished 250 million years ago. The oceans are now 30% more acidic than in pre-industrial times. In less than 40 years they will be 60% more acidic than then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/08/1976351/acidification-arctic/
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/2951
http://readthescience.com/2012/09/17/climate-change-book-review-under-a-green-sky/

When ice ages come and go the planet can change temperature 5°C in as little as 5,000 years. 50 times slower than what we are doing to earth now. In the past, a 5°C change normally takes 20,000 years, we are going to do 5°C in 50-100 years, 200 times faster.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page3.php
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/pd/climate/factsheets/iscurrent.pdf

Climate change is happening 100 times faster than in the past.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=todays-climate-change-proves-much-faster-than-changes-in-past-65-million-years

By 2025, humans will impact 50% of earth’s biosphere. This will cause a planetary ecological state shift leading to a mass extinction event that is unstoppable and irreversible once started.

http://www.ecoshock.info/2012/06/planet-shift-no-return.html

Why does nobody talk about the thousands of 1-kilometer wide bubbling methane seabeds recorded in 2011.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/vast-methane-plumes-seen-in-arctic-ocean-as-sea-ice-retreats-6276278.html

Only 1% of methane needs to be released to cause total disaster.
Peter Wadhams interview.

Natalia Shakhova interview:
Do you believe scientists
who spent 30 years in the arctic,
or do you believe scientists
who spent 30 years at their computer?

And the latest on the methane monster:

Extinction is a taboo word – bad for busine$$ and a real downer for everyone involved. Best to keep to the cultural storyline that such horrible things only happen on the silver screen with the aid of expensive CGI effects.

History Has Gone Vertical

22 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by Brutus in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 36 Comments

Tags

Arctic Ice Melt, Chasing Ice, Chris Hedges, Climate Change, Corporate State, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, IPCC, Mass Media Manipulation, Morris Berman, Mythos and Logos, Nature Bats Last, Oswald Spengler, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Religious Fanaticism

This blog is cross-posted at The Spiral Staircase. Feel free to comment here or there.

To orient oneself in life, a person chooses from among myriad narratives, typically assembling a hodgepodge worldview out of diverse parts. According to Oswald Spengler, cultural artifacts (e.g., the arts, humanities, and sciences) arise “needing the guidance of inspiration and … developing under great conventions of form.” The very same can be said of our origin and orientation stories, ancient or contemporary. Narratives intertwine and need not necessarily be discrete, mutually exclusive, or competing, even though that’s what’s often implied by time-worn tensions underlying science vs. religion, sometimes understood more philosophically as logos vs. mythos. Indeed, they cohere despite conflicts of logic and their being ahistorical. The power of subscription and consensus overcomes all objections.

If a master narrative exists, it ought to be simply reality obtained, though that is probably visible to only a small percentage of people able to apprehend the world clearly. For the rest, scales not yet having fallen from the eyes, the considerable benefit of hindsight can help clarify the view, but only if one has sufficient nerve to behold it honestly. Instead, our dominant inspirational narratives promulgate a wide variety of incompletely fulfilled hopes and desires. Few such promises bear much resemblance to reality, those of economists, politicians, and clerics demonstrating the most striking discontinuities from the actuality experienced by ordinary folks. A Chris Hedges article at TruthDig.com called “The Folly of Empire” discusses this departure from reality in his characteristically erudite style (apologies for the long nested quote):

… absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, the class of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus like Oprah and religious belief systems that assure followers that God will always protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking. “The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than the original,” Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. “We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories in the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”

I don’t usually lump into the mix entertainers, sports figures, gurus hawking self-help books and programs, or media pundits offering half-baked analyses because only idiots expect truth from them, but perhaps I should include them considering their stranglehold on the public’s wasted attention. Most of today’s media-driven narratives rely on conventions, gestures, and rhetoric that are notoriously predigested and therefore immediately swallowed by the guffawing crowd, disinviting additional analysis or careful consideration. This bears a curious family resemblance with intellectual conditions that sparked the Reformation. Further, because such mediated (or should I say medieval?) content is composed largely of fiction, pageantry, and untethered conjecture, no time is needed for the narrative to actualize. Hope functions in the present tense and requires no closure.

