Peak Oil + Peak Phosphorus = Peak Population

07 Sunday Oct 2012

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

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Algae Biofuel, Arno Rosemarin from the Stockholm Environment Institute, Dr Dana Cordell, Dr. Isobel Tomlinson, Global Phosphorus Research Initiative, Green Revolution, Industrial Agriculture, Morocco - the 'Saudi Arabia of Phosphate', Peak Phosphorus, Phosphate Rock, Professor Chris Rhodes, Professor Petter Jensen

This post is about a resource that is not discussed much, but whose importance to our survival is paramount. It was named one of the top six natural resources most depleted by human usage. All living organisms, including bacteria, require phosphorus in order to live. Modern industrial farming is dependent on phosphorus, and industrial civilization’s primary supply for this vital nutrient is phosphate rock, a finite and nonrenewable resource which cannot be synthesized or created in a lab:

…Just like oil, phosphorus cannot be replaced or artificially manufactured. It can only be recycled through the application of organic matter. However, since urban areas started to use flush toilets, phosphorus was no longer returned to the soil, but washed out into water systems. The use of the local organic matter was then replaced by phosphate rock, which has to be mined or drilled out from the deep soil.

According to Petter Jensen, professor at the University of Biotechnology and Environment in Oslo, phosphorus will soon be a rare and valuable resource. He has been analysing phosphorous production for more than twenty years, and concluded that based on the data available, it is clear that the alarm bells should be ringing…

Cheap energy has allowed humans to extract increasingly greater amounts of phosphate rock in order to propel the ‘Green Revolution’ and support the explosion of world population over the last six decades.

…The world’s reliance on phosphorus is an unappreciated aspect of the “Green Revolution,” a series of agricultural innovations that made it possible to feed the approximately 4.2 billion-person increase in the global population since 1950. This massive expansion of global agricultural production required a simultaneous increase in the supply of key resources, including water and nitrogen. Without an increase in phosphorus, however, crops would still have lacked the resources necessary to fuel a substantial increase in production, and the Green Revolution would not have gotten off the ground…

As you can see from the following graphs, the increase of the global population tracks with that of oil production and the mining of phosphate rock:

Now if “Hubbert Linearization” is used to predict the ultimate recoverable amount of mined phosphate rock, then we get a graph like the one created by the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative (GPRI):

The GPRI estimates the peak of phosphorus to occur around 2033. As with many other commodities, oil plays an important part in the price of phosphate rock. In the following graph, the spike in phosphate rock price coincides with the oil price spike of 2008. That same year China also imposed a temporary export tariff of 135% on their reserves:

The concept and analysis of peak phosphorus is based on the following premises:

1. Phosphate rock is a finite resource that takes 10s to 100s of millions of years to cycle or ‘renew’ naturally;

2. Phosphate rock is a non-homogenous resource, where the higher quality, more easily accessible layers are mined first;

3. As a result of 1 and 2 above, this means that over time, the average quality of phosphate rock is deceasing, in terms of P2O5 percentage (and also the increasing presence of impurities and heavy metals). This is also supported by empirical evidence;

4. Premise 3 means that increasing energy, resources, and costs are required per unit output of nutrient. That is, to extract the same nutrient content (e.g., P2O5) over time requires increasing inputs;

5. Premise 3 also means that extracting the same nutrient output generates more waste byproducts;

6. While the short and medium term costs may fluctuate due to short term changes in demand or improvements in production methods, over the long term costs and energy inputs will increase, and indeed will increase not linearly, but exponentially as ore concentrations decline and will require an increasing amount of phosphate rock to be mined. Observable changes over time typically occur once approximately 50% of the resource has been consumed;

7. While there may be some fluctuations causing year-to-year variation in phosphate production (due to supply-side or demand-side variables, there will always be a global demand for phosphorus, as argued in section 2);

8. This means at some critical point, the increasing annual production of phosphate rock will become unviable due to increasing energy, economic and other constraints, while demand will continue to increase.

A key significance of peak phosphorus analysis is that the critical point in time is not when 100% of the reserves are depleted, but much sooner than this. This means, preparing for a soft-landing will need to take this timeline into account, given that most measures (such as those outlined later in section 7 and [40]) will take decades to be implemented. It must be re-iterated here that farmers need both annual and long-term access to phosphorus fertilizers in order to achieve high crop yields. If no action is taken decades before the anticipated peak, a hard-landing response to peak phosphorus is likely to result in a situation of:

• increased energy and raw material consumption;

• increased production, processing and transport costs;

• increased generation of waste and pollution;

• further short-term price spikes;

• long-term trend of increased mineral phosphate prices;

• increased geopolitical tensions;

• reduced farmer access to fertilizer markets;

• reduced global crop yields; and

• increased global hunger.

Key factors likely to contribute to a net increasing future demand for phosphorus include:

 increased population growth (9 billion expected by 2050) causing a surge in food demand;

 per capita increased phosphorus demand due to changing dietary preferences towards more meat and dairy products (especially in growing economies like China and India), which require significantly more phosphorus fertilizer per capita.

 increasing demand for non-food crops like biofuels (energy crops require substantial amounts of phosphorus fertilizers to ensure high crop growth) or lithium-iron-phosphate electric vehicle batteries, which can require 60 kg of phosphate per battery;

 The need to boost soil fertility in phosphorus-deficient regions. Industry projections of demand are often based on the current market demand, that is, those players with purchasing power. However there is a large ‘silent’ demand from poor farmers with phosphorus-deficient soils that cannot currently access fertilizer markets. In Sub-Saharan Africa for example, where at least 30% of the population is undernourished, fertilizer application rates are extremely low and 75% of agricultural soils are nutrient deficient thus yields are falling.

While improvements in efficiency in phosphorus recovery from mining may decrease demand for phosphate rock, it is likely that the factors placing upward pressure on demand would still outweigh these efficiency gains.

Only a couple of countries hold the majority of phosphate rock. Interestingly, upon joining the World Trade Organization, China’s reported reserves doubled overnight. Like Saudi Arabia’s dubious stated oil reserves, China’s commercial interests and lack of transparency appear to have muddied a true accounting of their phosphate rock reserves.

Morocco, known as the ‘Saudi Arabia of phosphate’, is the major source on the market. If you speak to anyone from that country involved in their phosphate industry, they will tell you there’s no problem with supply. Similarly, the Saudis swear that they can meet the needs of the world oil market far into the distant future. Experts on the global extraction of phosphate rock are not swayed by reassurances from industry suppliers:

Author of the report ‘A rock and a hard place: Peak phosphorus and the threat to our food security’, Dr. Isobel Tomlinson, has said:
“A radical rethink of how we farm, what we eat and how we deal with human excreta, so that adequate phosphorus levels can be maintained without reliance on mined phosphate, is crucial for ensuring our future food supplies.

Competing with our food supply’s need for phosphates are biofuels whose production also requires large amounts of the nutrient. Biofuel from algae is the latest proposal to solve our liquid fuel needs, but according to Professor Chris Rhodes, phosphate is the Achilles’ heel of biofuels and it’s not feasible to replace global oil consumption with biofuels:

World rock phosphate production amounts to around 140 million tonnes. In comparison, we would need 352 million tonnes of the mineral to grow sufficient algae to replace all the oil-derived fuels used in the world.² The US produces less than 40 million tonnes of rock phosphate annually, but to become self-sufficient in algal diesel would require around 88 million tonnes of the mineral. Hence, for the US, security of fuel supply could not be met by algae-to-diesel production using even all its indigenous rock phosphate output, and significant further imports would be needed. This is in addition to the amount of the mineral necessary to maintain existing agriculture. In principle, phosphate could be recycled from one batch of algae to the next, but how exactly this might be done remains a matter of some deliberation. e.g. The algae could be dried and burned, and the phosphate extracted from the resulting “ash”, or the algae could be converted to methane in a biodigester, releasing phosphate in the process. Clearly there are engineering and energy costs attendant to any and all such schemes and none has been adopted as yet…

“Personalised transport (cars) will be largely a thing of the past.” says Professor Rhodes.

Now if we can just get rid of all the world’s cars and retrofit all the toilets to recycle the global human population’s urea and feces, then maybe we’ll have a chance to survive. Oh yeah, I forgot about that climate change problem.

Future Forecast: Rising Fascism, Expensive Food, and Social Unrest

03 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Wall Street Fraud

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Capitalism, Car Culture, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Happy Fascism, Inverted Totalitarianism, Oxfam - Extreme Weather - Extreme Prices, Police State, Security and Surveillance State, Walmart, War on Terror, Yaneer Bar-Yam

I found the following story pathetic, predictable, and a microcosm of America’s inverted totalitarianism. This is the corporate state flexing its fascist muscles with for-hire private armies, replete with the latest face-stomping boots and weaponry from Homeland Security. You can never have too much police intimidation in the land of the fearful and home of the paranoid.

Basic rights are what the workers were requesting, but the corporations are working hard to ensure American workers are on the same footing as laborers of Third World sweatshops.

…and don’t forget the sonic cannons to completely suppress the oppressed:

Criminalizing dissent extinguishes free speech. The threat of a nightstick cracking open your head is a good silencer. I fail to see much difference between America and China at this point. A lot has been written recently about the rise of America’s ‘Security and Surveillance State’. Let’s recap:

Why Don’t Americans Care About Democracy at Home?

…the financialization of the economy and culture has resulted in the poisonous growth of monopoly power, predatory lending, abusive credit card practices and misuses of CEO pay. The false but central neoliberal tenet that markets can solve all of society’s problems has no way of limiting the power of money and has given rise to “a politics in which policies that favor the rich … have allowed the financial sector to amass vast economic and political power.”[24] As Joseph Stiglitz points out, there is more at work in this form of governance than a pandering to the wealthy and powerful: There is also the specter of an authoritarian society “where people live in gated communities,” large segments of the population are impoverished or locked up in prison and Americans live in a state of constant fear as they face growing “economic insecurity, health care insecurity [and] a sense of physical insecurity.”[25] In other words, the authoritarian nature of neoliberal political governance and economic power is also visible in the rise of a national security state in which civil liberties are being drastically abridged and violated.

