04 Saturday Oct 2014
Tags
André Carrilho, Culture Jamming, Ebola, End-Stage Capitalism, Jani Leinonen, Ron English, The Onion, Weekend Funnies for the Depressed Collapsitarian
Capitalism’s onward march to self-destruction (by Polyp):
Poignant Ebola cartoon by André Carrilho:
In Our Dreams We Have Seen Another World:
Culture Jamming by JANI LEINONEN:
Culture Jamming money:
More culture jamming with Ron English:
Bon appétit…
Irresponsible parenting in 21st century end-stage capitalism:
29 Monday Sep 2014
Tags
6th Mass Extinction, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, China's State Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Dennis Meadows, Dr. Ovamir Anjum, Environmental Generational Amnesia, Gross Inequality, Linear Thinking, Maldistribution of Wealth, Nihilism, Overconsumption, Overpopulation, Peak Debt, Shifting Baselines, The Limits to Growth
The linear thinking that has dominated Western civilization since the Enlightenment has become a death trap for mankind in the 21st century. The dynamic system of the Earth’s biosphere with its many interconnected parts interacting in complex and unpredictable ways is clashing with modern man’s linear, sequential, and reductionist frame of thought for solving problems. Technical fixes only act as bandaids to the inherent flaws of global techno-capitalism. Time lags and feedbacks set in motion by industrial civilization’s rampant consumption of natural resources will extend over centuries and into deep geologic time. Ignoring the various environmental and social warnings at our own peril, we neither fully understand nor comprehend the consequences of our unsustainable way of life. The laws of physics and chemistry are indifferent to such human tragedy.
Institutional changes required to deal with complicated problems such as climate change move at a sloth’s pace, and the transition to new energy sources has proven historically to be a long, drawn-out process spanning decades. Never mind the fact that so-called ‘green energy’ cannot support the current mode of living nor the overpopulated state of the planet. In other words, our current socio-economic system is unsalvageable.
After one accepts, at least on a subconscious level, these realities, is it then any wonder that nihilism is on the rise? What is more nihilistic than the view that our fate is the end result of the “evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate”, that “human intelligence is a lethal mutation”(Ernst Mayr), and that industrial civilization is a cancerous growth? I would qualify such thinking by stating that intelligence without wisdom brings destruction. Wisdom is not a genetic trait and has little to do with intelligence. Wisdom is attained through life experience and conscious choice.
There is nothing wise about the culture of capitalist industrial civilization. Global capitalism co-opts and corrupts everything within its sphere; what it cannot control, it kills. Flip the channel to CNN’s Anothony Bourdain and you’ll see a celebration of unrestrained capitalism and “free markets” in China, a country suffocating under the weight of its own pollution:
…Shanghai can come as a rude surprise. In spite of its nominally communist system, it is the most go-go, unfettered, money and status mad, materialistic place on earth. Its skyline alone is confirmation that money talks loudest. In no other city could you build the world’s largest, tallest and ominously curved phallus—stick it right up into the clouds like a giant “FUCK YOU!” to the world and not have trouble with the NIMBYs…
Billions clamoring for an American level of consumption appears to be the real weapon of mass destruction on the planet. Capitalism shows no sign of stopping its downward spiral into barbarism:
The dilemma of progress, as captured neatly by the authors of The Axemaker’s Gift(1995), is that the human species’ very success in exploiting its natural environment and dominating others of their kind (the two go hand in hand), and generally fulfilling its aspirations (and its aspirations, unlike those of all other animals, seem to have no limits) has directly led to its self-destruction. The linear march of progress, on this view, has been from human life in caves only minimally taxing its environment, to life as tribes and agriculturalists exploiting it just a bit more, to modern life. And what is modernity but the triangle of secular science, corporate-capitalism, and nation-states – all made possible by the human ability to create large, secular, result-oriented organizations? In this inexorable story of progress, nature (as well as human lifestyles friendlier to it) have been the losers.
~ Dr. Ovamir Anjum
Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of the prophetic book The Limits to Growth, says that because capitalist industries and the political-legal framework supporting them are so powerful and entrenched, humanity will not evolve through proactive change, but will stumble into multiple unfolding crises as it clings to failing policies and ideologies of promoting material growth at the expense of all else. If we look at current news, this is clearly what is happening:
Global debt is still soaring:
…Overall, the world’s total debt load has risen from 160 per cent of national income in 2001 to almost 200 per cent after the crisis struck in 2009.
But contrary to all the talk of “deleveraging” that ratio has actually increased since the financial crisis, and was up to 215 per cent globally last year. Put another way, the world owed a collective $70 trillion US before the last recession. But today that figure is up to $100 trillion.
“Contrary to widely held beliefs, the world has not yet begun to delever and the global debt to GDP ratio is still growing, breaking new highs,” the report reads…
The cognitive dissonance between our fossil fuel use and the collapsing environment continues:
Global overpopulation shows no signs of stopping:
The Wealth Gap continues to grow:
The most striking finding in the new Survey of Consumer Finances may be the degree to which wealth is being concentrated in the hands of a small portion of the population.
That trend isn’t new. “Many other studies have also shown the lasting effects of the recession and documented rising income disparity in the United States,” writes Reuters.
But the SCF shows that the wealth gap continues to grow. The share of wealth belonging to the richest 3 percent of Americans was:
44.8 percent in 1989.
51.8 percent in 2007.
54.4 percent in 2013.
And the 6th extinction is far worse than we realize:
These are just a few of the realities once we scrape away the greenwashing, political spin, and optimism bias humans are prone to, but let’s not get “lost in a roman wilderness of pain.” Check back with me next year and the story will be much the same as humans accept higher poverty rates, a steeper Keeling Curve, and lower biodiversity levels as the new normal. There’s a name for this gradual adaptation of humans to a worsening environment —environmental generational amnesia. We really won’t know what we’ve been missing until everything is far too gone to support another generation of humans.
16 Tuesday Sep 2014
Tags
Alan Weisman's 'The World Without Us', Anthropocentrism, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Edward O. Wilson's Consilience, Extinction of Man, Greenwashing, Pandemic, Resource Wars, Runaway Climate Change, Sara Teasdale, Sea Level Rise, Techno-Optimists
False Gods
To the extent that we depend on prosthetic devices to keep ourselves and the biosphere alive, we will render everything fragile. To the extent that we banish the rest of life, we will impoverish our own species for all time. And if we should surrender our genetic nature to machine-aided ratiocination, and our ethics and art and our very meaning to a habit of careless discursion in the name of progress, imagining ourselves godlike and absolved from our ancient heritage, we will become nothing.
~ Edward O. Wilson, Consilience; Chapter 12: ‘What Does It All Mean?’
From its inception, capitalism paved a one-way path to annihilation, predicated as it was on unmitigated growth, the extraction of finite resources, the exaltation of individualism over communal ties, and the maximization of profit at the expense of the environment and society. The capitalist world was, as one author described so bleakly, ”dominated by the concerns of trade and Realpolitik rather than by human rights and spreading democracy”; it was a ”civilization influenced by the impersonal, bottom-line values of the corporations.” Capitalist industrial civilization was built on burning the organic remains of ancient organisms, but at the cost of destroying the stable climatic conditions which supported its very construction. The thirst for fossil fuels by our globalized, high-energy economy spurred increased technological development to extract the more difficult-to-reach reserves, but this frantic grasp for what was left only served to hasten the malignant transformation of Earth into an alien world.
The Fossil Fuel Age did not end for lack of fossil fuels, but because there was no place left to store its CO2 waste. Earth’s overwhelmed carbon sinks became carbon sources. Humans with their hubristic technological overreach had been living on borrowed time for a long time; techno-fixes were not able to artificially expand the carrying capacity of the planet any longer. The climax of the ecological crisis had arrived.
The ruling class tried to hold things together for as long as they could by printing money, propping up markets, militarizing domestic law enforcement, and orchestrating thinly veiled resource wars in the name of fighting terrorism, but the crisis of capitalism was intertwined with the ecological crisis and could never be solved by those whose jobs and social standing depended on protecting the status quo. All the corporate PR, greenwashing, political promises, cultural myths, and anthropocentrism could not hide the harsh Malthusian reality of ecological overshoot. As crime sky-rocketed and social unrest boiled over into rioting and looting, the elite retreated behind walled fortresses secured by armed guards, but the great unwinding of industrial civilization was already well underway. This evil genie was never going back in the bottle.