Perhaps the quintessential inspirational narrative was trotted out by the Obama campaign back in 2008, which relied on promises (empty, we later found out) to fulfill everyone’s desire for a better life, calling on hope and change to achieve those promises. Another religious hope narrative promises to enhance one’s afterlife, earned in earthly realms through achievements in social justice and the judgment of posterity. Both adopt time-honored conventions and are part of what is described in Morris Berman’s book Wandering God as the ascent tradition. Significant among those conventions is orientation along a vertical axis as seen, for instance, in easy acceptance of the legitimacy of hierarchy (and therefore egregious power, wealth, and class stratification and imbalance) and a longing for transfiguration, transcendence, and communion with god (or the gods) above.

Looking back across history, evidence of “progress” and growth is legion. However, most of those achievements are demographic, material, and technological, each having their unique and unintended blowback. What’s notably lacking as we sally forth into the 21st century is the ability to transcend our own base nature, which is characterized by corruption, violence, stupidity, short-term gratification, and inability to achieve the utopian dreams that populate the minds of many despots. So that same history is marked by downturns and setbacks. One might even say that the overall upward trend of history is pockmarked by periodic scars. Still, nothing just yet has stalled the hubris of history rising (unless domestic peak oil in the 1970s and global peak oil a few years back prove to have been among the first of a series of turning points). And judging from blog traffic and commentary, the steady stream of negative assessments in scientific literature, and news reports telling of weather and ecological calamities with increasing frequency and severity, awareness is beginning to dawn on even the most congenital optimists (plus some fools and the average ignoramus) that what goes up must eventually come down. Since history has gone vertical, hard limits must eventually assert themselves.

The plethora of charts, tables, graphs, and infographics that evidence not just rising trends but verticality is frankly astonishing. Sometimes a gradually ascending slope is observable within a short timeframe, such as receding glacial ice documented in Chasing Ice. Other times it takes long traces of historical, evolutionary, or even geological time to observe. Even short timeframes often conceal effects that lie handily beyond normal perception, but we luckily have scientists trained to recognize short- and long-term trends. Too bad they’re uniformly ignored and/or pilloried by a public spoon fed the blandishments of corporate marketing and political propaganda. Typically, ascending curves (whether geometric, logarithmic, or exponential) don’t appear to be walls (limits) when viewed from the far left or from within a narrow time band, meaning microscopically close. Zoom out or to the right, however, and the trend pointed into the stratosphere is readily apparent, such as in the following video (animation) of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere:

Similar x-y coordinate graphs showing, for instance, energy use per capita and human population growth demonstrate the same trajectory but at much briefer durations. Trendlines are mathematical abstractions, like fiat currency being printed into existence. At some point, gravity takes hold and drags everything back to earth (reality), though that eventuality can be forestalled for a surprisingly long time. The return trip down various vertical trends is approaching ever more quickly as lift skyward fizzles like an Icarus nightmare. Or in the case of atmospheric carbon, we can’t stop the rising trend we unwittingly initiated from blowing through the roof and rendering the earth uninhabitable.

It’s often said there is no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole. Presented with the likelihood or certainty of battlefield death, holdouts succumb and cash the eternal-life insurance card of a last-minute profession of faith. Same as death-bed conversions. Thousands of years of philosophy and religion might prepare us to face our inevitable demise if we bothered to learn anything worthwhile besides how to make money, and yet in all our frailty, many of us cannot accept that our final departure is merely a fact of life, not a gateway or journey to somewhere else. (Um, opinions vary on this, obviously.) The final departure of Homo sapiens sapiens is even harder to contemplate.