As the war on terror becomes a normalized state of existence, the most basic rights available to American citizens are being shredded. The spirit of revenge, militarization and fear now permeates the discourse of national security. For instance, under Presidents Bush and Obama, the idea of habeas corpus with its guarantee that prisoners have minimal rights has given way to policies of indefinite detention, abductions, targeted assassinations, drone killings and an expanding state surveillance apparatus. The Obama administration has designated 46 inmates for indefinite detention at Guantanamo because, according to the government, they can be neither tried nor safely released. Moreover, another “167 men now confined at Guantanamo … have been cleared for release yet remain at the facility.”[26]

With the passing of the National Defense Authorization Act in 2012, the rule of legal illegalities has been extended to threaten the lives and rights of US citizens. The law authorizes military detention of individuals who are suspected of belonging not only to terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda but to “associated forces.” As Glenn Greenwald points out, this “grants the president the power to indefinitely detain in military custody not only accused terrorists, but also their supporters, all without charges or trial.”[27] The vagueness of the law allows the possibility of subjecting US citizens who are considered in violation of the law to indefinite detention. Of course, that might include journalists, writers, intellectuals and anyone else who might be accused because of their dealings with alleged terrorists. Fortunately, US District Judge Katherine Forrest of New York agreed with Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky and other writers who have challenged the legality of the law. Judge Forrest recently acknowledged the unconstitutionality of the law and ruled in favor of a preliminary barring of the enforcement of the National Defense Authorization Act.[28]

The anti-democratic practices at work in the Obama administration also include the US government’s use of state secrecy to provide a cover or prevent being embarrassed by practices that range from the illegal use of torture to the abduction of innocent foreign nationals. Under the rubric of national security, a shadow state has emerged that eschews transparency and commits unlawful acts. Given the power of the government to engage in a range of illegalities and to make them disappear through an appeal to state secrecy, it should come as no surprise that warrantless wiretapping, justified in the name of national security, is on the rise at both the federal and state levels. For instance, the New York City Police Department “implemented surveillance programs that violate the civil liberties of that city’s Muslim-American citizens [by infiltrating] mosques and universities [and] collecting information on individuals suspected of no crimes.”[29] And the American public barely acknowledged this shocking abuse of power. Such anti-democratic policies and practices have become the new norm in American society and reveal a frightening and dangerous move toward a 21st century version of authoritarianism.

This police state the über wealthy are building better live up to all the hype that’s been advertised about it. There are too many horsemen (Climate Change, Peak Oil, Neoliberal Economic Policies, 6th Mass Extinction, Water Scarcity, Ocean Acidification) bearing down on humanity to even entertain the idea that the starving masses will go die quietly in some dark corner.

If There Are Riots In New York, You Can Blame Ethanol And Index Funds…

…Yaneer Bar-Yam, a physicist, complex systems theorist and general man-about-town with a pleasing CV that includes writing a book called “Making Things Work” and telling Slate that “the shortcomings of the U.N. humanitarian-response system in Haiti have a lot to do with a 50-year-old mathematical theorem known as Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety.”

He and some friends wrote a paper, released yesterday, arguing that increases in food prices over the last few years can be explained almost entirely by two factors: financial market speculation and the growing use of corn for ethanol production rather than food.

Now these arguments have been made before, and also disputed or minimized. The new paper rejects a lot of those criticisms; more interestingly, it constructs a fairly simple four-parameter model that can pretty closely match the actual trends in food prices over the last few years:

So, neat. Also disturbing. And more disturbing is this:

That’s from their companion, non-mathy paper that proposes “that protests may reflect not only long-standing political failings of governments, but also the sudden desperate straits of vulnerable populations. If food prices remain high, there is likely to be persistent and increasing global social disruption.” The main graph is food prices, the red dotted lines are incidents of rioting. Charmingly the numbers in parentheses are death tolls. They predict global doom in 2012-2013.

We apparently value feeding our cars over alleviating worldwide hunger and misery as well as preventing global unrest. A little unrest is always good for the bottom line of the Military Industrial Complex.

“Food prices (blue) and food price model (red) including projected increases in coming months. The social unrest threshold, corrected for inflation (purple dashed line) is a level of food prices that is likely to cause food riots of impoverished populations and social disruption. Parameters as in July update, modified to include larger recent reported FAO food price index increase of 6%.” – link

And a new report buy Oxfam, Extreme Weather, Extreme Prices, looks into the grim future of food production in a world of extreme climate change:

Even under a conservative scenario, another US drought in 2030 could raise the price of maize by as much as 140 per cent over and above the average price of food in 2030, which is already likely to be double today’s prices.

Drought and flooding in southern Africa could increase the consumer price of maize and other coarse grains by as much as 120 per cent. Price spikes of this magnitude today would mean the cost of a 25kg bag of corn meal – a staple which feeds poor families across Africa for about two weeks – would rocket from around $18 to $40.

A nationwide drought in India and extensive flooding across South East Asia could see the world market price of rice increase by 25 per cent. This could see domestic spikes of up to 43 per cent on top of longer term price rises in rice importing countries of such as Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.

My prediction is that we will continue to sacrifice land and human lives at the altar of American, and now Chinese, car culture. Walmart, the enduring symbol of happy fascism in America, will enjoy a growing pool of cheap labor amid cut-throat competition to ensure stellar profit margins. And a new reality TV series featuring climate change survivors will air on America’s propaganda box. Why not? We’ve already got a reality TV series to promote our perpetual war economy.

The Technomass of Industrial Civilization Vs the Biomass of the Living Planet

30 Sunday Sep 2012

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

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Alf Hornborg, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Machine Fetishism, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Poverty, Resource Wars, War on Terror

Here is the interview with Alf Hornborg along with a couple of essays of his. To understand our predicament, you must understand that the flow of energy, fossil fuels, humans have tapped into for running our economy, machinery, and energy-intensive mode of living has some serious environmental drawbacks, namely climate change and ocean acidification, which will certainly lead to our own destruction with the business-as-usual path we are so determined to follow. Some of the other consequences of basing our way of life so heavily upon fossil fuels are resource wars, support of brutal dictatorships in resource-cursed countries, hypocritical foreign policies based on resource control rather than the publicly professed mantra of human rights and democracy, the fomentation of resentment and terrorism towards the West, etc. So if you couple fossil fuels with capitalism, then you have a truly planet-destroying system. Capitalism is coerced competition for finite wages and resources, pitting person against person, company against company, and nation against nation. What the State calls Terrorism is really defined as those who have grievances with the plunder of their homeland’s resources to support the unsustainable lifestyles of OECD countries. If China continues to follow the same arc of resource consumption as America, the ‘War on Terror’ will be theirs as well. My favorite quote from Horborg:

Is the war on terrorism and climate debate two sides of the same coin? Imports of cheap oil are just as crucial as exports of carbon dioxide for a high-energy future. Both are confined to the parts of the world that have amassed the most purchasing power.

Alf Hornborg on How We Have Been Mystified by Technology …

14 July 2011, 12:54 PM
Alf Hornborg on How We Have Been Mystified by Technology
by Adam Robbert & JP Hayes
Alf Hornborg, professor in the department of Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden has long been untangling the tightly fused networks that merge the material dimensions of the environment with the cultural processes of society. “Machine Fetishism” Hornborg’s term for the way in which we have been mystified by technology highlights the links between technology and asymmetries in global exchange and uncovers the relationship between ecology and power. As technological devices multiply exponentially in a vain attempt to make our lives “efficient,” “luxurious” and “productive,” Hornborg, restless in his critique of technocapitalism, reminds us that on planet earth everything is a zero-sum game – one person’s gain is always another’s loss. Last January we caught up with Professor Hornborg to see where his latest thinking on machines, money and climate change stand and how we, as the concerned and informed, can intervene to make a difference.

Q: You have suggested that the difficulties in understanding the relationship between the environment, the economy and technology arise partly out of the separation between the social and natural sciences within the university. Bringing the natural and social sciences together implies entangling material dimensions of the environment with the cultural processes of society. How has this split mystified our understanding of the relationships between ecology and economics, and how is this affecting our ability to respond to major events such as the mass extinction of species, climate change and global inequality?

It is becoming increasingly obvious that material processes in the biosphere are very much intertwined with cultural aspects such as our ways of thinking and our consumption patterns. The most obvious example is perhaps climate change, which we know is largely driven by our patterns of consumption. If ecologists look at the biosphere as if there were no human societies in it, and economists look at societies as if they didn’t depend on the biosphere, none of them will know how to handle things like climate change. As long as economists continue to think that the only relevant metric for measuring global trade is money, they will not see the asymmetric net transfers of real resources such as energy and matter that make technological expansion possible within some areas of the world.

Q: Your analysis of technology as a globally situated event that requires the establishment of multiple asymmetric economic linkages to be in place raises questions about the role of technology in current ecological problems. If technology, and in particular machine technology, requires inequalities in the terms of global trade, how are we to assess the appropriate use and level of technology employed in solving ecological problems?

I don’t think modern technology will be of much use in solving ecological problems, because modern technology is basically a way of shuffling around resources and problems between different social groups. For example, by shifting to ethanol European car drivers may think they are becoming sustainable, but Brazilians engaged in growing sugar cane may be growing less sustainable as a result. Solving ecological problems should not be about finding new technological solutions, which generally means shifting the problems onto someone else, but about developing new economies and lifestyles which reduce environmental degradation.

Q: You advocate a “zero-sum” approach to your analysis of the relationship between ecology and economics, with technology acting as a kind of basin within which material exchanges of the biosphere and economic or political policies churn. In this way, what you call “machine fetishism” produces the image of a machine that exists without its connections to culture, power and ecology. Could you elaborate on how the illusion of machine technology came to take hold and what relevance unmasking machine power for what is –a globally situated object- has for encouraging a more politically just and environmentally sound society?

Our faith in technology emerged most markedly in the early nineteenth century, as colonial Britain was accumulating resources from all over the world and investing its economic surpluses in new machinery. To British economists of the time, it seemed as if ecological (land) constraints had been overcome once and for all, and the magic wands of labor and capital would suffice for economic progress to continue. That is exactly the time when modern economic ideology was born. What these Europeans could not grasp was that their capital was built on the exploitation of land and labor elsewhere in the world. In other words, the factors of production were NOT substitutable in an absolute sense. We are all ultimately dependent on land.

Q: Following David Harvey’s analysis of money, you have suggested that money is a social institution that generates “space-time” in such a way that is both an “objective, political ecological framework” and a “subjective experience.” In other words, money becomes the medium by which society, technology and even the whole biosphere are transformed within a particular set of cultural ideas. Given the latest financial crises, what do you foresee the role of currency to be in the transformation of the relationship between ecology and economics?