The melting of the glacial poles meant that global weather patterns and jet streams were irrevocably altered. Consequently, extreme floods and drought wreaked havoc on agriculture. Sea levels also rose much faster than predicted, inundating coastal cities and salinating farmland. Currency markets collapsed, cell phones went silent, transportation systems ground to a halt, and grocery shelves went bare. The disintegration of globalized trade, the dissolution of nation states, and the exhaustion of the biosphere brought forth a new dark age. Deadly microbes and pathogens that had lain dormant or been restricted to certain outlying areas of the planet were now free to migrate and proliferate in new regions. This opened the door for a string of global pandemics that the world had never seen before. Pestilence and famine whittled the population down to under a billion within a few decades.
Entropic Wastelands
The electric glow of the world’s cities was blotted out; the stars and moon were the only sources of illumination in the pitch black of night. A ghostly silence replaced the hustle and bustle of people and machinery that once animated the city. Time was no longer measured with the hands of a clock, but by the rise and fall of the sun and the changing of the seasons. A carpet of overgrown grass, weeds, bramble, and trees silently overtook the crumbling city, uprooting and splitting concrete and asphalt. Skyscrapers, once the temples of corporate power and wealth, were now nothing more than monstrous sundials casting their long shadows across the decaying wastelands. Never again would there be such a complex, globe-spanning civilization on Earth.
Haunted for millenia by the legacy of mankind’s fossil fuel binge, roving bands of human survivors were condemned to wander this angry Earth. Only the most physically and mentally fit were able to eke out an existence in an increasingly inhospitable world to pass through the evolutionary bottleneck. They huddled together at night around bonfires and fed the flames with old office furniture and business papers from abandoned buildings. Without electricity, modern medicine, and sanitation systems, life became a short and brutal affair. Nature’s primal forces could no longer be disregarded; their harsh reality sharpened all the senses. Nearly all the technology that had enslaved and anesthetized modern man for so long was now of no use in this neo-medieval world. Megacities were reduced to entropic wastelands, their detritus scavenged by these post-apocalyptic tribes.
Like a rocket disintegrating in mid-flight, capitalist industrial civilization rushed headlong into oblivion, always believing human ingenuity and free markets would solve the mounting number of crises. It turned out humans were extraordinarily clever at deceiving others and, in turn, equally clever at deceiving themselves. They burned the devil’s excrement, split atoms to play with lethal radiation, and tinkered with the building blocks of life, but they never heeded numerous warnings against such folly. Like Icarus who, flying too close to the sun, forgot that his wings were made of wax, humans ignored their earthly origins, believing too much in their own technological infallibility.
A passage from The World Without Us:
There Will Come Soft Rains
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
~ Sara Teasdale
22 Friday Aug 2014
Tags
"Renewable" Energies, '1 C Max', Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Alternative Energy Fetishes, Biofuels, Fossil Fuel Extenders, Green Illusions, Military Industrial Complex, Ozzie Zehner, Peak Oil, Resource Wars, Solar Energy, Techno-Fundamentalism, The Fertile Ground Institute, The Resource Curse, War for Profit, Wind Turbines
I’ve become rather jaded at the stream of ever-worsening environmental reports these days. Surely if we had some sort of techno-fix to halt the cascade of biospheric tipping points we have breached, we would have deployed them by now. Nevertheless, the carrot of a civilization-saving technological breakthrough is forever dangled before our eyes. By all accounts, we appear hellbent on doing everything humanly possible to maintain and perpetuate industrial civilization by deploying “earth-friendly” renewable energy technologies which, in the end, turn out to be nothing more than “reconstituted fossil fuels”.
The role that fossil fuels play in the creation, maintenance and support of alternative energy technologies is not discussed or analyzed at all by those peddling it to the masses who live with the hope of a “green” economy and carbon-neutral civilization. From the massive mining operations and manufacturing processes necessary to extract the rare earth metals essential in constructing wind turbines, solar panels, and electric car batteries to their daily maintenance, de-activation, and final discardment, the amount of fossil fuel energy embedded in the entire life cycle of such alternative energy technologies renders moot their benefits when compared to what is actually more effective in solving our energy and climate conundrum —reducing our consumption through energy efficiency improvements and waste reduction programs. Alternative energy technologies cannot replace our dependence on fossil fuels and are, in the final analysis, diverting us from coming to grips with a way-of-life that cannot go on for much longer. We have a consumption crisis.
Here is an excerpt from a must-see talk by engineer and energy analyst Ozzie Zehner, author of Green Illusions:
“Common knowledge presumes that we have a choice between fossil fuels and green energy, but alternative energy technologies rely on fossil fuels through every stage of their life cycle. Most importantly, alternative energy financing relies ultimately on the kind of economic growth that fossil fuels provide. Alternative energy technologies rely on fossil fuels for raw material extraction, for fabrication, for installation and maintenance, for back-up, as well as decommissioning and disposal. And at this point, there’s even a larger question: where will we get the energy to build the next generation of wind power and solar cells? Wind is renewable, but turbines are not. Alternative energy technologies rely on fossil fuels and are, in essence, a product of fossil fuels. They thrive within economic systems that are themselves reliant on fossil fuels.
Now, I’m no fan of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are finite and dirty, but we use them for five principal reasons. Fossil fuels are dense. Their energy is storable, portable, fungible (which means they can be easily traded), and they are transformable into other products like pesticides, fertilizers, and plastics.
Now, these qualities cannot be measured in kilowatts, so what happens when we spend our precious fossil fuels on building alternative energy. Well then we get energy that is not dense, but diffuse. It’s not easily storable. It’s not portable. It’s not fungible. And it is non-tranformable.
Now to increase the quality of the energy, we then have to spend more fossil fuels to build batteries, to build back-up power plants, and other infrastructure. And of course this is incredibly expensive. Ultimately that expense represents the hidden fossil fuels behind the scene.
There’s an impression that clean energy can supply a growing population of high consumers. There’s an impression that alternative energy can displace fossil fuel use, but the evidence doesn’t show that.
As Ozzie Zehner states, fossil fuels are finite and dirty. If you look at the headlines, the geopolitical wrangling and wars that takes place over the extraction of fossil fuels are another nasty and destabilizing side-effect of our dependency on fossil fuels. America’s global network of bases and its military industrial complex are yet another hidden cost of our fossil fuel addiction. Does President Obama tell the people of America the real underlying reason for why we are again bombing Iraq?
The US military intervention, despite its “humanitarian” propaganda, is nevertheless part of clear political objectives that are to protect American diplomatic personnel stationed in Erbil (which is also home to a CIA base) and large multinational companies in the hydrocarbon/oil sector such as Mobil, Chevron, Exxon and Total exploiting the oil production in the region and having already invested more than $10 billion there, but the primary purpose above all is to keep the Iraqi regime ally, inherited from the American invasion. The United States did not intervene when Mosul fell and other regions and more than 200 000 refugees were on the road in the direction of Iraqi Kurdistan, but only when IS was threatening to conquer the Kurdish areas of the North and the capital Baghdad in the South. – link
Here we are once again back at war because we need that black goo lying beneath the ground that those lunatic terrorists are running around on. And it also doesn’t help that America has become a warfare state with the corporations and the über rich benefitting every time we crank up our war machine.
Among many others who have written about this subject, here are two people from The Fertile Ground Institute who have also looked into alternative energy technologies and come away with the same conclusion as Ozzie Zehner:
I agree with commenter ‘C 1 Max’ whose many thoughtful comments at Robert Scribbler’s site were summarily deleted.
As long as we ignore the limitations of technology and the unsustainable nature of our economic system, the battle is lost for mankind. The grave we are digging for ourselves will only get deeper and deeper, spurred on by our alternative energy fetishes and temples to technology.
07 Monday Jul 2014
Tags
Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Albert Einstein, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, E.M. Forster: “THE MACHINE STOPS”, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Ferengi of Star Trek, Inverted Totalitarianism, Joseph Tainter, Kevin Lister's The Vortex of Violence and why we are losing the battle against climate change, Military Industrial Complex, Nuclear Proliferation, Peak Oil, Resource Wars, Rudolph Herzog, Social Unrest, Thermonuclear War, War for Profit, War Profiteers
“Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops – but not on our lives. The Machine proceeds – but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.”