So what foxhole moment awaits us? Here’s one: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released in late September 2013 a publication by Working Group I of the Fifth Assessment Report, which presents the underlying physical science behind climate change (used to be called global warming). The IPCC website states that “The Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) is being released in four parts between September 2013 and November 2014. It will be the most comprehensive assessment of scientific knowledge on climate change since 2007 when Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) was released.” Preparation of these reports has been ongoing for decades already, and the difficulty of their assemblage assures that they’re already out of date at the time they’re released. Being the work of governments, AR5 is also reputed to be remarkably conservative in its conclusions, as contrasted with prophesying near-term human extinction (NTE or NTHE) as those of us unconstrained by geopolitics have begun to do (mostly taking our cues from Guy McPherson of Nature Bats Last). That’s not a gambit for attention, BTW. It’s about a soul-destroying a realization as there is, and no one comes to admit it easily.

The likelihood of anyone plunging into the 2216 pages of this first of four parts of AR5 is, well, dismal. One could easily level the accusation that the IPCC is burying its findings behind pages and pages (and pages) of prefatory material; acknowledgements; missing or incomplete figures, tables, and citations (to be inserted when?); technical and executive summaries; glossaries; references; and dry obfuscation. That’s not really the case, though; the data and discussion are abundant and available for anyone capable of deciphering it. Technical and scientific analysis and discussion is exactly what Working Group I delivers in these chapters:

Introduction
Observations: Atmosphere and Surface
Observations: Ocean
Observations: Cryosphere
Information from Paleoclimate Archives
Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles
Clouds and Aerosols
Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing
Evaluation of Climate Models
Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional
Near-term Climate Change: Projections and Predictability
Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility
Sea Level Change
Climate Phenomena and their Relevance for Future Regional Climate Change

I downloaded the report and sought something succinct to quote, such as an answer to the question “Just how fucked are we, anyway?” but the technical summaries proceed with this sort of dry, useless, blank, uninformative text:

The primary purpose of this Technical Summary is to provide the link between the complete assessment of the multiple lines of independent evidence presented in the 14 chapters of the main report and the highly condensed summary prepared as the WGI Summary for Policymakers. The Technical Summary thus serves as a starting point for those readers who seek the full information on more specific topics covered by this assessment. This purpose is facilitated by including pointers to the chapters and sections where the full assessment can be found. Policy-relevant topics, which cut across many chapters and involve many interlinked processes in the climate system, are presented here as Thematic Focus Elements, allowing rapid access of this information.

The WGI Summary for Policymakers is not contained within the larger report but both can be found at this link. It’s unclear how much of the report was used in preparation of this story at National Geographic, but the story provides five takeaways from WGI:

On the extreme weather front, the report concludes it is “very likely” that cold days and nights have decreased, while warm days and nights have increased, since 1950 …
The oceans have warmed with “virtual certainty,” the report concludes, at a rate of about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit (0.11 Celsius) per decade since 1970 in the upper 246 feet (75 meters) of surface water …
What about those polar bears? Sea ice (as well as glaciers and ice sheets) has declined overall since 1970 …
Sea level rise has happened, and will happen in the future, as a result of global warming, the report finds …
More than half of the global warming observed since 1950 has a human cause, largely from the greenhouse gas effects of gases such as carbon dioxide emitted from burning fossil fuels ….

The ellipses indicate brief discussion behind each takeaway. The conclusions are hedged, of course, relying on observations of what’s happened so far and omitting extrapolation of trends that go vertical. Even the three levels of confidence communicate not certainty of our fate (exact details TBD) but hope that projections are subject to change or we can do something to reverse things or at least forestall the worst. Like IPCC, National Geographic is yet to have its foxhole moment even though the evidence is staring them ghoulishly in the face. If one is at all engaged in this subject, I suppose it makes sense to stay hunched in the hole chain-smoking cigarettes and making do with what meager rations and sleep are available. My sneaking suspicion is that the go order will come quickly enough to catch lots of shivering, quivering, wavering souls before they get to their last eternal hope. In the meantime, the fat lady is singing, the coal-mine canary has expired, pigs are flying, and hell has frozen over. We’re vertical against the wall, facing the firing squad, and what’s left to do, though no one knows just quite when, is to get horizontal.

