Praying to the Gods for Rain

04 Wednesday Feb 2015

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

Tags

Amazon Deforestation, Anthropogenic Global Warming, Antonio Nobre, Arctic Amplification, Arctic Ice Melt, Atlantic Forest of Brazil, Brazil Drought, Disaster Capitalism, Dr. Jennifer Francis, El Niño, Global Forest Watch, La Niña, Meridional Heat Transport, NASA Landsat, Paulo Ito, Polar Jet Stream, Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, Sabesp, São Paulo Water Crisis, Sea Level Rise, Sistema Cantareira, Tijuca Forest, Tipping Elements in the Climate System, Water Privatization

Brazilian graffiti artist Paulo Ito in São Paulo

While capitalist carbon man clings to his position atop the billions of energy slaves constructed over shifting sands of geologic time, the stable weather regime of the Holocene is being pulled right out from under our feet. Governments pray to the gods for rain as the Earth’s glaciers melt away and climate chaos unfolds around us:

…In 2015, the party in power, the Workers’ Party (PT), still thinks the divine will provide for everything, making it rain so that hydroelectric plants can generate power for the people. This is not surprising for a government whose minister of science, technology and innovation believes that global warming is a tool used by imperialism to control the poor countries. For the current Government, any intervention by man in nature seems mysterious and unpredictable in its consequences…

What impresses most in government pronouncements is their view of nature as indomitable and wholly unpredictable. Any measure involving future projections is absolutely absurd and unfeasible for the government, which works in cycles of four years (up to the next election). If hydroelectric plants run out of water, we can only pray for rain to restore the dams to their usual levels. If potable water runs out, only nature can replenish the reservoirs. Like tribesmen for whom any human interference in climate is anathema, every solution proposed by the government is an appeal to fortune and divine grace.

…Brazilian politicians should be wary, however. Divine grace periodically answers the call for rain. And with the gift of rain, periodically Brazilian cities are flooded, hundreds die, and thousands are displaced. Even though that happens anually, without fail, the government floods are absolutely unpredictable, too. Well, what can we do? Let’s pray for rain. But not a lot.

Three primary elements have converged to make the present drought in Brazil the worst in its recorded history, threatening to bring the megacity down:

anthropogenic global warming(AGW)
rampant deforestation of the Amazon rainforest
gross mismanagement of water resources and government corruption

The first factor is planet-wide and beyond the ability of any one state, no matter how powerful, to solve alone. The accelerated warming that is happening twice as fast in the Arctic as any other region is known as Arctic amplification. This runaway warming of the Arctic is a result of the radiative forcing of GHGs, water vapor, and dark aerosol particles combined with increased solar absorption from loss in Arctic albedo. Consequently, the equator-to-pole temperature gradient is being weakened, meridional heat transport is decreasing, and sea levels are rising. These changes are altering the polar jet stream and affecting such things as ocean salinity, currents and oxygen levels. A recent study revealed that within a matter of 100 years, the Earth’s oceans have undergone extensive and abrupt changes in oxygen levels when the ice caps melted in the past. The early phases of a mass extinction level event are taking place right before our eyes, but humans view the world through anthropocentric rose-colored glasses, oblivious to such dangers happening on a time scale of more than a few decades.

Ten years before Jennifer Francis’ work on the effects of climate change to jet stream patterns, scientists had predicted that the loss of Arctic sea ice would warm the oceans and give rise to heated air columns which would act as powerful blocking patterns, altering jet streams and preventing rains from reaching California. The findings of their models are eerily similar to the recent weather phenomenon called the “ridiculously resilient ridge” which has continued to block any significant amount of moisture from reaching California for the past two years. Weather reports from Brazil describe similarly persistent formations of warm air columns:

Similar to last year, a giant dome is now forming over the heartland of Brazil that is blocking moisture out in eerily the same manner as it did a year ago. The reason for this may have little to do with natural occurring weather patterns, but climate change from deforestation from the Amazon, where experts have warned this could be the outcome and that drought could occur with increased frequency. Rather than regular rainfall, the areas directly impacted are getting both extremes with intense drought followed by above average rains and then turning dry again. – Jan 2015

Droughts are persisting in both Brazil and California, as well as many other parts of the world. It has been known for a long time that global warming would result in drought and crop failures, an enormously destabilizing factor to any government. To compound the problem, humans are pumping water from aquifers much faster than natural processes can replenish them. Both El Niño and La Niña weather phenomenon are projected to double in frequency:

…The paradox is that global warming could also increase the intensity of not just hotter-than-usual seasons but also cool or cold episodes that would trigger unusual or extreme weather responses far from the ocean’s cool centre.

So some parts of the world are likely to experience blazing drought, followed by catastrophic floods, while across the ocean, other nations will have torrential rain and then unseasonal drought, every 13 years or so.

Brazil drought as of Dec 2014:

The second factor of deforestation is also planet-wide and its effects are not confined to the area in which it takes place. A recent study indicates that a denuded Amazon will have international ramifications:

…The researchers report in the Journal of Climate that an Amazon stripped bare could mean 20 percent less rain for the coastal Northwest and a 50 percent reduction in the Sierra Nevada snowpack, a crucial source of water for cities and farms in California. Previous research has shown that deforestation will likely produce dry air over the Amazon. Using high-resolution climate simulations, the researchers are the first to find that the atmosphere’s normal weather-moving mechanics would create a ripple effect that would move that dry air directly over the western United States from December to February…

…”The big point is that Amazon deforestation will not only affect the Amazon — it will not be contained. It will hit the atmosphere and the atmosphere will carry those responses,” Medvigy said.

“It just so happens that one of the locations feeling that response will be one we care about most agriculturally,” he said. “If you change the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, where most of the irrigation for California’s Central Valley comes from, then by this study deforestation of the Amazon could have serious consequences for the food supply of the United States.”…

40% of the Amazon has already been clear-cut or degraded to some degree, putting Brazil’s rainmaker well within the tipping point for irreversible die-off as discussed in the prior blog post. Deforestation of Amazonia will lead to desertification of the major agricultural regions in the south-east of Brazil. Speaking of Brazil’s drought counterpart to the north, alarming news was recently reported that California has lost half of its big trees since 1930. The following GIF image spanning the years 2001 through 2013 illustrates deforestation in Latin America(Brazil/Amazon). It was compiled by me from data at Global Forest Watch. The spreading pink color represents tree cover loss:

And a closer look at Amazon deforestation with NASA landsat imaging:

Brazil’s leading climate scientist, Dr Antonio Donato Nobre, is calling for a wartime effort to restore the Amazon and reverse the drought effects caused by its deforestation which equates to 184 million football fields worth of rainforest. While I’m not optimistic, small miracles have happened in Brazil such as the replanting of Tijuca Forest by hand. Nonetheless, the devastation wrought by man swamps all his restoration efforts. Virtually all of the Atlantic forests that once extended along the entire Brazilian coastline have been cut down since colonists arrived in the 1500s. Humans are wrecking the Earth in myriad ways, and sea level rise will become the ultimate destroyer:

The third factor of gross mismanagement of water resources and government corruption is truly what exacerbated the drought problem for the city of São Paulo. Since the 1970s, there were professors of ecology and hydrology at São Paulo University and in the government who warned of a future water crisis if steps were not taken to conserve and recycle water as well as plan new infrastructure for adequate water supply, as this article reveals. Some suspect that the problem with São Paulo’s water supply really began when Sabesp, the company that manages the city’s water, was partially privatized in the 1990s (i.e. profits over long-term planning). Sabesp is owned 50.3% by the state and the rest by private investors who have made excellent returns over the years. Investments in infrastructure appear to have been sacrificed for shareholder payouts. With the Cantareira system starting to fail in 2012/13, billions of dollars in dividends were still being paid out to shareholders, yet nothing was done to stop the unfolding collapse of São Paulo’s water system. In fact, government and Sabesp officials continued to deny the seriousness of the problem until just recently when they were planning to scrape the bottom of the Cantareira System for the last drop of brown sludge. Is it any surprise that disaster capitalism had a role in this crisis? An article entitled ‘Cantareira: a new word for when politics is put ahead of public interest‘ sheds light on much of the corruption, mismanagement, and privatization of water:

…São Paulo produces 60% of Brasil’s Ethanol, and Agencia Publica attempted to use a freedom of information request to force SabeSP to reveal details of their contracts of supply with the biggest industrial & agricultural companies in the state. SabeSP have so far refused…

…A United Nations report placed the responsibility for the crisis squarely on Sao Paulo state government & SabeSP’s shoulders, a report which Geraldo Alckmin attempted to make them alter, exonerating his administration, a request they refused...

…Geologists have also been studying plans to open up the enormous Guarani Aquifer to exploitation in order to alleviate the crisis. The World Bank already funded research in the late 1990s on the underground system, during the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Their contract with Brazil to support this research stipulated that any future use as a water resource had to be privatised, but once that contract expired a decade later, Brazil refused to renew on the same terms…

With no time left to properly prepare for a megacity of 20 million people without water, São Paulo’s plan is to divert a river from another area hit by drought and that will take nearly 2 years to complete. The training for riot control that São Paulo’s military police received from the FBI last year may come in handy for more than just the World Cup.

