I’ve been at this blogging for about six weeks now, reading and researching industrial civilization’s demise. The more one goes back and looks at the wholesale destruction we have done and continue to do to this planet, and in turn ourselves, the more you come to realize how blind and foolish we have been. Entire ecosystems have been wiped off the face of the earth and whole environmental systems altered beyond their normal evolution. In place of forests, jungles, and deserts, we have constructed vast tracts of monoculture industrial farming, endless vistas of cookie cutter suburbia, thousands upon thousands of miles of asphalt roads, parking lots, and concrete paths, and cathedral-like malls for the citizenry to partake in the consumption of goods made by someone we’ll never meet and shipped from lands we may never visit.
What underpinned the creation of this entire edifice of modern man in less than two centuries? The power to transform the earth in our image came from cheap, energy-dense fossil fuel, i.e. oil. So highly dense in energy is oil that just one barrel of it equates to the labor of one man working forty hours a week for twelve years. Was all of this frenetic, ant-like labor worth it if, at the end of the day, we find that all of that effort to be for nought, cleared away by an escalating, civilization-ending climate chaos? It seems that we went to a party and drank so much of the intoxicating drinks offered to us that we ended up killing ourselves from the overdose and subsequent poisoning. For those sitting at the top of the capitalist hierarchy, do they not fully understand that a world thrown out of balance will not spare the elite sitting behind their barb-wire walled and guarded mansions? Is the desperate clawing at low EROEI fossil fuel sources worth the expense of further, unmitigated environmental destruction just to eke out a few more decades of what is inevitably a self-destructive system? What will we be left with but a completely poisoned and pillaged planet with no resources left to construct an alternative that might replace the current bankrupt system.
Right now we are in the intoxication phase, blind to the self-imposed eradication that comprises our present course in energy policy. So blind are the elite that they are willing to lie and propagandize in order to make sure the plans go forth. Having poisoned the biosphere, oceans, and land, the only place left seems to be deep beneath the ground beyond everyone’s sight where the remaining life-giving reservoirs of water rest.
“Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” — Will Durant
I just saw a very somber, but beautiful mini-documentary about the Colorado River called Chasing Water by photo journalist Pete McBride. It is the highest utilized river on the planet relative to irrigation and human consumption. Once hailed as a wonder of the world and North America’s greatest estuary, the Colorado River Delta is now a barren wasteland:
In 1922, the great naturalist Aldo Leopold canoed through the delta, which he described as “a milk and honey wilderness” and a land of “a hundred green lagoons.” It was home back then to deer, quail, raccoon, bobcat, jaguar and vast flocks of waterfowl, and its 2-million-acre expanse was a crucial stopover on the Pacific flyway, providing respite and feeding grounds for millions of migratory birds as they journeyed across the western Americas.
Fisheries in the upper Gulf of California depended on the Colorado delta too. The totoaba, a relative of white sea bass that could grow to more than 250 pounds, would migrate from the upper gulf to spawn in the delta’s brackish estuaries. For at least 1,000 years, the indigenous Cucapá, the “people of the river,” fished and farmed in the delta, keying their lives to the river’s ebb and flow.
Today, the Colorado delta is a shadow of its former self. Once one of the planet’s most vital aquatic ecosystems, it is now one of the most threatened. A low-altitude flight over the region reveals a desiccated landscape of salt flats and cracked earth. There is little sign of a living river because the river is gone; in all but the wettest years, it disappears into the desert sands a short distance south of the border.
Its waters are siphoned off by several states, the lion’s share going to California. According to a study last year by the Bureau of Reclamation, the reliability of this water flow is not going to hold up into the future. Quoting from a recent article in the National Geographic, the results of the study are profound:
Last year the Bureau of Reclamation finalized their first assessment of climate change impacts on Colorado River flows, concluding they would most probably decline by 8.7% by 2060. That’s a loss of 1,300,000 acre-feet, the entire annual capacity of the canal diverting water to Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties.
In simple terms, increased temperatures mean that every living thing will need more water to survive. This includes all the lawns we water and all the crops we grow with Colorado River water.
Reclamation hasn’t put these two numbers together yet in a public document, but the result is profound. The climate change impact on Colorado River water translates into a decrease in supply and an increase in demand totaling a deficit of 1,800,000 acre-feet. Keep in mind, this is just the average, not the worst case. Moreover this is just the deficit created by climate change, and does not account for the inevitable increase in water demand by a growing regional population.
In his book Dead Pool, author James Lawrence Powell says that the Bureau of Reclamation and politicians used flagrant exaggerations of not only construction costs, but also water flows in order to facilitate the building of dams along the Colorado River. Taxpayers were left with the bill for overpriced dams which delivered water costing far more than the value of the crops it fed. The massive Western water projects amounted to what Powell calls a “a kind of hydraulic Ponzi scheme.”
The Bureau’s Colorado River Compact promised more water to the various states than what the river could realistically deliver because its water-flow projections were based on measurements of a period before 1922 during the ‘wet years’ when the river’s annual flow averaged 21 million acre-feet (MAF).
Even though current Colorado River allocations are based on a presumed annual flow of 16 MAF, historical records taken partially from tree-ring studies show the Colorado River to have an average of only 14.6 MAF per year over the last four and a half centuries. If you couple these findings with that of the climate change predictions discussed above, then unless there is some new miracle for conserving a massive amount of water, a mass exodus of the population from the Southwest seems likely over the next several decades. Making matters worse, the Southwest is the fastest growing region in the country. Climate change has already had a visible effect on the Southwest’s water supply, says Powell:
The flow of the Colorado River during the twenty-first century dropped so much faster than the experts thought possible that by 2004, Lakes Powell and Mead together held 20 MAF less than their worst-case forecast. …Including the relatively wet 2005, the average inflow to Lake Powell during the first eight years of the twenty-first century is down by an average of 40 percent [from the twentieth-century average].
Othersare already seeing the handwriting on the wall with climate refugees here in the U.S.:
No one has a crystal ball. But it is now predicted that the Southwest will experience a permanent drought, far worse than the 1930s Dust Bowl. That may cause massive population migration in a breathtakingly short period of time (in the next four decades), as the arable water supply from Kansas to California dries up. University of Arizona studies indicate that if greenhouse gases continue to go unchecked, the overused Colorado River – which supplies municipal and agricultural water to seven western states – may be reduced to half of its current flow under a plausible worst-case scenario.
…Millions of displaced Americans could be on the move. They will not be the first climate refugees in the world, nor the last, but they certainly will be knocking on our door.
The other day I saw the headline story ‘Injection Wells: The Poison Beneath Us‘ at ProPublica and wondered to what lengths we as a society will go to keep industrial civilization running before we come to our flippin’ senses figure out that our current way of life is neither sustainable nor the model for the rest of the world to emulate. BraneSpace did a post on this subject as another obvious sign that we have hit peak oil:
…I want to confine attention in this blog to the energy issue, that of Peak Oil certainly having passed in 2005, and the further evidence being what I call energy pursuit desperation. Evidence? Since 2005, 680,000 waste and injection wells have been drilled, of which nearly 150,000 have injected millions of liters of toxic industrial fluids below the surface to “frack” natural gas. None of this polluted water can then be incorporated back into the hydrological cycle because of the 190 -odd contaminants (most carcinogenic) that the fracked water contains.
“In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted,” according to Mario Salazar, an engineer who worked for 25 years as a technical expert with the EPA’s underground injection program in Washington. “A lot of people are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die.”
Another aspect to what I call “energy desperation”, in the sense of being willing (now) to put aside concerns for life quality to obtain energy: The 2005 Federal Energy Appropriations Bill which exempts the gas industry from compliance with:
– The Clean Water Act
– The Safe Drinking Water Act
– The Clean air Act
– The Superfund (CERCLA) Act
The last implying they can dump as much toxic crap as they want and there’ll be no “toxic release inventory'” to assay it, and hence, no need to ever clean it up. If this isn’t desperation, what is? The willingness to put our future health as a nation in dire risk to satisfy immediate energy demands – mainly to dredge whatever low EROEI (energy returned on energuy invested) sources from the ground since the high EROEI oil has peaked.