Post-Apocalyptic Musings

17 Saturday Aug 2013

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

≈ 36 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Geoengineering, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, The End of More, Theocracy, unwashed public

Having conquered every last inch of Earth, humans now dream of spilling their burgeoning numbers out into distant planets, even whilst our own blue orb reels from climate chaos and our ever-growing consumption. Every iota of nature is now at the whim of the free market which sees no other path than to convert everything into a profit scheme. Thus a deadly game of musical chairs will be played out in the last days of capitalist industrial civilization as the foreign lands and water reservoirs of indigenous people are stolen to feed the mouths and gas tanks of cash-paying consumers in the First World. As the industrial world clamors for the last pockets of high-density energy sources to feed its energy-starved economic machine, desperate governments and businesses will continue to cut their country’s social safety net, throwing more and more people to the wolves. If you happen to live in a so-called developed country, you will have to run faster and faster on the cutthroat treadmill of the free market in order to stay afloat, lest you fall into the same boat as those of the malnourished and starving Third World. Wary of growing instability, governments will continue to strengthen their security and surveillance apparatus to control the growing unrest. For many, the confines of a prison cell may become the only place that a meal and secure place to sleep can be found. The last remaining chairs of this perverse game will be saved for the cosseted elite who sit at the top of the capitalist pyramid scheme. This social system may seem savage and ‘uncivilized’, but little has changed since the brutal reign of medieval kings up to today’s rule of international bankers and corporate overlords…

…The laws of survival for them are the same now as they were in mediaeval times, when eating above subsistence level was a privilege of those with the means to pay for it… The market economics of the Middle Ages has been brought into the twenty-first century, its brutal indifference unchanged in 500 years…

~ End of More

Thus we are headed for a modern Dark Age: a tyrannical corporate state wielding overwhelming fire power and surveillance capabilities, a collapsing biosphere with unpredictable weather patterns and superstorms, and a blissfully ignorant population eager to find a scapegoat. The time to avert disaster was decades ago, yet the public believes technology is a source of energy as well as a solution to every conceivable problem, that economic growth is a prerequisite to living on Earth, and that anthropocentric climate change is still debatable, if not an outright lie. Our house is on fire and we’re still watching TV. The exit doors have all been super-glued shut with hopium and MSM propaganda. There is no place to run; the deathtrap is foolproof.

Reality filtered through the most effective propagandist tool in history, i.e. the television, has made even climate change a boring non-event for the masses awash in disaster flicks and Hollywood CGI effects.

Some have predicted that we will embrace theocracy as our world falls apart and the myths of modern life can no longer be maintained. The wrath of climate chaos could be interpreted and used as a sign of retribution from God; some already declare such disasters as divine vengeance:

In the absence of government, bishops ruled for decades and even centuries during the Middle Ages with religion as the law and morality system. It’s highly conceivable that the surviving populations will fall back on this authority when governments lose legitimacy, providing that the climate does not spiral too far out of control and allows some humans to reorganize into post-industrial communities. Of course there are other manmade booby traps lying in wait around the globe, as explained by a Guardian reader:

“A sudden cessation of industrial activity, besides financial collapse and the end of a regular and plentiful food supply, will affect every industry from nuclear and chemical to oil and electrical. Deep-sea oil wells, left to themselves when workers desert them to return home to their distressed families, will eventually escape into the oceans. With no-one willing or able to plug them, entire oil-fields will vent until depleted. Nuclear power stations, already the repository of all the nuclear waste of decades of power production will eventually meltdown and every molecule of radioactivity will ultimately escape into the biosphere, irradiating the entire planet to one degree or another while leaving much of it uninhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years. Poisoned water sources, from chemical leaks and spills as well as polluted underground aquifers created from frenetic and frantic fracking will add to the mess. Returning to even a medieval style of living will be impossible.”