Forests Precede Us, Deserts Follow

22 Thursday Jan 2015

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

≈ 168 Comments

Tags

Amazon Deforestation, Anastassia Makarieva, Antonio Nobre, Biodiversity Hotspot, Brazil Rainforests, Cantareira Reservoir System, Capitalism, Climate Change, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Drought in the Amazon Basin, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, François-René de Chateaubriand, Global Risks 2015 Report, Mayan Civilization, Medicinal Plants, Peak Water, Roman Empire, São Paulo Water Crisis, The Biotic Pump Theory, Victor Gorshkov, World Economic Forum (WEF)

As Goes the Amazon, So Goes the World

Thought to be up to 100 million years old and home to more species than any other ecosystem on Earth, the Amazon rainforest is a magical place, but your average soft-bellied city dweller of industrial civilization would last no more than a week there, likely succumbing to yellow fever, malaria, flesh-eating parasites, venomous snakes, and an endless array of creepy-crawlies. Nearly one-third of the planet’s biodiversity is found in the Amazon, including ancient indigenous tribes, hundreds of animal species, 16,000 tree species, 2.5 million species of insects, and new discoveries happening all the time. With a treasure trove of medicinal plants, many of which have yet to be discovered, the Amazon is known to many as the world’s largest pharmacy. 70% of all drugs introduced in the U.S. in the last few decades were derived from nature, and 70% of plants identified as containing anti-cancer characteristics are found only in tropical rainforests.

The Amazon discharges one-quarter of the Earth’s freshwater and plays a critical role in the Earth’s carbon cycle and climate, absorbing 1.5 billion tons of carbon every year through photosynthesis. Additionally, the Amazon’s 400 billion trees are responsible for producing 20% of the Earth’s oxygen and generating the region’s heavy rains needed to irrigate crops, fill reservoirs, and generate hydropower. A single large rainforest tree is the equivalent of a standing lake releasing up to 317 quarts (300 liters) of water each day through evapotranspiration (evaporation and plant transpiration). The importance of the Amazon rainforest in regulating not only South America’s climate but also that of the entire world cannot be overestimated. Like the Earth’s cryosphere, the Amazon and other rainforests are essential geographic features of the planet that help regulate the climate and provide habitat for unique wildlife. As with the melting polar regions, the loss of the Amazon to capitalist “resource development” will prove to be a self-destructive act for all of mankind.

The Biotic Pump Theory

In 2006, two Russian scientists, Victor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva, used basic physics to theorize that condensation from forests, not temperature gradients, is what creates the low atmospheric pressure over land masses necessary for pulling moist air currents from the coasts to the continental interiors. Forests drive the water cycle on land. After two years and major pushback from the established meteorological community, their paper was finally published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and to this day has withstood refutation.

Gorshkov and Makarieva argue that meteorologists have long-missed an important driver of winds: condensation, and most importantly condensation caused by the major evaporation that occurs over forests. While scientists have long noted that deforestation also brings a drop in precipitation, no one could adequately explain the mechanism behind this. But Gorshkov and Makarieva argue that forests drive winds through “persistent condensation,” bringing in rain from the oceans. Put simply: no forests, no rain…

“During condensation water vapor disappears from the gas phase. Air pressure depends on the number of air molecules and is reduced by condensation. Areas with persistent condensation become zones of low pressure that suck in the air from the surrounding regions. Forests ensure both a store and a flux of moisture on land and thus create such persistent low pressure zones on land. This causes moist winds to blow from the ocean to land,” they explain.

Put another way, regions with lots of rainfall “set up a positive feedback in which they bring in moisture from elsewhere,” according to Sheil, who adds that, “Forests maintain the highest evaporation of moisture of any land cover.”…

…if the biotic pump turns out to be true, it would not change the fact that the climate is changing and herculean efforts are needed to mitigate both the causes and the impacts, whether that focuses on greenhouses gas emissions, forests, or, as it happens, both, since forests ability to store carbon is just one of the many services they provide. – Link

A more in-depth explanation of the biotic pump theory can be found in these two videos here and here.

The biotic pump hypothesis explains what is behind the so-called “flying clouds of the Amazon” which carry moisture inland from the Atlantic ocean until they hit the Andes mountains and turn southward, dumping rain onto central and southern Brazil. Antonion Nobre, Brazil’s top climate scientist, is a proponent of the theory that forests function as biotic pumps for atmospheric moisture.

…As long ago as 2009, Antonio Nobre, one of Brazil’s leading climate scientists, warned that, without the ‘flying rivers’, the area that produces 70% of South America’s GNP would be desert.

In an interview with the journal Valor Economica, he said: “Destroying the Amazon to advance the agricultural frontier is like shooting yourself in the foot. The Amazon is a gigantic hydrological pump that brings the humidity of the Atlantic Ocean into the continent and guarantees the irrigation of the region.”

“Of course, we need agriculture”, he said. “But without trees there would be no water, and without water there is no food.

“A tonne of soy takes several tonnes of water to produce. When we export soy we are exporting fresh water to countries that don’t have this rain and can’t produce. It is the same with cotton, with ethanol. Water is the main agricultural input. If it weren’t, the Sahara would be green, because it has extremely fertile soil.”

Like other climate scientists, Nobre thinks the role of the Amazon rainforest in producing rain has been underestimated. In a single day, the Amazon region evaporates 20 billion tonnes of vapour – more than the 17 million tonnes of water that the Amazon river discharges each day into the Atlantic. – Link

In 1980, just 3% of the Amazon rainforest had been cut down, but today the total loss has grown to about 25%, and in the last five months of 2014 the assault on the Amazon has intensified with October registering a staggering increase of 467% in deforestation. Although agriculture and illegal logging constitute the majority of cleared land, a growing percentage over the last 13 years has been for gold mining, a process that is particularly damaging to the environment due to the toxic brew of chemicals left behind. The double whammy of deforestation and anthropogenic global warming continues to weaken the Amazon. Remember that the Amazon suffered two 100-year droughts within 5 years in 2005 and 2010 and failed to recover since then. Other studies have confirmed that the Amazon appears to becoming more unstable in response to the large-scale environmental impact of rising CO2 and the cumulative effects of land degradation by humans. A study that came out just last month indicates a tipping point of 30-50% deforestation of rainforests in the Amazon and Central Africa which could lead to global effects.

…“What this study shows is that there are additional, independent effects of deforestation on climate.”

Lawrence’s report is a peer-reviewed summary of existing research, and she found that deforestation, even at small, localized levels, can change the climate. “Farmers in one place are connected to farmers in another. Countries are connected to each other,” Lawrence said. “We don’t want to wait until the climate system has shifted so we can measure it on the ground.”

She said there is a possible “tipping point” of 30 to 50 percent deforestation for the Amazon and Central Africa. Deforestation beyond that could invite disaster.

“Tropical deforestation on many scales influences local, regional and even global climate. Deforestation-driven changes to water availability and climate variability could have strong implications for agricultural production systems and food security in some regions,” the report says… – Link

If we add up the harmful effects of climate change and deforestation to the Amazon, then the tipping point may have already been breached. According to the Global Risks 2015 report by the World Economic Forum (WEF), water has for the first time displaced all other concerns to become the number one threat:

“Droughts, floods, glacial melt, unpredictable precipitation, runoff, groundwater supplies and water quality will all reflect an increasing instability as long-standing rainfall patterns change and weather extremes increase,” said Ganter.

The interconnecting risks regarding water, food, energy and climate change will be one of the overarching megatrends to shape the world in 2030, according to Ganter. – Link

São Paulo, Brazil: Repeating the Mistakes of the Mayans

A wall mural in São Paulo painted by Brazilian artists Mundano and Fel depicting a boat on a cracked riverbed

São Paulo, a megacity of 20 million people in southeastern Brazil, is suffering its worst drought in 84 years since the summer rains failed to materialize a year ago. Only recently did water officials finally admit how serious the crisis was and that they had covertly rationed water by manipulating flow pressure in various parts of the city under the guise of “maintenance work”. Cantareira, the city’s largest water reservoir, is currently down to just 5.4% of its capacity and officials have implemented plans for pumping a third dead volume that represents the “rock bottom” of the reservoir. And this crisis isn’t just confined to São Paulo. Ninety-three other Brazilian cities affecting 3.9 million people are rationing water due to the lack of rain.

As of 1-22-2015:

Without water to run their hydroelectric power plants which provide 80-90% of the country’s electricity, Brazil has been forced to turn to more expensive and dirtier thermal plants burning natural gas, coal, diesel fuel and biomass. In turn, electricity rates have jumped 60% and Brazil’s CO2 emissions will undoubtedly increase. The rains may come again sporadically but I think the Brazilians have permanently broken the region’s biotic pump. What’s next for the wealthiest city in Latin America? Water wars will likely erupt for the last drop of moisture from a once-magnificent rainforest mowed down for hamburger-cattle, soybeans, and short-term profits.

Keeping the lights on and maintaining this current way of life is becoming increasingly tenuous as capitalist carbon man eats away at the last vestiges of a dying biosphere. Modern-day Brazil and the entire industrialized world are repeating the same mistake made by past civilizations such as the Mayans who cleared their forests for agriculture and development:

…In the first study, published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Arizona State University analyzed archaeological data from across the Yucatan to reach a better understanding of the environmental conditions when the area was abandoned. Around this time, they found, severe reductions in rainfall were coupled with a rapid rate of deforestation, as the Mayans burned and chopped down more and more forest to clear land for agriculture. Interestingly, they also required massive amounts of wood to fuel the fires that cooked the lime plaster for their elaborate constructions—experts estimate it would have taken 20 trees to produce a single square meter of cityscape…

…Because cleared land absorbs less solar radiation, less water evaporates from its surface, making clouds and rainfall more scarce. As a result, the rapid deforestation exacerbated an already severe drought—in the simulation, deforestation reduced precipitation by five to 15 percent and was responsible for 60 percent of the total drying that occurred over the course of a century as the Mayan civilization collapsed. The lack of forest cover also contributed to erosion and soil depletion…

…The collapse is especially intriguing because it seemingly occurred at “a time in which developed a sophisticated understanding of their environment, built and sustained intensive production and water systems and withstood at least two long-term episodes of aridity,” says B.L. Turner, the lead author of the ASU study. In other words, the Maya were no fools. They knew their environment and how to survive within it—and still they continued deforesting at a rapid pace, until the local environment was unable to sustain their society.