More signs of desperation in the western states, such as Colorado: According to a Denver Post report on the results of an analysis by the Western Resource Associates (WRA), “Colorado’s oil and gas drilling consumes enough water to sustain 79,000 households for a year- enough for a medium sized city.”
This despite the fact the state has been in the throes of drought for years (though the severity has waxed and waned) and now is as bad as it was in 2002, with wildfires occupying more land than the whole Florida panhandle. But how is our water being used? On oil drilling and fracking!
According to WRA, between 22,100 and 39,500 acre-feet are pumped into the ground each year for drilling wells and hydraulic fracturing to coax out oil and gas. Tens of thousands of wells now dot the Colorado countryside. Meanwhile, farmers in the state barely have sufficient water to bring one crop to market far less all of them.. (As much as 5 million gallons of water can be injected into a single fracking well, of which 200,000 is laden with carcinogenic toxins such as benzene, so the water can’t be re-used.)
Pair this with the earlier use of corn (a food crop) for ethanol, and you have the makings of an energy desperation syndrome of epic proportions. But hardly anyone hears of the extent of it or the harm done…
This is what I and others call the Third-Worldization of America as we descend the net energy cliff of peak oil. We start using the harder to extract, dirtier stuff like tar sands, deep water oil, and gas fracking:
The formula for making Canada and the U.S. the “Saudi Arabia” of the twenty-first century is grim but relatively simple: environmental protections will have to be eviscerated and those who stand in the way of intensified drilling, from landowners to local environmental protection groups, bulldozed out of the way. Put another way, North America will have to be Third-Worldified…
Has any American bothered to look at how our energy hungry lifestyles have left the environment in the Third World? That’s what happens when mass consumerism is coupled with unfettered free-market capitalism devoid of regulation. If you missed it, Obama recently opened the gates for the oil companies to drill in the Antarctic:
Someone at the Oildrum once said that our planet will look like it’s been denuded and scavenged by a swarm of hungry locusts when humans are done with it. That seems to be an apt description at the rate we are going trying to prolong the impossible. To put another more devious twist on this situation, we now have privately owned water companies partnering up with the fracking industry in order to profit off the exorbitant amount of water those drillers need to perform their nasty business:
…The water companies — American Water and Aqua America — are leading drinking water suppliers in Pennsylvania, where drilling is booming. They also sell water to gas companies — which use a drilling technique that requires massive amounts of water — and have expressed interest in treating drilling wastewater, a potentially lucrative opportunity.
These investor-owned, publicly traded water utility companies are also dues-paying “associate members” of the gas industry’s powerful Marcellus Shale Coalition, a fact confirmed by coalition spokesman Travis Windle, who says associate members pay $15,000 annually in dues. “Our associate members are really the backbone of the industry,” adds Windle…
…Aqua America is aggressively positioning itself to take advantage of what CEO Nick DeBenedictis has described to investors as a “water-energy nexus that could have a positive impact on the future of our company.” In recent years, the company has made sizeable acquisitions in Texas and Ohio – states that, like Pennsylvania, are home to large shale gas plays – and is also building a pipeline in Pennsylvania to supply water to drillers.
It’s not a good sign when a life-giving resource the public wants protected is owned by a company profiting from it. We then get perverse alliances like that described above in which the water company sees dollar signs when it looks at the profligate use of H2O by the fracking industry. You see, our capitalist system is not engineered to protect resources, but to maximize their consumption for the most profit possible, whether that be through people drinking it or the fracking industry pumping millions of gallons of water into the earth mixed with a witch’s brew of toxic chemicals. The for-profit water companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves in regards to what is in the public’s best interests.
I’m glad that at least one state is smart enough to see the self-destruction of fracking and is strong enough to do something about it:
…many of our official pronouncements – echoing those of most elite institutions and organizations – proudly and confidently insist that our future lies in “globalization.” Globalization – for lack of a better term – is, in actuality, the building out of a monoculture, a singular culture based upon basic presuppositions of modern political, economic and social theory.
Nature abhors monocultures. Nature abhors them so much that they do not exist in accordance with nature. They would be unknown but for modern man.
A monoculture is a single form of life – or, by extension, a single culture – that exists over a large expanse of space, even globally. Nature abhors monocultures because they are so susceptible to annihilation by one agent of destruction. In plant or animal life, for example, a single virus or bacteria, a single destructive fungus or disease, a single hostile predator or pest would wipe out an entire monoculture without the barest resistance. It is the very nature of nature to avoid monocultures – indeed, it cannot be otherwise since any form of monoculture cannot long exist in nature. Life in the natural realm is manifold and varied, precisely so that some life will weather the inevitable deadly challenges that arise. – Patrick J. Deneen
The following is an excellent essayby Chris Williams, a professor in the Dept of Chemistry & Physical Science, Pace Universityand author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis (Haymarket Books, 2010). It goes well with my previous post on the corporatized Rio Earth Summit. In the last two decades only four out of ninety United Nation environmental sustainability pledges have been fulfilled, a pretty dismal failure by anyone’s standards. The four were: reducing ozone depletion, removing lead from gasoline, improving access to water supplies and boosting research for marine pollution. The reason for its epic failure is that the whole process of sustainability and scaling back ecologically destructive megatrends have been co-opted by our economic system, i.e. capitalism. The need for continuous growth and expansion into new markets is inherent in capitalism. It has come to define our culture and relationship with nature and our fellow man. As history has clearly shown, capitalism will be the death of us all if we allow this ethic-less system to define ourselves and to continue its rampant, unbridled destruction in the name of ‘development’ and profit.
Sometimes, the calendar of international conferences attended by global elites serves up potent lessons for the rest of us, when they shine a spotlight on the deliberately murky affairs of the people who run the system. As the 20 most powerful world leaders deliberate on economic issues in Los Cabos, Mexico for the G20 summit, representatives of the rest will be simultaneously converging on Rio de Janeiro to consider how to follow up on the original Earth Summit, 20 years ago this year.
At these seemingly separate gatherings, we in truth observe the two sides of the capitalist coin. Namely, how can the capitalist elite continue the necessary work of exploiting both humans and the natural world in the service of profit, while cloaking their intentions in the benign language of growth, development and sustainability? Fine words to cover nefarious ends. No doubt, as people’s livelihoods and world decay around them as a direct consequence of the system the elite oversee, and in response the flame of revolt is rekindled from Cairo to Athens, political elites in the two locations will reflect on the fact that it’s not getting any easier. From the other side, critics and commentators of the two conferences are missing an important and significant lesson when they consider them in isolation.
At the original Earth Summit in Rio, it was generally accepted that environmental questions could not be separated from economic ones. This year, the two conferences, occurring concurrently at different ends of the South American continent, bring to light how this thinking has been undermined. Furthermore, they indicate with geographical and political precision where the priorities of the global elite lie. While the most important world leaders hot-foot it to Mexico to discuss global economic development, they send low-level delegates to Brazil to discuss issues they deem less vital; to be exact, planetary ecological crisis.
Indeed, so desperate were the Brazilian organizers of Rio+20 to cajole the British premier to attend, they changed the date of the conference so as to avoid conflicting with the much more important and worthy 60th anniversary celebrations of the Queen of England’s ascension to the throne. An attempt that proved ultimately and embarrassingly futile, as British Prime Minister, David Cameron, chose to cling to the coattails of President Obama and other G20 leaders in Los Cabos, as they calculate, connive and concoct the further dismemberment and disenfranchisement of communities of workers and peasants around the world.
In a further sad irony, to enhance attendance at Rio, Brazil is providing flights courtesy of the Brazilian air-force to those countries too poor to send delegates. It’s hard to imagine that the countries who can’t afford to send delegates to an environmental conference will have the financial capacity to take action to preserve biodiversity and a stable climate without international funding and technology transfer. But the concept or even use of the word “transfer” is exactly what the United States delegation is trying to excise from any document emerging from Rio+20.