~ E.M. Forster, “THE MACHINE STOPS”
Insects, birds, mammals, and fish have all been migrating to cooler zones for the past four decades in response to the cataclysmic climate disruption ignited by industrial civilization, but humans are the only organisms inhabiting this blue orb we call Earth who are not altering their behavior. They live within an energy cocoon that keeps them cool in the summer, warm in the winter, stuffed with massed produced food from mechanized factory farms, and entertained by a virtual world of digital imagery. As cracks and holes in the Earth’s biosphere grow ever larger, the natural response of capitalist carbon man ensconced within his protective energy shell is to try to put a price tag on what is being burned, i.e. fossil fuels, rather than deal with the deeper root cause of an unsustainable economic system and way of life which demands such exorbitant consumption of resources.
Our energy slaves feed us and control the climate for us while at the same time destroying the natural world that had enabled humans to create such an artificial environment. Detached from nature and enslaved by our own technological creations, we sleepwalk over the cliff of extinction. Our so-called progress will, in the end, disappear like a mirage in the scorching desert sun as nature is sacrificed to the machine of industrial civilization.
Throwing money into the maw of the ‘free market’ is the predictable modus operandi of technocapitalism’s indoctrinated disciples who believe such offerings will create a technofix, miraculously healing the planet. In the Star Trek TV series, the Ferengi were an extraterrestrial race whose culture was characterized by “a mercantile obsession with profit and trade, and their constant efforts to swindle unwary customers into unfair deals.” Just like the Ferengi species where profit is the first, last and only important factor, the high temples of private enterprise are commodifying and monetizing the atmosphere just as they have everything else in nature. The colonization of the public mind by capitalism is complete and overriding. We ignore unfolding geologic forces and instead put our faith in manmade market forces to our detriment.
In the final days of capitalist industrial civilization, the relentless and compulsive pursuit of profit and growth has subsumed any intelligent and realistic plans for survival. In fact, with the race amongst nations for nuclear technology and sophisticated weaponry, the requisite competitive economy to support such hi-tech militaries nullifies any attempts at reducing greenhouse emissions and pushes the world towards nuclear annihilation. As Kevin Lister, author of the forthcoming book The Vortex of Violence and why we are losing the battle against climate change, points out:
…The fundamental dilemma all nuclear weapons states face is that to maintain a credible nuclear force, be it a force of one or one thousand nuclear warheads on deployment, a massive military industrial complex must be maintained. As well as building the actual nuclear weapon systems, it must also provide the conventional defence screen consisting of fighter jets, patrols planes, anti-submarine warfare technology etc. In an ultimate irony, the purpose of these becomes to defend the nuclear forces to ensure a second strike can be launched rather than to defend people, because there is no defence against a determined nuclear attack. The military industrial complex that delivers this equipment must be continually fed with new streams of contracts at increasing values otherwise the industrial complex collapses. Thus a key objective in the initial gate document which justified to parliament the early procurement of material for Trident was that, “We must retain the capability to design, build and support nuclear submarines and meet the commitment for a successor to the Vanguard Class submarines.” In other words, we build Tridents to continue building Tridents.
The enormous cost of this needs to be covered by taxes, and for this some £500 billion of additional excess economic activity is needed which requires energy from fossil fuels and is the antithesis of making the urgent cut backs we need to tackle the soaring greenhouse gas overburden. Thus once the decision is made to proceed with Trident, it becomes impossible to make the climate change agreements to save the planet. In this context Trident is more dangerous than we ever first thought and it is the ultimate Faustian bargain.
Your commissioners have also failed to acknowledge in their report that the public spending that will be needed on Trident must be made at the same times as scarce public funds must be diverted to building a low carbon economy and mitigating the effects of climate change such as flooding and storm damage. This conflict will arise as tax receipts simultaneously drop through energy price rises.
The impossibility of meeting these conflicting challenges is the reason that much of the negotiations at climate change conferences takes place around the positions of the nuclear weapons states and their need to maintain large military industrial complexes and competitive and expanding economies to fund these…
…to build at huge expense a nuclear force whilst the nation is effectively bankrupt that will never provide secure protection from nuclear attack and merely encourage our competitors to reciprocate. It drives a race to the bottom where rational decisions on climate change can never be taken.
This nexus between global capitalism, the lucrative military-industrial complex, and the strategy of nuclear deterrence has locked the nations of the world into a trajectory of escalating anthropogenic climate disruption, environmental degradation and an ongoing arms race since World War II. Illustrative of this are the energy consumption levels of the U.S. DoD and war profiteering motives of defense contractors:
…The US military is the largest single consumer of energy in the world. If it were a country, the Department of Defense (DoD) would rank 34th in the world in average daily oil use, coming in just behind Iraq and just ahead of Sweden…
…Electricity usage by the military, which accounts for even more greenhouse gas emissions, is also gargantuan. In FY 2006, the DoD used almost 30,000 gigawatt hours of electricity at a cost of almost $2.2 billion. The DoD’s electricity use would supply enough electricity to power more than 2.6 million average American homes.
In fiscal year 2012, the DoD consumed about a billion gigawatt hours of site delivered energy at a cost of 20.4 billion dollars. While consuming that amount of energy, DoD emitted 70 million metric tons of CO2. And yet, total DoD energy use and costs are even higher simply because the energy use and costs arising from the contractors to support military operations both domestically and abroad are not included in DoD’s data…
…The increased propensity for war and conflict brought about by global warming is being exploited by the military-industrial complex which is planning on how to profit from it. Defense contractors are looking at climate change as a growth and profit opportunity due to the potential conflicts produced by food and water shortages. They are salivating over the potential profits to be made leading to increased stock market performance and, therefore, higher CEO compensation.
Defense contractors are setting their sights on a narrow-minded militarist approach. Indeed, the very companies most responsible for climate change are set to make a killing from its intensification. – link
Only one civilization in history has voluntarily uncomplicated/decomplexitized its society in the face of resource scarcity. According to Joseph Tainter, that civilization was the Byzantine Empire:
“After the Byzantine empire lost most of its territory to the Arabs, they simplified their entire society. Cities mostly disappeared, literacy and numeracy declined, their economy became less monetised, and they switched from professional army to peasant militia.”
As commenter James wryly puts it:
…Because the human ape is such a competitive and vicious sort, there must be a constant “progress” in technology and development to prevent being eaten by or dominated by another nation. Evolution writ large. Without a doubt it will end soon and nothing shall remain but the Ozymandian technological skeletons of times gone by…
Yes, where is the evolution? Teeming within the capitalist industrial civilization that is M.A.D. are 7+ billion naked apes, the most dangerous creature to ever walk the face of the Earth capable of wiping itself out within mere minutes from thermonuclear war, if anthropogenic climate disruption, ocean acidification, and global nuclear reactor meltdowns don’t do the trick.
As a warming planet cooks our brains and scrambles our environment, the trigger finger of some mentally ill and agitated soul may just belong to someone sitting at the launch button of a nuke. As Albert Einstein said, ‘I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’
Full video here: http://www.c-span.org/video/?312985-1/book-discussion-short-history-nuclear-folly
28 Wednesday May 2014
Posted in Peak Oil
Capitalism, no matter what label is put on it such as “green” capitalism or “inclusive” capitalism, still has the self-destructive characteristics of capitalism embedded within it. The very recent PR campaign orchestrated by the financial elite of the world under the socially responsible-sounding title of “inclusive capitalism” is no exception:
Yesterday’s Conference on Inclusive Capitalism co-hosted by the City of London Corporation and EL Rothschild investment firm, brought together the people who control a third of the world’s liquid assets – the most powerful financial and business elites – to discuss the need for a more socially responsible form of capitalism that benefits everyone, not just a wealthy minority.
Leading financiers referred to statistics on rising global inequalities and the role of banks and corporations in marginalising the majority while accelerating systemic financial risk – vindicating the need for change.
While the self-reflective recognition by global capitalism’s leaders that business-as-usual cannot continue is welcome, sadly the event represented less a meaningful shift of direction than a barely transparent effort to rehabilitate a parasitical economic system on the brink of facing a global uprising.
Central to the proceedings was an undercurrent of elite fear that the increasing disenfranchisement of the vast majority of the planetary population under decades of capitalist business-as-usual could well be its own undoing….
Systemic Disorder has written a clear-minded essay explaining why nothing short of a complete paradigm shift away from capitalism’s inherent growth and profit-maximizing imperatives is needed to save mankind.