When entire civilizations crumble, megalomaniacs come out of the woodwork to institute their warped agendas and visions of how the world should be. The luxuries and wealth of today’s corporate elite will simply be transferred to this new circle of self-proclaimed holy leaders – televangelists of the post-apocalyptic world. With electricity in short supply, low-tech forms of punishment such as execution by the wheel, quartering, and of course hanging would come back into fashion. Human muscle would make a comeback in a post-fossil fuel world. Given enough time and with the absence of our fossil fuel servants, large-scale human slavery would likely become acceptable again. If you think about it, the wage slaves of today toiling away in mindless, soul-crushing corporate slots are not that far off from forced labor in a rock quarry.

In the mean time, we’ll all be a captive audience to the onslaught of geoengineering schemes soon to commence once governments of the world figure out that food does not grow very well in a destabilized climate and that the 99% will not go quietly into the dark night of ecological overshoot. In a future of catastrophic sea level rise, the phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats” will not apply.

Techno-Optimism Vs. The Laws of Physics

14 Wednesday Aug 2013

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

≈ 86 Comments

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Dr. Michael Huesemann, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, EROEI, Extinction of Man, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Optimal Foraging Theory, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Robert Scribbler, Security and Surveillance State, Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won't Save Us Or the Environment, Techno-Optimists, Wall Street Fraud

I was poking through my email looking for a reference article on China’s plundering of the oceans when I came across some comments made recently over at Scribbler’s site. Now before I get into a discussion on these comments, I need to say that I am not anti-technology per se, but there are very serious problems with technology as it’s utilized in the current socio-economic paradigm we have – capitalist industrial civilization. We have become a society in which techno-optimism is dangerously ingrained in our thinking and culture, especially in the United States. I just discovered the work of Dr. Michael Huesemann by way of an excellent interview he did on this subject. His book Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won’t Save Us Or the Environment came out just last year. I’m going to break down the Huesemann interview in a later post with all the salient points he makes.

Now to get to the comments, the first one sets a dire but realistic tone…

Viewed from a purely biological perspective, humans are following the optimal foraging theory whereby an organism exploits sources of food with the highest energy content first. In terms of humans and industrial civilization, the most energy dense source right now is fossil fuels. This partially explains why we see the following news-bite:

One of the big problems with so-called renewable energies is that, as I pointed out in the last post, intermittent and diffuse energy sources cannot support the current energy-intensive, high consumption way of life promoted and exercised by capitalist industrial civilization. This isn’t a matter of politics, it’s a matter of physics.

Yes there are too many of us. Just as with any organism which has overshot the carrying capacity of its environment, there will be no soft landing for humans when the laws of ecological balance cull our numbers. Modern man has dominated the Earth to the point of altering the biosphere on a planetary scale, destroying the once stable climate which allowed our clever (not wise) species to proliferate. Did humans think they could continue to rack up an ecological debt without consequences? Governments can print money, but the Earth cannot print forests, arable soil, healthy oceans, and clean air.

Rather than seek solutions to the root of the problem – our unsustainable mode of living and exploitive socio-economic system, techno-optimists will look to geoengineering for a fix which, even if such a “solution” would initially appear to “work”, will inevitably have unforeseen side-effects. Then other techno-fixes will be deployed to fix those unintended consequences, and so on.

So Scribbler responds to the above comment:

When, pray tell, are we going to suddenly be gifted with a sustainable system with which to apply our technology? From where I’m sitting, just the opposite is occurring. Governments are becoming more corrupt and totalitarian, printing money with abandon and hardening their surveillance state apparatus. The global human population is exceeding the growth estimates of the United Nations. Extreme weather events are accelerating. And yet business-as-usual persists with the requisite talk of growth and expansion in every economic periodical and newscast. Albedo management? What the hell is that – installing millions of snow-making machines in the Arctic? Since when has anyone on this site ceded to a “defacto business as usual mindset”? We’ve talked of nothing but changing the mindset of a system hellbent on converting every last bit of nature into digits on an accounting ledger for Wall Street.