The financial crises illustrate the risks a society takes when it permits monetary assets and real, biophysical resources to become so thoroughly dissociated from each other. Our current problems with overconsumption would not have been possible if money had not become so completely disconnected from material resources. I am not saying that the gold standard that we abandoned in the seventies was a solution, but at least it limited the possibilities of printing ever more money to keep the treadmill of consumption (and production) spinning at a pace that satisfies the corporate demand for profits. But the real problem with money is not that it is fictitious, as all money must be, but that it embodies the idea that everything can be exchanged for everything else. What we need is an economy with at least two incommensurable currencies, to distinguish between values that should not be interchangeable, such as local subsistence and survival versus globalized entertainment.

Q: In your analysis of the industrial revolution you suggest that the “technomass” of industrial civilization is now competing with the “biomass” for living space on planet earth. How are we to approach the reality that we are already thoroughly enmeshed within a technosphere that now seems to require our continued maintenance (so as not to leak the wrong toxic substances into the wrong environments) and the fact the we need to be equally attentive to the livelihood of the biosphere which we depend upon for life?

The sooner we stop prioritizing the metabolic needs of our “technomass”, at the expense of human and other biomass, the better. Our technological fixes are no less absurd than the fetishism that brought earlier civilizations to collapse, whether through overinvestment in armies (Rome), temples (Maya), or megalithic statues (Easter Island).

Q: Given that you believe that an integration of the social and natural sciences would lead to better policy strategies, could you comment on the differences or similarities between these two spheres? Do the cultural, political and economic relations that social scientists study differ in nature from the ecological and material systems that a natural scientist study? Their conjunction seems necessary, and yet problems of integration seem numerous. What is our way forward here?

Yes, the social and natural sciences study different kinds of phenomena and need to respect the limitations of either approach. Societies have always implicated questions of power, unequal distribution, and collective processes of meaning-creation and ideology. Ecosystems can be studied and understood without insights about any of these things. On the other hand, as economists and others illustrate, social systems can be studied (if not understood) without any regard to the flows of matter and energy that preoccupy the ecologists. To understand the interface between social and ecological systems we need to understand POWER as partly material, partly symbolic. Social power is based on unequal access to material resources, but also on the ideological mystification of such inequalities.

Q: Uncertainties of measurement and misleading methodological approaches characterize current economic attempts to manage the world system. Such a measurement/theory mismatch creates uncertainty and error in understanding what is occurring in the present state of economic-ecological affairs. As a result of these poor methodologies, modern bureaucracies have created a routine of socioeconomic functioning that is notable for its lack of applicability to social & environmental reality. How can we characterize and develop change that ensures the development of a truly sustainable world system? How can we, as academics, activists, and concerned citizens, best intervene, as you say, “in the destructive logic of our current economic system?”

First of all by recognizing the dilemma as I have outlined it in my earlier responses. Second by using their political agency (ultimately as voters in democratic political systems) to choose representatives who are prepared to reorganize the economy for the long-term good of all people and ecosystems, rather than for the short-term benefits of corporate interests.

Q: Could you comment on the role of emergent popular discourses on the environment such as “green capitalism,” “sustainable development” and “ecological economics?” Though each is different in character and always subject to a variety of uses, do you think that these movements, in general, are adequate to the tasks they set out to solve?

I don’t believe in “green capitalism” or “sustainable development” the way they are currently conceived, as both are oxymorons. “Ecological economics” is a very important arena for discussion, but will lead to real changes in our thinking only if it is able to radically transcend the assumptions of conventional economics.

Q: What, in your opinion, are the most effective modes available with which to express a need for change within the current political and economic regimes? If traditional models of education, politics and economic theories are not serving the urgency of the crises at hand, what action do you advise concerned peoples to take?

The best we can do is to develop awareness of our global predicament and resort to it as opportunities for real change appear, not least as we confront crises of various kinds in the future. Crises, whether financial, environmental, or other (or a combination of them), can offer possibilities of change, and it is important for society not to be confused by such events, but to understand what is happening and be prepared to safeguard the health and security of citizens.

Q: If you are correct in asserting that “mainstream” thinking about the environment is fundamentally flawed and will not lead to positive change (as advocated by the sustainable development movement, for example) where do we start? Must we begin from scratch so as to completely re-interpret the ingredients and causes of our crises, or do we in fact have something like a base or foothold from which we can begin a renewed attempt to make a difference in the world? Who are the primary thinkers involved that provide us with tools that the 21st century can believe in?

The Internet has provided humanity with a unique chance to globally communicate about crises and how to handle them. I will not mention any specific thinkers, only note that the social and natural sciences both have rich traditions of thought that attempt to show how social power and inequalities are interconnected with natural circumstances such as land constraints, soil fertility, and thermodynamics. We need more current researchers working on how these different kinds of knowledge can be stitched together. Unfortunately, a very small minority of researchers is dedicated to such challenges.

click to enlarge…

“The last sigh of the fossil-fueled global economy” (translated)

Published January 6, 2010 – 10:00
Updated January 7, 2010 – 09:31

What will future historians say about the early 2,000’s? That it was the turning point. In the course of that decade were visualized the unsustainable contradictions within global fossil fuel-driven industrial capitalism.

First came 9/11. We sat glued in front of the television screen and saw the towers fall, again and again. We were just as shocked as the European upper classes two hundred years ago when the mob guillotined the royals in Paris. How could such a hit happen to us? Where did all this hate come from? Are there really such contradictions in the global community? Could it have to do with oil, this stored solar energy from the ancient landscape that drives most of our lives, that we can afford to continue paying for it? And to whom then is this resource so critical that some countries are prepared to go to war for it.

Then came the Peace Prize of Al Gore, a person who appeared to have become the world’s most powerful man able to say that we were destroying the planet, and be rewarded for it. If a U.S. Vice President, Nobel Committee and the UN climate panel agree on the reality of global warming, may we take it seriously? Should we stop using fossil fuels?

Then came the financial crisis – the worst stock market collapse since 1929. Is the world economy really so vulnerable? And how is it that economists could not predict it? Are there contexts in the world that economists have not understood?

The early 2,000’s was the decade when we passed the peak of conventional oil production, that which in English is called peak oil. We now, therefore, use the remaining oil faster than we can find new deposits. We realize that oil prices will rise in the future, making our current lifestyle increasingly untenable… a two hundred year old bubble approaching the breaking point.

In two centuries we have been able to forget that the earth’s land surface is the resource that limits us. We have become used to deriving our energy from drilled holes in the earth’s crust instead of from our landscape. We have lived in the former solar energy of epochs instead of the annual insolation stored in living plants.

What should we do when we can no longer afford oil? How will the land be sufficient when it once again will have to support both people and vehicles? It used to be horse feed we had to compete with, now it is the cane for ethanol.

Not only do biofuels take up land space needed for food for a growing world population, but they also can not be nearly enough to sustain the consumption levels that the rich world has become accustomed to.

The early 2,000’s was also the decade when we definitely realized that the balance of power in the world would not be forever. China became an economic power by cashing in on cheap labor and lax environmental laws. We buy Chinese goods like never before. But is continuing to wallow in their products the best thing we can do for the Chinese, their environment and our common atmosphere?

The early 2,000’s was also the decade when a new kind of president moved into the White House. A whole world had understood that the American people could no longer hope to solve global conflicts by taking up arms. But what options are there really for Obama?

During the past decade, two of America’s most powerful politicians received the Nobel Peace Prize, the one for his warning us of what can happen to the climate if we continue to burn oil, the other in hopes that he will refrain from war… always for oil.

And just before the decade is over, we will experience COP 15. Fifteen thousand delegates and a hundred heads of state will gather in Copenhagen to discuss whether there is any hope. We know that carbon dioxide emissions are only continuing to increase despite all the warnings and promises. We recognize that emissions are as unevenly distributed in the world as money. An average American emits 18.7 tons of carbon dioxide per year; an average of 1.3 tons for Indians.

Perhaps we can imagine a connection between these various trends and events? Is the war on terrorism and climate debate two sides of the same coin? Imports of cheap oil are just as crucial as exports of carbon dioxide for a high-energy future. Both are confined to the parts of the world that have amassed the most purchasing power.

Economic growth is basically about earning money to expend resources. And the more money we earn today, the more resources we can afford to consume tomorrow. No wonder it is difficult to reduce carbon emissions.

But this is a logic that economists are not trained in. Can we hope that the next decade offers more insight – and more power shifts?

Alf Hornborg
Professor of Human Ecology, Lund University

Life in a Zero-Sum World: Capitalism, Socio-Ecological Crisis and Alternatives

30 Sunday Sep 2012

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

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17th World Congress of the IUAES, Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Gross Inequality, Peak Oil, Poverty, Social Unrest, The Socio-Ecological Crisis

For my own records and for your curious minds, I’m posting some abstracts on papers that were written for an upcoming symposium called the 17th World Congress of the IUAES (Manchester, UK; 5th-10th August 2013). Many of these papers sound very interesting:

Papers

That Big Slow Curve: Fossil Fuel Based Growth meets A Prosperous Way Down

Author: Thomas Abel (Tzu Chi University) email

LONG ABSTRACT

This century and the last may someday be called the Oil Years. Many who view our human economies in biophysical terms have come to conceive the peak of oil production as a turning point for peoples of the world. For the Odum’s, A Prosperous Way Down (2001) is in no part inevitable as oil production peaks and declines. Their book offers guidelines for a preferable future, a hopeful scenario, but with clear recognition that there are many less desirable and more likely directions that the world may take. In this paper I will reprise the Odum’s preferred scenario as it relates to undesirable alternatives. I will place these scenarios along the path of a big slow curve—the 80-year curve of world oil consumption. At human time scales, we might think that the big slow curve is difficult to detect or attend to. However, I will argue that the effects of asset growth and decline are indeed attended to, and have dramatically affected cultural trends in these oil years. This is because the detection of the growth (or its absence) of cultural assets is of central concern to all ‘consumers’ within ecosystems, but especially to human consumers who produce and manage their own food in various ways. These issues will be explored with mini-model simulations.