Green capitalism is destined to fail: You can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results. We can’t shop our way out of global warming nor are there technological magic wands that will save us. There is no alternative to a dramatic change in the organization of the global economy and consumption patterns.
Such a change will not come without costs — but the costs of doing nothing, of allowing global warming to precede is far greater. Therefore it is healthy to approach with a dose of skepticism the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that concludes the annual reduction in “consumption growth” on a global basis would be only 0.06 percent during the course of the 21st century. Almost nothing!
Wahiba Sands, Oman (Photo by Andries Oudshoorn)
The “Summary for Policymakers” supplement of the IPCC’s Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change report, a dense 33-page document…
View original post 2,364 more words
19 Monday May 2014
Tags
BP, British Petroleum, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corexit, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Corporate State, Dr. Wilma Subra, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Sacrifice Zones, Environmental Collapse, Gross Inequality, Gulf Oil Spill, Industrial Disease, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Noam Chomsky, Peak Oil, Renfrey Clarke, Tragedy of the Commons, Vice Media: Crude Awakening
A recent investigative piece by Vice on the aftermath of the BP oil spill, America’s most devastating environmental accident to date and the “largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry”, shows that people are still getting sick and dying in the Gulf region.
Award winning chemist, Dr. Wilma Subra, conducted blood tests on Gulf Coast residents who were symptomatic with new illnesses and found that some of the cancer-causing agents were 65 times the expected level in the victims blood tests. Subra noted that Corexit is in the air, the water and the Gulf resident’s blood.
“There’s a whole population that’s very sick and doesn’t have access to medical care, and that’s what we’ve been trying to work on now, from the very beginning, is getting them medical care so they will get better,” says Subra. “How many people do you think we’re talking about, do we have any guess?” “Hundreds of thousands along the whole coastal area,” Subra says. “Hundreds of thousands of people?” “That are sick, yes.”
It also is likely that the BP cleanup workers are going to suffer the same fate. Listen to what Dr. Wilma Subra had to say about the health of this group.
These findings can leave little doubt that BP’s use of Corexit has seriously compromised the collective life span of Gulf Coast residents. This is a staggering implication for the collective longevity in the Gulf. – link
Nearly 2 millions gallons of Corexit were used to prevent the millions of barrels of leaked oil from hitting shorelines. Where did all that oil go? Once Corexit is dispersed over an oil slick, it causes the spilled oil to break apart and sink to the bottom of the ocean. In the case of the BP oil spill, this toxic material created massive kill zones on the Gulf floor. When oil and Corexit are mixed together, the resultant substance becomes 52 times more toxic and penetrates human skin much easier. The locals don’t eat what they catch, but remember that Obama said it was safe.
Corexit has been banned in 18 countries, including the UK, because “it is a cancerous causing neurotoxin pesticide that is acutely toxic to both human and marine life.” Every time there is a strong storm, the Corexit chemical and oil mixture gets swept up onto shore and enters the water cycle:
As of early October 2013, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) website specifically stated that the spill should have no effect on drinking water, and that any questions residents might have about their water should be directed to their drinking water provider. The website fails to mention that water from the Gulf, mixed with oil and Corexit could make its way into the ecosystem eventually, washing up onto the Gulf’s shores and seeping insidiously into the ground water. Florida’s ground water aqueduct system provides drinking water to 18 million residents. – link
The happy motoring culture of suburban sprawl, bread & circus infotainment, and celebrity/wealth worship has long since forgotten what has been called “the biggest public health crisis from a chemical poisoning in the history of this country“. Entrapped by poverty and lacking the means to escape the Gulf region, its residence have become part of the sacrifice zone offered up in the name of profit to the carbon-hungry God of industrial civilization.
None of the locals who took part in the clean-up effort were told of the dangers to their health, nor were they allowed to wear protective gear such as respiratory masks, suits, and gloves because it would have more accurately conveyed to the world the true nature of the disaster. More recently, BP has been accused of hiring internet trolls to threaten critics of its handling of the 2010 disaster. Surely the authorities were aware of the aftermath from the Exxon Valdez accident wherein the same dispersant was used by those clean-up workers who are now nearly all dead at the average age of 51. For BP and the U.S. government, image and corporate interests override the horrific realities of ecocide and corporate manslaughter. Better to sink the oil out of sight and mind in order to maintain the illusion that all is well rather than have a company pay the full cost for its recklessness. All that oil mixed with Corexit is now a 3 to 4 inch toxic layer blanketing the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, inhibiting its biodegradation by natural oil-consuming bacteria and prolonging the disaster for decades. And BP is once again allowed to bid for U.S. government contracts after having sued the EPA in 2013 to lift the suspension. Of course lots of conspiracy theories surrounded the BP oil spill, but the only real conspiracy here was the government/corporate collusion to hide and minimize the damage, control the public’s perception of the disaster, and protect corporate profits over people and environment — nothing out of the ordinary for the corporatocracy we live under, here or abroad.
It’s not just in the oceans that we have to worry about oil spills. If we look at just one set of data from one inland state, you can get an idea of the staggering scale of the fallout from the oil drenched machine of industrial civilization:
When you take into account all the global destruction that capitalist industrial civilization has wrought over the last few centuries, you realize no solution will ever be forthcoming from our corporate overlords. The idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is simply a PR and marketing ploy. CSR employs ineffective market-based solutions, making it appear that a corporation is addressing a social or environmental problem when in fact it only serves to protect corporate financial interests and shift the blame to the individual and elsewhere. Over decades, corporations have molded society into atomized, uninformed, and passive consumers who parrot the same talking points fed to them from the mainstream media. Those wielding the power in society and leading mankind over a cliff are the same ones that hide behind the moniker of CSR, a smokescreen for continuing the looting and polluting of the planet to the point of ecological collapse.
As the catastrophes of the BP oil spill and Fukushima illustrate, a bankrupt planet is preferable to them over a bankrupt corporation. The Tragedy of the commons, as Noam Chomsky points out, has been perverted and twisted by the widespread adoption of the capitalist ethos. It actually means the opposite of what most have been taught to believe:
…there is another part of Magna Carta which has been forgotten. It had two components. The one is the Charter of Liberties which is being dismantled. The other was called the Charter of the Forests. That called for protection of the commons from the depredations of authority. This is England of course. The commons were the traditional source of sustenance, of food and fuel and welfare as well. They were nurtured and sustained for centuries by traditional societies collectively. They have been steadily dismantled under the capitalist principle that everything has to be privately owned, which brought with it the perverse doctrine of – what is called the tragedy of the commons – a doctrine which holds that collective possessions will be despoiled so therefore everything has to be privately owned. The merest glance at the world shows that the opposite is true. It’s privatization that is destroying the commons. That’s why the indigenous populations of the world are in the lead in trying to save Magna Carta from final destruction by its inheritors…
I’m afraid we are light years away from the Charter of the Forests and any sort of bucolic utopias. As for the future, think moonscapes, tumbleweeds, and the creaking sheet metal of rusted-out cars. The hyper-reality of megacities, with their pulsating neon lights and traffic-filled streets, will fall into silence and decay. Coastal cities will be swallowed up in watery graves. The impotence of man’s technology will become painfully evident as the global-scale geochemical disruptions caused by man quickly unfold, ripping asunder any hold we once had on Earth.
…If modern industrial capitalism were a person, he or she would be on suicide watch. The system that has brought us quantum physics and reality television, modern medicine and the columns of Andrew Bolt is set on a course which, by all the best reckoning, points directly to its doing itself in. If capitalism goes on — everything goes. Climate, coastlines, most living species, food supplies, the great bulk of humanity. And certainly, the preconditions for advanced civilisation, perhaps forever…
~ Renfrey Clarke
10 Saturday May 2014
Posted in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil
Tags
9/11 Truthers, Blowback, Capitalism, Chemtrails, Climate Change Denial, Conspiracy Theorists, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Empire, Inverted Totalitarianism, Noam Chomsky, Occam's Razor, Resource Wars, The Principle of Parsimony, The Principle of Plurality, War for Profit
Occam’s razor, or Ockham’s razor, is a line of reasoning which uses succinctness and simplicity, employing the least assumptions to arrive at the most probable hypothesis that fits the available evidence. In other words, given two equally plausible explanations for a given phenomenon, the one making the fewest assumptions is more likely correct. Its foundation rests on two guiding principle to cut through falsehoods and pseudoscience reasoning:
In the search for truth, this tool of reasoning has been used throughout history by scientists and philosophers in the creation of models and theories, by detectives in solving crimes, and by objective researchers in debunking convoluted conspiracy theories. Occam’s razor is embodied by the probability theory which says that “all assumptions introduce possibilities for error and if an assumption does not improve the accuracy of a theory, its only effect is to increase the probability that the overall theory is wrong.” It is a heuristic method to guide scientists in the development of theoretical models. In the case of anthropogenic climate change, it can be applied to show how those who are skeptical about AGW are forced to weave a much more tangled web in order to explain things:
The serious, mainstream science view goes like this:
Reasonably simple, given the vast complexity of our planet’s climatic system, and in fact the handful of serious climate scientists on the “sceptic” side agree with points 1-4.