One of the lessons of these complementary studies, says climate modeler Robert Oglesby of the University of Nebraska, who worked on the second paper, is that our reshaping of the environment can often have unintended consequences—and we may not have any idea of what they are until it’s too late… – Link

One could safely say all human endeavor is at the mercy of the natural world and the vagaries of the weather. The ebb and flow of the mighty Roman Empire, along with its downfall, aligned with shifts in the climate, according to tree ring research:

…When [lead researcher] Büntgen showed the data to historians and archaeologists, they pointed out remarkable consistencies with what we know of past societies. At times of social stability and prosperity, like the rise of the Roman Empire between 300 B.C.E. and 200 C.E., Europe experienced warm, wet summers ideal for agriculture. Similar conditions accompanied the peak years of medieval Europe between 1000 C.E. and 1200 C.E.

The study also showed that climate and catastrophe often line up. In the 3rd century C.E., for example, extended droughts matched the timing of barbarian invasions and political turmoil. Around 1300 C.E., on the other hand, a cold snap combined with wetter summers coincides with widespread famines and plague that wiped out nearly half of Europe’s population by 1347… – Link

Believing that somehow things are different this time around and that our technological prowess will save us, few today pay much attention to the history of man’s folly and the overreach of past civilizations. The brutal reality is that nothing has changed since then except for the epic degree of capitalist carbon man’s hubris and the scale of his overshoot which has now reached global proportions, guaranteeing that no one will be spared, neither rich nor poor, wretched nor innocent. Meanwhile, our fearless leaders took a page out of The Onion the other day and got together to agree that “climate change is real and not a hoax” while inserting the caveat that humans are still not the cause. Did that really just happen?…Don’t let this surreal world get you down. We’re simply spectators observing the tragicomedy of the human race.

On the Supersonic Track to Extinction

15 Thursday Jan 2015

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

≈ 113 Comments

Tags

Canfield Ocean, Capitalism, Chemical Pollution, CO2 Emissions, Extinction of Man, Geoengineering, Greenhouse Extinction, Greenhouse Gases, Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S), Industrial Civilization, Jevons Paradox, Keeling Curve, Lee R. Kump, Machine Fetishism, Mass Die Off, Mass Extinctions, Misanthropocene, Peter D. Ward, Ron Cobb, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming - the Mass Extinctions of the Past - and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future

Where is the “Misanthropocene” right now in relation to past extinction events? The chart below tells the tale. Notice that our current rise in GHG’s is essentially instantaneous in relation to past warmings which took place over thousands of years. As far as scientists can tell, the current warming from industrial civilization is the most rapid in geologic time. Ice core and marine sediment data in the paleoclimatology archive have revealed brief periods of rapid warming and there is no reason to believe modern man is immune to such catastrophic and abrupt climate events. In fact, we know that the Arctic is already warming twice as fast as anywhere else on the planet. Earth sensitivity to climate change is now thought to be possibly double that of previous estimates. An entirely different planet can result from just a slight change in temperature:

We’re about halfway towards the same CO2 levels as the Paleocene Thermal Extinction, but our speed of trajectory surpasses even that of the Permian Extinction:

In 2005, Lee R. Kump and fellow scientists published a paper describing what would become known as the Kump hypothesis, implicating hydrogen sulfide (H2S) as the primary culprit in past mass extinctions. According to OSHA, “a level of H2S gas at or above 100 ppm is immediately dangerous to life and health.” Prior to Kump’s study, the working theory had been that some sort of singular, cataclysmic event such as an asteroid strike was to blame for all mass die-offs, but Kump and colleagues proposed that a global warming-induced asphyxiation via hydrogen sulfide gas(H2S) was to blame for snuffing out life under the sea, on the land, and in the air. In past mass extinctions, volcanic eruptions and thawing methane hydrates created greenhouse-gas warmings that culminated in the release of poisonous gas from oxygen-depleted oceans. Humans with their fossil fuel-eating machines are unwittingly producing the same conditions today. The Kump hypothesis (elevated CO2 with lowering O2 levels) is now regarded as the most plausible explanation for the majority of mass extinctions in earth’s history:

Excerpt from Lights Out: How It All Ends

In the short term as both poles completely melt away and the Equator-to-Pole temperature gradient declines, the hydrologic cycle and storms will intensify, jet streams will be altered, global air circulation and ocean currents will be rearranged (especially in northern latitudes), and sea levels will rise. While some local winds will slow down, other areas may actually increase due to local temperature gradients becoming more influential than global ones. New research has indicated early warning signs of a collapse in ocean circulation. When that happens, the oceans ultimately turn into stagnant, anoxic pools belching deadly hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere.

As others have noted, our energy, transport and building infrastructure was not constructed to withstand a mutated planet blindly molded by over seven billion humans. For example, think of all those massive wind farms rendered useless by alterations in local wind patterns, hydro-power shut down due to devastating droughts, solar farms destroyed by large hail storms, etc.

Many are under the delusion that we’ll be able to turn this process around with “green energy” while ignoring that such technologies are derivatives of fossil fuel or that increased efficiencies will lower our carbon footprint while ignoring Jevons paradox. Countless other self-reinforcing feedbacks loops driving our socioeconomic system come into play as well such as rampant overpopulation (Overpopulation key driver of climate change, mass extinction), chemical pollution (“Every year, up to 400 million tonnes are produced and a thousand new substances concocted“), and capitalism’s inherent growth dynamics:

The monstrous capitalism we see today is the result of capitalism’s inherent growth dynamics. To give one modern-day example, the solar energy industry/movement began with the conception of local, i.e. decentralized, and roof-top solar electricity generation for local consumption. Today we see projects like Desertec (huge solar power plants in the Sahara that would supply 15% of Europe’s total electricity needs) and competition between European and Chinese solar panel producers for larger chunks of the world market. – Link

The destructive trend has been inexorably cumulative:

…the central trend is verifiable: mass die-offs are on the rise, increasing by one event per year for the last 70 years.

“While this might not seem like much, one additional mass mortality event per year over 70 years translates into a considerable increase in the number of these events being reported each year,” explained co-author Adam Siepielski, a biologist at the University of San Diego. “Going from one event to 70 each year is a substantial increase, especially given the increased magnitudes of mass mortality events for some of these organisms.” – Link

If we shed our anthropocentric blinders, the harsh reality is that nothing of substance is being done to prevent our own extinction, and after looking back at humanity’s track record for slowing down this beast of globalized industrial civilization even one iota, any sane and rational person would have to conclude that there are forces at work well beyond the control of any one group of people, any state, or even any one country. Humans have the dubious honor of being the earth’s first sentient beings to have thoroughly documented their own demise while arguing with each other over whose fault it is. And the longer the Keeling Curve stretches skyward, the greater the odds that we will pull the trigger on a geoengineering scheme to slow down the inevitable:

Do these experts—the top scholars and scientists researching the subject in the world—think we will see geoengineering in our lifetime?

“Let’s see it for ten years,” the emcee said. A few scientists cautiously raised their hands. Twenty and 30 years saw some more converts. When he called out “fifty years,” more than half the room had their hands up.

That, according to the experts, is a 50-50 shot that someone is going to try, this century, to engineer the Earth’s climate. To hack the planet. – Link

Techno-capitalist carbon man’s fetish with high-tech gadgetry has already gotten the best of him. Just look at us glued to our iphones, tv’s, internet, and sundry other social media tools. We’re addicted to and dependent on our technology, and the idea of pulling the power plug on this way of life is unthinkable, not to mention fatal, for those raised within its confines.

“In Earth’s history we see climate changes over time, and we know that some of these climate changes were associated with enormous biological destruction. How could we believe that the same sort of experience moving into the modern-day wouldn’t do the same thing?” ~ Dr. Peter D. Ward

Spectating at the End of the World

02 Friday Jan 2015

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

≈ 205 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Abrupt Climate Change, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Davi Kopenawa, Eco-Apocalypse, Extinction of Man, Green Washing, Guy McPherson, Inverted Totalitarianism, Military Industrial Complex, Mr. Natural, Neoliberal Capitalism, Robert Crumb, Security and Surveillance State, Social Psychology and Theories of Consumer Culture: A Political Economy

Front Row Seat to the Eco-Apocalypse

“I fear their euphoria of merchandise will have no end and they will entangle themselves to the point of chaos. They do not seem concerned that they are making us all perish with the epidemic of fumes that escape from all these things…” ~ Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami leader and shaman

Another year has turned over on Earth, home to an exothermic, bipedal omnivore known as capitalist carbon man whose expanding numbers and army of fossil-fueled machinery spans the globe. There’s nothing subtle or restrained about his reign of terror. He pokes and prods the climate change beast while taking for granted the stability of the Holocene, a peculiar aberration in the paleoclimate record. Plotted on a graph, the history of Earth’s climate resembles the jagged teeth of a demonic monster, a volatile creature whose abrupt and catastrophic shifts have wiped landscapes clean of most life. The consequences of burning the equivalent of an olympic sized swimming pool of oil (300,000 liters) per second, year after year, into the atmosphere will ultimately prove lethal to the planet’s habitability. Recently, scientists were surprised to discover a “Delaware-sized methane cloud” hovering over the U.S. southwest, the remnant of “years of intentionally released and errantly leaked natural gas during fossil fuel drilling operations.” No less problematic to the Earth’s homeostasis are the many other destructive habits of capitalist carbon man such as moving ten times more dirt than all natural processes, fixing more nitrogen than all terrestrial bacteria, and producing more sulfate than all ocean phytoplankton.