In Los Cabos, 20 people wielding enormous economic power gather to ensure that nothing stands in the way of the international accumulation of money by their respective corporations; that capitalist growth continues, uninterrupted by paltry considerations such as democracy. Scheming and plotting in Los Cabos, the 20 leaders will huddle, concerned that their plans have been exposed by the people of Greece. As they jet to Mexico, one of the first countries to be devastated by the neoliberal prescription of privatization, deregulation and cuts to social spending, the election results in Greece ring in their ears as a collective rebuke to austerity and unemployment. In unprecedented numbers, Greeks exercised their democratic rights by voting for a previously obscure and marginal left coalition, SYRIZA and against handing the welfare of their country over to unelected technocrats governing from afar. A vote, it should be emphasized, carried out in the teeth of apocalyptic warnings of doom from central bank acolytes of the 1%, desperate to stop the people voting ‘the wrong way’.
As for the Global South, capitalist economic development, particularly since its neoliberal mutation, has been a disaster of gigantic proportions as money and natural wealth are siphoned into Western financial institutions. According to Oxfam, gross capital flows to developing countries fell from $309 billion in 2010 to $170 billion in 2011. Last year, aid donations from major donors experienced the first decrease in 14 years, dropping by $3.4 billion; overall aid was $16 billion below what the G8 committed to delivering in 2009. The drop in aid, along with legal and illicit financial transfers out of the developing world, mean that for every dollar received in aid (much of it tied to the purchase of materials from the West), 7-10 dollars go out. In 2009 alone, the developing world saw $903 billion disappear overseas thanks to a rigged system from which the majority cannot benefit. While 16 of the 20 members of the G20 have seen inequality increase over the last 20 years, as complement to that process, is it any wonder that developing countries seem to be permanently ‘developing’ even as social and ecological conditions there also worsen?
The violent dispossession that characterized the bloody dawn of capitalism captured by Marx in his writings on the enforced removal of peasants in the 1500’s amid the first acts of privatization – the land enclosures, is repeated in contemporary form through land grabs; his writing has a remarkably contemporary ring to it: “Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system.”
In the 20 years since the optimism of the first Earth Summit in Rio, carbon emissions have increased by 50% and, since 1950, while the rest of the world has seen an average increase in temperature of 0.70C, the arctic, due to various positive feedback loops, has experienced double that. Absent serious action, whereas the world is now on track for 20C of warming, the arctic is on course for a truly calamitous 3-60C. The June 16th 2012 special edition of The Economist pondered an ice-free arctic with a mixture of trepidation, casual racist indifference and a general leaning toward monetary excitement: “In the long run the unfrozen north could cause devastation. But, paradoxically, in the meantime, no arctic species will profit from it as much as the one causing it: humans. Disappearing sea ice may spell the end of the last Eskimo cultures, but hardly anyone lives in an igloo these days anyway. And the great melt is going to make a lot of people rich.” Yes, to The Economist, while the change may be “devastating” to ancient and indigenous cultures, along with cold-adapted species, a certain small subset of humans will become rich while ‘making a killing’ – in all senses of the phrase.
We and the land have certainly changed and the continuation planned by the capitalists and their political representatives has unquestionably become impossible, as further capitalist development begins to contradict not just human rights or a sense of social progress, but the thermodynamic laws of the universe, which underpin a stable biosphere, upon which all life ultimately depends.
To quote British journalist George Monbiot on the reasons for the failure of so many environmental conferences, “These summits have failed for the same reason that the banks have failed. Political systems that were supposed to represent everyone now return governments of millionaires, financed by and acting on behalf of billionaires. The past 20 years have been a billionaires’ banquet. At the behest of corporations and the ultra-rich, governments have removed the constraining decencies – the laws and regulations – which prevent one person from destroying another. To expect governments funded and appointed by this class to protect the biosphere and defend the poor is like expecting a lion to live on gazpacho.”
From the other side of the political spectrum, representatives of the US environmental organization, Environmental Defense Fund, writing in a New York Times op-ed concede that “As the Arctic becomes ice-free, we can expect that it will be drilled for oil”. But, nevertheless, despite two decades of failure, hold out hope that with just a little more effort and market reforms such as cap and trade, 10 years from now we’ll be okay “with determination and the right policies, by the time Rio+30 rolls around, optimism might be the order of the day.”
Now, socialists are often decried as Utopians. We are told, our ideas may sound good in theory, but humans living equitably with one another in a democratic system based on cooperation, in a society that lives in harmony with the natural world, will simply never work in practice. Is it more realistic to believe that the same system that got us to this point will extricate us? The message from the ‘realists’ seems to be that while we may well have covered the arctic in drilling rigs by then, just give it another 10 years and things will be fine. Going beyond the wrong-headed pronouncements of the EDF, UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon managed a level of fervor that would have put Dr. Pangloss himself to shame, “Increasingly, we understand that, with smart public policies, governments can grow their economies, alleviate poverty, create decent jobs and accelerate social progress in a way that respects the earth’s finite natural resources.”
One has to ask, who are the real Utopians? To many people around the world, leftwing and explicitly socialist ideas, along with class-based revolt, are re-emerging as real alternatives precisely because our rulers quite clearly have no answer other than an extension of the market into whole new areas. Meena Raman of the Malaysia-based Third World Network, was unequivocal in her denunciation of the US’s role in derailing climate negotiations in Durban in 2002 and in Rio+20: “Given the US stance, we do not want President Obama or any US leader to come to Rio to bury what was agreed in 1992 in Rio. We cannot expect the US to show any leadership in truly wanting to save the planet and the poor. So it is better for President Obama to stay at home.”
Meanwhile, 105 scientific institutions are urging action at Rio on population and consumption “For too long population and consumption have been left off the table due to political and ethical sensitivities. These are issues that affect developed and developing nations alike, and we must take responsibility for them together,” said Charles Godfray, a fellow of the Royal Society. Except that population growth is a function of poverty and it is in fact the countries with the largest levels of consumption, such as the United States and Europe, that not only are the historical cause of the ecological crisis, but are helping to drive it to its logical conclusion – a cascading collapse of ecosystems – by advocating continual economic expansion and the generation of poverty through the promotion of financial and trade agreements that accentuate inequality. Capitalism is like a shark; just as these animals can never stop moving forward for fear of drowning, so capitalism must grow or die.
It’s important to understand why negotiators see the primary way to save the environment is through putting a price on it. This is the main thrust of the talks and accepted by all negotiating parties inside the conference, representing a major schism with the tens of thousands of protesters attending the Rio+20 People’s Summit who are being forcibly kept out of the deliberations by armed riot police.
The argument goes that only by giving natural resources “value” in monetary terms can the environment be protected. On the one hand, it’s easy to see the further privatization of every molecule of water, every tree and every piece of land as dovetailing beautifully with the desires of the corporations. Extending the “free” market to new areas for exploitation is a tried and true method to enhance profits. Those who run the corporations are not slow to catch on and self-advocate: “For companies this is enlightened self interest…Those who can afford water should pay. Water is essentially over exploited because we are not valuing it as an economic good. Introducing methodologies such as escalating tariffs, which some countries have already done, will help in terms of using water intelligently, often for the first time.” So said, Gavin Power, deputy director of the UN Global Compact, which is acting as an umbrella group for 45 of the most powerful CEO’s, from such well-known environmentally conscious concerns as Coca Cola, Glaxo-SmithKline, Nestle, Merck and Bayer, to ensure their voice is heard at Rio+20.
But advocacy for the “valuation” of natural resources occurs not just or even primarily because it coincides with what corporations want. Many of the people arguing for such quantization of nature genuinely believe it will help preserve biodiversity, slow climate change and reduce the pressure on natural resources.
More fundamentally, the need to place “fair value” on everything is part of the ideological foundation of capitalism. Within the philosophy of capitalism, if something does not have a price, it cannot have value. Hence, putting the correct price, otherwise known as internalizing the cost, of a natural good, is to make possible its rational exploitation and simultaneous conservation. To those mired deep within the labyrinth of a capitalistic value system, there is no contradiction between these two aims: the commodification of nature can be seen both as a way of making money from it, and as a way of saving it, as perfectly expressed by Ban Ki-moon.
The quantification of nature is the rational end-point of capitalism’s philosophical approach to nature and hence a practical approach to ‘saving nature’. The non-quantifiable, qualitative side of nature, the purely spiritual and awe-inducing beauty of watching a sunrise for example, is not only entirely absent, or under-appreciated, it is essentially unknowable. Hence, assuming you’re not prepared to advocate regulatory reforms to place limits on the operation of corporations and boundaries beyond which they cannot cross, or you’re not advocating revolution, then extending the market becomes the only option left, consequently the focus at Rio+20 on doing exactly that.