Now here is the climate “sceptic’s” case:
What the above shows is that there is an endless complexity to the arguments brought by the “sceptics”, many of them self-contradictory.
They are not trying to present a coherent picture of reality, which is the aim of science. They are merely producing a stream of counter statements. I have been impressed recently that when I try to discuss the one point where agreement exists with a delayer, they rapidly change the subject to find disagreement.
In fact, their case often boils down to a mirror image of the case for man-made global warming. If we say white, they just say black.
I predict therefore that soon “sceptic” blogs will be quoting William of Occam as evidence for the truth of their case.
Another cock-eyed conspiracy theory is chemtrails which astronomer Bob Berman deconstructs using the logic of Occam’s razor:
Some folks regard contrails suspiciously. Apparently, many don’t know what they are. Several websites call the lines chemtrails, and think that the US military is deliberately spraying a substance upon the population.
This is silly for a number of reasons. First, if you’ve ever watched crop dusting you know that chemicals must be released very close to the ground. Released on high, they’d dissipate with the wind and take forever to get down; the concentration on the folks below would be zero. Second, my commercial pilot friends (along with the controllers at the FAA) would all have to go along with the plot, since they’d see the process happening. I’m a pilot and airplane owner myself: It’s NOT happening. Third, what would be the purpose? Some say mind control. But are people acting differently lately? Others say it’s to sow disease. But why would anyone want to do this? Who would go along with it? Finally, some say “chemtrails” are a government project to combat global warming. Nice, but then why should such a laudable effort be kept secret? Other web-based “explanations” involve even wackier stuff like electromagnetic rays.
Logic never placates the truly paranoid, and discussions are rarely satisfying. Those who “believe” WANT to believe, and claim soil tests show that dangerous substances have been found beneath the planes. But again, nothing released from 40,000 feet would ever reach the ground except diluted to zero. And, more to the point, the videos of these supposed “chemtrails” shown on the scare web sites are actually a common type of contrail. The believers claim they’ve only started around 1998 – but I’ve observed those “spreading out” contrails for over 40 years. They’re not new. They’re contrails. No mystery, and nothing sinister here at all.
And yet another imaginative conspiracy, thoroughly debunked by the scientific community, surrounds the terrorist attack of 9/11 in which its die-hard followers believe that elements within the U.S. government planned and executed a controlled demolition of the TWC towers and WTC 7 in order to justify the invasion of Middle East countries and restrict domestic civil liberties. The first obvious question is why would a nefarious group within the government go through the logistical nightmare of crashing airliners into buildings in addition to rigging those buildings beforehand when a massive truck bomb, Timothy McVeigh-style, would have sufficed? Was that elaborate scheme really necessary in order to galvanize the political will to invade a foreign country for oil? And as Noam Chomsky points out in the video below, why implicate nationals from our major ally Saudi Arabia instead of people from the very country the neocons so desperately wanted to invade, Iraq? Perhaps the Bush administration just enjoyed the extra hurdle of fabricating WMD’s because planning and executing such a byzantine maze of deception involving so many people was the best way to keep it all secret and ensure the highest probability of success.
Another article of faith among conspiracy theorists is that the conspiracy would not have to have been very large. In Crossing the Rubicon, Michael Ruppert writes that there didn’t have to be any more than two dozen people with complete foreknowledge of the attacks to orchestrate 9/11, and that they would all be “bound to silence by Draconian secrecy oaths.” But those numbers begin to balloon out of control if all of the people and institutions accused of playing a part in the cover-up are counted. They would have to have included the CIA; the Justice Department; the FAA; NORAD; American and United Airlines; FEMA; Popular Mechanics and other media outlets; state and local law enforcement agencies in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New York; the National Institute of Standards and Technology; and, finally and perhaps most prominently, the 9/11 Commission. – link
[youtube:www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRV_MsbAZv4]
As more and more people fall off the economic ladder and lose faith in government, their plight will become fertile ground for conspiracy theorists looking to manipulate the anger and desperation of the dispossessed. JFK conspiracists have been around for nearly half a century and I think it’s fair to say that 9/11 conspiracists will have an even longer lifespan, perhaps outliving industrial civilization itself. The maxim of never letting a good crisis go to waste certainly held true for abusive power structures all across the globe after 9/11, but such an atrocity was inevitable due to nearly a century of nurturing and exploiting radical Islamists to serve the interests of the British and American Empires:
…When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in the 1980’s, the West, led by the United States, countered by implementing the “Islam” strategy. The recruiting of Islamic militants from around the world to fight in the “jihad” included the recruitment of Osama bin Laden by Saudi and Pakistani intelligence services. [26]
Ultimately, British strategy manifested or transmogrified into American support for the ‘holy warriors’ against the Soviet invasion. The United States invested massive amounts of armoury, military training and billions of dollars in this enterprise.
Chalmers Johnson defined, ‘blowback’ “as a way of thinking of an individual, a class, a nation or an empire…” when employed in the arena of “international conflicts” this way of thinking, “has a tendency to blow back onto the party releasing it.” [27] The criminal events in New York and Washington almost ten years ago, were partly and clearly a blowback from the “Islam” strategy.
Whereas Britain concocted and propelled the “Islam” option into strategic consideration amongst policy makers during the Cold War period, it was then the United States which was largely seen to “release”, implement and support this policy in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.
In conclusion, it needs to be emphasised that as the provenance of this “Islam” strategy pre-dates the Cold War and even the emergence of the United States as a superpower, there is every reason to believe that it will also outlive a perceived declining United States. We can now see this in Libya where NATO has worked in conjunction with Libyan Islamists to overthrow the Gadhaffi regime. [28]
The inside job of 9/11 was not some fiendishly clever plot by Cheney and a crack team of explosive experts and false flag operatives. It was the net result of decades and decades of colonial rule and the thirst for resources by Western citizens weened on suburban living, gas-guzzling automobiles, fast food, and industrial age values. Much energy and time is wasted on chasing phantom villains, while the real problems pile up around our make-believe world. Looking into history as well as into the mirror might be more productive than a crusade to bring imaginative boogeymen to justice.
28 Monday Apr 2014
Tags
6th Mass Extinction, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Dark Mountain Project, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Mass Die Off, Mike Ruppert, Neoliberal Capitalism, Paul Kingsnorth, Peak Oil, Uncivilization
Originally posted at: Prayforcalamity.com
The flowering dogwoods are in bloom. Along the country lanes, the pink petals have already exploded into ephemeral radiance and begun to wither and fall from the branches of the Jane Magnolia trees. For me this means no longer having the agonizing luxury of hours to sit and write. After six months of bi-weekly essays, I feel I have expressed much of what had become balled up and cluttered in my mind, and now it is time to ruminate in the garden once again.
I named this blog, “Pray for Calamity,” because there are several major crises converging which threaten human civilization, and there are no existing structures capable of mitigating them. Democracy, capitalism, neo-liberal globalization; they are all incapable of undertaking the work necessary to avert cataclysm. The paradigms of thought and approach which are almost hardwired into the modern mind at this point, need to be scrubbed. Of the remaining, solvable ecological crises, which may not include climate change, there is no tool available to attend to them that comes from the conventional tool box of legal, lawful pursuit. These ecological crises, which range from topsoil depletion to tree extinctions to massive die off of oceanic life, cannot be remedied without a fundamental shift in the thinking of the people in the civilized world. If people do not begin to perceive the world as a living entity, interconnected, conscious, and with intrinsic value beyond how it can be carved up and sold, then it is only a matter of time until the human race begins to suffer on a massive scale due to their callous disregard for the other beings with whom they share this planet.
And then there are the political and economic and resource depletion crises as well.