Accumulation by Displaced Emission: On Climate, Consumers, and the Rhetoric of Confidence

Author: Cindy Isenhour (Centre College ) email

Long Abstract

Whether referred to as ecological modernization, bright green environmentalism, or the rationalization of lifestyles, technological improvement has long been presented as a “win-win” strategy resulting in both economic growth and improved environmental health. Yet significant and mounting research suggests that these strategies have not delivered on their promises. Efficiency gains are being rapidly outstripped by sustained net growth in consumption. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research, this paper explores a series of reports published by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and their subsequent impact on other nations. The report authors advocate a zero-sum approach to understanding green house gas emissions – recognizing that while Sweden has reduced domestic emissions since 1990 — simultaneous growth in the consumption of imported goods and services has resulted in net increases elsewhere. The Swedish “consumption approach” to global GHG emissions accounting helps to elucidate the zero-sum reality of outsourcing emissions to nations where the need for economic development results in environmental injustice. While it is certainly more just to attribute all environmental costs to the consumers who benefit from the products associated with emissions, this perspective was contentious in Sweden where many saw it as anti-market. Its logical conclusion implied moving past economic and environmental de-coupling, toward de-growth. While these reports have had a substantial impact on several other nations, I argue that the approach they advocate is unlikely to gain much traction within UN climate talks until the pro-growth rhetoric surrounding consumer choice, responsibility, and freedom are challenged.

Cornucopianism and the image of limited good

Author: Richard Wilk (Indiana University) email

Long Abstract

In this paper I argue that the metaphors that we use to think about global economic processes suffer from inherent limitations. The metaphors come from early moral and vitalistic thinking about the economy, and from modernist mechanical models which have now been enhanced with systems thinking, nationalism, and what I call “ecologism” which fetishizes nature. I propose that both cornucopian and zero-sum limited-good ideas about the future are fundamentally flawed, and are incapable of projecting a credible imagination of sustainability. I focus particularly on the language and metaphors of temporality and boundaries, both of which incorporate assumptions which we know to be false. I also discuss the prevailing dualism in discourse about the economy, and the way it limits our thinking and blinds us to what Latour calls “the proliferation of hybrids.” The economy is a cyborg, partially human and partially machine, and the sooner we recognize this, and stop fighting the pre-determined wars of modernism, the better we will be capable of thinking about a planet with 10 or 11 billion human beings on it.

Rethinking Economy

Author: Stephen Gudeman (University of Minnesota/ Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) email

Long Abstract

Most economists see material life as consisting of markets surrounded by market-like behavior: everything else is a positive or negative externality on market exchange. The anthropological perspective is different. I see economies as fields of value defined by crosscutting coordinates. One axis locates economies on a scale from High Relationship to Low Relationship transactions; the other positions economies on a measure from High Markets to Low Markets. Set diagonally to this “graph view” are five, increasingly abstract and encompassing institutional spheres that shift from the House, to Community, to Commerce, to Finance, to Meta finance. This view offers a comparative way to understand economies, change, and the contemporary crises. It suggests that economy is built on a material base whose uses change and are differentially valued. The more abstract spheres, through cronyism, oligopolies, information control and other devices, extract “value” that is first achieved through production and innovation. Unless mollified by communal action, this power of abstraction heightens unequal distribution and leads to environmental degradation seen in terms of entropy and pollution. I contest the belief in growth that is generated by market competition and consumption desires, as well as the ideology that growth, with its increasing toll on the environment, is the remedy to unequal distribution. Placing limits on the growth of inequalities in wealth counters the entropic toll we are incurring, and the reverse.

Revisiting the Image of Limited Good: On Sustainability, Thermodynamics, and the Illusion of Creating Wealth

Author: Paul Trawick (Idaho State University) email

Long Abstract

This paper focuses on worldview, examining two cultural models that are now contending for dominance on the world stage: the open-system model long promoted by economists, referred to as the ‘image of unlimited good’, and a closed-system model, the ‘image of limited good’ made famous by George Foster, who attributed it to members of peasant societies throughout the world. The former worldview is based on the idea that people ‘create’ wealth, an illusion arising from a fundamental confusion about the respective properties of real wealth and virtual wealth, or productive capital and finance capital. This perspective ignores the near-total reliance of the global economy on fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources, finite forms of real wealth whose exploitation is governed by the laws of thermodynamics. The alternative “zero-sum” worldview rests on the axiom that most of the ‘goods’ that people value in life are inherently scarce, being derived from those limited resources and raw materials, a scarcity that must somehow be shared. Based on an ethnographic and ethnological argument, a radical shift toward the closed-system view is said to be necessary if people are to act collectively to impose sustainable limits on their expanding consumption, a cultural change that may already be underway.

The moral economy and moral ecology of organic food in Western Sicily: from growth to degrowth?

Author: Giovanni Orlando (Independent Scholar) email

Long Abstract

For almost a century now the dominant socio-ecological regime of the world agri-food system has rested on the two pillars of productivism and mass consumption. An idea of limitless growth is thus intrinsic to it. Such growth has resulted in the degradation of ecosystems and the exploitation of farmers and consumers. The organic food movement has sought to counter this situation by developing agri-food systems that renew, rather than deplete, natural resources, and that do justice to farmers and consumers. Potentially, then, organic food can be grounded in non-accumulative paradigms such as agroecology and degrowth. From a cultural point of view, what values and symbols would underpin these ‘sustainable’ paradigms? This paper tries to answer this question in Western Sicily, Italy. By looking at the practices and discourses of people who grow, sell and eat organic foods, it explores the degree to which subjects hold values about nature and people that speak to notions of degrowth and agroecology. The paper uncovers a common thread in people’s emphasis on what might be termed ‘excess’. From the fear of the dietary abominations created by an excessive use of technology in food manufacturing and processing, to the outrage for the abuses caused by a desire for excessive profits in food retailing, the paper shows how the ideal of sufficiency, documented by anthropologists in a variety of non-Western societies, creates a moral economy-ecology of organic food.

The Revival of Survival: Pioneering a Post-Financial America

Author: Eliza Jane Darling email

Long Abstract

The financial crash of 2008 precipitated the renaissance of a primordial American tradition: survivalism. Often stigmatized as an eccentricity, the survivalist ethos is in fact deeply ingrained in American cultural production, from post-apocalyptic film to millenarian religious movements, as well as in American capitalism, generating millions of dollars in annual profits through the production of demand for palliative commodities. In recent years survivalism has indeed infiltrated mainstream American politics at multiple scales, from New York City’s “go-bag” scheme to Wyoming state’s “doomsday bill” to the CDC’s “zombie-preparedness” initiative. Like its historical predecessors, Great Recession survivalism is predicated upon a zero-sum logic simultaneously economic and environmental, entailing fears of an imminent collapse of finite financial and ecological resources as well as alternative visions for post-crisis continuity. This paper examines the history of survivalist ideology as a heterodox response to capitalistic crisis that is cyclically subsumed by its alleged antithesis: a cultural manifestation of deep-seated doubts about the propensity for endless growth which has itself been absorbed into the warp and weft of capitalist expansion through commoditisation.

Why Solar Panels Don’t Grow on Trees: Technological Utopianism and the Uneasy Relation between Ecomarxism and Ecological Economics

Author: Alf Hornborg (Lund University) email

Long Abstract

Ever since the Industrial Revolution saved Britain from ecological crisis in the early nineteenth century, visions of miraculous new technologies have alleviated Euro-American anxieties about the impending doom of the fossil-fuelled capitalism that it inaugurated. Although Malthus’s worries about land shortages were transcended by world-historical events as well as by Ricardo’s and Marx’s different versions of technological optimism, they were soon reincarnated in Jevons’s warnings about the depletion of coal. Today economists generally dismiss the pessimism not only of Malthus and Jevons, but also of current concerns over peak oil, by expressing faith in human ingenuity. To retrospectively ridicule pessimists by referring to technological progress that they did not anticipate has become an established pattern of mainstream thought. Almost regardless of ideological persuasion, the seemingly self-evident concept of “technological progress” inherited from early industrialism has been resorted to as an article of faith serving to dispel the specter of truncated growth. The increasingly acknowledged threats of peak oil and global warming are thus generally countered with visions of a future civilization based on solar power. In this paper I discuss this technological scenario as a utopia that raises serious doubts about mainstream understandings of what “technology” really is, and what it means to say that something is “technologically” feasible. The technological utopianism professed, for instance, by ecomarxists raises difficult but fundamental analytical questions about the relation between thermodynamics and theories of economic value.

Decoupling waste from growth

Author: Catherine Alexander (Durham University) email

Long Abstract

The correlation between increased waste production and increased wealth
headlines the EU’s environmental strategy. On the basis of trends so far,
the OECD projects a 45% increase in waste from 1995. The need for
continual economic expansion is taken as an unproblematic given. The
question that therefore seems to present itself is how to continue to
increase wealth without environmental despoilation. The EU’s Sixth
Environment Action Programme identifies waste prevention and management
as one of its top priorities. Its primary objective is to decouple waste
generation from economic activity, so that EU growth will no longer lead
to more and more rubbish. In the paper I make three points in response.
The first is that the desirability of growth remains unquestioned,
alternatives unexplored. The second is that environmental justice or
equity seems now to be foregrounded, often at the expense of other
inequalities produced by capitalist relations. The answer to waste
production, however, appears to be shifted away from economic rationales
of constant expansion to technocratic solutions or campaigns to change
consumers’ ‘attitudes and behaviour’ or the sleight of hand involved in
reclassifying wastes as energy (with the potentially bizarre prospect of
an economy that demands more waste in order to feed energy demands). I
suggest that the production of wastes is intimately tied to every aspect
of mass economic activity from extraction, through production,
distribution and consumption to disposal, and crucially, capitalist growth
depends on things breaking down, the inability to repair things, fashion.
One of the first steps forward might be to recognize that this kind of
growth is inseparable from social and environmental degradation.

Keeping the Machine Well Fed

29 Saturday Sep 2012

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

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6th Mass Extinction, Biophysical Economics, Chris Hedges, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Financial Elite, Greenwashing, Mass Die Off, Shell oil drilling in the Arctic

One of the recent headlines that caught my eye:

And of course the cartoonist Polyp had the perfect response…

While reading this morning, I stumbled across the following blog and found it informative…

Occam’s razor does not favor a climate change “hoax” {Infographic}

Occam’s razor suggests that the more likely explanation for some phenomenon is the explanation which requires the fewest number of assumptions or required assertions. Even though in science the correct answer is sometimes the more complex one, rationally speaking, the fewer amount of assumptions that we have to make in order to get a theory to work, the better.