However, for those of us who truly want to see a better world, the extension of its commodification to every single particle of nature cannot be an answer. Taking our inspiration from the rising struggles of 2011 around the globe, it is imperative that we link up the movements of social resistance, and forge new alliances with organized labor and the disenfranchised of the planet to force regulatory changes onto those who would foist false solutions on us. Only by linking social and ecological change and fighting on both fronts, autonomous of mainstream political parties, while creating our own independent battle organizations, can we hope to make progress.
Ultimately, however, it is just as vital that fighters for social emancipation, human freedom and ecological sanity, recognize that capitalism represents the annihilation of nature and, thus, humanity. A system based on cooperation, real democracy, long-term planning, and production for need not profit, i.e., socialism, represents the reconciliation of humanity with nature. And its achievement will, as Marx pointed out, of necessity be much less violent than the process by which capitalism was born in the first place:
“The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labor, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialized production, into socialized [common] property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.”
We currently live in an age that has been characterized as the Anthropocene, the Age of Man, by some scientists to take into account how drastically human civilization has altered the biosphere on a geological time scale. Only by overthrowing capitalism and moving toward a cooperative, planned economy based on democracy and sustainability can we move toward an age characterized, after Epicurus, as the Oikeiotocene – The Age of Conformity to Nature.
The following article is perhaps the most important one I have posted thus far on ‘Collapse of Industrial Civilization’ because it gets at the root cause from which all the global crises have emerged, threatening not only the mass extinction of all flora and fauna, but also mankind’s own annihilation. This is the final act in the tragedy of the commons and it’s capitalism’s last gasp to commodify the rest of the planet for GDP growth, profits and the externalization of costs onto communities and the environment. There can be no price tag put on ecosystems because they are a finite entity priceless to the existence of life as we know it. But this is what is being created by the profit-at-any-cost transnational corporations in a so-called ‘green economy’ and its ‘sustainable development’. We can see this in the global land grab that was discussed in my post Hydro-Colonialism.
The Church of the Almighty Free Market is sending out its missionaries to ensure that neoliberal capitalism extracts the last bit of life from a ravaged planet teetering on the verge of ecological bankruptcy. If you want the unvarnished, non-commercialized report of the Rio Earth Summit, go here.
The upcoming Rio Earth Summit gives us a window into a fierce battle for the future of global environmental action. Danny Chiversexplains what it’s all about.
Many people don’t even know it’s happening. But from 20-22 June more than a hundred heads of state, along with an estimated 50,000 representatives from businesses, NGOs, trades unions, local government and others will gather in Rio de Janeiro for the 2012 UN Earth Summit.
The conference’s official website makes it look like a friendly gathering of world leaders and other ‘stakeholders’ from business and civil society. However, underneath the surface layer of polite discussion documents and optimistic press releases, a battle is raging.
Harmless-sounding phrases like ‘green economy’ and ‘sustainable development’ have become grounds for bitter dispute, as different governments and business interests attempt to redefine these terms to meet their own agenda.
Like a door that swings unexpectedly open to reveal a family squabble, the 2012 Rio Summit gives us a glimpse of an argument that’s been rumbling away largely out of the public eye – an argument about the future direction of intergovernmental environmental action.
This year’s event is commonly referred to as Rio+20 as it falls exactly two decades after the famous 1992 Earth Summit in the same city. That earlier UN conference is often cited as a key moment in the history of environmental politics: it established the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21.
The price of everything
While these measures contained many fine words and good ideas, they didn’t have much regulatory force behind them and relied on voluntary actions by governments, business and civil society.
This row of well-meaning policy sandcastles have spent the past 20 years being eaten away by a rising tide of fundamentalist free-market economics, unfettered financial speculation, and consolidated corporate power.
As a result, any environmental and social gains from the first Rio summit look small next to the destruction wrought by a voracious corporate sector and by governments obsessed with growth in GDP before all else.
Global inequality has increased, natural habitats have been degraded and climate talks have been stalled by a mix of corporate lobbying and self-interested political horse-trading.
Much of this has been done by companies and politicians under the banner of ‘sustainable development’ – sustainable in this case meaning ‘able to keep making money into the future’.
A shift to a genuinely sustainable society will require us to challenge these negative forces, rein in the excesses of corporations and markets, and build an entirely different economy based on wellbeing for the many rather than profits for the few.
But Rio+20 shows little sign of achieving this. It could make things worse. The preparatory Green Economy Report launched by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2011 provoked outrage among NGOs by focusing on market-based and technological responses to the environmental crisis, rather than the underlying economic and political causes.
Silvia Ribeiro from the campaign group ETC Mexico points out: ‘Collapsing financial markets in Northern countries mean that banks and other investors are now looking desperately for new areas of expansion and speculation. We can see these desires leaving their mark on the Rio+20 process. The “Green Economy” now under discussion would unleash a wave of risky but lucrative new technologies such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology and climate technofixes. This isn’t about finding the best environmental solutions: it’s about creating profitable new investments.’
Another key theme of the 2011 UNEP report – which had investment banker Pavan Sukdhev as a lead author – was that placing a financial value on natural systems, cycles and habitats would allow markets to price them properly, and thus prevent them from being degraded.
Large polluting industries… like mafia bosses invited to a meeting on reducing gang violence
This approach has broad support from many Northern governments and institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, but has set off alarm bells elsewhere.
Thomas Barlow from the World Development Movement says: ‘The global market is a fundamental part of the problem. Through its quest for never-ending growth, it helps to drive our insatiable appetite for the things – like clean air, water, biodiversity – that nature provides.
‘Protection of these cannot be left in the hands of this market – we cannot afford to live in a world where ecosystems are protected if, and only if, there is more profit to be made by protecting them than by trashing them.
‘Protection of natural systems will only happen through bringing the market under control, not by giving it yet more power over nature.’
Unacknowledged power
What price a gliding treefrog in the costing of ‘eco-system services’ that the Rio+20 process seems to be heading towards?
How has this controversial vision of the green economy crept into the Rio+20 process? Part of the problem is that the UN is attempting to figure out a global governance system that would prevent environmental destruction, but is allowing those most responsible for that destruction to claim a disproportionate voice within the process. Large polluting industries, business lobby groups and financial institutions are welcomed in as well-meaning ‘stakeholders’ – like mafia bosses invited to a meeting on reducing gang violence.
While the UN’s stated commitment to dialogue and consensus is laudable, the process fails to acknowledge the imbalances of power that allow the wealthiest governments to wield greater influence within the negotiations, while small farmers, indigenous groups, and other representatives of affected communities are given token representation but largely ignored.
The businesses with the most wealth and power are those that have flourished in an economy based on the unrestricted use of natural resources and the exploitation of many of the world’s people. Those with the most to lose from a shift to true sustainability are therefore those with the most power to block that change. Some, like South African petrochemical giant Sasol, influence the UN process through cosy relationships with national governments. Some, like Brazilian miner Vale, muscle in on civil society networks and influence their input in the Rio process. Still others work via lobbying organizations such as the International Emissions Trading Association. Meanwhile, industry groups, like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, have had an organizing role within the various Rio+20 pre-meetings.
this kind of research accepts and reinforces the terms laid down for us by the existing system – the idea that nothing can be valued unless it has a price tag
The scientific community has also been getting increasingly vocal. A major conference called Planet Under Pressure brought together almost 3,000 scientists in London in March, with the aim of giving some stark warnings and policy advice to politicians in the run-up to Rio. The ‘State of the Planet’ declaration issued from the conference didn’t mince its words: ‘Research now demonstrates that the continued functioning of the Earth system as it has supported the wellbeing of human civilization in recent centuries is at risk… creating the potential for a humanitarian emergency on a global scale.’
The accompanying policy papers recognized the need for social change and better environmental governance, not just more technology. Useful concepts like planetary boundaries and the ‘Inclusive Wealth Index’ (an alternative to GDP) were presented, and speakers from the stage spoke repeatedly for the need for a ‘paradigm shift’ in society.