Changing our minds, changing how we think, is physically speaking one of the easiest things we can do. However, when our egos and our identities are wholly interwoven with an idea or an ideology, changing our way of thinking and discarding the old ideas, can be the hardest thing we are asked to undertake. If our physical reality changes, this can create a rip in the threads that stitch our view of ourselves with a dogma or a paradigm. So I await calamity because the egos of the civilized have hardened their hearts and deafened their ears, and until those in the first world middle class feel the gnawing pain of persistent hunger and the fear of deafening uncertainty, they will refuse to consider that maybe everything they have been taught to believe about themselves and their collective destiny, is abjectly wrong.
—
“We’re many generations overdue for a revolution, in our thinking. I’m not talking about blood and violence although I’m afraid thats already happened. I’m talking about a revolution that’s probably the hardest kind, the kind that takes place within the human soul and the human mind. To be able to tear everything down, throw everything out, and start with a completely fresh piece of paper and say, ‘OK, how do we solve this problem?’”
Mike Ruppert said that in the documentary “Collapse.” While by no means a perfect man, Mike was a good person, and did his best to tell the truth as he knew it. He shot himself two weeks ago. He left many insights like this one as gifts for us.
People who become aware of the depth of the problems facing humanity at this juncture in time, often seek answers. They want to know what we need to do. Some suggest we need a revolution. Some suggest we need to take to the hills and hide on personal homesteads, to perhaps form communities of these homesteads and just hold on white knuckled through the bottle neck of collapse. Then there is Paul Kingsnorth of the Dark Mountain Project, who speaks of the difference between problems which are to be solved, and predicaments which are to be endured.
“What do you do,” he asked, “when you accept that all of these changes are coming, things that you value are going to be lost, things that make you unhappy are going to happen, things that you wanted to achieve you can’t achieve, but you still have to live with it, and there’s still beauty, and there’s still meaning, and there are still things you can do to make the world less bad? And that’s not a series of questions that have any answers other than people’s personal answers to them. Selfishly it’s just a process I’m going through.” He laughed. “It’s extremely narcissistic of me. Rather than just having a personal crisis, I’ve said: ‘Hey! Come share my crisis with me!’
Kingsnorth was recently interviewed by the New York Times. As a long time environmental activist who years ago lost faith that there is much we can do to “save the planet,” he decries the false hope sold by mainstream environmentalist groups. With friend Dougald Hine, Kingsnorth wrote the “Uncivilization” manifesto, on which The New York Times writes:
“Uncivilization” was firm in its conviction that climate change and other ecological crises are predicaments, and it called for a cadre of like-minded writers to “challenge the stories which underpin our civilization: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality and the myth of separation from ‘nature.’ ”
On this matter I think Kingsnorth and Hine are right on the mark. We will never weather the predicaments before us, let alone solve what problems remain solvable, if we refuse to take an honest look at who we are, where we are, and just what the hell we are doing. I think this is a meditation that would benefit revolutionaries and those hiding in the hills alike. We must ask if civilization is something we are even interested in continuing. We must ask what it is we value most and whether or not the lifestyles we are cordoned into are even in line with those values. We must ask what it means to be human. And if we are to trust any of our conclusions, we must first find a way to step outside of everything our culture has programmed us to believe.
—
Civilization is a power structure. It is a rejection of natural law in favor of the control of those high on social hierarchies. Civilization is the domestication of nature and people alike. It is the creation of a once regional, now global farm where the multitudes of humans are livestock, restricted by the borders of various owners, and subjugated and exploited for the extraction of the surplus values generated by their labor. Non human life forms and entire ecosystems are subjugated likewise, and as this control apparatus is now world wide and hell bent on growing in scale year over year, life itself is at risk. Simultaneously, this architecture of domestication and control has blunted the souls of the humans it dominates, and like house pets, the great many people have been declawed and broken. This is the existential portion of the crisis we face. The meaninglessness of life on the inside. The dull static of the best case scenario, where those in the first world yearn for the life of tepid, safe predictability offered by the owner class, should only one produce enough without question or complaint. We are a wretched bunch who fetishize our oppressors and spew vitriol at insurrectionaries who would in trying to shake us loose even for a moment, dare make us late for work.
Navigating circumstances beyond our control in which masters are hostile to us, constantly maneuvering to exert more control over our lives as well as to extract more value from us even in our imprisonment or death; most people are surviving, not thriving. Merely jockeying through a preset condition of work and fee schedules has muted the potential of our species. What has been throttled cannot be measured in discoveries or inventions, but in the satisfaction of individuals and communities to thrive on their own terms. To be fully actualized and autonomous creatures. To witness the assembly line life of modern man is to suffer a snuff film.
If we are to rescue our own hearts and our minds, if we are to save the last embers of burning wildness in our souls and to break the tethers that bind our thinking to suicidal paradigms, then we must uncivilize. Like Buck in “The Call of the Wild,” we must seek to undomesticate ourselves, no only to survive the realities of the world into which we are being thrust, but because to be a house mutt lying bored at master’s feet is to barely exist at all.
—
So what does any of this really mean? What are the steps, the actions to undertake which will align the force of our arms with the rhythms of our hearts? Do we fight or do we flee? Or do we stand upon the hill and bear witness until the fire consumes us? Or is there perhaps some combination of all; a time for rebellion, a time to tend our gardens, and a time to merely sit and say goodbye?
Certainly, if people seek a recipe for action that can maintain society in a form even remotely similar to its present incarnation, then I offer nothing. If what people desire is a map of the future from which plans can be derived and survival assured, I have none. I think maybe it is time to give up on maps. Maybe it is time to just be in the territory for a while. Maybe it is time to give up on human words and to leave the electronic buzz of the internet and to set foot on soil and rock. If domestication is the product of being in the domicile, in the house, then perhaps what we need is to step outside. If the stories we have been told for generations have poisoned us; if these myths about the greatness of the lines on maps and the men who ruled those patchwork lines have only served to make us slaves to abstractions, engendering in us a self righteousness and a malice towards all that isn’t of our hands and seeding in us a fear of what lies outside comfortable walls, then perhaps it is time to go and to hear some different voices. To hear some new stories. Maybe, lost in the ballad of crowing frogs and moaning trees we can crumple up what is written before us and find a blank piece of paper, and on it we will write of our sadness and our fear. We will admit our weakness in the face of all that we have made and we will scratch out our apologies and our gratitude.
Then we will collect up everything that we think the future needs to be given, and we will carry it within us to barricades and to garden gates, to jail cells and to barn bays and to graves. We will find the fire that will make tomorrow worth struggling towards, in that dark, when we are bent and cold heaps of hungry, smoke smelling bone and sinew beneath taught and blackened skin. The madness of the world will grow raw, and real. Privation and awfulness will bloom, and we will endure it.
25 Friday Apr 2014
Posted in Peak Oil
A Step-By-Step Plan to
Calculate Hubbert’s Curve
Ing. Hans Zandvliet, April 2014
Table of Contents
Do the Math of Peak Oil and Convince Yourself
Table of Contents
Introduction
Download and Organize CDIAC Data
Methodology of Calculating Hubbert’s Curve
Do the Math!
Back to Our CDIAC Database
Defining the Linear Trend Line
Calculating Hubbert’s Curve
Matching Hubbert’s Curve with Historical Data
Combining Hubbert’s Curve and Historical Data in a Graph
Conclusions
Recent Developments
Bibliography
Introduction
Until Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère published their paper The End of Cheap Oil in 1998 (Campbell & Laherrére, 1998), the petroleum geologist Marion King Hubbert (1903 – 1989) was all but forgotten, including his correct forecast – back in 1956 – of the US’s peak of oil production in 1970 (Hubbert, 1956). In their paper Campbell and Laherrère warned that:
“Barring a global recession, it seems most likely that world production of conventional oil will peak during the first decade of the 21st century.”
It took another 12 years, but eventually the oil production optimist par excellence, the International Energy Agency (IEA, of the OECD countries), also had to admit the undeniable in their World Energy Outlook of 2010 (IEA, 2010):
“Crude oil output reaches an undulating plateau of around 68–69 mb/d by 2020, but never regains its all‐time peak of 70 mb/d reached in 2006, while production of natural gas liquids (NGLs) and unconventional oil grows strongly.” (emphasis added)
Since Campbell’s and Laherrère’s paper, the peak of global oil production has been studied and commented on intensely. Centre stage in the debates has been Hubbert’s peak-oil calculation. However, in order to calculate Hubbert’s curve, one needs to have reliable petroleum production data and this is precisely the biggest problem. Oil reserves and production data of many countries and oil companies are kept secret, so one has to circumvent those obstacles by piecing together national import and export data from all countries in the world. Doable for a petroleum geologist, but not for an ordinary college student.