The exponential melting of Earth’s cryospheric regions is a foreboding harbinger of devastating sea level rise, altering oceanic and jet stream circulation, changing hydrologic cycles, and wholesale disruption of the entire planet’s biospheric system. A brief retrospective of our unfolding environmental meltdown by a major news source concludes that “2014 will likely go down as the year that melting polar ice caps graduated from being a geographic abstraction to a symbol of the irreversible ways we’ve warped the planet.” News reports continue to grow more ominous with recent warnings that the oceans are on the verge of belching their decades of stored heat from human industrial activity. CIVILIZATION is in the process of going ‘poof’ as its leaders play monkey politics and the masses are drowned in a sea of consumerist images. As Dr. McPherson recently pointed out, gallows humor is the 6th stage of grief for coping with a civilization that is blind to its own demise.

“Going Green” is a Marketing Slogan and Inverted Totalitarianism is the Most Successful Form of Tyranny

The unsettling truth is that the slogan “going green” has become a marketing ploy to greenwash capitalism and keep business-as-usual going. The speeches of corporate and political leaders are sprinkled with conscious-soothing key words such as “sustainable”, “eco-friendly”, and “2°C climate goal”, but there’s nothing sustainable about globalized techno-capitalism and the target of limiting warming to 2°C is a cruel illusion. So-called “green energy” is severely limited by suitable geography and intermittency of power production. The behemoth Google learned from its own extensive research that “today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us.” The top business firms appear to be having a problem squaring their green rhetoric with reality, and there seems to be no way to make automobiles truly sustainable. Germany, the poster child for a green economy, is now “burning more coal than at any point since 1990.“:

“We already are on the edge of what is possible,” Mr. Löllgen said in an interview at his Düsseldorf office. “Is it worth it if we as a country succeed in reaching our targets in reducing carbon emissions, but sacrifice good jobs and our industrial base?”

Another misleading headline I get tired of reading states that humans may be headed for a 6th mass extinction. Let’s clarify this statement once and for all by admitting emphatically that we are well in the throes of a mass extinction which will likely include ourselves within this century. By all rational evidence, industrial civilization with its billions of inhabitants cannot survive without fossil fuels. The only way capitalist carbon man will ever be sustainable is as fertilizer beneath the crumbled concrete and asphalt ruins of industrial civilization. Don’t expect any mea culpa from a culture which has been programmed to believe converting all of nature into inanimate symbols of wealth is “progress” and “development”. Not even the dire warnings of esteemed scientists and religious leaders can break the spell cast by capitalism and its definition of progress. Our institutions have become intransigent, petrified monoliths to which all will be sacrificed.

“I think the notions of free will and self-determination have the appearance of reality during a civilization’s gestation and expansion phases, when there is more opportunity and social mobility. As things calcify, instruments becoming institutions that serve their own ends, the facade is harder to maintain. Human existence has always been contingent and constrained by circumstances. These ‘free’ notions are illusions, narrow windows of perception with a limited range of influence during times of transient prosperity.” ~ BP

The term inverted totalitarianism, coined a decade ago by philosopher Sheldon Wolin, describes America’s brand of despotism in which “every natural resource and every living being is commodified and exploited to collapse as the citizenry is lulled and manipulated into surrendering their liberties and their participation in government through excess consumerism and sensationalism.” Opposition to this dominant consumer culture is systematically co-opted and suppressed by the marginalization and alienation of alternative thought. Neoliberal capitalism governs not only states and economies, but extends right down to an individual’s behavior and way of living:

One of the goals of neoliberalism is to foster a population of individuals who will play an active role in their own self-governance by interacting with the market and consumption through calculated acts and investments… sets of rules and conditions are established between institutions, economic and social practices, and patterns of behavior. They generally function outside of conscious awareness and they habitually influence social behavior. Examples of dominant consumer culture discourse include the political linking of consumer sovereignty and choice with freedom, the linking of citizenship and national pride with consumption, the work and spend treadmill that many people choose to pursue, the commercialization of childhood and adolescence, and the celebration of consumer values through the mass media and advertising.
– Social Psychology and Theories of Consumer Culture: A Political Economy

Who better to label people as “unpatriotic” if they acknowledge the reality of climate change than the host of TV’s quintessential symbol of capitalism, The Wheel of Fortune? Beneath this digital web of commercials and TV infotainment is the iron fist of militarized local police and the panopticon surveillance state which can quickly stomp out those troublesome malcontents who break free of the American hologram. What better way is there for controlling entire populations than to condition them to enjoy their chains of slavery? America’s form of tyranny, a blend of covert and overt oppression, is the most successful in the history of mankind.

None of This Can Really Be Happening, Can It?

With all the disjointed and delusional thinking out there, I feel compelled to write a blog post periodically to get the facts straight and assure myself that what I see and hear every day is really happening. Yes, we really are terraforming the Earth into a barren wasteland while convincing ourselves that it’s worth it for the sake of a cubicle job and life in cookie-cutter suburbia. Yes, we really are ruled by the Washington-Wall Street-Pentagon complex. No, you will never get the raw truth from mainstream news outlets. Yes, I’m getting older and need to exercise more because a sedentary lifestyle is as bad as smoking. Yes, industrial civilization is still on track to collapse within my lifetime. As Robert Crumb’s mystic guru Mr. Natural exclaimed, “The whole universe is completely insane!”

Locked-Up Inside the Complexity Trap

18 Thursday Dec 2014

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

≈ 71 Comments

Tags

"Renewable" Energies, 6th Mass Extinction, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, ALTERNATIVE, Antarctic Ice Melt, Arctic Ice Albedo, Capitalism, Carbon Dioxide Equivalent (CO2e), Climate Change Impacts on Freshwater Ecosystems, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Complexity Trap, Corporate State, Creeping Normalcy, Daniel Quinn, David Spratt of Climate Code Red, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Geoengineering, Geological Deep Time, Global Coal Consumption, Global Dimming, Global Warming Potential (GWP), Greenhouse Gases, Homeostasis of Earth, Ishmael, Jared Diamond, Joseph Tainter, Landscape Amnesia, Nate Hagens, Planetary Tipping Points, Runaway Climate Change, Suicide by CO2, The Anthropocene Age

From the acidified and plasticized oceans to the greenhouse gas-polluted atmosphere to the radioactive and heavy metal-contaminated soils, the Anthropocene Epoch will leave behind a planet radically altered in its atmospheric and biospheric chemistry. This disruption, unprecedented in geologic time for its rapidity and wide-scale destruction, is already too severe for the complex web of life that had evolved under earth’s previous life-sustaining homeostatic system. As Brian Moss (et al.) wrote in Climate Change Impacts on Freshwater Ecosystems, “The chemistry of the biosphere is the ultimate sine qua non of our existence.”:

It is expected that we will have lost over half the world’s land ecosystems to agriculture or development by 2050. The urbanites may not be noticing this but the consequences will nonetheless be huge, for it is these natural ecosystems that regulate the nature of the biosphere. We have absolutely no idea how much of them can be damaged without serious consequences for human survival. All we know is that such systems, honed by the utterly ruthless mechanisms of natural selection to be as near fit for purpose as possible, are just as crucial to us, indeed much more fundamentally so, than the local grocer, filling station or hospital. The chemistry of the biosphere is the ultimate sine qua non of our existence. …in contemplating the hitherto effects of climate change, we fail to realize that the loss of ecosystems and the changing climate are linked. Indeed we blithely cost the damage of climate change (Stern 2006) as we cost the goods and services we are losing through the application of the same approach of classical economics. We have failed to see the interaction of climate, ecology, and equability. Our attempts to mitigate climate change, in a desperate bid to avoid disruption of our societies, may inevitably be doomed to failure unless we begin to see the whole picture and not just the components we find most convenient to our cash economy. – Link

Man-made climate change is the number one driver of the 6th mass extinction currently unfolding. Without bees, the grocery shelves look rather bare. Without coral reefs, the oceans are devoid of most life. Perhaps the greatest blind spot of humans is their inability to imagine that earth does not need them. The myopic, anthropocentric worldview that humans “own the earth” is emblematic of our economic system and its principles, and this belief that everything can be valued in dollars and cents will prove to be our undoing.