However, there was little acknowledgement of what this would mean in practice, that there are powerful interests working against such a shift and that they will need to be challenged. Instead, the general plan seemed to be just to keep on telling people about the problem and hoping that good folks from across society will agree to work together to fix it – including the big corporations.
The waters were particularly muddy in the discussions around ‘valuing ecosystem services’. Researchers have been assessing the monetary value of crucial environmental services such as the water-filtering properties of wetlands, in order to explain to policymakers just how much would be lost by damaging or destroying them. For example, the Stockholm Environment Institute calculated that the economic value of the oceans could be reduced by up to $2 trillion per year if climate change is left unchecked.
These studies are doubtless carried out with the best of intentions and may help to protect some ecosystems in the short term. However, they could also represent a dangerous first step towards the ‘costing’ of ecosystem services for trade on the open market. Rather than seeking that much-vaunted paradigm shift, this kind of research accepts and reinforces the terms laid down for us by the existing system – the idea that nothing can be valued unless it has a price tag.
Timid monstrosity
Of course, scientists aren’t a lab-coated homogeneous mass. Nor are activists all of one mind. Some NGOs and civil society groups have fully engaged with the Rio+20 process, sending submissions into the draft document and delegates to the meetings; others have preferred to spend their time mobilizing people elsewhere, including at a parallel People’s Summit which will take place in Rio during the UN talks. Many are pursuing a dual strategy, both inside and outside the talks.
However, most are united in their criticism of the draft declaration that’s been put together so far – the ‘outcome document’ that governments will sign up to at the end of Rio+20. An initial 19-page ‘zero draft’ document was launched in January as a starting point for discussion. It contained no binding resolutions of any kind, just a wish-list of voluntary actions that business and government would be ‘encouraged’ to take, and lots of mentions of a poorly defined ‘green economy’.
In response, civil society and industry groups put forward their own suggested amendments. Environmental campaigners, indigenous peoples and Southern farmers’ groups called for major changes; meanwhile, the business lobby were generally happy with the document, asking for adjustments like the removal of references to technology transfer and the role of small farmers.
Governments – often grouped into ‘blocs’ – then submitted formal amendments to the draft, with suggested additions and removals. These suggestions swelled the document from 19 to over 150 pages, reflecting the level of disagreement involved. Derek Osborn of the Stakeholder Forum has described the new draft as a ‘monstrosity’ full of ‘timidity, caution, suspicion, protection of vested interests, and even attempts to undermine and go backward on rights, actions and issues already agreed.’
Groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and La Via Campesina are calling for a very different Rio+20 agreement based on respect for people’s rights to land, food and clean water. Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of IEN, said: ‘Systems such as “payment for ecological services” and using forests in carbon offset markets do nothing but make Mother Earth into the World Trade Organization of nature.’ He stated that Indigenous Peoples from around the world would be coming together at Rio to ‘oppose an agenda based on the privatization and commodification of nature’. Campaigners like theETC Group are calling for proper technology assessment measures to be built in to any agreement, before untested geo-engineering and synthetic biology techniques are unleashed in the name of the green economy.
Quite how all of this will be boiled down into any kind of coherent final statement remains to be seen. However it emerges, the new Rio declaration will give us a snapshot of where we’re at with these crucial debates, and how far we still need to go.
Moving forwards
On a more positive note, Rio+20 has been a good opportunity to raise the profile of some interesting and potentially useful sustainability ideas. It’s also helped to bring together disparate groups and build important new alliances. For example, an international pre-Rio+20 conference organized by the Central Workers of Argentina reinforced alliances between trades unions and environmental movements. According to Lucia Ortiz of Friends of the Earth Brazil: ‘Trades Unions are getting very concerned about the “green economy” agenda, because it represents a deepening of neoliberal policies, and threatens to undermine the social rights already secured by past struggles. They are working in solidarity with environmentalists, indigenous peoples, farmers and women’s rights activists, calling instead for a transition to a sustainable and just society free from the exploitation of workers and of nature.’
The best thing to come out of Rio+20 could be the strengthening of social movements in opposition to one of its core ideas. The false green economy’s grand Brazilian showcase might just be the event that helps to trigger its downfall.
Note: The People Summit held dialogues outside of the UN participation structure and published ‘Another Future is Possible’ in direct opposition to the orientations the UN negociators have been taking in the past few months. Their position: the green economy as defined in the negociations deepens “the commodification, privatization, and financialization of nature and its functions. It is a reaffirmation of full control of the entire biosphere by the economy” and is to be rejected.
Most who are up on current news are aware of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and our throw-away culture. By the way, there are five of these ocean gyres filled with plastics across the world’s waters. Last month a report was released from the Scripps Institute which puts into perspective what has been the environmental price of our convenience-obsessed culture:
Scripps Institute graduate Miriam Goldstein was chief scientist on a similar expedition to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 2009. According to her research, there has been a 100-fold increase in plastic garbage in the last 40 years, most of it broken down into tiny crumbs to form a concentrated soup.
The particles are so small and profuse that they can’t be dredged out. “You need a net with very fine mesh and then you’re catching baby fish, baby squid — everything,” Goldstein says. “For every gram of plastic you’re taking out, you probably take out more or less the equivalent of sea life.”
Scientists are worried that the marine organisms that adapt to the plastic could displace existing species. Goldstein said this was a major concern, as organisms that grow on hard surfaces tend to monopolize already scarce food, to the detriment of other species.
“Things that can grow on the plastic are kind of weedy and low diversity — a parallel of the things that grow on the sides of docks,” she says. “We don’t necessarily want an ocean stuffed with barnacles.”
Eriksen says the mood on the Sea Dragon has been upbeat, with crew members playing a ukulele and doing yoga, “but the sobering reality is that we’re trawling through a synthetic soup.“
LOL. The researchers mood has been “upbeat” despite the “sobering reality” of their work. Forensic detectives usually develop a morbid sense of humor to deal with the gruesomeness of their work. This might be a tactic that the environmental scientist will want to adopt as we continue working on our own self-eradication from a ravaged planet.
The plastic stuff is broken down into parts so small as to make it impossible to clean them out of the ocean, not to mention the astronomically prohibitive cost of doing so. In other words, we are unable to clean it up:
Stiv Wilson of the ocean conservation group 5 Gyres has made a first attempt to tally how much plastic is in the global ocean.
In a new post on 5gyres.org, Wilson takes what appears to be the first-ever stab at trying to figure it out.
The number he comes up with is staggering: he conservatively estimates there are 315 billion pounds of plastic in the oceans right now.
Now, Wilson will be the first to admit a lot of assumptions were made in order to arrive at that number, but most of them err on the side of caution. It’s worth going through his thought process and calculations here.
To help visualize that massive heap of trash, Wilson divides by a “supertanker” — that is, a giant ship that could theoretically sail through the seas, skimming out the plastic junk as it goes (much of which hovers down to 90 feet below the surface).
No such ship has been outfitted to skim plastic. But let’s say it did, and it could hold 500 million pounds of plastic. You’d need 630 of them to do the job, or about 17 percent of the planet’s current fleet of oil tankers.
Yipes.
To make it a little more personal, every American produces about 600 pounds of garbage each year. The proportion of plastic varies from household to household, but overall about half of all waste is synthetic. Some of that probably ends up in landfill, or recycled (Wilson says only about 3 percent of virgin plastic gets recycled).
Either way, the pile of plastic you inadvertently dump into the ocean each year is probably more than you can lift.
The point of the calculations is this: cleaning up the plastics in the ocean ain’t gonna happen. Well-intentioned programs designed to take the fight to the high seas, like Project Kaisei and the Environmental Cleanup Coalition, for example, are exercises in futility.
“I’m not trying to call them out,” Wilson told Discovery News. “What I really fear is a barge full of plastic coming in under the Golden Gate bridge, the media taking pictures and people thinking ‘oh good, we’ve solved that problem.'”
A real cleanup would be astronomically expensive, both in terms of dollars and equipment
According to scientists from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, the patch is just too large and too “broken down” to be cleanable. As plastic is exposed to the sun, it photodegrades (breaks down) into fine plastic chips. In some areas, the plastic is as fine as dust. Once the plastic turns into dust, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean, making it even more difficult to clean.