And this is a pity, because ordinary people cannot verify what the experts say about the timing of the peak of global oil production. The entire calculation remains a kind of magical mystery in which to either believe or not. The calculation itself is not the problem; any college student with a bit of affinity for mathematics should be able to do these calculations. The lack of reliable data is the problem.
Download and Organize CDIAC Data
Fortunately there is a fairly accurate solution to this problem, freely accessible to the general public. It’s not direct petroleum production data, but a closely related proxy: carbon emission data from liquid fossil fuels. On the basic assumption that burning one barrel of petroleum will always produce roughly the same amount of carbon-dioxide, it doesn’t really matter whether one calculates the peak of global oil production or the peak of global carbon emissions from liquid fossil fuels. The unit and vertical scale of the curve will be different, but the general shape of it and the timing of its peak will remain the same.
This database of carbon emissions from fossil fuels has been put together by CDIAC (Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre), which “[…] has served as the primary climate-change data and information analysis center of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) since 1982.” So, CDIAC is not some kind of obscure website with dubious and poorly documented information, but an authoritative source used by climate scientists.
So, let’s go and take a look at CDIAC’s website: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/. On CDIAC’s home-page, in the pull-down menu “Data”, click “Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions”. Now, click “Global, Regional, and National Annual Time Series (1751-2010)” on top of the list on this page. Here you can choose between national, regional and global data. It’s worthwhile to have a look at some national data (like those of the U.K.), imagine the work to get these data together from historical archives and appreciate the magnitude of this database. (By the way, for the interested, it’s a nice cross-check to use the U.S.’s national emissions data to calculate the U.S.’s peak of oil production back in 1970.) For the purpose of this article, we click “Global” emission data. Now you can choose between three data formats: “Graphics”, “Digital Data (ASCII, Fixed Format)” and “Digital Data (ASCII, Comma-Delimited)”. Choose the third option and open the data file (presented in CSV format) with Excel. Now save the CSV-file as an XLS-file (or XLSX-file) in a map of your choice. Additionally, going back to the “Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions” page, click “Preliminary 2011 and 2012 Global & National Estimates” to update your database with two more years. This only requires a bit of copying and pasting of a few numbers between two Excel sheets.
You now have a database of global carbon emissions from fossil fuels running from 1751 until 2012. The data differentiate between solid (like coal and peat), liquid (predominantly petroleum) and gaseous (mainly natural gas) fossil fuels. Row number 1 contains the headings of the table, but they are very long. For convenience, rename them to something shorter, like “Year, Total, Gas, Oil, Coal, Cement, Flaring and Per Capita” (cells A1:H1). Row number 2 mentions the source of the database. Copy this information away to somewhere on the right side of the table and use row 2 to mention the units of the data (million metric tons of carbon [Mt C] for all columns, except the per capita data in column H (after 1949): metric tons of carbon [t C]). Your Excel sheet should now look like this:
Methodology of Calculating Hubbert’s Curve
This article follows the explanations of Kenneth S. Deffeyes’ book Beyond Oil, the View from Hubbert’s Peak (Deffeyes, 2005). Deffeyes is a geologist and was a colleague and friend of Hubbert when he started his career at the Shell Research Lab in Houston, back in 1958. He wrote this book with the intention of explaining how Hubbert’s curve is calculated, so in this sense my article is not that novel. However, my aim is to get more into the details of how to actually do it, step by step, by means of an (Microsoft Office 2007) Excel sheet and (which I think is novel indeed) CDIAC’s carbon emission data from liquid fossil fuels.
Marion K. Hubbert discovered a peculiar pattern in oil production data, which allowed him to make a fairly accurate estimate of the amount of oil “yet to be discovered”. This almost sounds like a contradiction of terms: how can you know how much oil you are going to discover in future decades? Still, Hubbert discovered a linear trend in historical oil production data and a linear trend can easily be extended into the future. The following graph shows the pattern of oil production that Hubbert discovered:
The vertical axis represents the oil production of a certain year divided by the cumulative oil production up to that year (“P” stands for annual oil production and “Q” means cumulative oil production). The horizontal axis represents the cumulative oil production in billions of barrels.
Every dot represents the data of one year. At first the cumulative production is still little, so the quotient of P/Q gives relatively high outcomes (the blue dots in the graph). But the cumulative oil production keeps rising steadily, so the outcome of the quotient P/Q trends downward. Most importantly, from 1983 onward the dots start to line up fairly close to a straight line (the red dots in the graph) and form a linear trend (the black line in the graph).
If we extend this linear trend line until it reaches the horizontal axis, we can get an idea of the ultimate recoverable amount of oil. Upon reaching the horizontal axis, the quotient P/Q becomes zero, meaning that the annual oil production has become zero and no more oil can be produced. Therefore, this point indicates the total cumulative oil production at the end of the age of oil. Once you know how much oil you can ultimately produce, you have the key to calculate the future trend of annual oil production.
Do the Math!
In mathematical terms, the equation of a straight line is very simple:
Where “b” is the y-value where the line intersects with the y-axis. In other words, the y-value when the x-value is zero.
The “a” indicates the inclination of the line. When two points on the line are known, this inclination can be calculated as follows:
Or, the difference in y-values divided by the difference in x-values of the two known points. A negative outcome means the line slopes downward from left to right.
So, if we can define this linear trend line, we can calculate the future trend of oil production and to quote Deffeyes: “Since we want to estimate likely future trends, nothing beats a straight line on a graph.” No cooked up magic added, just straight forward mathematics.
First we translate the mathematical terms into oil production terms, taking the intersections of the trend line with the x and y axes as the two known points:
With these translations, the mathematical formula becomes the following oil production formula:
Or simplified:
To calculate annual production data, you’d like to know “P”, not some incomprehensible quotient “P/Q”. This is easily achieved by multiplying both sides of the equation with “Q”:
To define “b” and “Qt”, we will make use of Excel’s linear trend line option. Then we will come back to this formula.
Back to Our CDIAC Database
Time to roll up some sleeves, because now we’re starting to elaborate our Excel calculations. First, insert two new columns (E and F) to the right of the column with carbon emission data from liquid fossil fuels (D). Merge cells D1, E1 and F1, rename cell D2 into “P [Mt C]”. Name cell E2 “Q [Mt C]” and F2 “P/Q”. Your Excel sheet should now look like this:
The cumulative emission data are easily calculated by adding the emission data from the present year to the cumulative emission data of the previous year. Of course, 1751 doesn’t have a previous year in this database, so here (cell E3) we enter “0”. In cell E4 enter the Excel formula “= E3 + D4” and copy it down to all cells of column E (cells E5 till E264).
Petroleum was not yet discovered in 1751, so everything is still zero. As from 1870 the first emission data from liquid fossil fuels appear in the database. For convenience, you can split the window (menu tab “View”) to keep visible the heading of the table. Go to cell F122 (of the year 1870), enter the Excel formula “=D122/E122” and copy it down to the rest of column F (cells F123 till F264). Your Excel sheet (as from 1870) should now look like this:
Defining the Linear Trend Line
From the menu tab “Insert”, select the graph type “Scatter with only Markers” and a blank window opens up to design a chart. From the menu tab “Design” (“Chart Tools” are only visible when you select the chart window), click the button “Select Data” and a dialogue box opens. Click “Add” (under “Legend Entry (Series)”) and yet another dialogue opens in which you can type a name for the data series and the range of x-data and y-data. Under “Series Name” type something like “P/Q (1900-2012)”. I suggest making the graph as from 1900, because initially P/Q values start at 1, so the vertical scale becomes very large and the final and most relevant values between 0.04 and 0.02 become barely visible. For your x-data select the values E152:E264 and for your y-data select the values F152:F264. With some layout editing, your graph could now look like this:
Below a value of 0.04, you can see the dots lining up in a roughly linear way. When you move the cursor over the first dot just below the 0.04 line, an information box shows the coordinates of this dot: “Series “P/Q (1900-2012)” Point “55,931” (55,931, 0.0389)” Looking up these data in the table and you will find that they belong to the year 1983. So, as from 1983, the carbon emission data from liquid fossil fuels start to line up in a linear way.