Modern man evolved in an environment composed of carbon dioxide(CO2) levels averaging 240ppm and methane(CH4) levels averaging 700ppb. Today’s atmosphere is now filled with nearly double the amount of CO2 and triple the CH4. A third greenhouse gas worth noting is nitrous oxide(N2O) which has 296 times the ‘Global Warming Potential’ (GWP) of CO2 and a lifespan of 150 years. N2O’s pre-industrial levels were around 270ppb, but are now at around 330ppb and climbing 0.3% per year. When all greenhouse gases are combined, the world is at a carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) of 479 ppm. And we’re locked into much more warming due to the carbon-based civilization we have built. Global dimming and the lag time of climate change have hidden the full effects yet to come, but the changes we are already seeing at only 0.85°C are catastrophic. If you are unaware of the runaway feedback loops causing the Arctic to warm twice as fast as the rest of the planet and the exponential ice melt happening in both of the Earth’s poles, then you haven’t been paying close enough attention. David Spratt elucidates some of the tipping points we have already breached:

…tipping points that have been passed thus far, at less than 1°C of warming:

The loss of the Amundsen Sea West Antarctic glaciers, and 1–4 metres of sea level rise (Rignot, Mouginot et al., 2014; Joughin, Smith et al., 2014). Dr Malte Meinshausen, advisor to the German government and one of the architects of the IPCC’s Representative Concentration Pathways, calls the evidence published this year of “unstoppable” (Rignot, 2014) deglaciation in West Antarctica “a game changer”, and a “tipping point that none of us thought would pass so quickly”, noting now we are “committed already to a change in coastlines that is unprecedented for us humans” (Breakthrough, 2014).
The loss of Arctic sea-ice in summer (Duarte, Lenton et al., 2012; Maslowski, Kinney et al., 2012), which will hasten regional warming, the mobilization of frozen carbon stores, and the deglaciation of Greenland.
Numerous ecosystems, which are already severely degraded or in the process of being lost, including the Arctic (Wolf, 2010). In the Arctic, the rate of climate change is now faster than ecosystems can adapt to naturally, and the fate of many Arctic marine ecosystems is clearly connected to that of the sea ice (Duarte, Lenton et al., 2012). In May 2008, Dr Neil Hamilton, who was then director of Arctic programmes for WWF, told a stunned audience (of which I was a member) at the Academy of Science in Canberra that WWF was not trying to preserve the Arctic ecosystem because “it was no longer possible to do so.”

Such environmental changes are imperceptible to the real-time cognitive processing of humans, but in geological ‘deep time’ these events are cataclysmic and portend a dire future for humans. As Jared Diamond described in his writings, climate change is the ultimate under-the-radar threat able to undermine human reasoning and response:

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

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

Nate Hagens recently made a comment online which is key to understanding much of the frustration, obstinacy, and mass delusion that modern society exhibits when trying to understand one piece of the global crisis rather than taking a holistic approach:

“I think 95%+ of environmentalists don’t integrate systems, energy or human behavior into their analysis of our climate predicament and think we can just plug and play BTUs (British Thermal Units) and have low carbon economic growth – PCI (Post Carbon Institute) has spent most of the last 5 years trying to educate [the public] on this front, to little avail.”

Most energy experts know that “renewable energy” will never be able to replace energy-dense fossil fuels at the global scale (Just for oil, it’s 90 million barrels consumed every day and forecast to hit 96 million BPD by 2019), but they don’t take into full consideration the collapse of earth’s stable Holocene climate which has allowed industrial civilization to flourish. On the other side of the coin, most climate scientists and activists I have encountered do not understand the sever limitations of “renewable energy”, yet many are well aware of the looming disaster posed by anthropogenic climate disruption. Trying to fully comprehend the multiple interconnected global crisis bearing down on industrial civilization is like the allegory of the six blind men and an elephant. Unable to see the bigger picture, each man argues and maintains that their limited view of reality is the only correct one.

As global coal consumption continues its upwards march, the real outcome of the Lima climate conference is that humans are more than willing to hide behind contractual jargon and kick the can down the road rather than come to terms with the unsustainable nature of industrial civilization:

The shift of a single word—from a “shall” to a “may”—means the world will very likely continue to burn lots of coal. Instead of being required to provide “quantifiable information” about their greenhouse-gas emissions, countries may choose whether or not to include those statistics in their pledges instead, known in the jargon as “intended nationally determined contributions. – Link

After more than two decades of climate talks, are we to believe that industrial civilization will ever reform itself for the sake of a living planet? As pervasive as self-deception is in modern society, the reinsurance industry is one sector of industrial civilization unable to turn a blind eye to the rising costs of increasingly extreme and chaotic weather events. The U.S. military is another entity impelled to acknowledge anthropogenic climate disruption, whether it be responding to the wreckage from monster typhoons in the Philippines or the destabilizing effects of droughts in the Middle East. After a few centuries of burning fossil fuels and the accumulation of vast amounts of climate science data, techno-capitalist carbon man is also being forced to react to the fact that the earth’s atmosphere is not an infinite pollution sink for his endless consumption of energy. The problem is that several planetary tipping points have already been irreversibly transgressed, threatening the very habitability of earth. Our predictable collective response is to try to techno-fix the problem rather than entertain any fundamental rethink of the pillars of the capitalist economic system and the scientific reductionism that have led us to this impasse. As evidenced by the number of articles published in mainstream periodicals these days about geoengineering the atmosphere, awareness appears to be growing amongst the business elite that things are starting to spiral out of control:

Geoengineering is another problem-solving strategy that our complex society will employ in order to try to solve the ever-complicated problems arising from ecological overshoot. In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter described this process of developing progressively more sophisticated technologies to solve problems. Geoengineering is wrought with dangers and even frightens many of those scientists who are working on such schemes, but it may be our last hope of saving ourselves from abrupt climate change and a hothouse Earth similar to past rapid warmings. Recent research has shown that the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a time in earth’s history when global temperatures rose upwards of 5°C in the space of about 13 years, serves as a better case study for modern climate change than previously thought:

About 55.5 million years ago, a burst of carbon dioxide raised Earth’s temperature 5°C to 8°C, which had major impacts on numerous species of plants and wildlife. Scientists analyzing ancient soil samples now say a previous burst of the greenhouse gas preceded this event, known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), and probably triggered it. Moreover, they believe humans are pumping similar levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere right now, raising concerns that our own emissions may also destabilize Earth’s climate, triggering the planet to emit devastating bursts of carbon in the future.

The paper implies that even if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide right now, our descendants might still face huge temperature rises, says paleoclimatologist Gabriel Bowen of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, the lead author of the new research. “It is a possibility,” he says, “and it’s a scary one.”…

…The researchers used climate models to investigate how the initial, smaller heating could have triggered the later surge in temperature. They estimate that the first thermal pulse is likely to have warmed Earth’s atmosphere by 2°C to 3°C, but that the atmospheric temperature would have gradually returned to normal as the heat was absorbed into the deep ocean. However, when that heat finally reached the ocean floor, it might have melted methane ices called clathrates, releasing the methane into the ocean and allowing it to make its way into the atmosphere. As a greenhouse gas, methane is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide [up to several hundred times the Global Warming Potential of CO2 for the first two decades before decaying into CO2], so a sudden spike in methane emissions could lead to huge climate change. – Link

If we are only going to use geoengineering techniques to try to keep business-as-usual afloat, then such efforts will be nothing more than the last gasps of a dying civilization, but if these technologies are coupled with an expedited wartime transformation of our society, culture, economy, and political institutions into a very low or zero carbon society, then perhaps such efforts would be worthwhile and could save our species from extinction. However, I see no signs of any such transition towards a decentralized, simplified society, and more noteworthy, neither does Tainter. We are firmly locked within the complexity trap:

…‘the study of social complexity does not yield optimistic results’ (Tainter, 2006: 99). In fact, there is something deeply tragic in Tainter’s view, because it suggests that civilisation, by its very nature, gets locked into a process of mandatory growth in complexity that eventually becomes unsupportable. Furthermore, history provides a disturbingly consistent empirical basis for this tragic view (Tainter, 1988), leading Tainter (2006: 100) to conclude that ‘all solutions to the problem of complexity are temporary.’ This seemingly innocuous statement is actually extremely dark, for it implies that ultimately and inevitably social complexity will outgrow its available energy supply. – Link

As things stand right now, not only must we stop the rise of CO2, but we must also halt the loss of Arctic ice albedo and implement methods for pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere because a 2 °C warming limit is a thing of the past. Sound advice would be to stop digging when in catastrophic overshoot, but it does not appear we can stop because the system is in control, not us.

“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That’s what’s at stake, isn’t it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

A Brief Thanksgiving Message

25 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality

≈ 114 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Abraham Lincoln, Black Friday, Capitalism, Civil War Propoganda, Consumer Culture, Corporatocracy, Ferguson Missouri, Genocide, Indigenous Cultures, Ocean Acidification, Overpopulation, Resource Depletion, Ron Cobb, Sarah Josepha Hale, Thanksgiving Day, The Elite 1%, William S. Burroughs

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, a holiday created from romanticized myths about grand and cordial feasts between pilgrims and the indigenous people whose lives, land, and culture would soon be exterminated from coast to coast. Truth be told, Thanksgiving sprang from the imaginative mind of Sarah Josepha Hale, an author and editor who campaigned for nearly two decades to make it a national holiday before winning over President Lincoln who made it official in 1863. Some historians believe Lincoln used the creation of Thanksgiving as propaganda during the Civil War to paint Northerners as the true founders of the nation whose cause in the war was virtuous and just. In her writings, Hale also pushed the delusional belief that the “United States government was founded without bloodshed.”

Today the holiday has become fully merged into the capitalist superstructure as a time to binge on turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce and puddings just before camping outside consumerist temples for the true day of worship… Black Friday. Riots and mob violence are generally tolerated on Black Friday since it is the key event kicking off the holiday shopping season and driving up corporate profits. Protests and riots for social justice and equality are seen as threats to the capitalist status quo and are systematically undermined, quelled, and co-opted. As I explained in a previous post, the events in Ferguson dominating the headlines are rooted in our socio-economic system.