…removing plastics from the ocean would expend energy about 250 times plastic’s mass .
The following video is a short documentary made back in 2008 by Vice, but it’s worth the watch to give you an idea of the problem which has gotten worse since then:
In his book GARBOLOGY, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes says that the plastic we expel out into the ocean every year is the weight equivalent of 40 aircraft carriers. Since plastic is not biodegradable, it only gets broken down into smaller pieces which persist in the environment, acting as accumulators of hydrophobic pollutants “like DDT, an extremely toxic pesticide, and PCB’s – dangerous persistent organic pollutants. These can be up to one million times more concentrated on the surface of these bits of plastic than they are in the ambient sea water.” Being mistaken for plankton or other food, they get eaten by fish and birds and have now entered the food chain for long into the future. This plastic, as it degrades, also releases chemicals that are endocrine disruptors:
The team analyzed sand and seawater from more than 200 sites in 20 countries, mainly in Southeast Asia and North America. All contained what Saido described as a “significant” amount of BPA, ranging from 0.01 parts per million (ppm) to 50 ppm. They concluded that polycarbonates and epoxy resin coatings and paints were the main source.
Plastics may be the most persistent memory of mankind that we leave behind:
The tipping point is only recognized and acknowledged after it’s too late. Exponential, or non-linear, growth is sneaky in that one minute things appear manageable, even benign, when in fact we are mere moments away from total saturation and death. That’s the situation we are in now, having reached the limits of growth on a finite planet. Despite all the handwringing about the Euro Crisis and fixing the problem there, the only way out is degrowth and an awareness that we must live within the means that the earth will allow. For self-serving reasons, the social hierarchy that benefits from the current system will not allow this to happen because it would mean a radical restructuring of how the economy works and how the world’s resources are used and distributed. This is the straitjacket we are caught in by those benefiting at the top of the ponzi scheme who want to use austerity in an attempt to preserve the current scheme at the expense of the masses. But under our capitalist economic system, austerity becomes self-defeating:
The reasons given by S&P, the rating agency concerned, is revealing: “we believe that a reform process based on a pillar of fiscal austerity alone risks becoming self-defeating, as domestic demand falls in line with consumers’ rising concerns about job security and disposable incomes, eroding national tax revenues” (www.standardandpoors.com).
Without growth, debt reduction becomes impossible – and yet the only way capitalism has to stimulate growth is by government intervention, thus increasing debt! Capitalism is caught in a vicious pincer movement from which it cannot escape.
The following post explains why we have reached the limits of cheap fossil-fuel driven growth, requiring an out-of-the-box thinking in order to solve our current problems.
The true danger posed by our exploding population is not our absolute numbers but the inability of our environment to cope with so many of us doing what we do.
“In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder.” says Professor Stephen Hawking as reported by Edward Morgan in Looking at the New Demography.
Suffice to say the rate of population growth will not continue, and Morgan makes the case we are already in stage 5 of The Demographic Transition Model
click on chart for sharper image
Peak Oil Implications on Population Growth
Whereas Morgan presents a relatively benign view of things, even wondering if there are ways to reverse stage 5 decline, Paul Chefurka in Population: The Elephant in the Room sees things quite differently, primarily because of oil usage.
Each of the global problems we face today is the result of too many people using too much of our planet’s finite, non-renewable resources and filling its waste repositories of land, water and air to overflowing. The true danger posed by our exploding population is not our absolute numbers but the inability of our environment to cope with so many of us doing what we do.
It is becoming clearer every day, as crises like global warming, water, soil and food depletion, biodiversity loss and the degradation of our oceans constantly worsen, that the human situation is not sustainable. Bringing about a sustainable balance between ourselves and the planet we depend on will require us, in very short order, to reduce our population, our level of activity, or both. One of the questions that comes up repeatedly in discussions of population is, “What level of human population is sustainable?“
Oil first entered general use around 1900 when the global population was about 1.6 billion. Since then the population has quadrupled. When we look at oil production overlaid on the population growth curve we can see a very suggestive correspondence:
A closer look at the two curves from 1900 to the 2005 reinforces the impression of a close correlation:
The first questions everyone one asks when they accept the concept of Peak Oil is, “When is it going to happen?” and “How fast is the decline going to be?”
The steepness of the post-peak decline is open to more debate than the timing of the peak itself. There seems to be general agreement that the decline will start off very slowly, and will increase gradually as more and more oil fields enter decline and fewer replacement fields are brought on line. The decline will eventually flatten out, due both to the difficulty of extracting the last oil from a field as well as the reduction in demand brought about by high prices and economic slowdown.
The post-peak decline rate could be flattened out if we discover new oil to replace the oil we’re using. Unfortunately our consumption is outpacing our new discoveries by a rate of 5 to 1. to make matters worse, it appears that we have probably already discovered about 95% of all the conventional crude oil on the planet.
A full picture of the oil age is given in the graph below. This model incorporates actual production figures up to 2005 and my best estimate of a reasonable shape for the decline curve. It also incorporates my belief that the peak is happening as we speak.
In ecology, overshoot is said to have occurred when a population’s consumption exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment, as illustrated in this graphic:
Overshoot
Populations in serious overshoot always decline. This is seen in wine vats when the yeast cells die after consuming all the sugar from the grapes and bathing themselves in their own poisonous alcoholic wastes. It’s seen in predator-prey relations in the animal world, where the depletion of the prey species results in a die-back of the predators. Actually, it’s a bit worse than that. The population may actually fall to a lower level than was sustainable before the overshoot. The reason is that unsustainable consumption while in overshoot allowed the species to use more non-renewable resources and to further poison their environment with excessive wastes.
In the case of humanity, our use of oil has allowed us to perform prodigious feats of resource extraction and waste production that would simply have been inconceivable before the oil age. If our oil supply declined, the lower available energy might be insufficient to let us extract and use the lower grade resources that remain. A similar case can be made for a lessened ability to deal with wastes in our environment.
Excess Deaths
[Chefurka goes through a series of grim charts culminating with with this explanation of what is coming]
The Cost
The human cost of such an involuntary population rebalancing is, of course, horrific. Based on this model we would experience an average excess death rate of 100 million per year every year for the next 75 years to achieve our target population of one billion by 2082. The peak excess death rate would happen in about 20 years, and would be about 200 million that year. To put this in perspective, WWII caused an excess death rate of only 10 million per year for only six years.
Given this, it’s not hard to see why population control is the untouchable elephant in the room – the problem we’re in is simply too big for humane or even rational solutions. It’s also not hard to see why some people are beginning to grasp the inevitability of a human die-off.
UN Population Projections
Let’s put aside the really grim projections and simply ponder the “low population track” in the following charts of population projections from the UN.
I cannot find the article or source for that chart but the image is from a link on Seeking Alpha.
Demographic and Economic Questions
Is that low UN track that unbelievable? If not, what if the starting point is now, not 2040?
Who is going to pay the medical costs of all the retirees in the developed-world if people live longer and the population simply stagnates?
Where are the energy resources going to come from if the population keeps growing instead?
Where are the energy needs of China alone going to come from at the current rate of China’s economic growth regardless of whether the Chinese population grows or not?
Those who think we are going to “grow” our way out the the current global economic mess better have good answers for the questions in points number one and three above.
Problem number two is a huge problem in Japan right now. The US will face the same problem not too far down the road.
Those who suggest immigration and population growth is the solution to problem number two better have an answer to question number three while also explaining how immigration and population growth is nothing more than a can-kicking exercise.
The China problem is right here, right now. Peak oil all but ensures China’s growth rate is going to plunge in the not too distant future, there is going to be a huge global showdown over oil supplies with China the winner, or a cheap easy to produce means of renewable energy is found in the next five years?
The following video is from 2degrees and helps visualize human population growth from “1 AD up to 2030 AD. Each dot represents 1 million people.” The only time global population shrank was during the Black Death in Europe from 1348 to 1350 with the death toll estimated at somewhere between 75 and 200 million people or 25% to over 60% of the population.