Then the following comment:

Dave, you’re harassing a techno-optimist monkey in his self-imposed cage of normalcy bias and delusion. Don’t do that. He’ll just sling shit at you, as we’ll see:

He finds the reports “radically too pessimistic”. Did he check the backgrounds of those people behind the reports? Sorry, but I’ll take their decades of experience and education over Scribbler’s childlike foot-stomping of the bad news being too scary for his delicate ears to bear. And the cheap name-calling of “modern incarnation of Ludditism” is simply a scapegoat for avoiding root causes, as Dr. Huesemann explains:

Labels like Luddite distract from an objective and scientific examination of technologies and modern societies… What Luddites did in the past is irrelevant to our critical analysis of technologies today. Many technologies facilitate exploitation by creating a safe distance between exploiter and exploited…

To clarify for Scribbler what my previous post was about since he evidently did not read it or comprehend it, the post was not about saying that all energy technologies are bad, but an explanation of their limitations due to the reality of EROEI and the laws of Physics. As Kevin Moore noted, “Geochemistry overrides ideology.”

Now having said all of the above, I appreciate Scribbler’s climate tracking expertise and hope he continues his writings.

Energy Unicorns and Delusional Greenwashing of Industrial Civilization

13 Tuesday Aug 2013

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

≈ 34 Comments

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"Renewable" Energies, Capitalism, Climate Change, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Embodied Energy Costs, Environmental Collapse, EROEI, Externalized Environmental Costs, Extinction of Man, Greenwashing, House on the Borderland, Inverted Totalitarianism, Kevin Moore, Mass Die Off, Nuclear Energy, Peak Oil, Pedro Prieto, Professor Charles Hall, Second Law of Thermodynamics, Solar Energy, Ted Trainer, William Hope Hodgson, Wind Energy

Clinging to the Status Quo

Through my experience on this website I’ve learned that the pro-fossil fuel/climate change skeptics share something in common with the pro-renewable energy/climate change realists. Neither wants industrial civilization to fade away. This is the fatal flaw shared by both – that industrial civilization with all its toxic trappings of materialism, instant gratification, and objectification of nature can continue with perhaps a few tweaks and modifications here and there. Nothing that the capitalist free market cannot correct, right? Others even fantasize with the idea that there will be some sort of a post-crisis prosperity. So-called “renewable energies” fit nicely into the greenwashing of capitalist industrial civilization. Ignoring the fact that abrupt climate change is well under way with multiple extinction-causing feedback loops having already been set into motion, the right course of action would have been a rapid downsizing and simplification of our mode of living:

We would also have to ignore the reality of the corporate state’s all-pervasive power. With its techniques of inverted totalitarianism, the corporate state has extinguished everything but the façade of democracy. Serving as the corporate mouthpiece, the mainstream media frames public discourse on socio-economic issues in very oversimplified terms while lumping the population into a very stark, cartoon-like dichotomy of Left versus Right. Thus there is never a substantive debate about our predicament; the dominant paradigm is never questioned except in small and obscure circles whose views never see the light of day. Refusing to acknowledge that fossil fuels are causing planetary ecocide and that renewable energy will not, by any stretch of the imagination, meet the high energy consumption levels of consumer capitalism are both fatal flaws of thinking. Neither group will admit that the root cause of the disease is our way of living. To do so would undercut their belief system, the principal tenants of which are that mankind’s superior adaptive capabilities and technological innovations will carry us through. Self-delusion on such a massive scale results in strange conspiracy thinking to emerge such as the following right-wing tripe:

Never mind that our government has become nothing more than a feeding trough and revolving door for corporations seeking market control and revenue streams. The people truly latched to the teat of government are those with the money to hire armies of lobbyists, bribe officials with lucrative private sector positions, ‘buy’ government contracts and game the system fully in their favor.

The Fantasy of Energy Unicorns Rescuing Industrial Civilization

The second law of thermodynamics states that energy flows or dissipates from concentrated forms to diffuse forms. Fossil fuels are very concentrated forms of energy, but renewables like wind and solar are very diffuse and intermittent energies. According to leading energy experts like Professor Charles Hall, the EROEI of renewable energy continues to be too low when compared with fossil fuels. Thus in the free market system, the lowest-priced energy (with environmental costs externalized) will always win out and be utilized.