A few recent thoughts on Twitter about Ferguson and the state of the “civilized” world…

We could go into great detail about each of the above comments, supporting them with a multitude of facts and references, but I think they speak for themselves and summarize quite well the disintegrating social fabric in America and across the world. Compounding the problem of our sociopathic and sclerotic economic system are the environmental crises of climate change, ocean acidification, resource depletion, and overpopulation, none of which can be successfully dealt with unless we address the system that underlies them all, i.e. capitalism and its energy-intensive way of life. The facts tell us it’s much too late to do anything to save ourselves, but this hopeless mindset only serves to empower those at the top who continue to profit from this corrupt and self-destructive system. It’s past time to step outside our comfort zone and do something to try and save a piece of the web of life fast disappearing before our eyes.

The following poem by William S. Burroughs resonates with what has gone horribly wrong in America and perhaps what has always been wrong.

Climate Chaos Casino: Another Roll of the Dice

22 Saturday Nov 2014

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

≈ 68 Comments

Tags

Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Bering Sea Superstorm, Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Dr. Jennifer Francis, Lake-Effect Snow, Mangled Jet Stream, Physicist Paul Beckwith, Super Typhoon Nuri, Techno-Utopians

“A vehicle, with a large chunk of snow on its top, drives along Route 20 after digging out from a massive snow fall in Lancaster, N.Y. on Nov. 19”

Snow-Bombed Buffalo NY

Buffalo, NY is the latest loser of industrial civilization’s destabilization of the climate with a tally of 13 dead, 30 major roof collapses and nearly three times as many minor roof collapses, not to mention the soon-to-be flooded homes as the mountains of snow melt in next week’s wild oscillation back to unseasonably high temps. As much as 90 inches of snow fell on the Buffalo area in just three days, prompting climatologist Paul Beckwith to tweet the following remarks:

What Happens in the Arctic Does Not Stay in the Arctic

What caused this unusually heavy lake-effect snowstorm in Buffalo?…
Firstly, record warm Pacific waters gave birth to Super Typhoon Nuri, the second most intense tropical cyclone worldwide of 2014. Also fueling the creation of such a storm is an atmosphere over the oceans that has 5% more moisture in it than prior to 1970. From there the typhoon moved into the Bering Sea of the Arctic and transformed into an extratropical cyclone that was “the most powerful storm to ever move over the Bering Sea in recorded history in a terms of central pressure.” This cyclone caused an “Arctic outbreak” by pushing the weakened Jet Stream southward, carrying that region’s cold air down into North America. This blast of cold Arctic wind swept across the warm waters of the Great Lakes and strengthened the lake-effect snowfall. The lakes’ warm air evaporated up into the freezing atmosphere and condensed, coming down as a snow bomb on the residents of Erie county.

Clear image of lake effect snow from NASA. Clouds and snow are to the South and East of each Great Lake. :

Decadal data proves that a warming world is making this lake-effect snowfall even more intense as humans continue their grand chemistry experiment with the planet’s atmosphere. The waters of the Great Lakes are getting warmer and losing their historic freeze point to form ice cover during winter; thus an increasing temperature differential between the warm waters of the lakes and the cold Arctic air passing overhead provides greater energy for stronger lake-effect snowfalls. The more heat energy we inject into Earth’s atmosphere, the more statistically likely that freak weather and powerful storms will occur. Fossil fuel-burning humans are continuing to load the dice of climate chaos and the big losers will most certainly be the future generations of every living thing on the planet.

Lake Erie is warming (along with the rest of the planet) by a steady but measurable amount. Since 1960 that trend has been about a half of a degree Fahrenheit per decade. More important than this, though, Lake Erie has been losing its ability to freeze over in the winter, with a decline of about one sub-freezing day per year in recent decades. – Link

Concomitantly, lake-effect snow events are increasing in the interim as the Arctic melts away and loses its ability to regulate global weather patterns.

Deformed Jet Stream

According to climate experts Jennifer Francis and others, Anthropogenic global warming is altering jet stream behavior and making certain weather extremes more likely to occur:

“We know that the Arctic is warming much faster than everywhere else on the planet,” Francis said. That’s important because the speed of the jet stream as it moves eastwards is driven by the temperature differential between the Arctic and areas to the south.

“Because the warming is so fast, it’s causing that temperature differential to become smaller, and as a result the winds, west-east winds, are getting weaker,” Francis said.

When the jet stream weakens, it tends to wander more north and south — instead of its usually straight circle around the Northern Hemisphere. Francis said that scientists measuring the “waviness” of the jet stream have found that it becomes wavier as the Arctic melts. Masters echoed Francis, saying, “We’ve experienced record loss of Arctic sea ice and … when that happens it can influence the jet stream to allow more frequent plunges over the eastern part of the U.S.”

“We’ve had record-breaking Arctic sea ice loss over the last 15 years, and we’ve seen a lot more of these Arctic plunges over the eastern two-thirds of the U.S., starting around 2000,” Masters added. – Link

————————-

…the evidence in her favor is mounting — she cites no fewer than five (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) scientific papers published in the last year or so that she considers supportive, and hints that more are coming. “We’ve got 5 papers that all look at that particular mechanism in different ways — different analysis, different data sets, observation and models — and they all come to the same conclusion and they all identify this mechanism independently,” she says. – Link

Anthropogenic Climate Disruption is Still Greek to Most Americans

If polling studies are any indication, all of this talk about jet streams, extreme weather, and the melting Arctic is still greek to the average American:

The survey also reveals a “misunderstanding” of climate change as only one in 10 of those polled said they know that more than 90 percent of climate scientists say humans are contributing to global warming. Just half blame human activity while even fewer are “very worried” about climate change.

“Very few Americans are aware that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is human caused,” the authors said. “This public misunderstanding of the scientific consensus — which has been found in each of our surveys since 2008 — has significant consequences.” – Link

And the politicians are still talking out of both sides of their mouths on the subject:

As are corporations:

And to the very end, the climate change illiterate will continue to drown out those who still have a certain level of brain activity:

And lastly, the multiple environmental crises we face are like a multi-headed hydra. Cut one head off with a techno-fix and it grows two more. Even those who are well-read and knowledgable on climate change still hold fast to a techno-utopian future, clueless as to what is and isn’t sustainable:

Remember… it’s the economy, stupid!

Death by Dollar$ and Suicide by CO2

08 Saturday Nov 2014

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

≈ 179 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Bliss Point of Sugar, Capitalism, Carrying Capacity, Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate $tate, Corporatocracy, Dalai Lama, Death by Dollars, Dr. Suzanne de la Monte, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Geoengineering, Hydropower, Inverted Totalitarianism, IPCC, Kurt Vonnegut, Mass Die Off, Nate Hagens, Overpopulation, Paul Chefurka, Processed Food, Senator James Inhofe, Senator Mitch McConnell, Suicide by CO2, The Unsustainability of Mega-Cities, Tragedy of Privatizing the Commons, WWF's Living Planet Report

Unresponsive and Corrupt Governments

Another election cycle passes and the American people responded with the lowest voter turnout since WWII. The staged events of today’s political rallies will soon be composed solely of people paid off with corporate bribes to wave flags and chant slogans. As ever more corporate money floods into the faux democratic process, participation by the average citizenry has plummeted. Americans are now more disillusioned with the charade of “American democracy” than at any time in history:

Confidence in Congress as an institution is at 7%, the lowest measurement in history and lower than any other institution tested, including organized labor, banks and big business. Views of the honesty and ethics of members of Congress are at 8% on average, one percentage point above lobbyists, but one point below car salesmen… – link

We are also undoubtedly becoming more callous and insensitive to our fellow-man when a 90-year-old gentleman is arrested for feeding the homeless from a church kitchen. In fact, we’ve lost all our humanity and exchanged it for the almighty dollar. Neoliberal capitalism has permeated very aspect of social and civic life, creating a new epitaph for the demise of such a mean-spirited culture —‘death by dollars’.

You Are What You Eat

I just became aware of Dr. Suzanne de la Monte’s studies on the food industry’s use of sugar in all its products in order to fabricate a consumer “bliss point” for maximizing sales. Capitalist industrial civilization has bred a morbidly obese creature conditioned to overeat processed food spiked with sugar, fat, and salt. A high-fructose diet has undoubtedly turned the cognitive skills of many into mush. John Oliver recently used a clip from her work in his takedown of the sugar industry:

“De la Monte has done her research by feeding healthy rats the equivalent of a North American diet, complete with all the sugars and fat. All her rats ended up demented.” – from the documentary The Secrets of Sugar

The Dopamine Rush of Fossil Fuels

With the recent elections the lunatics have taken control of the asylum. Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, recipient of 2012 Rubber Dodo Award, is in line to chair the Senate’s top environmental job, and incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says his first priority will be to “do whatever I can to get the EPA reined in.” At least a dozen newly-elected climate science deniers will be there to help Mitch compete with China and India in a race to global mass extinction.

The IPCC stated back in 2007 that emissions would have to peak in 2015 to avoid a rise of 2°C, but since that is not going to happen, they are putting their hopes in technology that could pull CO2 out of the atmosphere while conceding that such techniques are “uncertain” and “limited”. Mankind’s grave is already deep enough, yet we keep digging. Just as China’s coal consumption has registered a drop for the first time this century, India has announced it will pick up the slack by planning to double its coal production to meet the country’s soaring energy demand. Poland has rejected the IPCC target of zero emissions by 2100. In the U.S., new data has revealed that climate change has become the most politically divisive issue in the U.S.