Yesterday the author of The Elements of the Corporatocracy at his site Brane Space published a post called ‘Could the ‘Black Death’ Strike Again?‘ in which he brings up a recent case in Oregon and posits that with austerity measures imposed on our indebted economy in the age of peak oil, our infrastructure will inevitably deteriorate faster without the funds or cheap energy to maintain such things as the endless labyrinth of water pipes and waste management infrastructure. This scenario certainly is what we are facing. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ Report Card on America’s Infrastructure gave the country an overall grade of “D” in its most recent report and put a price tag of $2.2 Trillion to make it meet adequate conditions. Another fast approaching reality is that of “peak antibiotics“. The director-general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Margaret Chen, says that we are facing a world without antibiotics:
If current trends continue unabated, the future is easy to predict. Some experts say we are moving back to the pre-antibiotic era. No. This will be a post-antibiotic era,” Chan said. “In terms of new replacement antibiotics, the pipeline is virtually dry…The cupboard is nearly bare.
The UK is facing a “massive” rise in antibiotic-resistant blood poisoning caused by the bacterium E.coli – bringing closer the spectre of diseases that are impossible to treat.
Experts say the growth of antibiotic resistance now poses as great a threat to global health as the emergence of new diseases such as Aids and pandemic flu.
Professor Peter Hawkey, a clinical microbiologist and chair of the Government’s antibiotic-resistance working group, said that antibiotic resistance had become medicine’s equivalent of climate change.
The “slow but insidious growth” of resistant organisms was threatening to turn common infections into untreatable diseases, he said. Already, an estimated 25,000 people die each year in the European Union from antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.
“It is a worldwide issue – there are no boundaries,” he said. “We have very good policies on the use of antibiotics in man and in animals in the UK. But we are not alone. We have to think globally.” Between 2005 and 2009 the incidence of E.coli “bacteraemias” [the presence of bacteria in the blood] rose by 30 per cent, from 18,000 to over 25,000 cases. Those resistant to antibiotics have risen from 1 per cent at the beginning of the century to 10 per cent…
Also worth reading are these three articles from last year:
In 2010, Professor Timothy Walsh had a sobering outlook for the future prospects of our battle with antibiotic-resistant bacteria:
Professor Timothy Walsh told Wales on Sunday that in the “Darwinian” battle against disease-carrying bacteria, we are on the losing side.
And he said that we will all have to face up to a world where antibiotics simply do not work anymore.
His claim came after he and his team of scientists at Cardiff University found 37 cases in the UK of a deadly new form of superbug that is resistant to ALL antibiotics….
He said: “This is Darwin’s survival of the fittest – and we are on the losing side.
“The real test is – can bacteria evolve resistance and maintain resistance quicker than we can develop antibacterial drugs?
“The ultimate answer to that is yes, it can.
“We have all been scratching around to try to find new classes of antibiotics, but ultimately bacteria’s DNA systems can evolve and transfer very quickly so the odds are not in our favour.
“We have to be realistic and accept that this is potentially the future we will have to face.”
The world’s population has exploded from two billion people 80 years ago to more than six billion today – all thanks to the discovery and mass production of antibiotics like penicillin.
Because bacteria multiply every 20 to 30 minutes, they evolve very quickly and become resistant to antibiotics used against them.
In the past, this has not mattered because scientists were producing so many new types of drug, but in the last 15 years development of new antibiotics has almost ground to a halt, meaning bacteria are catching up fast…
Worth reprinting in relation to the above article is a response by Dr Edo McGowan PhD, Medical Geo-hydrology, Environmental and public policy analyst, environmental scientist, medical geo-hydrologist working with environmental contaminants:
“A principal route for the spread of newly emerging infectious diseases is through sewage treatment plants which generate these bugs and then release them. Genetic information is rapidly spread amongst the very large number of bacteria found in sewage treatment works. The issue of over prescribing antibiotics may now be vastly over-shadowed by the generation and release of pathogens and superbugs by sewer plants. There have been some good studies coming out of India on the augmentation and generation of sewage assisted superbugs derived from hospitals, see: (http://www.indmedica.com/journals.php?journalid=6&issueid=21&articleid=179&action=article)
What we are finding in America is that the regulatory community, including the US/EPA and the US CDC have been asleep at the switch when it comes to how superbugs are made and then multiplied in sewer plants, thence spread through sewage byproducts such as biosolids into the environment. Several U.S. scientists as well as scientists around the world have documented the spread of antibiotic resistance via treated sewage, biosolids or released treated wastewater. For example, see: “Vancomycin resistant enterococci (VRE) in Swedish sewage sludge”, by Leena Sahlström, Verena Rehbinder, Ann Albihn, Anna Aspan, and Björn Bengtsson. Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica 2009, 51:24 doi:10.1186/1751-0147-51-24.
Documentation of antibiotic resistance spread by sewage goes back decades but the regulatory community continued to ignore it—-or worse, hid it. The standards used are antiquated and the regulators are well aware of this also. Thus, along the great rivers in the U.S. and other nations, each successive city gets its drinking water from the immediate up-stream sewage outfall of the preceding city. Agricultural lands with applied biosolids also drain into these rivers carrying antibiotic resistant pathogens, see: “Increased frequency of drug-resistant bacteria and fecal coliforms in an Indiana Creek adjacent to farmland amended with treated sludge” by Shivi Selvaratnam and J. David Kunberger.
This process cycles these bugs and each time they get stronger. The fact that we are now finding pharmaceuticals in drinking water shows one that the wastewater systems are not working. Unbeknown to most, there are antibiotic resistant genes, so small that they pass through most water treatment plants and are in fact now found in drinking water. These are not affected by chlorine at currently used levels. They easily transit within the human gut to the gut bacteria and there wait like tiny time bombs for an incoming pathogen, thus arming this pathogen with yet more resistance and virulence.
Once in the gut biota this damaging genetic information can remain for years and also because of the very large number of bacteria in the normal gut biota, there are opportunities for creating higher level pathogens. Antibiotic resistant infections in the United States now cause more deaths than AIDS. This is not an easy issue for U.S. regulators to accept, especially if they want you to believe all is well and rosy. But unless we want to return to amputation as the cure for infections, the regulatory community around the globe needs to wake up.
We may delay what Professor Timothy Walsh indicates by immediately dealing with the current standards for wastewater and redesigning sewer plants. There are extant systems and designs that greatly diminish the flow-through of pathogens. Additionally, the current use of sewage sludge on agricultural land merely spreads more antibiotic resistance into farming areas, thence into the food supply. The current use of reclaimed water on food crops does the same. We have created this problem. It may be that current surgeries will not be possible because of the risk of unstoppable infection and cure for infection may revert to amputation.” – Dr. Edo McGowan
…A permanently contracting economy will result in a bioethical crisis as fewer resources are available to an increasingly stressed global population. We need to reconsider our goals of expansion of capitalism-driven wealth as the system loses its surplus energy. Instead we need to consider the sustainable good of the entire country during the contraction of the economy. We need justice in terms of basic needs for all, with more attention to the health of entire communities rather than individual rights. Failure to provide basic needs for all affects the whole system, with increases in epidemics due to stress, overcrowding, poor nutrition, dirty water and pollution, and failures in vaccination programs and general control of illnesses.
Based on the apparent politics of today, as we continue to descend, what we will probably get as the system becomes more imbalanced and unsustainable is limited fee for service care for the wealthy (with eventual failure of insurance), very limited care for the poor, and early mortality for many….
So if we take into account these various elements of peak oil, austerity cuts, a crumbling infrastructure and ineffective waste treatment facilities, a for-profit healthcare system that primarily serves the wealthy, and “peak antibiotics”, then the outlook does not look good for avoiding another outbreak or plague of some sort. In fact, it appears inevitable if you also consider that bacteria have been imbued with superior mutation and survival abilities from their unbroken 3.5 billion year reign on this planet.
The environmental disaster that has been unleashed by China’s industrialization over the last several decades has polluted not only its air and water, but also its soil. In fact, the soil has been degraded to such a degree that perhaps as much as 40% of China’s land is unusable for agriculture, as explained in the Guardian:
Scientists told the Guardian that this is likely to prove a bigger long-term problem than air and water pollution, with potentially dire consequences for food production and human health.
Zhou Jianmin, director of the China Soil Association, estimated that one-tenth of China’s farmland was affected. “The country, the government and the public should realise how serious the soil pollution is,” he said. “More areas are being affected, the degree of contamination is intensifying and the range of toxins is increasing.”