For example, think of how many assumptions you have to make to consider the September 11th attacks a government conspiracy. So many claims about time, space, engineering, politics, prior knowledge, flight patterns, etc., must be made to even start bridging the gap. On the other hand, the simpler explanation that requires less assumptions (and indeed has more evidence) is that a group of terrorists hijacked some planes and flew them into the buildings.

By association, Occam’s razor regularly dismantles most conspiracy theories without much effort. Of course, any of the conspiracies could be true, but without evidence the numerous assumptions that need to be made push these theories into irrational confines.

The infographic below takes a similar approach. On the side that accepts anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, it takes many more assumptions to make the idea that the majority of the world’s climate scientists are in collusion to make a worldwide hoax from which they see no benefit work than it does to think that oil companies are protecting their bottom line. We know that there are huge oil lobbies, oil companies that have scientists in their pockets, and that large corporations are trying to purposefully undermine the science of climate.

Therefore, which makes more sense?

At the root of the Anthropocene Crisis of the 21st century is the unabated expansion of humankind fueled by fossil fuels. We are pushing all other living things off the cliff of extinction, with ourselves soon to follow.

Global efforts to slow extinctions lag pledges, UN says:

…32 per cent of livestock breeds are under threat of extinction within the next 20 years, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says. And 75 per cent of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops has been lost since 1900.

“Because we don’t really know the full impacts of climate change down the line, we don’t really know what’s going to happen in terms of growing conditions around the world. It’s just safer for us to have a lot of these other varieties in our pocket,” said David Ainsworth, spokesman of the CBD Secretariat.

Cooper said the pace of extinctions among the planet’s estimated 9 million species – plants, animals from insects to whales but excluding legions of tiny bacteria – was perhaps 100 times the background rate estimated in fossil records.

“If you project the rates into the future, the rest of the century, they are likely to be 100 times larger still,” he said. The rising human population threatens ever more habitats with expanding cities, farms and roads…

The machine of industrial civilization has become the master of our fate. It rolls onward under its own colossal impetus, crushing all in its path. The billions of people in the globalized economy are now mere cogs in its wheel. ‘Economic development and growth’ is the mantra chanted by all. ‘Green’ and ‘sustainable’ are the adjectives used by corporations to whitewash the continued plunder of the environment. Capitalism, an economic system that requires continued expansion and control, is inherently unstable and incompatible with the long-term habitability of the planet. Will the principles of biophysical economics become accepted as truth before we destroy ourselves?

The answer lies in this excerpt from Chris Hedges’ latest essay:

…perhaps the most egregious assault will be carried out by the fossil fuel industry. Obama, who presided over the repudiation of the Kyoto Accords and has done nothing to halt the emission of greenhouse gases, reversed 20 years of federal policy when he permitted the expansion of fracking and offshore drilling. And this acquiescence to big oil and big coal, no doubt useful in bringing in campaign funds, spells disaster for the planet. He has authorized drilling in federally protected lands, along the East Coast, Alaska and four miles off Florida’s Atlantic beaches. Candidate Obama in 2008 stood on the Florida coastline and vowed never to permit drilling there.

You get the point. Obama is not in charge. Romney would not be in charge. Politicians are the public face of corporate power. They are corporate employees. Their personal narratives, their promises, their rhetoric and their idiosyncrasies are meaningless. And that, perhaps, is why the cost of the two presidential campaigns is estimated to reach an obscene $2.5 billion. The corporate state does not produce a product that is different. It produces brands that are different. And brands cost a lot of money to sell…

Capitalist Carbon Man

28 Friday Sep 2012

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

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Arctic Sea Ice Melt, Fossil-Fuel Based Economy, Greenland Ice Sheet Melt, Greenwashing, Mass Die Off, Resource Exploitation

Sometime next week I’ll post part two of climate tipping elements, but I want to emphasize right now that industrial civilization’s undoing will be its transgression of environmental elements which will cause dramatic and worsening rates of climate change. The delusion that there will be nice, slow and predictable changes from anthropogenic climate change has already been destroyed by the first tipping point of the melting Arctic sea-ice sheet and its multiple, concomitant feedback loops. The Arctic is now irreparably altered, never to recover from the clumsy tinkering and meddling of human hands. Arctic animal species face mass extinction not only from the loss of their habitat but also from hybridization and competition from southern species migrating northward as well as the spread of diseases. Bid adieu to those disappearing glacial Arctic landscapes once designated as World Heritage sites.

Concerning rapid development of climate chaos:

The consequences for the biosphere of accelerating climate change are discussed by Baronsky et al in the following terms:

Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence.

Climates found at present on 10–48% of the planet are projected to disappear within a century, and climates that contemporary organisms have never experienced are likely to cover 12–39% of Earth. The mean global temperature by 2070 (or possibly a few decades earlier) will be higher than it has been since the human species evolved.

At 400ppm CO2, potential climate conditions have reached levels which last existed in the peak Pliocene epoch (5.3-2.6 million years ago). Given an increase in extreme weather events under conditions of +0.8C, an even higher rate of extreme events is expected under conditions of +2.0C currently shielded by industrially emitted sulphur aerosols.

Like 99.999% of the population, I do have to generate a living which means coercive participation in the predominant economy. This forced inclusion in the globalized capitalist model is illustrated quite well in the following article. If you’re in a hole, quit digging. But if you are capitalist carbon man, then you can’t help but keep digging:

KANGERLUSSUAQ, Greenland – President Lee Myung-bak said Sunday Korea wants to help Greenland pursue economic development in an environmentally friendly way, expressing sadness and concern after seeing the Arctic glaciers that are melting due to global warming…

‘Development’ is the code word for supplanting nature with the money-generating schemes of capitalist carbon man.

Lee arrived in Greenland earlier in the day to take a first-hand look at problems resulting from climate change and to hold talks with Premier Kuupik Kleist of the Danish autonomous territory about green growth, resource development and Arctic shipping routes…

There’s that oxymoron again – “green growth”. Development and growth by industrial civilization is neither green nor sustainable. It’s simply another nail in the coffin for the natural world and all other species that don’t have an opposable thumb, walk upright, and trade shares on Wall Street.

Upon arrival at the airport in the small town of Kangerlussuaq, Lee flew on a light plane to Ilulissat, a Unesco World Heritage site known for its famous icefjord, one of the best locations to observe melting Arctic glaciers, icebergs and ice sheets…

Was that “light plane” another product of “green growth” and “sustainable development”? Perhaps it was buoyed in the air by magical green technology.

Premier Kleist and Danish Crown Prince Frederik traveled together with Lee.

“This is a tragic site,” Lee said aboard an icebreaker while touring the ice-floating sea, apparently meaning that global warming, caused by economic development, is having serious impacts on the environment…

…Increasingly warm weather has led to Arctic ice melting dangerously…

No shit, it’s caused by “economic development”! But these twits think attaching the word ‘green’ to the word ‘development’ will make everything all better. Capitalist carbon man is apparently no smarter than yeast in a petri dish. Yeast in a petri dish never choose degrowth over reproducing and consuming ever more.

Melting occurred on about 40 percent of the surface of Greenland’s ice sheets on July 8, but it expanded to 97 percent only four days later. A massive glacier twice the size of Manhattan broke off from Greenland recently, officials said.

Lee’s entourage also included three special members: prominent Korean climber Um Hong-gil, who is the world’s first to scale the globe’s 16 tallest mountains; famous cartoonist Hur Young-man; and Shin Soo-min, a college student chosen for his enthusiasm about green growth.

Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are blamed for warming the globe.

In an effort to tackle the issue, Lee has championed what is dubbed the “low carbon, green growth” policy, one of Lee’s trademark policies that calls for seeking economic growth through environmentally friendly technologies and industries without releasing greenhouse gases…

Oh, so now we will also attach the words ‘low carbon‘ to the word ‘development’. Sugar and spice and everything fucking nice!!!

Greenland is also rich in oil, rare earth materials and other resources. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, about 17 billion barrels of oil are estimated to be buried along Greenland’s western coast, with another 31.4 billion barrels along the northwestern coast.

Greenland is also believed to be holding the world’s largest reserves of rare earth materials. At least 10 regions have been confirmed to be holding the increasingly important resources, with the southern region holding enough reserves to meet 25 percent of global demand, officials said.

During the flight to Ilulissat, Prince Frederik told Lee that he hopes countries like Korea will help develop Greenland while preserving its environment. Lee said in response that he came to Greenland with “the spirit of green growth.”

Later in the day, Lee held talks with Kleist about ways to boost cooperation in green growth and resources development, saying Korea is willing to work actively together to transform “environmental crisis” into “economic opportunities.”

The two sides also signed four memoranda of understanding calling for cooperation in resources development, geological survey and Arctic science and technology. The agreements are expected to serve as a foothold for Korea’s participation in Greenland’s development.

“South Korea wants to seek economic development in a way that Greenland remains green,” Lee said during the signing ceremony. “I hope Greenland will be preserved as Greenland forever. In this sense, South Korea can be a good partner.

So now the truth comes out from under the cloak of feel-good greenwashing. We just can’t wait to get our hands on all that newly revealed, CO₂-polluting carbon energy. How else would we be able to run our fossil fuel-based economies? Oh boy, we really do have more than enough fossil fuels to destroy every living thing on Earth, and like a moth’s fatal attraction to a flame, we just can’t stop ourselves. A few types of heat-loving bacteria will be the last remaining survivors in this brave new world of our own creation.

Tipping Points for Runaway Climate Change, Part One

23 Sunday Sep 2012

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

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Amazon Rain Forest Drought, Arctic Sea Ice Melt, Boreal Forest Destruction, Geneticist Andrea Manica, Greenland Ice Quakes, Greenland Ice Sheet Melt, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Professor Tim Lenton, Runaway Climate Change, Tipping Elements in the Climate System

Coronal Mass Ejection from August 31, 2012. And the associated 4096×4096 (!) video.

What force, more than anything else, has regulated the evolution and expansion of mankind throughout history? A new study with climate models by geneticist Andrea Manica at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues shows how sensitive the human species has been to climate over the past 120,000 years and continues to be to the present day. The rise and fall of ice sheets and sea levels and the desertification of continents acted as road blocks to control the migration and settlement of humans across the planet.

…To see just how sensitive our species has been to changes in climate over the ages, Manica ran the model several times, varying the strength of climate’s effect on populations.