According to energy expert Nate Hagens, modern-day carbon man’s metabolic energy consumption makes each of us a 30-ton primate. It appears the Pavlovian conditioning of modern man to energy dense fossil fuels and capitalist wealth have irrevocably hacked and rewired his brain’s reward system. The autopsy results for the age of the Anthropocene will read: “fossil fuel overdose” and “suicide by CO2”.

Hydropower is Not Green

Even overlooking the GHG emissions from a dam’s construction and maintenance, hydropower is seen by some as a “renewable energy source”, yet it is apparently a much larger source of methane emissions than once thought, perhaps releasing nearly as much as the methane emissions that accompany the burning of fossil fuels:

…In 2012 study, researchers in Singapore found that greenhouse gas emissions from hydropower reservoirs globally are likely greater than previously estimated, warning that “rapid hydropower development and increasing carbon emissions from hydroelectric reservoirs to the atmosphere should not be downplayed.”

Those researchers suggest all large reservoirs globally could emit up to 104 teragrams of methane annually. By comparison, NASA estimates that global methane emissions associated with burning fossil fuels totals between 80 and 120 teragrams annually…

Nonetheless, industrial civilization is currently damming up every large river on the planet:

The Unraveling Web of Life

The WWF(World Wildlife Fund) released its biennial ‘Living Planet Report’ which some on Twitter are calling the ‘Dead Planet Report’. The silence of mass extinction draws ever nearer…

The report writers, based on data kept by the Zoological Society of London, studied 10,380 populations of 3,038 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles from 1970 to 2010. Over these four decades, the average decline of these vertebrate species was 52 per cent – all in less than two human generations.

Amongst freshwater species the population decline was a staggering 76 per cent, owing to habitat loss, land fragmentation, pollution and invasive species.

In the same period terrestrial species declined by 39 per cent through unsustainable land use and increased poaching, often spurred on by wildlife crime syndicates.

Marine species declined also by 39 per cent, to include large migratory seabirds, many shark species and also sea turtles.

A major contributory factor to marine loss of life was through by catching (accidentally catching, in certain fish net sizes, species which were of no market value and then casting these dead fish overboard), illegal fishing and overfishing of the same fishing grounds.

Currently we need a 50 per cent bigger Earth to allow the regeneration of the natural resources we consume…

…By 2050, we will have an extra 2.4 billion people in our world, with urban populations increasing from 3.6 billion in 2011 to 6.3 billion. In 1970, there were only two megacities (over 10 million people) – New York and Tokyo; in 2014 there are 28 such cities – 16 in Asia, three each in Europe and Africa, four in Latin America and two in North America, all totalling 12 per cent of the world’s urban population.

The United Nations (UN) predicts that in 2025, there will be 37 megacities with eight new ones in Asia. Also in the pipeline are meta-cities – conurbations of over 20 million people – through the amalgamation of megacities…

…The report interestingly mentions that the diversity of human languages in our world is strongly correlated to areas of high plant diversity. Some linguists have predicted that 90 per cent of the world’s languages will expire by the end of this century…

Here is an interesting graph created by Paul Chefurka which shows that the combined biomass of humans with their farm animals exceeds the natural carrying capacity of the earth sevenfold:

In the graphic, the “wild animal” biomass doesn’t include insects, bacteria, or marine organisms.

I used three data sources to develop the chart: a paper by world-respected ecological scientist Vaclav Smil, called “Harvesting the Biosphere”, linked below; world population estimates from the Wikipedia article of the same name; and the UN’s Medium Fertility variant for the human population in 2050 (9.6 billion).

The definition I used for Global Carrying Capacity is, “The biomass the planet can support without the assistance of human technology or fossil fuels.” The impact of human activity has gradually eroded the Earth’s carrying capacity over time, which is why I show the red dotted line sloping down to the right. The degree of erosion is very hard to estimate. My guess is that we may have lost around 25% by this point, some of which would of course be naturally regenerated over time in the absence of human activity. Any biomass above that dotted line has to be supported by human technology and energy supplies (which at this point are mostly from fossil fuels).

The conclusion is that we have been living in the midst of an accelerating Global Mass Extinction Event for over 100 years already. Unfortunately we’ve been too fixated on human issues like economics and politics to even notice, let alone realize what it means. Those who did realize the significance, both to wildlife and the human species, have been powerless to act in the face of economics and politics.

Paul gives the following further explanation for the graph:

The definition one uses for “carrying capacity” is so loose as to make it quite arbitrary. Here’s the definition I used: “The global carrying capacity is the total biomass of the organisms under consideration that the planet can support without the assistance of technology or fossil fuels.”

Accordingly, I estimated the carrying capacity in this case as being about the same as the world’s wild animal biomass in 10,000 BCE, with the assumption that the unassisted carrying capacity of the world would have been fully utilized at that point. I estimated the wild animal biomass in 10,000 BCE as being somewhat less than the combined wild and domestic animal biomass in 1900, per Smil. I made it lower in order to account for the technological intensification of farming already well under way by that time.

The slope of the carrying capacity line is arbitrary, because it’s impossible to determine how much we have actually eroded the world’s unassisted carrying capacity. We just know that we have. I chose the slope to correspond to my belief that we’ve eroded it by about 25% at this point. The actual slope is therefore somewhat editorial.

The Dalai Lama says, “Affection, a sense of community and a sense of concern for others are not some kind of luxury. They’re about the survival of humanity,” but the socio-economic system that rules the world is characterized by hyper-individualism and self-interest devoid of moral constraints. A system that enshrines greed and mocks equity and the public good will never be able to find a solution to the tragedy of privatizing the commons.

All lights are about to go out. No more electricity. All forms of transportation are about to stop, and the planet Earth will soon have a crust of skulls and bones and dead machinery. And nobody can do a thing about it. It’s too late in the game. Don’t spoil the party, but here’s the truth: We have squandered our planet’s resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn’t going to be one.
~ Kurt Vonnegut

Paradise Lost and Future Pending

28 Tuesday Oct 2014

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

≈ 60 Comments

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6th Mass Extinction, Abrupt Climate Change, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), California Drought, Capitalism, Cold Fusion, Dr. Erik Pianka, Extinction of Man, Fracking Chemicals Contaminating Groundwater, Global Famine, Greenhouse Gases, Materialism, Oscar Wilde, Techno-Utopians

The following video message is from Dr. Erik Pianka, an esteemed American biologist, one of the world’s most accomplished field ecologists, and author of the classic 1983 book Evolutionary Ecology. This video was made roughly four years ago. Not much has changed in the interim other than everything getting progressively worse —more people, more cars, more garbage landfills, more greenhouse gas emissions, more ocean acidification, more extinctions, etc…

To save the habitability of the Earth, many enlightened environmentalists and thinkers have proposed a radical but simple solution which calls for a reconfiguration of modern society into a much lower energy-intensive way of life with food production localized and resources socialized —just the opposite of what is now happening in our no-holds-barred global capitalist system. However, the time for a transition was decades ago before we had gone so far into overshoot that world powers are now scrambling to lay claim to the melting Arctic, carving up Africa for its land and water while unleashing a pandemic, and contaminating the dwindling aquifers with fracking waste. Our so-called leaders are too busy constructing an omnipresent spying Panopticon to bother noticing the gathering storm of climatic hellfire and brimstone. When harsh reality finally assert itself, such human folly will have created unfathomable catastrophes.

Not many have given much thought to how America will feed itself after the collapse of California’s agriculture industry is complete:

Farming is never going to go back, regardless of how much rain we get next year, to the way it was in the ’70s and ’80s. It’s a long-term era of scarcity.

California is much bigger than it was when these reservoirs were built, 40 or 50 years ago. There’s more water going to cities and the environment now. That boom era of California farming, I think everyone recognizes, is just a thing of the past.

They used to flood-irrigate everything here. When I was a kid, growing up, you’d walk outside in the middle of summer, six or seven months since the last rain, and it would be humid outside because there’d be so much irrigation going on. You hardly ever see anything flood-irrigated anymore. That time, that’s just not coming back.

The solution is not the techno-utopian fantasy of cold fusion. Even if cold fusion was a realistic possibility, the creation of unlimited amounts of ultra-cheap energy wielded in the hands of techno-capitalist man would surely spell disaster for any last vestiges of life that might have survived the omnicide of capitalist industrial civilization and the age of fossil fuels. A good steward of the Earth’s resources and web of life would never have perpetuated the 6th mass extinction and defiled the planet that gave birth to his kind while arrogantly naming himself Homo sapiens (Latin: “Wise man”).

Capitalist carbon man acted like a bull in a china shop, throwing his weight around and blindly destroying everything in his path. Now he wants to invent even more disruptive tools with which to save himself from the very techno-nightmare that he has already created? He treated the biosphere like a buyosphere, and money was his God. His epitaph was inscribed long ago by Oscar Wilde who perceptively said, “They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Tragically, humans had their chance in a magnificent paradise and they blew it in spades.