“2013 EIA new plant capital costs of various energy technologies and
pumped storage for balancing intermittent renewables”

As Ted Trainer has shown, claims of renewables running the industrialized world are numerous and avoid any critical evaluation of their claims:

…Unfortunately people working on renewable energy technologies tend not to throw critical light on the difficulties and limits. They typically make enthusiastic claims regarding the potential of their specific technologies.

There are now several impressive reports claiming that renewable can meet world energy demand, and almost no literature questioning the claim…” – link

“..Trainer’s general point on technology is that the extent of ecological overshoot is already so great that technology alone will never be able to solve the ecological crises of our age, certainly not in a world based on economic growth and with a growing global population… – link

Trainer and other analysts identify several factors that limit large-scale renewable energy projects:

– Transmission losses: Distant solar thermal, photovoltaic farms, and wind farms must transmit their generated energy through long distance high-voltage direct current cables. The best places for harnessing wind power are usually in remote locations far from populated areas, but solar lends itself more to a model of decentralized electricity generation which can avoid transmission losses and the high cost of transmission lines.

– Embodied Energy Costs: The energy to produce the steel, mine the minerals and raw material, and manufacture the wind turbines and solar panels, then deliver and install them, and later repair and maintain them, finally disposing of them. In a recent study, Charles Hall and Pedro Prieto have found that such costs have been unaccounted for in the estimates of solar PV’s EROEI. Spain’s boom and subsequent bust in solar energy production was found to have generated an abysmal EROEI of 2.45 thermal units of energy output for 1 thermal unit invested, as poor as biofuels.

Just to make the silicon used to trap the sun’s rays on manufactured wafers requires the melting of silica rock at 3,000 Fahrenheit (1,649 Celsius). And the electricity of coal-fired plants or ultrapurified hydrogen obtained from fossil sources provide the heat to do that. It also takes a fantastic amount of oil to make concrete, glass and steel for solar modules…

…Prieto calculates, for example, that to replace all electricity made by nuclear and fossil fuels in Spain would take a solar module complex covering 6,000 sq. km of the country at the cost the entire Spanish budget (1.2 billion Euros in 2007). It would also require the equivalent of 300 billion car batteries to store the energy for night-time use.

Prieto is not alone in reaching such sobering conclusions. A 2013 Stanford University report, for example, calculated that global photovoltaic industry now requires more electricity to make silicon wafers and solar troughs than it actually produces in return. Since 2000 the industry consumed 75 per cent more energy than it put onto the grid and all during its manufacturing and installation process.

Moreover it won’t pay off this energy debt or energy consumed in its construction until 2016. As a consequence, ramping up of industrial solar production produces more greenhouse gases than it saves for nearly a decade… – link

– Plant Lifetime: 20 years is estimated for wind (Sharman, 2012) and 35 years for photovoltaic. To quote Kevin Moore, “Gaia pulverises everything in the long-term and converts it all into sediment (except certain partially degraded plastics, which seem destined to drift in the oceans for eternity).” Another factor perhaps not discussed much is the effect climate change will have on the variability and volatility of weather patterns where solar, wind, and other renewable energy projects are constructed. Wind, cloud, and rain patterns will be altered, rendering energy plants ill-suited to their originally targeted sites. The world’s energy infrastructure will be increasingly vulnerable to the ravages of climate chaos with more intense flooding, droughts, and shifting weather patterns. Hydroelectric power, solar farms, nuclear plants, and biofuel plantations are dependant on water to run and cool the turbines, clean the solar panels and mirrors, mine the uranium as well as cool the reactor core and spent fuel rods, and grow the biomass. Hotter temperatures will tax the electric grid because of increased electricity demand for cooling in the summer, reduction in the performance and capacity of transformers and above-ground transmission lines, and infrastructure damage from wildfires. Sea level rise will also wreak havoc with coastal erosion, storm surges and flooding.

Creation is Subject to the Bondage of Decay