Before we can let Excel calculate a linear trend line, we first have to make a second graph of the 1983-2012 data. Do this in exactly the same way as the former graph, but only select the 1983-2012 data. Your graph should now look like this:
Of this second graph (of red dots) we let Excel calculate a linear trend line. You could calculate it yourself (the WikiPedia page “Linear Regression” will tell you all you need to know), but it’s very tiresome work and too farfetched for this article.
From the “Chart Tools” select the menu tab “Layout”, click the “Trendline” button, select “More Trendline Options” and select the “P/Q (1983-2012)” series. In the “Format Trendline” dialogue box, select the “Linear” type of trend line. At the bottom, tick the selection box “Display Equation on Chart” and close the dialogue box. You now see the linear trend line as a thin black line in your graph, together with its mathematical equation.
To improve the precision of this equation, right-click on it and from the quick menu that pops up, select “Format Trendline Label”. Now format the numbers of the formula as “Scientific” with two decimals (more decimals will only give a false impression of high accuracy). In this case scientific numbers come in quite handy because the P/Q-numbers are very small and the Q-numbers very large (so, don’t bother about them and let Excel do the job). Brightening up your chart a bit, your graph should now look like this:
Now we have the values for “a” (-1.84·10-7) and “b” (4.74·10-2) and we can convert the mathematical trend line formula into our carbon emissions formula by changing “y” into “P/Q” and “x” into “Q”:
Annual emission data follow by multiplying both sides of the equation with “Q”:
We can now calculate the ultimate amount of carbon emissions from liquid fossil fuels at the end of the age of oil (Qt). This is when P = 0:
So let’s solve this equation:
Calculating Hubbert’s Curve
Now we can calculate Hubbert’s curve of CDIAC’s carbon emissions from liquid fossil fuels. First we not only want to calculate our Hubbert’s curve up to 2012, but through the end of this century, so we have to extend column A to 2100. The quickest way is to enter the Excel formula “=A264+1” in cell A265 and copy this formula down to the cells A266 till A352.
To the right of column F (with the P/Q data) we insert two new columns G and H. Merge cells G1 and H1 and type something like “Hubbert Oil”. Something similar you can do with cells D1, E1 and F1, naming them Historic Oil. In cell G2, write “P [Mt C]” and in cell H2 “Q [Mt C]”. Your table (as from 1870) should now look like this:
We need to put the values of “b” and “Qt” somewhere in the sheet. I put them in the following cells:
In cell H122 enter “=M270” (To check, this is Hubbert’s cumulative emissions in the year 1870). Since the calculation of cumulative emissions remains the same, copy cell E123 to the cells H123 till H352.
We have to be careful now, because we’re going to use Q to calculate P and P to calculate Q, which results in a circular reference. However, given the right settings, Excel can easily deal with that. Click the Office button in the top-left corner of Excel and click the “Excel Options” button (bottom-right). Now click the “Formulas” button (top-left) and activate “Enable iterative calculation” (top-right). Usually it’s not necessary to tinker with the maximum amount of iterations and change. Leave the Excel Options by clicking “OK”.
Now we’re going to use the formula we arrived at on page 4 (repeated here, for convenience):
In Excel-format, enter in cell G122:
The dollar-signs mean that the row-numbers of these cells don’t change when the formula is copied. This is necessary, because M266 and M268 are the two numbers “b” and “Qt”, which occupy one fixed cell. Copy cell G122 down to the cells G123 till G352. Your table should now look like this:
You can see I gave the cells E264 and H264 a bold and blue format to let them stick out. Likewise I made cell M270 bold and red. It’s handy to do the same.
Matching Hubbert’s Curve with Historical Data
So what do we have now? We have a Hubbert’s curve (for sure, if you copy it down another century), but it’s not yet matched with the calendar years of historic emission data. To imagine what needs to be done, we need to move our Hubbert’s curve horizontally across the chart, until it best fits with the historical data. The most acurate way to do this is to adjust the initial value of cumulative emissions in 1870 (we set it to “1”, for time being) such that Hubbert’s cumulative emissions in 2012 equal the historical cumulative emissions of that same year (that’s why I marked them blue and bold for comparison).
Now finding this match is a matter of changing the value “1” of cell M270 and seeing what happens. To avoid having to scroll up and down between 1870 and 2012, I placed this adjustment cell at M270, while H122 uses M270 as its starting value (now you see why).
So, give it a try and change cell M270 from 1 to 10. You should now see that the blue cell H264 has increased from 984 to 9,498. So, we’re heading in the right direction, but we’re not there yet. Try 100 instead of 10. H264 has now increased to 70,639. It seems we’re half way now, so let’s try 200. H264 is now 110,198, so we’re getting there. Say, 250? H264 = 124,157. M270 = 300? H264 = 135,637. That’s just a tad too much! M270 = 299? H264 = 135,427. Still a tiny bit too much. M270 = 298? H264 = 135,217. For the record: M270 = 297? H264 = 135,006. So, 298 is a much closer match than 297: M270 = H122 = 298! We have matched Hubbert’s curve horizontally with the historical emission data.
Now, curious in which year Hubbert’s peak occurs? Look at the annual emissions of Hubbert’s curve in column G. In which year does it reach its highest value? In 2010!
Combining Hubbert’s Curve and Historical Data in a Graph
From the tab menu “Insert”, select a 2-D line graph. From the Chart Tools select the menu tab “Design”, click the button “Select Data” and click the button “Add” (under “Legend Entries (Series)”). In the dialogue box that opens up, enter as a “Series Name” something like “Hubbert’s Curve (1870-2100)”. Select the data cells G122 till G352. You can now see you have added a legend entry, but you still have to edit the “Horizontal (Category) Axis Labels”. So, click on the “Edit” button and select the cells A122 till A352.
Now add a second data series of the historic annual emissions of cells D122 till D264 (Chart Tools -> Design -> Select Data). However, select as its calendar series the same range of years as the Hubbert’s curve (1870-2100): cells A122 till A352. After tidying up a bit, your chart should look like this:
Conclusions
Based on CDIAC’s global data of carbon emissions from liquid fossil fuels (i.e. predominantly petroleum) and Marion King Hubbert’s method of calculating the oil production curve, we have arrived at a theoretical emissions peak of carbon from liquid fossil fuels (i.e. oil production peak) in 2010.
Compared to earlier forecasts of oil-geologists and other experts using Hubbert’s methodology, the calculations based on CDIAC data get quite close to the mark. Most of these experts (like Collin Campbell, Jean Laherrère, Kenneth Deffeyes and Matthew Simmons) forecast peak-oil between 2005 and 2010, so the CDIAC data turn out to be a fairly reliable source for this purpose.
Theoretically, we’re already 4 years past the peak, although historical data still show growth. This is very well possible for a limited period of time. Given the frantic drilling and fracking spree we’ve seen since about 2007, it’s not even surprising. Extraction methods have improved as well over the last decade or so: horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, deep-sea drilling, more accurate 3D soundings of geological formations, etc. The much higher oil price has also made it worthwhile to drill for harder-to-get oil. So, the ultimately recoverable amount of oil has increased indeed (though I don’t know by how much) and this is not (yet) reflected in the historical data.
Recent Developments
Since a few years, there has been a lot of talk that there are so much fossil fuel reserves left that we can only responsibly burn about one third of them (leaving two-thirds in the ground) in order to keep global warming below 2°C (IEA, 2012). This also implies that the shares of fossil fuel companies are over-valued by up to 80% (Carbon Tracker, 2012; Carbon Tracker, 2013). However, there are several caveats against this analysis:
Source: own compilation of U.S. Energy Information Administration data
(EIA, 2013)
So there are many ways to look at peak-oil (environmental, geological, economical, social, etc.). One way doesn’t exclude the other, so I surely don’t want to contribute to infighting between peak-oilists and environmentalists. Both are right and allies to the same cause: we have to think hard and take swift action to create a sustainable way of living in harmony with the world wide web of life on our planet, in order to prove that human intelligence was not an evolutionary error.
Bibliography
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The Crisis of Civilization. Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. Dead Dean Films, 2011. Film. Watch at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMgOTQ7D_lk
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Unburnable Carbon – Are the World’s Financial Markets Carrying a Carbon Bubble? Rep. Carbon Tracker. 2011. Print. Download at http://www.carbontracker.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2011/07/Unburnable-Carbon-Full-rev2.pdf
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