In parallel, he also modelled the history of human genetic variation, and compared that with real data on the genetic makeup of modern populations. Strikingly, he was only able to reproduce the known timings of migrations, and the real-world genetic data, if the human populations in his model were highly sensitive to the climate.

It’s the first time anyone has been able to explore climate’s power to facilitate human expansion, says Rick Potts of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. “The study fills in many of the links that have only been assumed or guessed at,” he says…

…Stewart has proposed that earlier bouts of climate change helped the many hominin species to evolve, by forcing them into isolated refuges where they evolved separately (Science, doi.org/jcz). If that’s correct, climate has been determining our fate for even longer than Manica’s model suggests.

Manica argues that modern civilisation is still highly dependent on the climate. Many societies have declined or collapsed when faced with climate change, for example.

While agriculture produces more food than hunting and gathering, and so supports more people, ultimately climate’s effect on food production still limits our population. “We are very much governed by climate,” he says.

With the discovery of oil, coal, and other fossil fuels we were able to vastly increase our numbers. Our entire transportation system, industrialized agricultural system, globalized economy of trade, and modern medical system would not exist without fossil fuels. Even so, humanity could have dealt with the painful problem of peak oil by powering down to a less energy intensive way of life, but something much more insidious developed which would throw modern civilization for a loop. Professor Tim Lenton and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber wrote a paper in 2007 identifying 9 specific tipping elements for the Earth’s climate:

Click to Enlarge…

1.) The Arctic sea ice is considered a “highly sensitive” tipping point with low uncertainty and is expected to disappear completely in summer within a decade, leaving behind open and dark waters which will absorb more of the sun’s heat that once was reflected by white ice.

In figure below, global emissions cause warming, especially in the Arctic, where warming is further accelerated by feedbacks, in particular sea ice loss and methane releases, threatening to lead to runaway global warming.

From the following graph, you can see Lenton’s and Schellnhuber’s tipping points (8 of 14) which are sensitive(yellow/red) to just a few degrees of warming:

Several positive feedbacks have been identified within the first tipping point of disappearing Arctic sea ice:

There are at least three positive feedbacks working together to reinforce one another – and now a fourth on salinity:

The albedo flip effect as sea ice is replaced by open water absorbing more sunlight, warming and melting more sea ice.

As the sea ice gets very thin, it is liable to break up easily and get blown into open water where it will melt more easily.

The open warmer water is allowing increased strength of storms, which break up the ice to make for more open water.

The storms are churning up the sea to a depth of 500 metres, producing salinity at the surface that will mean slower ice formation in winter and more open water next year.

These feedbacks are dangerous for methane. AMEG has been warning that, as the sea ice retreats, storms will warm the sea bed, leading to further release of methane. In ESAS, we only need mixing to a depth of 50 metres – so a storm capable of mixing to 500 metres will really stir things up.

Another feedback is the pollution and soot resultant from increased shipping traffic, oil drilling activity, and other exploitive ventures by our ravenous and wrong-headed culture. Like arsonists taking pleasure in their destructive activities, industrial civilization simply throws more fuel into the bonfire of anthropogenic climate chaos. You can see plainly from the current Arctic resource grab that “THE MARKET” is a soulless, nihilistic, and sapient-less entity with a one-track mind of commodification and exploitation.

2.) The Greenland ice sheet is considered a “highly sensitive” tipping point with low uncertainty and a decay time of approximately 300 years as cycles of degradation and regrowth tip toward melting. A rise in sea levels of more than 20 feet is estimated from the melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

As with other underestimations of mankind’s effect on nature, we have done the same with the destruction of the Greenland ice sheet:

The Greenland ice sheet is likely to be more vulnerable to global warming than previously thought. The temperature threshold for melting the ice sheet completely is in the range of 0.8 to 3.2 degrees Celsius of global warming, with a best estimate of 1.6 degrees above pre-industrial levels, shows a new study by scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Today, already 0.8 degrees of global warming has been observed. Substantial melting of land ice could contribute to long-term sea-level rise of several meters and therefore it potentially affects the lives of many millions of people.

The time it takes before most of the ice in Greenland is lost strongly depends on the level of warming. “The more we exceed the threshold, the faster it melts,” says Alexander Robinson, lead-author of the study now published in Nature Climate Change. In a business-as-usual scenario of greenhouse-gas emissions, in the long run humanity might be aiming at 8 degrees Celsius of global warming. This would result in one fifth of the ice sheet melting within 500 years and a complete loss in 2000 years, according to the study. “This is not what one would call a rapid collapse,” says Robinson. “However, compared to what has happened in our planet’s history, it is fast. And we might already be approaching the critical threshold.”…

And the surprises just keep on coming(click on pic to go to story):

…and unprecedented ‘Ice Quakes'(click on pic to go to story):

3.) The Boreal Forest, which rings the northern latitudes and provides habitat for migratory bird species and other wildlife, could die back within 50 years as trees succumb to summer heat stress, increased diseases and other threats. This is considered an “intermediately sensitive” tipping point with large uncertainty.

The most noteworthy destruction of boreal forests is the extraction of Canadian tar sands:

-Oil sands mining is licensed to use twice the amount of fresh water that the entire city of Calgary uses in a year.
-At least 90% of the fresh water used in the oil sands ends up in ends up in tailing ponds so toxic that propane cannons are used to keep ducks from landing.
-Processing the oil sands uses enough natural gas in a day to heat 3 million homes.
-The toxic tailing ponds are considered one of the largest human-made structures in the world.
-The ponds span 50 square kilometers and can be seen from space.
-Producing a barrel of oil from the oil sands produces three times more greenhouse gas emissions than a barrel of conventional oil.

PDF of report here via ::DeSmogBlog

As if the hellish blight of tar sands operations was not enough of a sacrifice zone for our unsustainable lifestyles, plans are being laid to duplicate the process for America’s own oil sands project in Utah.

Inside Climate News reports:

An administrative law judge in Salt Lake City has ruled against two environmental organizations that are trying to block a Canadian company’s plan to open the first large-scale oil sands mine in the United States.

Judge Sandra Allen sided with U.S. Oil Sands and Utah’s Division of Water Quality in deciding that the state rightfully granted the Calgary-based company permission to mine and process oils sands without requiring a pollution permit or water monitoring at the PR Spring mining site in eastern Utah. The judge agreed with the Water Quality Division’s opinion that there is so little ground water within 1,500 feet of the surface of the proposed mine that additional safeguards weren’t needed.

Greenpeace reports:

The northern boreal forests comprise almost one third of the Earth’s forest systems, covering 1.5 billion hectares. Along with the temperate forest of the mid-latitudes, and tropical forest near the equator, it is one of the three great forest ecosystems of the world, supporting a rich diversity of wildlife, endangered species, and extremely valuable timber…

…There is general consensus that climatic changes will have the greatest impact on boreal forests; their unique adaptation makes them more sensitive to temperature fluctuations than temperate or even tropical forests. Indeed, fossil pollen and macro fossil records demonstrate that North American boreal forests expanded and receded in response to temperature changes over the past 10,000 years. Even a slight increase in mean annual temperature is enough to affect many species’ growth and regeneration…

…The rate of climate change — and not the change itself — is perhaps the biggest threat to the boreal forest. With rapid change, conditions may become unsuitable for trees to complete their life cycle. Seedlings are especially sensitive to short-term drought, saplings to varying levels of sunlight, and mature trees to soil moisture during the growing season. Thus, in a kind of “arrested development,” healthy-looking tree populations may not ever mature to the point of reproduction. Entire remnant stands of forest may no longer sustain themselves, or their resident animal and plant communities. A temperature rise of only 2 degrees C could, for example, eliminate up to half of the animals currently inhabiting boreal mountain ranges from the Rocky Mountains to the Sierra Nevada…

4.) The West Antarctic Ice Sheet could collapse within 300 years, leading to a sea level rise of as much as 15 feet worldwide. This is considered an “intermediately sensitive” tipping point with large uncertainty.

A new study sheds light on the vulnerability of the Antarctic to climate change(clink on the pic to go to story):

5.) The Amazon rainforest could die back significantly within 50 years due to a combination of deforestation and global warming, which could trigger a 30% decrease in rainfall. This is considered an “intermediately sensitive” tipping point with large uncertainty.

The Amazon Rainforest is expected to be reduced by 40% by 2030 at the current rate of deforestation, despite recent reductions. A current scientific paper states that due to deforestation, the Amazon is becoming a net CO2 emitter rather than a sink for the world’s carbon dioxide. When we take into account the uncertainties of climate change-induced droughts, the prospect of losing one of the earth’s major lungs becomes a near certainty:

…One of the scarier possibilities to emerge from this body of work is worth dwelling on a bit, simply because it would be so devastating if it came to pass: the so-called Amazon dieback scenario. Many scientists were deeply skeptical of the idea when it was first published, but events in the last few years have made them less dismissive.

The scenario emerged most clearly in computer analyses in Britain led by Peter M. Cox of the University of Exeter and published in 2000 as a paper in the journal Nature. Running a large-scale computer simulation in which forests interacted with a changing global climate through the course of the 21st century, the Cox group found that forests would continue to take up carbon until about 2050.

But then, their computer predicted, warmer temperatures and water stress would cause a huge dieback of the Amazon forest, which would stop absorbing carbon and start emitting it as a result.

That was a startling possibility for many reasons, not the least being that the Amazon is the richest single ecosystem left on the planet, and functioning as a major carbon sponge is only one of the critical roles it plays. Might the Amazon really die as a direct consequence of human-induced climate change?…

…[That question] took on a new urgency in 2005, however, when a severe drought hit the Amazon region, killing many large trees. In 2010, there was an even larger drought with potentially worse damage — two “once a century” droughts just five years apart. The 2010 drought is still under study; some evidence suggests that the 2005 drought was linked to high Atlantic Ocean temperatures that may in turn be linked to human emissions of carbon dioxide.

The droughts raise a disturbing question: Could the great dieback predicted for midcentury already be starting?

Scientists do not know. They say the effects of the two droughts are likely to be transient, but only if similar events do not recur anytime soon. Oliver L. Phillips, a researcher at the University of Leeds, led a team that documented a huge loss of carbon in the Amazon because of the 2005 drought. “The most likely outcome is that the forest will gain all that carbon back, and then some,” he said in an interview.

But he and other scientists say that if the Amazon starts experiencing such droughts every few years, all bets are off.