Other estimates of soil pollution range as high as 40%, but an official risk assessment is unlikely to be made public for several years….
China’s worst soil contamination is from arsenic, which is released during the mining of copper, gold and other minerals. Roughly 70% of the world’s arsenic is found in China – and it is increasingly coming to the surface with horrendous consequences.
“When pollution spills cause massive die-offs of fish, the media usually blames cadmium, but that’s wrong. Arsenic is responsible. This is the most dangerous chemical,” he said. The country’s 280,000 mines are most responsible, according to Chen.
But the land – and food chain – are also threatened by lead and heavy metals from factories and overuse of pesticides and fertilisers by farmers. The risks are only slowly becoming well known. The Economic Information Daily reported this week that pollution ruins almost 12bn kilograms of food production each year, causing economic losses of 20 billion yuan.
Chen estimated that “no more than 20% of China’s soil is seriously polluted”, but he warned that the problem was likely to grow because 80% of the pollutants in the air and water ended up in the earth….
“If we don’t improve the quality of farmland, but only depend on increasing investment and improving technology, then – regardless of whatever super rice, super wheat and other super quality crops we come up with – it will be difficult to guarantee the sustainable development of our nation’s agriculture.”
“Right now most of the world is living under appalling conditions. We can’t possibly improve the conditions of everyone. We can’t raise the entire world to the average standard of living in the United States because we don’t have the resources and the ability to distribute well enough for that. So right now as it is, we have condemned most of the world to a miserable, starvation level of existence. And it will just get worse as the population continues to go up… Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies. The more people there are, the less one individual matters.”
If you take all of China’s environmental problems in total, you come to the conclusion that they are fouling their nest to such a degree that they can no longer support a large percentage of their population which is “still growing at an absolute rate of some 10 million additional inhabitants per year, despite its government’s efforts to stabilize it, through its one child per couple policy.” This simple fact would lead one to think that China’s one-child policy would be enforced even more harshly, especially in a cratering world economy. Yesterday I saw a gruesome news story on MSNBC which supports that assertion:
… She was blindfolded, thrown on a bed, and forced to sign a document that she couldn’t read with the blindfold still on her eyes. Then two shots were injected into her belly. Thirty hours later, on the morning June 4, she gave birth to a dead baby girl.
Feng is one of the many Chinese women who have been forced to have abortions under China’s strict one-child-only policy started in late 1970s to contain the country’s fast growing population, which has now topped 1.3 billion people….
The combination of enormous environmental degradation, the one-child policy, and rampant economic growth have all factored into forcing China to export its population to foreign lands, namely Africa, in order to deal with the crisis of environmental overshoot. The following article from the Asia Times is drawn from the report“300,000,000 Million Reasons: What China Really Wants In Africa” by Cedric Muhammad, CEO of Africa PreBrief.
While a cottage industry of “China-in-Africa” experts has emerged over the past five years, on balance their explanations of why a magnetic like pull exists between the two continents is unsatisfactory. Certainly no one denies an array of state-to-state economic and geopolitical incentives recognized by both sides. After all, the simplified resources-for-infrastructure win-win is rather obvious.
Yet and still neither of those benefits – Africa’s gain of badly needed dams, roads, pipelines and bridges and China’s receipt of desperately needed oil and minerals – is as compelling as the widely rumored and highly plausible determination that China’s mainland can only sustain 700 million persons. Therefore at least 300 million to 500 million of its current 1.2 billion population must go elsewhere. The “elsewhere” is Africa if we are to believe French authors Serge Michel and Michel Beuret, who quote an anonymous Chinese scientist in their book China Safari.
I am among those who accept the only 700 million can stay/300 million must leave hypothesis, but I find the explanation for this sorely inadequate. The reason provided for the necessary exodus of 300 million out of China is environmental degradation and in particular water scarcity – so many rivers have been polluted in China that the resource no longer exists in ample supply to satisfy the needs of a desperate Chinese population.
While lack of water is certainly a major issue (see California; Syria-Turkey; and Darfur disputes for proof) the Earth is still a very large place. Why Africa would be the destination of choice for hundreds of millions of persons fleeing a country plagued by simultaneous drought and flood, is not answered by the environmental degradation theory.
As serious as China’s population pressures and environmental woes are, there must still be a more compelling internal and external force driving individuals out of China. There must exist an irresistible motivation shaped by circumstance that draws and drives an enormous mass of Chinese into Africa.
We believe that force can be found coming from an unsuspecting source – the Chinese “one-child” policy.
Though Mao Zedong did state that “revolution plus production can solve the problem of feeding the population” and thought that China’s large population was more asset than liability, that thinking was replaced by efforts at social engineering that the Chinese government now credits with preventing 400 million births, thus keeping the Chinese population from otherwise reaching a level of 1.7 million today.
But people don’t neatly fit into the cardinal or ordinal nature of numbers, nor does their dynamism accept the rigid confines of static public policy. There have been real and unpredictable consequences on the thinking of generations of Chinese families and children living under these regulations – consequences that are now spilling over into Africa.
The pattern of history shows that people vote with their feet as much as they do by ballot and there are many illustrative examples which shed light on the Chinese “one-child” experience. One of the best available is the analogy painted by McGill University professor and economist Reuven Brenner, who years ago likened the experience of Jews living in Europe with what Chinese endure today, writing in an article “China: A Neurotic Prosperity”:
“What can be the point of reference to predict consequences of China’s current childbearing pattern, adjusted over the last decades to one-kid or you’re-out-of-your-apartment policy? To make any reliable analyses, one needs at least two points, so as to draw a straight line as a first approximation.
Fortunately for observers, though unfortunately for those who had to adjust to such social engineering, there is not much new under the sun. There has been a government in the past who passed similar regulations. The year was 1726. The place, Austria.
The Viennese court, under anti-Semitic pressures, fearing a large increase in Jewish population – a fear that by itself suggests that the Jewish birth rate at the time was relatively high – introduced a regulation. Only the eldest son of a Jewish family could marry. The younger boys could not. This regulation introduced into the Austrian empire, including Bohemia, Moravia, parts of what became later Germany, and Alsace, led to the instant migration of young Jewish generation to Eastern Europe, to Poland, to Rumania. Whereas within the Austrian Empire the Jewish birth rates dropped, in Eastern Europe they did not.
How did Jewish parents, who stayed, adapt to the regulation? As one would expect: they had less children, invested more in their education and health, and probably spoiled them much more than would have been otherwise the case. One can speculate that this regulation was the origins of the myth of the neurotic Jewish mothers, and the by now tradition of driving Jewish kids to excellence – true, occasionally, to neurotic excellence.
Will Chinese mothers and kids react in a similar fashion? At least this point of reference suggests a positive answer. Thus one unintended consequence of the one-child regulation will be prosperity driven by kids who will grow up to be very ambitious entrepreneurs.”
There are two intriguing features in this portion of Brenner’s thesis that resonate with us. The first is a comparison of regulatory 18th-century Europe with family planning policies of 20th-century China. The second is the possibility that entrepreneurship may be a more pronounced tendency of children living under such policies.
The regulations on the Jewish birth rate are not a perfect analogy but useful to our understanding of the Chinese experience under “one-child” policy, because they illustrate an incentive for Chinese to migrate elsewhere in pursuit of a greater quality of life and in order to broaden their personal and professional network which has been confined – in a familial context.
Africa represents a land of opportunity for the Chinese migrant. And history shows it is often strong kinship-based ethnic groups whose economic opportunities are more limited at “home” who become the “stranger-traders” abroad, for better or worse. This has certainly happened in parts of Africa where the Chinese represent a valuable link to manufactured goods and novel services unavailable in agrarian and peasant-like societies in Africa.
It is a link that the Jewish community played not only when they migrated into Eastern Europe as Brenner describes but also by the thousands who migrated from Alsace into the American South servicing the Mississippi Delta plantation economy as dry goods peddlers.
Far more important than the quality of the state-to-state negotiation between China and African governments covered ad nauseum by the chattering class, is the on the ground navigation of a swarm of Chinese entrepreneurs – running away from an old reality as much as they are chasing a new one.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 