The Systemic Roots of a Global Pandemic

19 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil

≈ 50 Comments

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Allee Effect, Antebacterial Drug Resistance, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Bill Gates, Capitalism, Center for Disease Control (CDC), Circuits of Capital, Conflict Minerals, Corporate Neo-Colonialism, Ebola, Epidemic, IMF, Infinite Growth Paradigm, ISIS, Neoliberal Capitalism, Pandemic, Peak Antibiotics, Rare Earth Minerals, Resource Wars, Rob Wallace, The Global Land Grab, The Resource Curse, The Roman Empire, War for Profit, World Bank, World Health Organization, Yves Smith

Over the ages, a number of empires have exploited and looted the resource-rich lands of Africa. At its height, the Roman Empire stretched from Scotland in the northern hemisphere to the deserts of Africa in the south. The Romans stripped their North African territory of its trees, making it their breadbasket of grain production. Originating in central Africa, malaria was likely spread to the center of the Roman Empire on their cargo ships. Passengers on their boats could have carried malaria in their bloodstream before becoming symptomatic, and water barrels on board could have harbored mosquito larvae. In fact, the DNA work of Dr. Robert Sallares has proven that the most lethal form of malaria helped topple ancient Rome. Fast forwarding to today, the blow-back from industrial agriculture and transnational corporate land grabs in Africa has now reached the shores of the hegemonic American Empire in the form of a deadly tropical disease called Ebola.

The Roman Empire seized fertile African land by brute force, but in modern times capitalist industrial civilization takes over Third World countries with the stroke of a pen. Structural adjustment loans by such tools of western power as the IMF and World Bank are signed requiring privatization of the economy and government cuts in social spending. Vast tracks of forests are cleared for mining or monoculture crop production such as palm oil. Subsistence farmers are dispossessed of their ancestral lands and forced to migrate to cities in search of work. Deprived of adequate healthcare and the opportunity to earn a livable wage, these urban poor live in squalor and are driven to hunt in the surrounding forests for a cheap source of protein known as bushmeat. Fruit bats, a keystone environmental species, have been identified as an Ebola virus host that has spread the disease through bushmeat consumption, habitat destruction, and human encroachment. Thus the neoliberal agenda of ‘developed’ nations has acted to create the atmosphere from which this pandemic arose.

Due to the long history of exploitation by outside powers, native Africans are justifiably wary and prone to conspiracy theories involving intervention by Western institutions as well as their own governments which have been, to a great degree, corrupted by the resource curse. These unpleasant facts are, of course, never mentioned by the MSM because it might spark a flicker of moral compunction in the ‘developed’ world which has ended up with so much of Africa’s wealth in the form of rare earth minerals used inside electronic devices, gold and diamonds in jewelry, or petrol pumped into vehicles. The horrific realities behind conflict minerals are always kept out of sight and out of mind by the next consumer diversion.

The following video is a brilliant lecture by Rob Wallace, evolutionary biologist and public health phylogeographer, discussing the epidemiologic links between the current Ebola outbreak and the socioeconomic policies of capitalist industrial civilization.

“Pathogens routinely trace society’s inequalities and expropriations like water traces cracks in ice… Ebola represents such a case. The shifts in land use in the Guinean region where the new strain apparently emerged are connected to the kinds of neoliberal structural adjustments that, alongside divesting public health infrastructure, open domestic food production to global circuits of capital… [The corporate agribusiness land acquisitions in Africa] are markers of a complex policy-driven faith change in agroecology…that undergirds Ebola’s emergence here.” ~ Rob Wallace

In biology there is a phenomenon known as the Allee effect which occurs when a species declines to a critical population threshold, becoming too spread out over a large area to find a mate for reproduction and thereby making a crash to extinction all but inevitable. The Allee effect applies to infectious diseases as well, and if you can knock down an outbreak below an infection threshold through such methods as vaccinations or proper sanitation, then the outbreak can burn out on its own. However, as Rob Wallace wryly states, “…structural problems can render emergency responses null and void, no matter how much Bill Gates pays out.” In other words, we may have destroyed the ecosystem’s natural ability to keep such pathogens in check and from expanding out of control in the future:

“…commoditizing the forest and neoliberal dispossession may have lowered the region’s ecosystemic threshold to a point that no emergency intervention can drive the pathogen population low enough to burn out on its own. The pathogen will continue to circulate with the potential to explode. In short, neoliberalism’s shifts aren’t just a background upon which such emergencies take place. It is the emergency as much as the virus itself. And history has demonstrated this time and again. Faith changes and social organization, for better and for worse, change epidemiologies. Domesticated livestock served as sources for human diphtheria, influenza, measles, mumps, plague, pertussis, rotavirus, tuberculosis, sleeping sickness, etc. Ecological changes brought about upon landscapes by human intervention selected for spill-overs of cholera from algae, malaria from birds, and dengue fever and yellow fever from wild primates… We can pretend otherwise for Ebola, but in protecting the rationals for institutions and policies that likely brought about such outbreaks, if as byproducts of a greater economy alone, we will surely only compound the problem. If not by Ebola this year, then perhaps something else next.”

In addition to the ecosystemic impact of industrial agriculture and global circuits of capital, our highly mobile society and the consequent climate disruption from fossil-fueled globalization have worked to propel the spread of invasive species, diseases, and pathogens:

The following graph show the increase of invasive species since 1500 with an explosion in the last 100 years:

Overuse of antibiotics and lack of developing new antibiotics are also facilitating the mutation, spread, and rebirth of deadly pathogens across the globe. No new class of antibiotics has been discovered since the 1980’s.

Below is a chart showing the increase in bacterial resistance for selected pathogens. “For example, Staphylococcus aureus resistant to methicillin has increased almost 70% since about 1975.” The dawning of an antibiotic apocalypse is upon us:

A new tv special entitled The Trouble with Antibiotics aired this past week (h/t reader PBM):

“FRONTLINE investigates the widespread use of antibiotics in food animals and whether it is fueling the growing crisis of antibiotic resistance in people. Plus an exclusive interview with the family of a young man who died in a superbug outbreak that swept through a hospital at the National Institutes of Health.”

Amplifying what some call peak antibiotics is the fact that in our capitalist economy, the perverse incentive for monetary profit discourages pharmaceutical companies from developing new antibiotics; there is no market for curing… only prolonging:

…Ebola emerged 40 years ago, and, Dr. Chan said, there were no vaccines or other remedies because it has traditionally been confined to poor African countries. A profit-driven pharmaceutical industry had no incentive to make products for countries that could not pay, she said.

The risks of neglecting health care in developing countries are global, Dr. Chan said, adding that “when a deadly and dreaded virus hits the destitute and spirals out of control, the whole world is put at risk.”… – link

The budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has also stagnated, leaving Dr. Francis Collins, head of the NIH, to admit that an Ebola vaccine would likely have been found by now if not for budget cuts:

The fragmented and “crapified” nature of America’s for-profit healthcare system has also factored into the fumbled response to Ebola’s invasion into America, as Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism explained recently:

…the statistics say compared to other developed countries, US processes and outcomes are at best mediocre using the best of some admittedly flawed metrics (look here), yet our costs are much higher than those of comparable countries. Furthermore, on Health Care Renewal we have been connecting the dots among severe problems with cost, quality and access on one hand, and huge problems with concentration and abuse of power, enabled by leadership of health care organizations that is ill-informed, incompetent, unsympathetic or hostile to health care professionals’ values, self-interested, conflicted, dishonest, or even corrupt and governance that fails to foster transparency, accountability, ethics and honesty…

…The US health care system is now heavily commercialized. Health care corporations, including pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, are often lead by generic managers who subscribe to the business school dogma of the “shareholder value theory,” which seems to translate into putting short-term revenues ahead of all other goals. Thus they have been“financialized.” At least in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector, such financialization appears to now be global…

…from 1983 to 2000, the number of managers working in the US health care system grew 726%, while the number of physicians grew 39%, so the manager/physician ratio went from roughly one to six to one to one (see 2005 post here). As we noted here, the growth continued, so there are now 10 managers for every US physician…

International institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO) have also been “crapified’ under neoliberal ideology:

There is little wonder why the Ebola outbreak caught the WHO so flat footed as they spent months making mealy mouthed statements but never coordinating an effective response. The Gates foundation is the WHO boss, not governments, and if they weren’t demanding action, then the desperate people affected by Ebola weren’t going to get any…

…The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged an additional $50 million to fight the current Ebola epidemic but that too is problematic, as Director General Chan describes. “When there’s an event, we have money. Then after that, the money stops coming in, then all the staff you recruited to do the response, you have to terminate their contracts.” The WHO should not be lurching from crisis to crisis, SARS, MERS, or H1N1 influenza based on the whims of philanthropy. The principles of public health should be carried out by knowledgeable medical professionals who are not dependent upon rich people for their jobs.

The Gates are not alone in using their deep pockets to confound what should be publicly held responsibilities. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was contributing $25 million to fight Ebola. His donation will go to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation. Most Americans are probably unaware that such a foundation even exists. Yet there it is, run by a mostly corporate board which will inevitably interfere with the public good…

Essentially, both ISIS and the Ebola pandemic are crises of the corporate state’s own making. Vast sums of money have flowed into America’s war machine to fight the terrorist threat of ISIS, yet the specter of a global pandemic has elicited a much more belated and tepid reaction from the leaders of our brave new privatized and financialized system of government. As with climate change, it has become clear once again that the health of the world and its people cannot be trusted with these adherents of neoliberal capitalism, and as I stated in a previous blog post, the conspiracy is systemic and legalized. The virus of capitalist industrial civilization appears to be on an unstoppable trajectory of burning itself out within our children’s lifetime.

“It was a nice run for the biosphere, but it finally came down with a lethal disease, homeostasis lost, the pyramid of life reduced to the pancake of life.” ~ James