“It’s a worrisome moment for the Amazon,” said Daniel C. Nepstad, an American scientist working at the Amazon Environmental Research Institutein Brazil to understand the pressures on the forest. “This is either just a big coincidence that we had these two severe droughts in close sequence, or it is a sign of things to come.”…

Satellite view of deforestation in Rondônia, Brazil, 1975 and 2012

Despite recent efforts by Brazil to curb deforestation, it continues at a ferocious pace outside Brazil’s borders:

Amazon deforestation grows outside Brazil – SFGate

…In Brazil, the enforcement of land-use laws reduced deforestation by 76 percent in eight years, from 10,424 square miles in 2004 – when a swath bigger than Maryland was cleared of jungle – until last year, when the country’s National Institute for Space Research reported that 2,471 square miles had been destroyed.

But more than 40 percent of the Amazon jungle is beyond Brazil’s borders, spread across eight countries in a carpet of green six times the size of California. These countries are poorer and less stable than Brazil, with less capacity to control clear-cutting of trees. Government agencies that regulate land use are spread thin, and some of those countries, including Bolivia, actively promote development in the jungle.

Satellite data and field work by environmental and forestry ministries in the region show that deforestation in the non-Brazilian Amazon rose from an annual average of 1,930 square miles in the 1990s to 2,779 square miles last year.

“There’s more deforestation going on in the Andean Amazon than in the Brazilian Amazon,” said Timothy Killeen, an ecologist and geographer in Bolivia who works with environmental groups and has been studying deforestation in the Amazon for 25 years. “Before, Brazilian deforestation was four times as great as in the Andean Amazon. Now the Andes has more. We’re winning the battle in Brazil but losing the battle in the Amazon.”

Environmentalists say the destruction of the Andean Amazon is particularly worrisome because it affects the lifeblood of the entire Amazon, the rivers flowing down from the Andes.

This post is part one of a three-part series. In the second part I will talk about the other climate change tipping points as described by Professor Tim Lenton.

I imagine a child born today would look at all adults as grotesque monsters. With the world we are leaving them, how could they see us otherwise…

Overly Conservative Scientific Estimates Hide the Coming Human Tragedy

22 Saturday Sep 2012

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

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, John Reilly Senior Climate Change Researcher at MIT, Overly Conservative IPCC Estimates, Paul A. O’Gorman Professor of Atmospheric science at MIT, Take Shelter

The excerpt ‘On the Threat of Environmental Catastrophe’ at the bottom of this post is from an essay just published a few hours ago entitled ‘A Tale of Two Crashes Part 2‘ from Empirical Magazine. It elaborates a bit more on the coming climate chaos and the destruction of industrial civilization. As has been noted by others, the estimates of the IPCC have been overly conservative:

Read what John Reilly, a senior climate change researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has to say about future scenarios in ‘On the Threat of Environmental Catastrophe’. Also, take notice of this recent news article:

Climate scientists have long projected that increases in global temperatures will result in higher rainfall and flooding in tropical regions. But now a MIT study has put some numbers to the prediction. Writing in Nature Geoscience in a September 16th letter titled “Sensitivity of tropical precipitation extremes to climate change,” Paul A. O’Gorman, professor of atmospheric science at MIT, said that for every one-degree Celsius increase in global surface temperature, there will be 10 percent heavier rainfall extremes in the tropics.

O’Gorman tells MIT News that “The study includes some populous countries that are vulnerable to climate change, and impacts of changes in rainfall could be important there.” Extreme rainfall in the tropics responds to climate change in distinct ways from that of other regions. He added, “It seems rainfall extremes in tropical regions are more sensitive to global warming. We have yet to understand the mechanism for this higher sensitivity.”

For more details, read his letter here.

On the Threat of Environmental Catastrophe

“The influence of private power over human fate is as strong as it has ever been and looks set to have an impact generally on much of life on earth if the reckless and single-minded pursuit of profit so often associated with modern capitalism is not reigned in. The gravity of the problem is almost certainly unrivaled by any threat to the species in recent history since the Second World War or the Cuban missile crisis.

Yet the danger is not posed by the familiar boogeyman of corporate greed per se. The threat is represented by the effects of significant global climate change, presently on course to occur barring some miracle.

An authoritative government report released last year indicated that in only the next decade New York would be under threat from temporary or partial submergence by rising sea levels and increased storm activity similar to Hurricane Irene, causing enormous damage with a massive economic price tag attached to the mess. Yet this scenario, entirely plausible and very worrying, is only a taste of what looks set to be a part of our future.

In November last year the International Energy Agency released a report described as the “most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure,” which indicated that if global fossil-fuel-producing infrastructure (i.e. coal and power stations) is not widely replaced or significantly altered in the next five years, then it would “become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating runaway climate change will be lost for ever.”

Additionally, around the same time as the IEA report was published last year, the US Department of Energy reported that the “biggest jump” in carbon dioxide (a major cause of climate change) outputs ever measured occurred in 2010, indicating that the trajectory of risk from the effects of global environmental cataclysm is rising steeply.

World-leading academics like John Reilly, a senior climate change researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have warned that some of the most widely-accepted estimates of the effects of global warming have been far too conservative. Reilly’s team at MIT forecast carbon emissions scenarios, their likelihood, and what the most likely outcomes are in the event they occur. What they discovered recently does not bode well. According to an Associated Press report, a “[UN-organised International Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, report’s] worst-case scenario was only about in the middle of what MIT calculated are likely scenarios.” It is interesting to note that, to many climate skeptics, the IPCC report was widely derided as being “too alarmist.”

The IPCC estimates foresaw a rise in global temperature of somewhere between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit (2.4-6.4 Celsius), with the most likely outcome being a rise of 7.5 Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius). To put this in perspective, the generally-agreed baseline for “safety” in terms of climate change would see an increase in global temperatures by only 2 degrees, in itself a global climate shift that would still have profound consequences.

However, topping the safety line things begin to look really scary. At 3 degrees alone the consequences for humanity are close to nightmarish.

According to British newspaper The Guardian’s science correspondent Alok Jha, who compiled the predictions of researcher Mark Lynas, the World Bank’s “Stern report,” and Britain’s Met Office, at 3 degrees: “Billions of people are forced to move from their traditional agricultural lands, in search of scarcer food and water. Around 30-50% less water is available in Africa and around the Mediterranean.” At 4 degrees “Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey become deserts and mid-Europe reaches desert temperatures of almost 50 degrees Celsius in summer. Southern England’s summer climate could resemble that of modern southern Morocco.”

At 5 degrees and above, the picture becomes apocalyptic. The results would see “global average temperatures … hotter than for fifty [million] years.” Additionally, Jha said that “most of the tropics, sub-tropics and even lower mid-latitudes are too hot to be inhabitable. The sea level rise is now sufficiently rapid that coastal cities across the world are largely abandoned,” with a risk that at 6 degrees and over, “there would be a danger of “runaway warming,” perhaps spurred by release of oceanic methane hydrates,” risking that the “human population would be drastically reduced.”

That’s quite some bad news. However, at present a 5-6 degree rise is not guaranteed, nor yet confidently forecast. There’s a lot of work to be done however to prevent or mitigate the worst effects of probable temperature rises above 2, 3 or even 4 degrees Celsius. God forbid anything higher.

Yet despite the urgent need for action on this issue, there are those who would try to convince the average citizen that climate change, a problem of planetary significance that Western industry has had an unrivalled role in creating, is merely the product of “liberal propaganda”–a kind of modern-day myth.

Oil companies like Exxon-Mobil are still largely the biggest in the world, and these groups have been proven to have funded climate change skeptics.

As the “carbon bubble” is being readied for bursting by rising emissions, a drop in media coverage of the effects of climate change has been measured by groups monitoring the news, helping to efface the issue from the public mind in an election year, where the aftermath of the economy still rides high among concerns for most people.

Yet regardless of the economic woes that still persist for many people, through little fault of their own, something has to shift in the world if it is to be rescued from the threat of climate change.

A Stark Choice

If this is to be done, a stark choice between submitting to the imperatives of the economy’s endless need for profit or protecting the future of the planet may be required of us. As environmentalist Bill McKibben articulated recently: “If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons–five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground. Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent towrite off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil … If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be, and that’s far scarier than drought and flood. It’s why you’ll do anything–including fund an endless campaigns of lies–to avoid coming to terms with its reality.”

“Growth for its own sake,” so the saying goes, “is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Regardless of the cliché of this thoroughly-abused slogan, its message is apt to our present crisis: the interminable desire for gain required by our present way of life may yet so damage the organism from which it derives sustenance (our planet) that it sabotages its own existence. This negative-sum game is given license to continue apace because it is inexpedient for those with real power to challenge it.

Endless clamoring for growth has meant that along with development, massive pollution has shadowed the steps of Western prosperity–yet the effects of this on the climate, now widely accepted as fact, are an “externality” not incorporated into market calculations. Climate change thus remains a total irrelevance to the closed system of global capitalism, regardless of its long-term impacts on the future of the sine qua nonbase that supports the market itself: human beings and their labor, the environment and its resources.

For big business, even when there are devastating economic crashes, somebody always benefits. Goldman Sachs famously reaped massive rewards by betting on the housing crash that they themselves contributed to, helping to consolidate their leading position in the banking world. However shocking this may seem, however such acts stink of grotesque immorality–they are merely consistent with the demands of the system in which they operate, and the rigid logic of the market.

It remains for politicians to act on this issue. But they are not doing enough.

As a result of runaway climate change, losses in the future may be so broadly and profoundly felt, however, that future generations can hardly be expected to accept with equanimity what history may teach them about how the miserable state of the world they have inherited came to be. Explaining to our grandchildren that the Earth was left to go to hell because it was deemed too much for our politicians to reign in corporate and industrial irresponsibility will not be easy, but it won’t stop it from being true–if we do nothing.

It is time to forget what is convenient or ideologically appealing, and address what is real–for our children’s sake…”

There is a Storm Comin’…

Global Ecological Collapse Unfolding in Plain Sight, Yet the Establishment Can’t be Bothered

21 Friday Sep 2012

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

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Inverted Totalitarianism, New Zealand's Kennedy Graham MP, The Elite 1%

Epic ice melt in the Arctic puts on a spectacular demonstration illustrating the consequences of our orgy on fossil fuel consumption, yet the global bureaucrats’ and corporatists’ only reaction is to race northward for further resource plundering.

Russia suffers its most severe wildfire season in recent history and discovers over 200 massive methane fields bubbling up from their seas, yet the Russian bureaucrats and corporatists plan to increase their coal exports to China by 50%.

Compared to forty years ago, American forests now succumb to twice as many conflagrations in burn seasons lasting over two months longer, yet the bureaucrats and corporatists proclaim that the development of the Keystone oil sands pipeline is inevitable.

The U.S. bread basket gets decimated by unrelenting drought, yet bureaucrats and corporatists institutionalize taxpayer-funded subsidies and insurance bailouts for Big Ag which is resposible for up to 30% of CO2 emissions.

“Much of the world’s photosynthesis, the basis of all of our food, comes from the ocean’s plankton. The oxygen in every other breath we take is a product of phytoplankton photosynthesis.” Yet we continue to burn ever more coal and other fossil fuels and carry out bottom trawling of the oceans, the end result being the death of the cradle of life on Earth.

You have cancer; please stop smoking.

New Zealand’s Kennedy Graham MP, who has tried to raise such points with his country’s bureaucrats and corporatists, has an interesting article out which questions whether these business suits he deals with are living on the same planet he is:

Climate change and human psychoses…

…A quarter century, actually, since the US Senate and the Brundtland Report put the issue on the international agenda. We’ve had, since then, Rio and Cairo, Kyoto and Marrakesh, Copenhagen and Cancun and Durban, and Rio again.

But the past week has been especially intensive, and this for two reasons. The NZ Parliament is conducting hearings on the Government’s bill to amend the ETS[emissions trading scheme], in response to the Advisory Panel’s report of 2011. And, concurrently and with no strong causal link, the latest scientific findings of climate change are reported in.

So, in the past week, I have asked two questions of the Government on climate change. Taken together, they traverse the range of the issue – the NZ Government’s domestic instrument for combating climate change, and its appreciation of the global reality out there.

The first questioned the Government on what the Green Party critiques as a weak emissions trading scheme, ‘subsidising polluters’ and incurring considerable net fiscal cost to the taxpayer.  The second queried whether, in drafting the latest amendments to the ETS, the Government had sufficiently taken into account the latest scientific findings.

In short, the Government’s response was as follows:

– The amendments defer any strengthening of the ETS because we live in fragile economic circumstances and it is ‘not a stellar time’ to increase charges and taxes. The changes did not amount to ‘subsidies’, and indeed New Zealand was on track to more than meet its five-year Kyoto obligations.

– The Government had, indeed, adequately accounted for the latest scientific findings, but it has to take into account a whole range of factors such as the global developments and employment levels in New Zealand.

This is as close as it gets to a meaningful exchange in the NZ Parliament on the future of the planet. I acknowledge that Ministers Groser and Bridges are well-meaning and competent. I count them as friends. Tim Groser, in particular, has huge international experience and reputation.

That does not make them necessarily right in what they are doing. It is possible for such people to be egregiously wrong, fatefully, fatally.

Effectively, the ministers are acknowledging that the amendments weaken the ETS in the sense of deferring sectoral obligations, and seek to explain why – protection of jobs, firms and investment at home against risk competitiveness during tough global economic times.

That is circular logic, and it rests on an erroneous premise. We are entering the Global Ecological Crisis. An ecological crisis means an economic crisis. They are one and the same thing. You do not defer measures to combat an ecological crisis because you are in an economic crisis. You deal with them as one crisis, and seek to resolve ‘it’ immediately.

The latest scientific findings are alarming. They possibly portend a new era for humanity – one where dangerous anthropogenic climate change may arrive within half a decade out, not half a century.

–          Arctic ice extent, as measured this month by the US Snow & Ice Data Center, is 49% below the past 30-year average. Between 2007 and ’11 it has dropped from 4.17 m. sq. km to 3.41 m. sq. km., an 18% drop in four years. The different trends in Antarctica, where there is some cooling and ice-accretion, is understood by scientists to be consistent with an increase in average global temperature.

–          Russian scientists on the Viktor Buinitsky research vessel have found methane fields in the Laptev Sea of 1 km. in diameter. Methane deposits in the seabed near Spitzbergen are effervescing to the surface.

–          This has been described by Cambridge University scientist, Prof. Wadhams, as ‘terrifying news’. It facilitates the release of potent methane gas from land-based tundra and seabed floor, reducing Earth’s albedo effect, risking a positive feedback loop on temperature increase that can breach unpredictable tipping-points. While we must await the IPCC’s 5^th assessment report in 2013, the latest specific findings are of far-reaching concern.

I confess I experience my share of surreal moments in the NZ House of Representatives when I ask these questions and receive the answers I do. It is as if we truly are, my National MP colleagues and I, on different planets.

For I am asking questions, in as measured tones as I can, of what appears to me to be about the future of the planet and humanity, and they are answering as if (a) it is just another problem and (b) I am something of an irritant.

No-one will be more relieved than I shall, if the science proves to be wrong or excessively ominous. I shall simply look stupid. That will be my preference, since my grand-children will have a decent future.

But I do not see how that can be the case.

Browbeaten Scientists Not Telling the Public the Full Truth

19 Wednesday Sep 2012

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

≈ 10 Comments

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Capitalism, Climate Feedback Loops, Climate Scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, David Roberts, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Free Market Ideologues, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, The Elite 1%

Is it still possible to limit climate change to a 2 degree increase? If we don’t take into account the loss of sulfate parasols as a result of our emissions controls and if we close our eyes to the multiple feedback loops that have already been unleashed and which, in and of themselves, could dwarf anthropogenic emissions, then it might be possible in such a theoretical and hypothetical world.

(click to enlarge)

But a theoretical and hypothetical world and a world of brutal reality are two very different things. Humans must ultimately answer to brutal reality which discards all of the fabricated economic theorems and pie-in-the-sky myths about the techno-supremacy of modern man that we delude ourselves with. So the cold and hard reality is “No, we are well and truly fucked!” Despite decades of warnings by scientists, we have kept on burning fossil fuels and continue to do so as I write this post. As a matter of fact, growth in fossil fuel consumption is baked into our economic system as far into the future as we care to fantasize. We have backed ourselves into a corner where the only salvation left is some sort of globally coordinated Manhattan project of geo-engineering. And how likely is that to occur, let alone succeed? As David Roberts reports in his latest essay ‘Freaked-out climate scientists urge other freaked-out climate scientists to speak up, fight Man‘, our current enslavement to an infinite growth economic paradigm precludes such a possibility:

…Can we make the radical changes necessary to meet that challenge? No, say climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows in a recent commentary in Nature Climate Change, not “within orthodox political and economic constraints.”

There is no political or economic constraint more orthodox than the primacy of economic growth. No solution to climate change that threatens economic growth can get any traction at all — even the most “alarmist” climate hawks fear to tread there. Which is too bad, Anderson and Bows say, because “climate change commitments are incompatible with short- to medium-term economic growth (in other words, for 10 to 20 years).” What’s worse, “work on adapting to climate change suggests that economic growth cannot be reconciled with the breadth and rate of impacts as the temperature rises towards 4 °C and beyond.” In other words: We either give up economic growth voluntarily for a little while or suffer a climate that will reverse economic growth long-term…

…Anderson and Bows stress that, “within orthodox political and economic constraints,” hitting such a target is wildly unlikely. Absent some pretty revolutionary political and economic changes, it won’t happen. For obvious reasons, scientists shy away from saying this kind of thing in public. They don’t want to depress people or come off as “political.” However, say Anderson and Bows, “away from the microphone and despite claims of ‘green growth’, few if any scientists working on climate change would disagree with the broad thrust of this candid conclusion.”…

The article goes on to explain how our scientific community is hamstrung and browbeaten into reciting and presenting only evidence without expounding upon and revealing what the consequences of those findings will be for humanity:

…scientists remain reticent, often assuming that “the most effective way of engaging is by presenting evidence, without daring to venture, at least explicitly, broader academic judgment.” This kind of just-the-facts reticence, Anderson and Bows say, is neither warranted nor wise given the urgency of current climate circumstances:

[W]e need to be less afraid of making academic judgments. Not unsubstantiated opinions and prejudice, but applying a mix of academic rigour, courage and humility to bring new and interdisciplinary insights into the emerging era. This would be controversial enough in itself. Various social and professional incentives work against academic researchers speaking out beyond their narrow specialties. And there is an entire cottage industry devoted to scolding climate scientists for going “beyond the science” to political analysis or policy advocacy. These latter sins, they are warned, threaten their status as “trusted brokers.” (Because the trusted-broker thing is working so well so far, climate-wise.)

What else can you do, though, when danger of such unthinkable scope and permanence is looming and humanity’s actions in the coming decade will determine the fate of future generations? I mean, it sounds like a sci-fi movie, but it’s real. What can you do if you’re one of the scientists who understands how dire the situation is? These are not ordinary times.

And in conclusion, the article talks of something I have posted about here – the failure and inability of the free market to solve this civilization-ending problem of climate change:

Anyway, as controversial as it is to ask climate researchers to venture broad social and economic judgments, the specific critique that Anderson and Bows offer is even more likely to make some of their straight-laced colleagues wince. It has to do with the “catastrophic and ongoing failure of market economics and the laissez-faire rhetoric accompanying it.” Specifically, market economists (and the politicians and scientists in thrall to them) suffer the “misguided belief that commitments to avoid warming of 2°C can still be realized with incremental adjustments to economic incentives.” They urge their colleagues:

Leave the market economists to fight among themselves over the right price of carbon — let them relive their groundhog day if they wish. The world is moving on and we need to have the audacity to think differently and conceive of alternative futures.

One of the objectives of this blog was to speak truth to power and reveal where the human race is headed. Now that we know our final outcome, our predicament is analogous to being diagnosed with terminal cancer. You people reading this post are an infinitesimal percentage of the global population who are privileged, or perhaps cursed, to be in possession of such depressing knowledge. Where do we go from here? What do we do? How do we live our lives knowing what we know of the dismal future of the world’s youth? The entire edifice of human civilization will become a worldwide ghost city before this century ends. Perhaps the only thing left to do is live each day as if it were our last because there really is no future without some miraculous, radical, and global social change accompanied by unprecedented global cooperation. Those in charge of such matters have chosen temporary preservation of the current system over the long-term survival of our species. Evil and suicidal or foolish and ill-informed… Which is it that best describes the self-destructive choices that have been made?

A truly frightening time-lapse visualization by the NOAA of the Arctic Ice Melt: