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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

Tag Archives: Addiction to Fossil Fuels

Sic Transit Imperium

02 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by darbikrash in Capitalism, Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation

≈ 55 Comments

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Neoliberal Capitalism

…. The passing of empire.

The dank and musty allure of 19th century opium dens beckoned to those weak of will and lustful for escape. An opioid fuel of sorts, nature’s stock for an addiction that consumed its adherents in exchange for a state of nonchalant bliss, a temporary reprieve from the thousand paper cuts of life.

Experienced practioners knew to employ the buddy system, in advance soliciting a disinterested friend to come collect the user after 12 hours or so, sternly instructed to ignore any pleas to the contrary, and to extract the user from the den and the throes of opioid delirium, forcibly if necessary. Failure to do so might mean the will for a voluntary exit could well evaporate after a few days, and any exit might be feet first in a pine box.

An early example of the addictive effects of nature’s stock upon humans.

Amid much fanfare and production, the scientists of our society engage us in cultural clashes where arguments pertaining to climate change rage on, point and counterpoint, endless minutiae and technical details debated and argued. Advocates and denialists in full combat, in a battle of data against superstition that has lasted the ages and will never resolve.

Exactly as the instigators intended.

What is missing from these credentialed technical arguments are more basic questions, such as Why? Or How?

Why did our culture take up an addiction to fossil fuels, and How did this happen?

Human ecology professor, Andreas Malm has taken to addressing these two overarching questions in his book “Fossil Capital” which I shall review here.

“Fossil Capital” deviates from the typical climate change discussion as he strives to understand the onset and dependency of fossil fuels from a Marxist perspective. I must admit I was somewhat skeptical, orthodox Marxism is notoriously lax in addressing the largest threat to our planet, seemingly content to lather about in worker exploitation and revolts that never seem to happen.

However, the author reminds us that the core construct of Marx’s magnum opus is based on the philosophy of social relations, if anything, Capital shows us the dialectic relationship between capital, the political economy, and society at large. It shows us how capitalist property relations impacts workers, and how workers impact capital, leading ultimately to Malm’s staggering conclusion- that our addiction to fossil fuels, the resulting present day climate impact, and the onset and general adoption of fossil fuels was not due to technology, not due to scarcity of existing organic resources, and importantly, not due to intrinsic and supposedly dormant human tendencies to plunder the planet.

With academic rigor, Andreas Malm answers the Why and How, as he traces the onset of fossil fuels into general usage, and in so doing discovers that a very small group of men in a very small part of the world, belonging to an even smaller class of participants, are wholly, totally, and irrefutably responsible.

Malm finds that those responsible belong to the Capitalist class of 19th century England.

He explains this by animating Marx’s discoveries of property relations and the laws of motion of Capitalist production. He takes the dry, tedious text of Marx and shows how it fits chapter and verse with the 19th century ascension of the Industrial Revolution.

Fortunately for Malm, 19th century England is one of the most thoroughly documented periods and he find much empirical support for his thesis. The records are quite clear, voluminous data is available for parsing and analysis and he takes full advantage to make his case.

“Fossil Capital” starts with a debunking of the two prevailing mainstream theories as to how we evolved into a fossil fuel economy. The first, the so-called “Elizabethan leap” contains the more common bourgeoisie understanding of how 16th Europe migrated from burning wood for heat and cooking, to the use of coal. The superficial explanation is that wood was a declining resource experiencing scarcity in England and Continental Europe, and the migration to coal was an entirely natural progression to a more dense and efficient energy source.

There are a couple of problems with this, not the least of which is that coal did not make any significant inroads into energy consumption (in England anyway) until the late 18th century, so there is the small matter of a 200 year discrepancy.

But Malm considers even this to be a red herring, he suggests that the use of either wood or coal for heating and cooking purposes (the dominant uses in this time period) is really not a very interesting story, in his words this is a “proto-fossil fuel” economy, the real story begins when these fuels are used for purposes other than cooking and heating.

As all of this late 18th century stuff was taking place in England, to supplement the superficial, the theories of Ricardo, Malthus, and our dear friend Adam Smith all get roped into contributing to this explanation. Ricardo, as he posits that the available land for photosynthesis (the main vehicle for organic fuel production) is insufficient to support an exponential expansion of energy in the soon to occur industrial revolution. Malthus, with his converging and exponential population growth, needs to preserve at least some arable land for food instead of fuel production, and of course, Smith for his division of labor theories.

The author calls this first explanation the “Ricardo-Malthusian” theory, which seeks to explain the evolutionary and entirely “necessary” conversion from wood to coal because of insufficient land mass, and a geometrically expanding population with arithmetically expanding food production. As the organic economy of pre-industrial England is in effect dependent on plants (photosynthesis) for energy production, these arguments might make some sense.

A review of the historical data reveals some troubling problems with the Ricardo-Malthusian explanation. First of all, the use of organic fuels such as wood for cooking and heating cannot explain the explosion of energy expansion in 19th century England. Between 1800 and 1870 the population of England grew by 160%, yet energy consumption grew by some 4,000%.

Next, these theories were applied after the fact, using a modern interpretation (within the last century) to explain what is now a self evident problem, but this is less than convincing as no one in 19th century Britain sat down with quill and ink and forecast the energy demands of the forthcoming industrial revolution, concluding that we must switch to a coal economy toute de suite.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Malm finds no evidence of scarcity of either arable land for wood production, or of wood as a commodity as seen by market forces, e.g. there were no price spikes in this time period that would indicate a shortage, or of pending scarcity. Now there are plenty of papers and scholarly opinions that conclude that large scale shortages were present in this time period, but Malm disagrees.

Malm theorizes with some justification, that if there were resource limits to organic energy production (wood) in this time period there would be at least some price anomalies- he found none.

What then? What could be the cause for a several thousand percent increase in energy consumption- and a paradigm shift away from an organic energy economy to one wholly sustained by fossil fuels?

The genesis can be found in James Watt’s 1784 patent of the steam engine.

Knowledge of the nature of the phase change of water when boiled, and the resulting energy release had been known for centuries. What Watt had done with his steam engine patents was to harness this effect in a self contained boiler, converting steam pressure into smooth, rotative motion. This system converted the choppy, erratic motion of a steam piston into a spinning wheel, which could then be used to power other machines through belt drive connections.

Machines which would soon be called “means of production”.

With twice the BTU’s and half the volumetric density of wood, coal was the perfect fuel to propel the steam engine into mainstream use. In the period of 1800-1870, the vast majority of all coal burned was used to power steam engines, and the largest use of steam engines was in the production of cotton.

And here is where it gets really interesting.

In 19th century in Britain, the economy was all about the production of cotton. By 1870, cotton accounted for nearly 40% of the UK GDP. So cotton was a big deal, not just in sheer numbers, but in the rapid adoption of Capitalist modes of production in the industrial scale up of this commodity. In 1780, it took approximately 600 man hours to process a single bale of cotton, with the invention of the cotton gin (1793), this dropped to around 12 man hours per bale. Adding to the efficiencies, the spinning jenny (1764) and Richard Arkwright’s water frame (1768) which was designed to be powered by water flow- all represented an ushering in of a crude form of machine age- centered around cotton production.

Significantly, the main competitive fuel to coal in the early 19th century was water power. It wasn’t even close, by far water power was the first choice of any and all sources of rotative power. The reasons were simple and compelling- it did not cost anything to run. Water flow was free. Any fuel that burned, be it wood or coal, had a cost associated with it and factory owners did not want to pay when water was readily available and free for the taking.

Water was clean, reusable, quiet, and put forth no emissions. And it was cheap. So why then would anyone want to abandon this cheap and abundant energy source and switch to the dirtier, and far more expensive coal?

Well initially anyway, no one did. But as the production of cotton began to scale, and as Britain shed its mercantilist mode of production for Capitalist tendencies, issues of property and social relations began to rear their ugly heads.

Another consideration was that the use of water flow was by its very nature collective. No one owns the water, and if other mill owners shared the same water source for their own mills, which was common, there could be a conflict between users of the same resource.

So as Malm describes it, the problems began to originate from the spatial attributes of the water mills, they were by necessity located near water sources, which meant that they were generally not near urban centers, and generally located in rural or countryside locations. So it became difficult to attract and keep labor at these semi-remote locations. There was little external infrastructure, often no towns or support resources for life, however short it might be, outside of the factory mills. And retaining labor once so located was also difficult as they might just run off, converting to a ruthless and grueling factory pace of 16-18 hours days, 6 days a week was a difficult adjustment from an agrarian lifestyle which marked the previous way of life.

So the ascendant Industrial revolution began to experience labor strife, it was to become acute, perhaps more acute than any time in modern history, as large numbers of people migrated from agrarian lifestyles to a wage labor supported factory life- they did not make the change with open arms.

The mill owners quickly came up with a brilliant solution as the realties of Capitalist property relations began to settle in. It seemed that the local orphanages were full to brimming with abandoned and runaway children from all walks of life, and surely, the mill owners would be doing all a tremendous favor to “rescue” these misfits and delinquents from their stultifying existence, unshackling them for a vigorous and meditative visit to the British countryside, where they might partake in fresh air and healthy exercise.

For around 20 years.

Ever the social liberals, the headmasters of the orphanages insisted that room and board be offered to each child, and perhaps an hour per week of study so as to insure that some level of education be maintained.

Other than that, they were happy to see them go.

 

To support this newfound labor pool, the Capitalist mill owners often had to construct at their own expense a compound, buildings to house workers, eating halls, etc. in effect all the necessities of a labor camp.

There were still more problems. Not all workers were children of course- most were not. Some of the labor classifications, such as spinners were highly skilled and these in-demand workers began to demand high wages. If a group of spinners left a mill, they could cripple production and the prospects for replacement staff was not good- given the remote locales of the water mills. As the water mills became more widespread throughout Britain, child labor also grew. Soon, the moral prospect of working young orphans 16 hours a day began to wear on society as a whole, and a bitter struggle for reformed labor laws ensued lasting throughout most of the first half of the 19th century. A brief listing:

-The Cotton Mills and Factories Act of 1819. Limited employment to children age 9 or older, children aged 9-12 could not work more than 12 hours per day.

– The Cotton Mills Regulation Act 1825. Limited work hours to 10 hours on Sat, added a one hour lunch break. The mill owners were having problems with inconsistent water flow, so they needed “make up” time, e.g. extra hours during the day when workers could be forced to work longer to make up for poor flow or equipment failures. This Act accommodated these conditions by imposing limits as to how many hours could be worked and how late they could be enforced, typically no later than 11:00 PM.

– Labor in Cotton Mills Act of 1831. Extended the 12 hour day limit to anyone under 18, no night work allowed for minor children.

– Numerous legislation passed between 1831-1867 essentially limiting children, and ultimately most adults to no more than 10 hours a day of work.

One might wonder why it took 50-60 years to resolve which seems like a simple issue of social justice, using children for indentured labor. The answer is twofold, first, the capitalist class put enormous pressure on British parliament to refrain from interfering with any regulations that might impede production, the “compromise” was a highly publicized effort to address the children, as the lawmakers understood that the optics of defending this egregious practice was not going to stand, so they made much of these paltry reliefs specific to child labor. The other reason was that of male suffrage. Incredibly, throughout the 19th century, men without property ownership simply could not vote. This held until the early 20th century, indeed until the 1918 Representation of the People act, which removed the restriction of property ownership and allowed all men (and some women) the right to vote.

All of these acts and legislations were bitterly opposed by the Capitalist class- but none more vigorously than the provision allowing mill owners to work extra hours if the water flow fell off during a production day, or if equipment broke. This provision allowed the mill owner to enforce a labor effort not just by the clock, but to make sure that this labor product could be productively deployed when all the conditions of production were operational- which they often weren’t. So if you were signed up for a 12-16 hour day, and water flow dropped off midday so as to deny production, you had to stay at the mill and make the time up when the water flow returned.

A typical workday might be 16 hours. And in this workday we are reminded of Marx’s principle of abstract surplus value, which says that the workday is organized to first cover the cost to reproduce the worker, then additional hours are used to provide surplus value to the Capitalist. That’s how we get to 16 hour days. 10 hours in this example to reproduce (cover costs) and 6 hours for surplus.

But when forced by regulations to limit the workday to 10 hours, with limited ability for make up time, we have a big problem as now we have to ask where does the surplus value come from?

And the answer is that it comes from intensification of production, e.g. with speeding up the machinery. This now gives us relative surplus value, so named as the surplus is now recovered by extending backward into the workday, by working faster we can reproduce the workers cost in 8 hours and get the same surplus as before in 10 hours total.

But we have to run the machines and the people faster to achieve this result.

And as it turns out, it is pretty easy to speed up a steam engine, not so much for a water wheel. And in fact according to Malm, the sum of these attributes outlines the fundamental reason for the shift to fossil fuels- they were infinitely more tolerant to the demands of the Capitalist class than renewable resources, even though they cost more.

Steam engines could be placed conveniently next to coal mines, or to even greater advantage in the middle of population centers where there was not scarcity of labor. If a crew of experienced spinners up and quit, a replacement crew could be assembled without too much trouble. Also, population centers did not need the infrastructure build out for living quarters for example, that the water mills needed, it already existed.

And this is exactly what happened, despite the more attractive cost model of renewable energy resources, the labor relations outcome was disastrous for the water mill owners and the shift to coal powered steam engines proved unstoppable. By 1840, the battle between water power and coal was largely over, coal fueled steam engines had made significant headway into the sphere of production. This however, was no panacea, labor revolts and labor strikes grew to epic proportions, as capitalists tried to lower wages, with roving bands of strikers marauding through the cities destroying the hated steam engines as Capitalist property owners reduced wages to increase profits.

In 1842 one of the largest strikes ever was assembled, involving some 500,000 striking workers. They took to destroying steam engines, many by pulling the plugs on the pressure vessel rendering the engines useless. The phrase “pulling the plug” is still in common use today and stems from this calamitous riot in Britain.

Soon after, intentionally damaging steam engines became a crime punishable by death in Britain.

Interestingly, the word ‘Power’ in the English language has two meanings, one meaning, the noun, describes ‘…the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events…’

The other usage is as a verb, “…..to supply (a device) with mechanical or electrical energy….’

In no other language does this word share this duality. This is instructive, as it became apparent that those that controlled the power, indeed had social power. We can still see evidence of this today in modern politics.

If Malm had been unkind to the Ricardo-Malthusian explanation for the onset of fossil fuels, he is not particularly generous to the more contemporary Anthropocene narrative. Malm’s objection with this movement is not necessarily to deny the labeling of this as an ecological epoch, rather, he takes issue with the notion that somehow man was intrinsically and irreversibly responsible as a species for the onset of fossil fuel usage and the resulting climate change.

He argues that early man’s mastery of fire does not necessarily implicate humans as destined to destroy the planet, he makes the rather succinct point that ownership of steam engines, and the resulting adoption of coal to feed these engines, was specific to a very small class of people, namely, wealthy white guys involved in the Capitalist mode of production. An average wage laborer did not own a steam engine in the 19th Century, why would she? The Capitalist class acted directly to divert an organic economy that was already successful and underway with renewable hydro power to an economy that relied on fossil fuels, specifically to avoid the untenable social relations present in using a collective energy resource like water power. The Capitalist must own not just the means of production, but the fuel sources as well.

Beyond this Malm ventures into some truly interesting commentary, he discusses in some detail the need for constant exponential expansion intrinsic to Capitalism, and makes a most interesting observation about this expansion from the perspective of fossil fuels.

To do this, he discusses the time honored theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which is the primary failure mechanism of Capitalism in orthodox Marxism. The rate of profit tends to fall, as the organic composition of constant capital to variable capital changes. In plain English, this means that as machines and automation replace people, the profits left for the Capitalist decline. This is because if labor is the source of all value, as labor content declines, so does surplus value.

But this “tendency” is not a hard and fast rule, there are ways that this “tendency” can be mitigated, indeed, the Capitalism of today goes to great pains to deflect these tendencies- largely through State interventions. However, we do know that as more machines are created to replace or accelerate human labor, more fossil fuels will be used to power them- just as it did in 19th century Britain.

Malm suggests that this energy consumption component of value production is a hard and fast rule- not a tendency, and that as the composition of constant Capital increases, the consumption of fossil fuels must also increase- exponentially. He expresses this as an increased carbon content per unit of production. This would suggest a death spiral related to fossil fuel use, unstoppable and with no known restraint under the laws of motion of a Capitalist economy.

To the notion that man as a species is intrinsically responsible and destined to destroy the planet, his view is that if we all are responsible, then no one is responsible. By this he suggests that if all are guilty, then no one can be deposed or held accountable.

And this narrative is starting to sound vaguely familiar, yes, blame the working class and the poor for societies woes, and for good measure be sure to inflict the greatest amount of retribution and payback amongst those least responsible.

This is a time honored strategy unique to class structure. A secondary outcome is the blaming of workers for global warming through consumption.

Malm makes a solid case using historical reconstruction and a Marxist framework to unveil the unity between energy and exploitation. He suggests that the need for exploitation within the Capitalist mode of production is largely the driver towards unfettered fossil fuel consumption. Another thrust, which he is covering in a new book, is the notion that the nexus to petroleum energy was in direct response to the crippling coal miner’s strikes.

So it is not surprising then that we see similar characteristics in our current bourgeoisie government in the persona of Trump. We see the ascension of energy moguls to the levers of power for exactly the same reasons, with exactly the same objectives that were there in 19th century Britain.

The current era Capitalist class is deeply concerned with the declining rate of profit, despite the mitigating influence of neo-liberal expansion. They reflexively return to tried and true restorative strategies, central to this is an expansion of fossil fuel production and simultaneous relaxation of regulations- of which we see abundant evidence that this is underway.

If there is an area of weakness in Malm’s work, it is in his explanation of why man is not acting in his own best interests. While I find his rejection of the culpability of man as a species gratifying, it is hard to connect the dots between the Plug Riots of 1842 and a similar modern day Black Friday mob descending like locusts on a Wal Mart sale. There really is no coherent explanation offered to connect the dots between these disparate behaviors, and it really is one of the more important questions of our time.

Perhaps a narrative that revolves around addiction, and its close companion denial is more appropriate.

Overall in his wrap up to include modern times, Malm is not hopeful for any relief from the fossil fuel madness or any meaningful redress to climate change. He points out that sunk capital costs in coal fired plants, refineries, and other capital intensive investments are unlikely to be unwound until they are fully amortized. Once paid for, there is little motivation to sunset them as after all, they are paid up and can then contribute to supra-profits. The modern day Capitalist class does not make these kind of massive investments without a priori policy assurances from the State- which they actively seek and receive.

In the end Malm accomplishes a great deal with his book, the approach of leaving aside pure science and using tools of sociology to examine causality is very effective. It will be interesting to see where he takes this thread in his upcoming book, continuing with a similar framework around petroleum fuels.

It is more likely that we will find coal a source of sunlight, than sunlight a competitor of coal.

William Stanley Jevons 1860

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Living in Bizzaro World

22 Sunday Feb 2015

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

≈ 171 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Amazon Deforestation, American Empire, Blowback, Capitalism, Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Climate Sensitivity of Earth, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporatocracy, Desertification, Duped! Delusion Denial and the End of the American Dream, Extremist Ideologies, Global Coal Consumption, Infectious Diseases in a Warming World, Inverted Totalitarianism, ISIS, Military Industrial Complex, Myth of the 2ºC Climate Goal, Nafeez Ahmed, Peak Antibiotics, Planetary Tipping Points, Professor Jerry Kroth, Psychological Displacement, Resource Wars, São Paulo Water Crisis, Snuff Films

bizarro

“Bizzaro Code: Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!”

For the past few days I’ve been nursing a bacterial infection on the dorsal aspect of my left hand with topical cream and oral antibiotics, and my hand appears to be healing quickly. I’m relatively healthy and this is the first time I’ve ever had this sort of thing happen to me. Left untreated, such an infection could fester for months, perhaps developing into an abscess and becoming life threatening. In a world of post-antibiotics, a tiny break in your skin could spell death for you. Despite a recent discovery of a new class of antibiotics, we’re still headed for a post-antibiotic age and unless we reform our system of profit-incentivized healthcare, infectious diseases will have plenty of poverty-stricken hosts within which to flourish and spread throughout the world. The wealthy are not hermetically sealed off from such human disease vectors. Anthropogenic climate disruption is already increasing the expansion of such pathogens and as with everything else connected to this grand climate experiment we’re conducting on ourselves, preparing for the consequences is an afterthought:

“We have to admit we’re not winning the war against emerging diseases,” Brooks says. “We’re not anticipating them. We’re not paying attention to their basic biology, where they might come from and the potential for new pathogens to be introduced.” – Link

Leading UK climate scientist Kevin Anderson has a new lecture out in which he explains how the world can have a 50% chance of staying below a 2ºC world (40% emissions cuts by 2018 from the wealthy, 70% by 2024, and over 90% by 2030.) The global wealthy are those defined as earning $30,000 a year. I posted Kevin Anderson’s video on a thread at Peakoil.com , and vox_mundi replied:

I’ve been following Kevin Anderson since his presentation at the 4 Degrees and Beyond International Climate Conference in 2009 at Oxford.

His points are inarguable – and that was before the positive feedback which we are beginning to see. His analysis is covered in the paper, Beyond Dangerous, and other participants assessments are here.

Whether or not Sao Paulo survives this year is immaterial because climate change is not going to be kind to their part of the planet in the coming decades. Unfortunately, this applies to just about everywhere else.

Vox_mundi is the one helping to keep all of us updated on the water crisis in São Paulo with his postings. The evidence tells me we have breached the tipping point for the desertification of Brazil. One thing to always keep in mind about the 2ºC climate goal is that it’s an arbitrary and politically convenient number set by business-as-usual bureaucrats:

…Why was the limit set at 2ºC?
It was pretty much arbitrary, but characterized by policy and political folks as the amount of warming that the scientific community had established would “prevent dangerous” climate impacts. Danger, of course, being a relative concept. Former NASA scientist James Hansen and other researchers have concluded that 2°C of human-made warming would trigger natural feedbacks that could end up doubling that amount of warming. Setting the limit was widely seen, however, as one of the few positive outcomes from the 2009 U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen…
– Link

By all evidence(both scientific and individual observation), climate sensitivity of the Earth is much higher than most know and even a 1ºC rise is too much. The idea that staying at or just below a 2ºC warming can save us from catastrophe is a myth. For those who don’t know, climate sensitivity is:

…defined as how much the average global surface temperature will increase if there is a doubling of greenhouse gases (expressed as carbon dioxide equivalents) in the air, once the planet has had a chance to settle into a new equilibrium after the increase occurs. In other words, it’s a direct measure of how the Earth’s climate will respond to that doubling.

We currently have a CO2e of 484ppm, nearly double that of the pre-industrial levels. As we approach the doubling level of 560ppm, then we can expect an average global increase in temperature of somewhere between “1.5 to 4.5ºC”, according to the latest mainstream research. The argument can therefore be made that we have already triggered the collapse of industrial civilization just by considering only the one global tipping point of climate change out of a total of nine planetary boundaries currently being monitored, four of which we have already crossed.

With the following headlines recurring every year, who are we fooling that these emissions will be reined in within our lifetimes:

Snap 2015-02-22 at 15.19.15 Snap 2015-02-22 at 15.20.04

To deal with the uncomfortable realities of manmade climate change, the Right practice denial of manmade climate change, while the Left employ the psychological process of displacement. Thus, no real solutions will ever come to fruition due to a great degree by these self-defeating mental traps. It’s also easy to forget or overlook these harsh truths when, as Democracy Later tweeted, “It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.” 

Capitalist industrial civilization has created a real bizarro world for itself from all the geopolitical blowback of resource wars and dark politricks, the entrenched vested interests of the military industrial complex and fossil-fuel conglomerates, the financial chicanery of the wealthy elite, and all the hi-tech gadgetry and weapons in the hands of every virulent extremist. ISIS now appears to even have their own TV show interviewing prisoners in cages before they make another snuff film. The world just seems to be getting more screw-balled by the hour. What the fuck is this?:

Screen Shot 2015-02-22 at 12.59.31 PM

Nafeez Ahmed has an excellent article on the failed state of Yemen and its slow collapse into a post-oil, post-water Mad Max land. Their primary crop is now qat, a mild narcotic plant whose cultivation sucks up even more of their dwindling water aquifers. As someone on Reddit said:

I know its sexier to focus on the collapse of rich states, such as America and various nations in Europe and Asia, but it will most likely be Yemen and other nations that provide a prediction of a future to come. Largely the modern nation or multicultural state will start to break down, beset by escalating crises in disaster, capital, and factional management until civil war breaks out. From that death spiral, who knows how far it will go…

In addition to a perfect storm of ecological and social problems that include overpopulation, resource depletion and climate change, there is also the baggage of imperialist U.S. foreign policies –arming and aiding corrupt and brutal kings/dictators, funding and arming radical extremists like Osama bin Laden’s jihadists in Afghanistan during the 1980’s, etc. in an effort to control global oil supplies and trade routes. In Bizzaro world, don’t expect any leaders of American Empire to touch those root causes with a 10,000 mile remote-controlled drone.

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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

imageedit_40_3593764711

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

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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:

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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.

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“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

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Burning Down the House

02 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by td0s in Peak Oil

≈ 71 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Chaos, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecocide, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Police State, Poverty

Cross posted from Pray for Calmity
By TDoS

Despite the oddly warm weather that blew in today, we are in the depth of autumn. The days have been full of regular chores. Splitting firewood and stacking it on pallets outside the front door is something I tend to every third day or so, and I try to split in excess so that come the raw cold days of winter, I need not swing the maul. The gardens are almost all covered in a layer of horse manure, and the chicken coop is surrounded with straw bales in the hope that the next round of polar vortecies will not claim the lives of any of our birds. The quiet days spent fleshing deer hides and hauling gravel into the drainage trench around our house arouse my mind to thinking. Furious thinking about the state of the planet, the state of human beings within this culture, and just what the hell any of us should do with our time, our will, and our strength as we collectively are drawn into a decidedly more difficult future.

The bulk of my days this summer past were dedicated to the construction of our house. We have several acres of beautiful land in one of the forested pockets of North America, and through the heat and the rain I swung a framing hammer until at long last I now have a small, mostly finished cabin. It was not once lost on me, that building my house in a rural place as part of an attempt to alleviate myself of the necessity of the industrial capitalist system, I quite often had to lean heavily on that very system. “Using the grid to go off the grid,” my friend said. Despite having no wires or pipes running to my cabin, I know the truth of the matter: there is no escaping civilization. One can scoot to the edges, hang out near the lifeboats if you will, smoking a cigarette and waiting for the moment reality dawns on the crew and they cry “Abandon ship!” But no matter how far one goes, no matter how many comforts they shuck, the chemicals of industry still course through their blood. Catastrophic climate change will wipe out ways of life even in the remote, uncontacted jungles of the world. People who never drove a car or owned a cell phone will be subject to famine and cancer. Ironically, it is the poor who will likely suffer greatest as climatic change spurs droughts, floods, and mega storms. Worse yet, it is the non-human species who are being eradicated daily, never to return, for the hubris of petroleum man.

—

I hate this civilization, this machine, this juggernaut, this sleepwalking hungry ghost, this pathological ideology, this imaginary cage that we cannot seem to imagine a key for no matter how deeply we come to resent our captivity. But I still wanted a steel roof so that I could collect rainwater. It was July when I screwed the roof down to the purlins, and on that day I asked myself, “What does a person do, when they simultaneously need a thing, and need to destroy it?” Such a double bind cannot possibly have a rational answer, because the rational is captured by society, trademarked and owned by the dominant culture. We can only know in our souls, in the still wild places of our being what must be done, but making the case with the words crafted in the forges of civilization will almost certainly always fail. Words and arguments are Trojan Horses, trap doors to counter arguments, to platitudes, to endless winding hallways of thought not designed to deliver you anywhere, but merely to sap you of your energy in the traveling.

We know what we must do, and we know that we will never be able to rationalize it to the denizens of civilization, because at its very core a rationalization is a request for permission. Those who benefit most from the demise of the natural world and from the agony of the global poor will never permit anyone to cut the lights on this cavalcade of compounding tragedies.

We know what we must do. We must burn down the house we have built, force ourselves back into the wild. And further, we must tell the story to all of our children explaining that the house made us weak, it made us sedentary, it turned us against our land and our kin who dwell on the land, it made us servile to its own needs even as it fell apart around us, off-gassing formaldehyde and leaching fire retardants into our blood. We must explain that the lure the comfort of the house provides is undeniable, and that a long many days from now, the children of our children’s children may forget the perils that the house presents. We must send strong words and songs far into the unseen future, so that those who come after us value the freedom of their life out of doors with only simple shelters, that they understand the impermanence of the tipi or the wigwam is not a failing, but a strength, as the nature of life on this Earth is that of impermanence. We must convey the futility of attempts to forever banish the cold, the rain, or the wind with immovable dwellings, and that such folly will forever chain those who build them to a lifetime of work while making enemies of their surroundings as they till more soil for crops, as they sink more mines for more metal, as they cut trees for more wood, and still lose their great battle against the ravages of weather and time.

It is a great house we have collectively built. Many will say there is no other way of being. They will say that despite the dangers the house presents to body, mind, and soul, that these dangers are nothing when weighed against the impossibility of life outside. There will be those who even acknowledge the limitations of this house, they will nod in agreement when you tell them that the roof is caving and the foundation buckling. They will say, “Yes, yes, I know” when you present the children afflicted with leukemia brought about by the toxicity of the house’s very construction, and they will fight you still when you suggest dismantling this place and creating something new.

The house is a prison, and the people within it have become institutionalized, domesticated. They have been subjugated in spirit and thought to think there is no life outside the walls. If it were possible merely to escape, to dig a mighty tunnel to the far reaches of the mortar and beyond, perhaps that would be the righteous choice. But there is no place left that the ravages cannot reach you. There are no lands across the sea where you will not be subject the dictates of the warden, where the poisons of industry will not claim your health and kill your landbase. The walls must go, by any means necessary, even if in the here and now, we rely upon them.

Sleet is falling now outside of my window. It has been a long season of work, and as my body finds itself resting more, my mind grows agitated. There have been uprisings against police authority across the United States in recent weeks. The petroleum markets are in turmoil as global powers seek domination over their competitors. Experts are advising that the temperature of the planet will necessarily rise to one and a half degrees Celsius above baseline, and still the owner class seeks to exploit tar sand, deep-water oil, and coal.

What is a person to do? It seems that simultaneously, everything and nothing is possible. Action and inaction both appear to be dead ends. There are those who silently hope for a massive solar flare or a great pandemic, assuming the only way to break from this Mobius strip of horrors is if it is severed by some cataclysm delivered from above. This is praying for calamity, it is begging a still listening God for absolution, as if we have done anything to earn such favors.

As the winter sets in, I will be writing about our responsibilities in such times.

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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

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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

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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”.

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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:

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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:

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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

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The Slow-Motion Train Wreck of Industrial Civilization

29 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 106 Comments

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

weapons-of-mass-destruction-02-621x439

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:

Snap 2014-09-29 at 12.38.19

…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:

Snap 2014-09-29 at 12.44.34

Snap 2014-09-29 at 12.48.42

Global overpopulation shows no signs of stopping:

Snap 2014-09-29 at 12.58.20

The Wealth Gap continues to grow:

Snap 2014-09-29 at 13.06.07

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:

Snap 2014-09-29 at 13.19.41

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.

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Alternative Energy Fetishes and Temples to Technology

22 Friday Aug 2014

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

≈ 173 Comments

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

robert-mccall-The-Prologue-and-the-Promise-1024x427 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.

Screen shot 2014-08-22 at 9.34.10 AM

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.

Screen shot 2014-08-22 at 9.41.42 AM

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

BvVXkB8IEAAf4U2.jpg-large

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.

Snap 2014-08-22 at 11.55.30 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.

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Where’s the Evolution?

07 Monday Jul 2014

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

≈ 69 Comments

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

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“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.

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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…

photo-11 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

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Capitalist Industrial Civilization = M.A.D.

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 82 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, David Suzuki, Depleted Uranium, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Gross Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Mountaintop Removal, NSA chief Keith Alexander, Nuclear Waste, Ocean Acidification, Plasticizing the Planet, Poverty, Privatization, Regulatory Capture, Strip, The Revolving Door Between Government and Corporations, War for Profit

картинки-Просто-картинки-смешные картинки-фотоприколы_3354663262

“This, then, is the legacy we leave to future generations so that we can turn on our lights and computers or make nuclear weapons… Have we, the human species, the ability to mature psychologically in time to avert these catastrophes, or, is it in fact, too late?” ~ Dr. Helen Caldicott

Radical, wide-scale planning should have been executed decades ago in response to the Limits to Growth study. Instead, we carried on with business-as-usual as the natural world underwent cataclysmic, mass extinction level changes. Every day, the insanity of capitalist industrial civilization(CIC) is on full display as we entertain ourselves with the illusion of token political gestures towards “sustainability”. None of it changes our death march over the cliff of extinction. Nature died long ago with man’s discovery of fossil fuels which fed his terminal overshoot. Any isolated pockets of remaining wilderness are trampled underfoot, amounting to no more than a mere novelty destination commercialized by the tourist industry.

Enslaved to his own self-destructive technology, CIC continues to toxify and irradiate the planet, plasticize the oceans, and disrupt the chemical conditions that allow for life. A society that dehumanizes everything with the fetishization of technology and money will always see disaster as a money-making opportunity. Anthropogenic climate disruption is no exception. Competition amongst nations and corporations for economic/military supremacy, wealth, and power demands that the energy resources to be exploited first are those with the highest available ERoEI, i.e. fossil fuels. The charts bear out this cutthroat strategy and so do the actions of nation states who have made it a legal duty to maximize greenhouse gases. Giving up the competitive advantage of coal, oil, and gas ensures you will be eaten alive in the global economy. Thus nation states are locked into a capitalist race to the grave. The nasty greenhouse gas-emitting side effects of these fuels are simply another negative externality quietly pushed onto future generations. However, physical reality will eventually overtake a fake mass-media culture consumed by the idolatry of materialism and greed. The Earth doesn’t bail out a species that continuously spends more than it saves. Instead, the biospheric slate is wiped clean to make way for the next bout of evolutionary events.

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Like radiation, GHG’s are seemingly invisible yet their effects are all too real. Because of the lag period involved in anthropogenic climate disruption, their devastating environmental costs will never be fully appreciated in time to avert disaster. Adding up the land, air, ice, and ocean warming data, a study from last year found that in recent decades the earth has been heating up at a rate of 250 trillion Joules per second. This is equivalent to:

    • Detonating four Hiroshima atomic bombs per second
    • Experiencing two Hurricane Sandys per second
    • Enduring four 6.0 Richter scale earthquakes per second
    • Being struck by 500,000 lightning bolts per second
    • Exploding more than eight Big Ben towers, with every inch packed full of dynamite, per second

For the Fox-news-befuddled masses, such analogies are meaningless because the threat is not in their face. In their conspiracy-addled minds, climate change is a socialist plot to ruin the American economy and undermine capitalism itself. To the genuflecting masses of capitalism, the mythical free market is seen as an all-powerful, self-regulating mechanism of the Earth, the Sun, and the Universe. Man-made constructs are inanimate and artificial, yet we cling to them as if they were immutable laws of nature.

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Keeping industrial civilization chugging along in the face of planetary ecological collapse is eerily similar to the military doctrine of nuclear deterrence called M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction), as commenter James explained:

Our competitive growth is MAD and considered on a geological time scale is only slightly slower than a sudden launch of nuclear missiles which may also eventually occur. We kid ourselves when we think that we’ll be fine as long as we never have a nuclear exchange, that sustainability is a possibility if we prevent nuclear war…

…This planet has the Big C, civilization, and it will torture its denizens as they struggle to maintain normalcy while the onslaught of malnutrition, decay and chaos drive them mad.

Do you think Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney are going to ameliorate the conditions of your decline? Ever wonder what it’s like to be a human sacrifice?

Capitalist carbon man’s unwavering faith in the powers of technology ensures that Big C’s omnicidal, energy-slurping $46 trillion-dollar infrastructure(U.S.A. only) and its array of mechanized contraptions cranks onward, squeezing out the last drop of resources from a spent Earth. Human cannon fodder will continue to be shoveled into Iraq and the Middle East to keep the fossil fuel furnaces burning. America’s corporate-industrial-military-political-financial complex will protect its financial coffers at the expense of the destitute masses and a habitable planet. When it comes to money, there is no loyalty to anyone or anything in the land of the FEE and home of the bamboozled. Just like countless Wall Street predators who have passed through the revolving corporate/government door, former NSA chief Keith Alexander is now getting in on the action to exploit his national security credentials. 

A simple lesson not learned from the two recent epic industrial disasters:

Collusion between big business, government and industry is hardly restricted to Japan. In every country, the health and safety of working people in their workplaces and their communities are routinely subordinated to the dictates of profit. Moreover, the past three decades of market restructuring have led to the systematic erosion of the limited regulations that previously existed. In many instances, regulatory bodies have been cut back or replaced by corporate “self-regulation”.

Fukushima is just one of the major disasters that have exposed the criminal character of capitalism. One year earlier, an explosion at the BP-run Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and created the worst environmental catastrophe in US history. The Bush and Obama administrations fast-tracked the project, which proceeded without an environmental impact study, despite public concern and opposition. In the wake of the oil spill, the Obama administration acted as a virtual attorney for BP, assisting the energy giant to minimise the economic and political fallout. From the outset, the White House made clear that the disaster would not impede further offshore oil projects—including by BP.

The Japanese government, first under Prime Minister Naoto Kan, and now Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, has performed a similar service for TEPCO—providing a huge bailout for the company and limiting the payouts to small businesses and individuals whose lives have been devastated…

…The real lesson that should be drawn from the report’s revelations is the incompatibility between capitalism and even the most elementary needs of humanity for a healthy and secure environment….

Structuring a society to reward the most sociopathic and ruthless amongst us, create grotesque levels of inequality and political disenfranchisement, deify material wealth as the primary metric of success, privatize and profitize war, and use the planet as a garbage dump for toxic waste is a recipe for disaster.

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Humans have thrown into the geological evolutionary processes of Earth several long-lived and very disruptive monkey wrenches. There are three which are noteworthy and will outlive us all in the deep time of planetary history:

    • Anthopogenic climate disruption will essentially last forever, according to Professor David Archer of Chicago University and his associates. He says “the climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge, longer than time capsules, far longer than the age of human civilization so far. Ultimate recovery takes place on timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, a geologic longevity typically associated in public perceptions with nuclear waste.”
    • Ocean Acidification, the so-called ‘evil twin’ of climate change, will mirror the longevity of anthropogenic CO2…

Snap 2014-06-27 at 11.07.57

    • Nuclear Waste from the production of nuclear power and nuclear bombs lasts essentially until the end of time. Coal-fired electric plants produce their own witch’s brew of radioactive waste as well. In the U.S. alone, roughly 2,000 metric tons of nuclear waste are produced every year with 70,000 tons now sitting at some 100 temporary sites across the country. A permanent disposal site has yet to be established to store the fatal stuff. The recent egregious, Homer Simpson-esque mishaps and incompetence at America’s only radioactive waste repository located in New Mexico don’t inspire any confidence that we can store this stuff safely even for a brief period, let alone for the thousands of years required. We’re too busy fracking around that fragile site to worry about any long-term consequences. Humans have sufficiently booby-trapped the planet that in the dying days of the Anthropocene, your chance of survival is the same as winning the Lotto.

A few of the deadly radioisotopes that can be found in nuclear waste are the following:

– uranium 238 (half-life 4.468 billion years)
– uranium 235 (half-life 700 million years)
– plutonium 244 (half-life 80 million years)
– iodine-129 (half-life 15.7 million years)
– neptunium-237 (half-life two million years)
– plutonium 242 (half-life 373,300 years)
– technetium-99 (half-life 220,000 years)
– plutonium-239 (half-life 24,000 years)

Depleted uranium is a byproduct of processing mined uranium for fuel in nuclear energy plants and as a component for nuclear bombs. Depleted uranium contains U-234, U-235, U-236, and U-238. Only two countries have acknowledged using depleted uranium in their weaponry, the US and UK, for its armor-piercing advantages. Only one country, Belgium, has banned its use. A couple of years ago, New Zealand put forth a bill to ban DU munitions, but it failed by one vote. The Dutch peace group PAX recently confirmed that the U.S. fired DU munitions into Iraqi civilian populations.

Once a DU shell impacts a target, it aerosolizes into a fine gas or mist which can then travel in the air for miles. These radioactive particles can get kicked up again and again by the wind or other disturbances after they have settled on the ground or in the sand. Once inhaled by humans, DNA is damaged and the ensuing cell mutations lead to cancer. For an example of the havoc depleted uranium has wreaked on the health of returning soldiers, watch this video. Investigative reporter Dr Nafeez Ahmed recently reported how the World Health Organization tried to cover up the horrific, lingering effects of depleted uranium contamination in Iraq. For those Middle East countries, the use of these radioactive DU munitions by Western forces constitutes an under-the-radar nuclear scourge with cancers, birth defects, and chronic ill-health affecting generations upon generations into the distant future.

1f54a1f78c6a

I suppose one could add plastics to the list of unimaginably long-lasting pollutants to the list. Microscopic particles of the stuff can be found at any beach and even in mountaintop lakes. And of course the scars from massive strip mining operations will remain as an indelible reminder of industrial civilization’s insatiable appetite for energy. Scientists didn’t declare this the Anthropocene Epoch for nothing; we have certainly left our mark like no other species before or since, literally terraforming the Earth into a planet inhospitable to ourselves. Perhaps aliens will pay a visit after the dust has all settled. They’ll surely shake their heads in disgust at the poisonous wreckage left behind by our fossil-fueled madness before zooming off into the night skies in search of a planet that has intelligent life.

 

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No Escape

15 Saturday Feb 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 161 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Regulatory Capture, Security and Surveillance State, Surplus Value, The Black Angels: Young Men Dead, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud

5688

A DJ on the radio mentioned the flooding in England the other day and exclaimed, “The climate is going crazy!”. The shallowness of the conversation and its failure to dig any deeper as to the reasons why the climate is “going crazy” is mirrored in the mainstream media and our society. Real journalism is simply another casualty of our rotting consciousness. Like a leper, those who cannot see or feel are oblivious to their own self-inflicted wounds. The flywheel of industrial civilization continues to spin out of control, taking out chunks of ecological bricks making up a once diverse and vibrant living planet. In some parts of the world, epic drought is desiccating cropland and exposing the cracked surface of lake beds, while on the other side of the globe unceasing rain is causing deluges of biblical proportion. Still other regions are experiencing freak snow and ice storms. The damage is done, but humans will continue to scour the earth for resources to maintain a house whose foundation now rests on the shifting sands of a destabilized biosphere.

If you thought shale gas was a nightmare, you ain’t seen nothing yet. A subterranean world of previously ignored reserves is about to be opened up. These are the vast coal deposits that have proved unreachable by conventional mining, along with gas deposits around them. To the horror of anyone concerned about climate change, modern miners want to set fire to these deep coal seams and capture the gases this creates for industry and power generation.
– 
Fire in the hole: After fracking comes coal

Weather patterns once held in place by an ice-locked Arctic are unraveling at an unsettling pace, yet industrial man can’t seem to pull himself away from his carbon burning orgy long enough to see that the monkey wrench inside Earth’s intricate and homeostatic climate system is himself. Never in the history of Earth has a single species become a geologic force for mass planet-wide extinction. The worshippers of the “free market” proclaim solutions to climate change will be forthcoming in the form of technology, yet all environmental laws and regulations are simply window dressing around the resource consuming pit of capitalism. Technology cannot replenish depleted resources or restore the relative ecological equilibrium that existed prior to the industrial revolution. Natural law is nonnegotiable and those who transgress it, repeatedly ignoring clear and present warning signs, are doomed to suffer the unforgiving consequences. Modern man will leave behind a toxic and radioactive wasteland for eons.

pollution_palace_by_equine_whisperer-d5snrdm

The corporate state is impotent in the face of the environmental meltdown since its only real purpose appears to be an enabler and enforcer to the plunder of the commons and the concentration of wealth into the most ruthless and greedy hands. There is no escaping this system that is locked into a path of self-destruction except through death, as Kevin Moore describes on this blog:

“…in general terms the purpose of government is:

a) to facilitate the looting-and-polluting of local regions and the planet as a whole in order that a small minority can acquire material wealth and enjoy themselves.
b) to facilitate the transfer of wealth from those lower in the hierarchical system to those near the top.
c) to keep the general populace uninformed and compliant.
d) to provide sufficient ‘trickle down’ for the misinformed and deluded masses to think they are not being exploited.
e) [more recently] to promote the agendas of transnational corporations, which are focused on complete control of populations and resources and maximization of short-term profits.

The purpose of environmental laws is:

1. to facilitate the looting-and-polluting of local regions and the planet as a whole but to limit the impact of severe pollution in specific cases where that pollution would be detrimental to other planet-destroying money-making activities..
2. to provide the pretence that governments care about the welfare of the general populace.
3. to provide looters and polluters with official mandates for looting and polluting, i.e. an environmental impact process having been gone through and ‘no significant impacts identified’, the activity of the looter-and-polluter is given the stamp of approval.

Under such a system it become inevitable that all politicians are, or quickly become, bought-and-paid-for professional liars and that all senior environment officers become lackeys to the system and therefore enemies of the people.

The entire political-economic system of western nations is geared to making everything that matters worse, so everything that matters gets worse.”

These are the unvarnished and stark rules of the game for those who care to know the truth. Becoming fully aware is a hope-destroying and soul-wrenching realization, but the truth is never measured by its popularity and very few ever face and accept it. The welfare and safety of the public and future generations will continue to be sacrificed at the altar of stock markets and mass consumerism. As commenter James says:

“…Murdering extant humans NOW to gain wealth is accepted government policy and in some cases personal policy…”

Nowhere is this more true than in the one country that comprises 5% of the world’s population, but consumes 25% of its resources; others are furiously trying to catch up.

___As_a_thief_in_the_night____by_pierk

So as the industrial world whistles past the graveyard on its civilization-ending trajectory, we watch the signposts of doom whiz by us each day and wonder what is the point of getting up every morning to participate in this omnicidal culture. With virtually the entire planet having been plotted, demarcated, sold off for exploitation and surveillance by drone, I’m afraid no one is getting out of this trap alive so you might as well learn to respond to current news events with a certain black and morbid humor. We are the pathologists of capitalist industrial civilization, dissecting its potholed road to collapse just as a coroner would conduct the postmortem examination of a morbidly obese person who gorged themself on twinkies and high fructose soft drinks.

Many have used the phrase “the climate is moving to a new normal” or “moving to a new paradigm”. Such phrases give a false sense of security, as if the damage has stopped and the Earth’s systems can now recalibrate to a new settled state, but human forcing of the biosphere by way of GHG emissions continues unabated and in fact has now tripped multiple climate tipping points. There is no “new paradigm”, but an ongoing cascading collapse of all known stability and equilibrium.

When you go into your mindless 9-to-5 job and your micromanaging boss harasses you for petty little things, you’ll think about how meaningless it all is in an age where governments will crumble, billions will starve to death, and the earth will soon become just another lifeless rock floating through space.

___Ruins____by_pierk

“…Run for the hills, pick up your feet and let’s go.

We did our jobs, pick up speed now lets move.

The trees can’t grow without the sun in their eyes.

And we can’t live if we’re too afraid to die….”

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Who really pulls the strings?:

The megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. The bought-and-paid politicians sitting in Washington are simply the marionettes of the corporations and financial elite who are dictating public policy and regulations.

Preserving the Status Quo

There is no right wing or left wing, only the aristocracy and the serfs (a vertical paradigm). To know this is to be like a fish who has broken the surface of the water, realizing he was in water the whole time.

A Kabuki Play

"What we have, in what passes for US democracy in 2012, is a kabuki play that Cicero put to papyrus 1948 years earlier. All historical empires and war aggressors have used propaganda to claim their looting and police states were necessary and helpful to the 99%. Instead, a sorrowful history tells us they were almost always for the sole benefit of the 1%." - Albert Bates

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  • [John Mearsheimer] Great Power Politics in the 21st Century January 26, 2023

RSS AlterNet

  • Profanity-filled tirades and threats about grassroots dominated RNC meeting January 28, 2023
  • Trump calls for wild education overhaul by 'certifying' patriotic teachers and allowing parents to elect school principals January 28, 2023
  • How concentrated wealth and corporate power nurture the greed of thieves January 28, 2023
  • 'It's a mistake' to believe murder case against cops who beat Tyre Nichols to death 'will be easy': legal expert January 28, 2023

RSS Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

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RSS Anarchist News

  • New Series: Audio Versions of CrimethInc. Articles January 28, 2023
  • Update about the health condition of Alfredo Cospito January 28, 2023
  • S1E57 - Nadia on Harm Reduction January 27, 2023
  • Ego Death Podcast - Episode Two January 26, 2023
  • Portland: Attack on UPS Shipping Center January 26, 2023

RSS Antony Loewenstein

  • Why Israel sells spyware to repressive Bangladesh January 16, 2023
  • TRT World interview on new far-right Israeli government January 4, 2023
  • The merging of Israeli far-right power January 4, 2023

RSS Apocadocs

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RSS Arctic Emergency Institute

  • Declining Summer Sea Ice Threatens More than Arctic Wildlife August 25, 2012

RSS Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG)

  • AMEG Strategic Plan December 8, 2012
  • Breaking the Chain November 27, 2012
  • AMEG Policy Brief September 23, 2012
  • The biggest story of all time September 1, 2012

RSS Arctic News

  • A huge temperature rise threatens to unfold soon January 3, 2023
  • Wild Winter Weather December 23, 2022
  • The short lifespan of technological civilizations and the future of Homo sapiens December 17, 2022

RSS Arctic Sea Ice

  • PIOMAS December 2019 December 17, 2019
  • PIOMAS November 2019 November 13, 2019
  • PIOMAS October 2019 October 14, 2019
  • PIOMAS September 2019 September 16, 2019
  • PIOMAS August 2019 August 7, 2019

RSS Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis

  • December lows January 5, 2023
  • Lingering open water areas December 5, 2022
  • Iced November 3, 2022

RSS Around the Coast Mountains

  • The name’s Mark… Mark BC March 18, 2014
  • Packrafting / Fatbiking Buntzen Lake March 3, 2014
  • My New Surly Pugsley Fatbike Build February 11, 2014

RSS Arthur Silber

  • Moving Interruptus, and Why Hospitals Suck July 1, 2019
  • Crisis May 16, 2019
  • How Many Damn Fucking Times Do I Have to Explain This? May 15, 2019
  • So Close, Yet So Far April 7, 2019

RSS Arundhati Roy

  • This is no ordinary spying. Our most intimate selves are now exposed | Arundhati Roy July 26, 2021
  • ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe – podcast May 7, 2021

RSS Arundhati Roy Says

  • A perfect day for democracy February 9, 2013
  • Arundhati Roy speaks about the issue of rape in India December 22, 2012
  • We Call This Progress December 17, 2012

RSS ASPO – USA

  • On hiatus December 8, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 23 October 2022 October 26, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 17 October 2022 October 17, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 10 October 2022 October 10, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 3 October 2022 October 3, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 26 September 2022 September 26, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 19 September 2022 September 19, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 12 September 2022 September 12, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 5 September 2022 September 6, 2022
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 29 August 2022 August 29, 2022

RSS Avedon’s Sideshow

  • You can not do that, it breaks all the rules January 28, 2023
  • Twelfthnight January 6, 2023
  • You just gotta call on me December 15, 2022

RSS Bad Astronomy

  • Echidnas Blow Snot Bubbles to Cool Down. Could We?
  • What It Was Like to Be a Target of Political Violence in New Mexico
  • Advertisers Wanted to Spend Money at Twitter, but “Our Emails Have Been Falling Into the Abyss”

RSS Barbara Ehrenreich

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RSS BBC: Science & Environment

  • Government green heating scheme off to slow start January 26, 2023
  • True wild camping on Dartmoor not threatened say landowners January 26, 2023
  • Asteroid 2023 BU: Space rock passes closer than some satellites January 27, 2023

RSS Big Picture Agriculture

  • BIG PICTURE AGRICULTURE'S LATEST NEWS February 26, 2022
  • How to Stay Informed About Agriculture, Food, and Farming Issues October 15, 2019
  • Dr. Walter Falcon's 2019 Iowa Farm Report September 11, 2019
  • Agriculture Reading Picks October 31, 2018
  • The Merits of Amaranth October 30, 2018

RSS Bill Moyers

  • PODCAST: Dr. Bandy Lee Saw It Coming – The Violence Foretold in Donald Trump’s Election August 18, 2022
  • Trump-Russia-Ukraine Timeline April 12, 2022
  • Insurrection Timeline March 13, 2022

RSS Bit Tooth Energy

  • Waterjetting 37e - Using Cavitation to disintegrate rock November 18, 2015
  • Waterjetting 37d - Underground Drilling with Waterjets November 16, 2015
  • Waterjetting 37c - A Drilling Diversion October 14, 2015

RSS Bizarro Blog

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RSS Brane Space

  • Can We Prevent Another Holocaust From Happening? January 27, 2023
  • "Near Miss" 2023 BU Asteroid To Graze Planet Earth This Evening January 26, 2023

RSS Brave New World

  • Islam: The Overlooked Aspect of Rumi’s Poetry March 9, 2021
  • Remembering Nur ad-Din Zengi: The Light of Faith March 6, 2021
  • Francophobia Among Muslims: Just Another Myth? February 25, 2021
  • A Year in Kazakhstan: Some General Observations October 25, 2020

RSS Breaking the Set

  • Abby Martin Breaks the Set One Last Time February 28, 2015
  • Never Stop Breaking the Set! February 28, 2015
  • Cuba Part III: The Evolution of Revolution February 27, 2015
  • Cuba Part II: Ebola Solidarity & Castro’s Daughter on Gay Rights February 26, 2015
  • Why Are Americans Getting Their Medical Degrees in Cuba? February 26, 2015

RSS Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  • Mink on a Spanish farm caught bird flu. Is the virus adapting to mammals? January 26, 2023
  • Reuters: Kremlin expresses alarm over ‘Doomsday Clock’ January 26, 2023
  • Mail & Guardian: Only bold, collective action can turn back the hands of the Doomsday Clock January 25, 2023

RSS Business Insider

  • The timeline of Tyre Nichols' death, from being stopped by Memphis cops to officers being charged with his murder January 29, 2023
  • Tyre Nichols live updates: Memphis Police Department says it will 'permanently deactivate' the SCORPION unit whose officers beat Tyre Nichols January 29, 2023
  • German chancellor's indecision on sending tanks to Ukraine has created a new word in Western war room politics: Scholzing January 29, 2023
  • AOC could potentially become the second-highest ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee: report January 28, 2023
  • 3 men arrested after attempting to kidnap an Iranian-American journalist and activist who is critical of the country's human rights abuses, feds say January 28, 2023
  • A teacher who quit and took a job at Costco says life is much better now — she has a life, can pay her bills and finally sleeps at night January 28, 2023
  • Former VP Mike Pence says he takes 'full responsibility' for classified documents found at his Indiana residence: 'Mistakes were made' January 28, 2023
  • 'It's a failure for us': Migrants at the Southern US border are reportedly frustrated with the mobile app that's supposed to speed up asylum appointments January 28, 2023
  • Department of Justice calls to bar Sam Bankman-Fried from contacting FTX employees after allegations of witness tampering January 28, 2023
  • SBF's lawyer asked the judge to let the disgraced FTX founder access the company's assets and crypto January 28, 2023

RSS C-Realm

  • Automation and SJWs: A Conversation with James Howard Kunstler February 12, 2016
  • It's official. The Age of Limits gathering is on hiatus January 22, 2015
  • Three Conferences in Three Weeks June 13, 2014

RSS Cagle: Premium Cartoon News

  • To win the battle of ideas, you have to show up January 28, 2023
  • If you thought Donald Trump was the worst, check out Mike Pompeo January 27, 2023
  • Biden’s lost docs and losing war January 27, 2023
  • KEVIN MCCARTHY’S GAVEL January 27, 2023
  • BIDEN SICKNESS January 27, 2023
  • CONSTITUTIONAL GRIEVING January 26, 2023

RSS Cassandra’s Legacy

  • Cassandra is Dead. Long Live Cassandra! April 15, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect": The Collapse of Saudi Arabia's Water Supply April 12, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect" April 5, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest post on "The Seneca Effect" April 1, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's latest post on "The Seneca Effect" March 29, 2021

RSS Censored News

  • Chili Yazzie -- Navajo's 'transitional energy' company is damaging the earth, encroaching on Hualapai land January 28, 2023
  • Chili Yazzie 'Relationship to Land Concepts: Who owns the land?' January 28, 2023
  • American Indian Airwaves: Listen to Nuclear Colonialism Series January 28, 2023

RSS Center For Biological Diversity

  • 50 Groups Urge N.M. Governor to End Oil, Gas Extraction by 2034 January 27, 2023
  • Federal Judge Finds BLM Imperiled Sage Grouse, Broke Environmental Laws in Approving Idaho Phosphate Mine January 26, 2023
  • Lawsuit Aims to Protect Imperiled Southern Hognose Snakes January 26, 2023

RSS Center for Investigative Journalism

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RSS Center for Economic & Policy Research

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RSS Charles Eisenstein’s Blog

  • Peace-building March 25, 2022
  • FASCHISMUS UND DAS ANTIFESTIVAL November 16, 2021

RSS Chomsky

  • The Kind of Anarchism I Believe in, and What's Wrong with Libertarians June 9, 2013
  • Upcoming speaking event in Boston with Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, and Jeremy Scahill April 19, 2013

RSS Chris Hedges

  • Biden Administration Unveils Proposed Renter Protection January 27, 2023

RSS Class Warfare Blog

  • Egregious Quote Mining Mistakes January 28, 2023
  • It’s a Miracle! January 26, 2023

RSS Cliff Schecter

  • North Korea denies arming Russia’s Wagner group January 29, 2023
  • Memphis disbands police unit linked to Tyre Nichols’s beating January 29, 2023
  • Iran thwarts drone attacks on Isfahan military site January 29, 2023
  • Netanyahu announces plans to arm Israelis after Jerusalem attack January 29, 2023
  • Czech Republic secures pro-West direction as ex-NATO general wins January 29, 2023
  • Russia claims 14 killed in attack on hospital in eastern Ukraine January 28, 2023

RSS Climate and Capitalism

  • Top 1% grab twice as much new wealth as everyone else combined January 16, 2023
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, January 2023 January 15, 2023
  • 90% of world’s people to face combined extreme heat and drought January 9, 2023
  • Practical nuclear fusion is still just hype January 2, 2023
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf: The Best of 2022 December 31, 2022
  • Degrowth and the end of capitalism December 17, 2022

RSS Climate Central

  • The looming threat for Maine’s iconic potato industry
  • Ellis Island, lighthouses among historic NJ sites flooding as seas rise
  • Still rare in Iowa, electric car powers Des Moines family’s home during blackouts
  • Storied Maine ski resort bets future on reining in high costs of warmer winters

RSS Climate Change: The Next Generation

  • Historic Greenland ice sheet rainfall unraveled May 30, 2022
  • Flip Flop: Why Variations in Earth's Magnetic Field Aren't Causing Today's Climate Change February 22, 2022
  • Let's call climate change deniers what they really are: CLIMATE LIARS! May 9, 2021

RSS Climate Citizen

  • Guest Post: Labor’s scheme to cut industrial emissions is worryingly flexible January 10, 2023
  • Ozone action on track, helping avoid 0.5C of global warming by 2100 says UNEP January 10, 2023
  • Chubb Review into the integrity of Australian Carbon Offsets sends mixed messages January 9, 2023

RSS Climate Code Red

  • Over half of all fossil fuels are extracted by just seven countries, as world heads to 3°C of warming November 28, 2022
  • Brace for impact. International aviation Net Zero 2050 flightpath crashes in Melbourne. November 19, 2022
  • Not on the same page: When science and politics collide in climate communication September 28, 2022

RSS Climate Connections

  • Climate Connections Update February 5, 2015
  • CIC’s environmental and social justice photography contest open for entries January 9, 2015
  • FBI Harassing Activists in Pacific Northwest January 7, 2015

RSS Climate Denial Crock of the Week

  • In Texas, Could Geothermal be an “Off Ramp” for Drillers? January 28, 2023
  • Could Geothermal Plan Edge Out Utah’s Mini Reactors? January 28, 2023
  • PBS: What are the Most Dangerous Areas for Climate Impacts? Where are the Climate Havens? January 28, 2023

RSS Climate Progress

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RSS Climate Snapshot

  • "Carbon tsunami" lead by Enbridge Northern Gateway takes aim at BC June 18, 2014
  • BC's tar sands? Thirteen proposed LNG projects equivalent to 13 times current BC emissions June 9, 2014
  • Car Carbon series: cool new animation, plus the jaw-dropping impact it left out May 13, 2014
  • Climate change fuels both California's record drought and "polar vortex" storms May 6, 2014

RSS ClimateSight

  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia (Part 2) March 23, 2021
  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia. March 11, 2021
  • Talking, typing, and the social model of disability July 22, 2020

RSS Club Orlov

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RSS ClusterFuck Nation

  • Pretend-O-Rama January 27, 2023
  • The End of Reality Consensus Disorder January 23, 2023

RSS Cocktailhag – FDL

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RSS Colin Tudge

  • Let's not bet the farm | Colin Tudge April 3, 2013
  • Why the world needs a renaissance of small farming | Colin Tudge September 18, 2012

RSS Common Dreams: News

  • GOP Utah Gov. Signs Ban on 'Lifesaving Medical Care' for Trans Youth January 28, 2023
  • Protests Erupt Across US After Memphis Releases Video of Ex-Cops Beating Tyre Nichols January 28, 2023
  • 'Sheer Brutality': Released Footage Shows Fired Memphis Cops Beating Tyre Nichols January 28, 2023
  • GOP House Puts Big Oil's Revolving Door Into High Gear January 28, 2023
  • At Least 7 Killed in Jerusalem Synagogue Attack After Israeli Troops Kill 10 Palestinians January 27, 2023

RSS Consortium News

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RSS Consumer Energy Report

  • Death of the Florescent Shop Light – Energy Efficiency September 21, 2022
  • Methanol VS Ethanol – Technical Merits and Political Favoritism September 21, 2022
  • Bill Nye the Science Guy – Social Primate and Nuclear Energy September 21, 2022
  • World’s Smallest Gasoline Engine – Technology Breakthrough September 21, 2022

RSS Corp Watch

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RSS CorrenteWire

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RSS CorrenteWire – Quick Hits

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RSS Counter Currents

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RSS CounterPunch

  • Less Freedom, More Money: Tony Blair’s Vaccine Passport June 14, 2021
  • The U.S. Dares to Criticize Israel October 3, 2014
  • Gaza – Betrayed In Thought and Deed August 5, 2014
  • Boeing Workers Take a Stand & Take the Heat December 31, 2013
  • Bank Corruption Down Under December 31, 2013
  • Europe’s Deadly Transition From Social Democracy to Oligarchy December 9, 2011
  • What We Can Not See December 29, 2007
  • The Sham of Homeland Security December 29, 2007
  • Beauty from the Heart of Texas December 29, 2007
  • Encountering Benazir Bhutto December 29, 2007

RSS Crooked Timber

  • Mitigated disaster January 24, 2023
  • Twigs and Branches January 22, 2023
  • Sunday photoblogging: Redcliffe flats January 22, 2023
  • On Constitutional Monetary Moments January 18, 2023

RSS Crooks and Liars

  • LNMC With Joe Pisapia January 29, 2023
  • Students Will Sue DeSantis Over AP African American Studies January 29, 2023
  • Former LAPD Cop Doesn't Pull Punches On Tyre Nichols Video January 29, 2023
  • Eagles Christmas Album Has Raised $1.25M So Far January 28, 2023

RSS Cryptome

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RSS Culture Change

  • Low Cost Polluting: The Real American Dream?
  • We Did It: Sailing Cargo in the Aegean
  • Cure for Depending on 90K Oil Spewing Cargo Ships: Sail Power Makes Inroads, Now in Mediterranean

RSS Dahr Jamail

  • For a Worse Tomorrow November 18, 2021
  • Covid-19’s Not Through With Us Yet September 21, 2021

RSS Daily Kos Comics

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RSS Damn the Matrix

  • To peak or not to peak… January 18, 2023
  • We’re all being poisoned… January 10, 2023

RSS Dan Hagen

  • Duck and Cover, 2023 January 27, 2023
  • Tippy-toeing around Stupid People January 18, 2023

RSS Dangerous Intersection

  • About Hamilton 68 January 28, 2023
  • Project Veritas Undercover Pfizer Video Fails to Ignite News Media Interest January 27, 2023
  • We Have Ended the War on Obesity. We Are Declaring Ourselves Healthy Fat and Moving On January 27, 2023

RSS Dark Ages America

  • 7 million and going strong January 6, 2023
  • Karma City December 13, 2022
  • Muddy Waters November 12, 2022
  • The Midterms October 19, 2022

RSS David Bollier

  • John Thackara on Designing for Life January 1, 2023
  • Joe Brewer's Bold Quest to Help Restore a Bioregion December 1, 2022
  • David Sloan Wilson on Evolutionary Science and Prosocial Behavior November 1, 2022

RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – National Memo)

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RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – Tax Analysts)

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RSS David Harvey

  • A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse: A letter from the editor January 21, 2023
  • Register for Reading Marx’s Grundrisse with David Harvey December 27, 2022
  • Interview: Creating a compassionate geography November 11, 2022

RSS David Hilfiker

  • Welcome August 4, 2011

RSS David McNally

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RSS David Roberts

  • Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck June 5, 2015
  • Please support Grist April 10, 2015
  • There’s an emerging right-wing divide on climate denial. Here’s what it means (and doesn’t) April 8, 2015

RSS Death by Car: Capitalism’s Drive to Carmageddon

  • Leading the way in preventing traffic accidents September 21, 2022
  • Truck safety rate system 3 years September 14, 2022
  • Traffic accident in the school zone August 31, 2022
  • cerebral hemorrhage in a traffic accident August 9, 2022
  • Uiseong-gun receives donations from children’s safety umbrella to prevent traffic accidents August 3, 2022

RSS Decline of the Empire

  • Defending Reality
  • Fascism And The Uniparty

RSS Deep Green Resistence News Service

  • Forever Chemicals in Every River in the US January 27, 2023
  • Dumping Nuclear Waste in the Pacific January 23, 2023
  • Wisconsin Town Gets Sued for Regulating Factory Farms January 20, 2023
  • An Environmental Defender Is Killed Every Two Days January 17, 2023

RSS Deepak Tripathi’s Diary

  • Afghanistan Awaits Uncertain Future After US Withdrawal July 7, 2021
  • UK’s Brexit Maze October 29, 2019

RSS Democratic Underground

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RSS Democratic Underground – Breaking News

  • Iran reports drone attack on defense facility in Isfahan January 29, 2023
  • Trump Delivers Bitter Speech Filled With Falsehoods in New Hampshire January 28, 2023
  • Memphis police disband unit that beat Tyre Nichols January 28, 2023
  • Zelensky blasts Olympic committee move: 'Any neutral flag of Russian athletes is stained with blood' January 28, 2023
  • Gov. Cox [Utah] signs high-profile bill on transgender surgeries January 28, 2023
  • Beverly Crest fatal shooting: 3 dead 4 critical, police say no suspect information January 28, 2023
  • Pence: 'Mistakes were made' in classified records handling January 28, 2023
  • Tyre Nichols' brutal beating by police shown on video January 28, 2023
  • Trump's handpicked 'MAGA all the way' candidate for RNC co-chair drops out after finishing third January 28, 2023
  • DC AG declines to charge mother of Ashli Babbitt, Jan. 6 protester killed by police January 28, 2023

RSS Democratic Underground – Good Reads

  • Mass Shootings in the U.S. by Shooter's Race/Ethnicity as of January 2023, & by Gender January 29, 2023
  • Cops Can't Be Allowed to Just Make Up Reasons for Pulling People Over January 28, 2023
  • AP African American Studies: 'Academic legitimacy' or 'indoctrination'? January 28, 2023
  • Why (some) Republicans want a national sales tax January 28, 2023
  • Massachusetts Bill allowing Prisoners to trade Organs for Reduced Sentences January 28, 2023
  • Officer Accused in Fatal Tyre Nichols Beating was Previously Accused of Assault January 28, 2023
  • U.S. general warns troops that war with China is possible in two years January 28, 2023
  • New study finds 6 ways to slow memory decline and lower dementia risk January 28, 2023
  • Time for a Showdown With Big Pharma: Chairman Sanders vs. Sky-High Drug Prices (Opinion by Nader) January 28, 2023
  • Twitter's Trust and Safety Head Ditches Protocol for Musk Whims January 28, 2023

RSS Democracy Now

  • Tyre Nichols' Parents Remember Son as "Beautiful Soul" & Describe Video of Beating by Memphis Police January 27, 2023
  • Memphis BLM Activist: Tyre Nichols' Killing Is Part of Police Brutality Crisis Facing Black Residents January 27, 2023
  • Headlines for January 27, 2023 January 27, 2023
  • Biden Proposes Renters Bill of Rights as Landlords Make Record Profits; Housing Advocates Want More January 26, 2023
  • "20 Days in Mariupol": Meet the Ukrainian Filmmaker Who Risked His Life Documenting Russian Siege January 26, 2023
  • Headlines for January 26, 2023 January 26, 2023
  • "Lacks Educational Value"? Critics Slam Florida's Rejection of AP African American Studies Course January 25, 2023
  • Doomsday Clock Moves Closer to Midnight: Peace Activist Frida Berrigan Demands Nuclear Disarmament January 25, 2023
  • As Germany & U.S. Agree on Tanks for Ukraine, German MP Accuses U.S. of Pushing Berlin into Proxy War January 25, 2023
  • Headlines for January 25, 2023 January 25, 2023

RSS Derrick Jensen

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RSS Desdemona Despair

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RSS Desertification

  • Saudi’s Ministry of Economy and Planning joins forces with UpLink to address food insecurity in arid climates (Part 2) January 25, 2023
  • Saudi’s Ministry of Economy and Planning joins forces with UpLink to address food insecurity in arid climates (Part 1) January 25, 2023
  • National plan aims to push back desertification January 25, 2023
  • Reclaiming degraded land key for urban revival January 18, 2023
  • MEET THE TREE MAN OF INDIA’S THAR DESERT January 18, 2023

RSS deSmog Blog

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RSS Digbys Blog

  • Untitled January 12, 2020
  • They can save the world by @BloggersRUs January 12, 2020
  • Just drifting: R.I.P. Buck Henry By Dennis Hartley January 12, 2020
  • It looks like he wants to take Iraq's oil money January 12, 2020
  • Untitled January 11, 2020
  • Let's not forget who worked with Suleimani's IRGC January 11, 2020

RSS Disinfo – Ecology

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RSS Dispatches from the Underclass

  • Exclusive Interview w/ Hezbollah’s Second-In-Command Sheikh Naim Qassem January 15, 2023
  • UN Official Calls for Lifting ‘Illegal’ Syria Sanctions After Seeing Devastation First-Hand November 21, 2022
  • Europe Self-Destructing for U.S. Proxy War In Ukraine, w/ Prabhat Patnaik November 21, 2022
  • US Brings World to Brink of Nuclear Armageddon As Europe Self Destructs, w/ Ali Abunimah November 21, 2022
  • Reality vs Propaganda: Understanding Iran’s Protests, w/ Navid Zarrinnal October 16, 2022

RSS Dissent Magazine

  • Paul Goodman Replies January 27, 2023
  • Universities and Intellectuals January 27, 2023
  • My Kaduchas And Yours January 27, 2023
  • Herman Kahn: Ideologist of Military Strategy January 27, 2023

RSS Dissident Voice

  • Google Hides the Main Reason for America’s Arming of Ukraine January 28, 2023
  • Don’t Mention the War: Interview with Joan Roelofs January 28, 2023
  • “Trans” vs. Children January 28, 2023
  • The Righteous Outrage of Norman Finkelstein January 28, 2023
  • A Prescription January 28, 2023
  • If We Ever Needed George Carlin January 28, 2023
  • Drug Price Showdown Time for Chairman Bernie Sanders January 28, 2023
  • The Power of the Written Word January 28, 2023

RSS Do the Math

  • Keeping Up On Appearances January 6, 2023

RSS Dollars & Sense Blog

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RSS Doug Stanhope

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RSS Douglas Rushkoff

  • Escape plans of the rich and famous November 30, 2022
  • Cyber: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires November 30, 2022
  • Survival of the Richest November 30, 2022

RSS Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

  • PCR interviewed by Greg Hunter USAWatchdog.com January 28, 2023
  • US Army Faces Worst Recruiting Numbers Since End of Draft Era, Offers Medals & Promotions for Referrals, mRNA mandate and woke agenda prompts immense crisis. January 28, 2023

RSS Dredd Blog

  • The Citizen Journalist In America - 4 January 22, 2023
  • In Search Of Ocean Heat - 13 January 21, 2023
  • Western Pacific January 20, 2023
  • Weddell Sea January 20, 2023

RSS Ear to the Ground – Truth Dig

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RSS Early Warning

  • New York Not Close to Exiting Lockdown April 17, 2020
  • Is New York Containing Covid? April 8, 2020
  • New York vs Italy March 23, 2020

RSS Earth First

  • “UNC Dildo-Boy” accosts homophobic preacher, releases anti-technology declaration March 2, 2014
  • Subpoena caps bad week for fossil fuel March 2, 2014
  • Less Than 60 Hours Left to Support Indigenous Land Defenders! February 18, 2014

RSS Earth Observatory: Image of the Day, Natural Hazards, and News

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RSS Earth Observatory: Image of the Day

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RSS Earth Observatory: Natural Hazards

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RSS Earth Policy Institute Blog

  • Data Highlight - Wind Power Beats Nuclear Again in China
  • Data Highlight - Plastic Bag Bans or Fees Cover 49 Million Americans
  • Plan B Update - Fossil Fuel Development in the Arctic is a Bad Investment

RSS Ecocide Alert

  • SBOBET Review January 21, 2023

RSS Ecohuman World

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RSS Eco-Shock News

  • Radio Ecoshock: Polycrisis Angst: Denial or Gaia? January 25, 2023

RSS Ecological Headstand

  • Dilke, Chapman, and Dahlberg Pop-ups May 15, 2021
  • For the Abolition of the Wages System! June 18, 2015
  • The Incredible Shrinking Blog June 9, 2015
  • Keynes "hadn't got round to it" May 25, 2015

RSS Ecological Sociology

  • Commons Enabling Infrastucture August 31, 2013
  • A Short History of Progress: Book Review August 26, 2013
  • Foucault, Power, Truth and Ecology August 14, 2013

RSS Ecologise

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RSS Economic Hardship Reporting Project

  • The Myth of the Socially Conscious Corporation January 27, 2023
  • Salt Lake and Other Utah Cities Used Most of a $10 Million Homeless Services Fund to Hire Cops January 25, 2023
  • No Vacancy January 18, 2023
  • Why Did a Man Starve to Death in an Arkansas Jail? January 17, 2023
  • The Silent Epidemic Affecting Generation Z January 12, 2023
  • A Museum for the Working Class January 9, 2023

RSS Economic Undertow

  • Z Marks the Spot September 1, 2022
  • The Death of Economics June 9, 2021
  • Cars and More Cars … March 22, 2021

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RSS Empire Burlesque

  • Generation of Vipers: The Original Sin and Continuous Crimes of America’s Involvement in Afghanistan August 17, 2021
  • Reich and Reality: Culture Wars of the Conquerors August 10, 2021

RSS Empirical Magazine

  • From the Empirical Archives: Genius or Folly? August 30, 2013
  • From the Empirical Archives: Nights Such as These August 29, 2013
  • From the Empirical Archives: Second Time Foster Child August 28, 2013

RSS EmptyWheel

  • Billy B and Johnny D Drank Whiskey before the Special Counsel Appointment
  • The Trump-Biden-Pence Documents Story Is Not (Yet) about Overclassification
  • More on Brandon Straka’s So-Called Cooperation

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RSS Energy Balance

  • “The Oil Machine” and the Changing Climate. November 22, 2022
  • Architects of Our Future: Energy and the Changing Climate. October 23, 2022
  • The Energy War, and Climate Breakdown. August 17, 2022
  • “Reading Hydro” – Microhydropower on the River Thames at Caversham Weir (Reading, UK). May 17, 2022
  • “Four Meals From Anarchy” – We Must Grow More Food Locally. April 23, 2022
  • Russia-Ukraine War and the Changing Energy Landscape. March 16, 2022

RSS Environment & Food Justice

  • National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Statement on the Climate Crisis October 31, 2019
  • La Lucha por La Sierra | Scion of Texas Oil Barons Seeks to Overturn Historic Use Rights to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant August 30, 2018
  • Biopiracy in Mexico | Foundation stealing wild beehives in Yucatán June 14, 2018

RSS Envisionation Blog

  • 2023 – The Dawning Era Of ‘Overshoot’ & ‘Intervention’ (Climate Engineering) December 30, 2022
  • Byronic Nomads – Francesco da Mosto discusses the fate of Venice December 28, 2022
  • But what is ‘Overshoot?’ – Rafe Pomerance December 5, 2022
  • Rabbi Yonatan Neril – Religion as a global force November 28, 2022

RSS Extraenvironmentalist Blog and Podcasts

  • [ Episode #95 // Economy of Things ] January 28, 2017
  • [ Episode #94 // Rocking the Google Bus ] October 25, 2016
  • [ Episode #93 // Climate Agreements ] September 5, 2016

RSS ExtraEnvironmentalist’s Videos

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RSS ExtraGeographic

  • An Unsuitable Job for a Woman film review
    On its release in 1982 An Unsuitable Job for a Woman was criticised for being under-powered and perfunctory. But 40 years on, what were seen as weaknesses are now strengths.
  • Covid-19 antibody test photo
    A lateral flow antibody test which involves pricking the tip of your finger to get a blood spot for testing.
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    Cartoon about mobile phones.
  • The Shard / London Bridge photo gallery
    A photo gallery of The Shard / London Bridge.
  • David Bowie
    Thank you, David.

RSS Facts for Working People

  • Sudden Opening to Win Mumia Abu-Jamal's Freedom. Please Act NOW! January 27, 2023
  • Microagrressions You Say January 25, 2023
  • Why Are We Bombarded With Advertisements? January 24, 2023

RSS Fair: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

  • As Unions Gain 273,000 Members, Media Opt for Gloomy Headlines January 26, 2023
  • Renomination of Gigi Sohn Gives Public Another Chance to Be Heard January 23, 2023
  • WaPo Feeds Denial With False Claims About Overcounting Covid Deaths January 20, 2023

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  • How Does Climate Change Affect Your Health? July 18, 2022
  • Health Screening Tests Every Woman Should Have July 12, 2022
  • The Day 2 Antigen Test When Travelling From The UK  November 19, 2021

RSS Farooque Chowdhury’s Diary

  • Road rage faces student spirit August 4, 2018
  • Fires within the Arctic Circle July 28, 2018
  • A Facebook post on quota mobilisation July 14, 2018

RSS Feasta

  • Update from the Wellbeing Economy Ireland Hub January 27, 2023
  • Another Teachable Moment from the Return of the Trillion Dollar Coin January 26, 2023
  • Mining, minerals and limits: grounding the green transition January 24, 2023

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RSS Foreign Confidential

  • Film History: the French New Wave July 2, 2021
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RSS FracTracker

  • Assessment of Rework Permits on Oil Production from Operational Wells Within the 3,200-Foot Public Health Protection Zone January 24, 2023
  • Environmental Health Fellowship Opening – Summer 2023 January 20, 2023
  • CalGEM Permit Review Q4 2022: Oil Permit Approvals Show Steep Rise Within Protective Buffer Zones January 18, 2023

RSS George Monbiot (Alternet)

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RSS Get Real List: Chris Nelder

  • Moving on… July 9, 2021
  • My new gig December 5, 2015
  • Announcing the Energy Transition Show October 14, 2015

RSS Gil Smart

  • With Gil Smart on guns, the NRA January 19, 2015
  • Gil Smart right on development February 8, 2015
  • Gil Smart makes sense May 19, 2014
  • Right on, Gil Smart February 17, 2014

RSS Glen Ford – Black Agenda Report

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RSS Global Guerrillas

  • The Long Night is Coming January 4, 2019
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RSS Global Oneness Project

  • Farewell RSS Feeds May 18, 2022

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RSS Green is the New Red

  • Trump Supporter Promises Legislation to Label Protest as “Economic Terrorism” November 22, 2016
  • Violence against environmentalists is now at an all-time high July 8, 2016
  • “To Build a Fire”: New Split EP With “Old Lines” and Will Potter June 13, 2016
  • “It changes who you are—forever. What you do with that change is what defines who you are.” April 28, 2016
  • Exclusive: New Virtual Reality Investigation Goes Inside Factory Farms April 13, 2016
  • New Sticker — Animal Rights Activists Must “Join or Die” February 22, 2016
  • “Truth and Power” TV series features Will Potter on “eco-terrorism,” ag-gag laws, and investigative journalism February 15, 2016
  • This woman rowed straight into a hurricane. And you should too. February 11, 2016
  • 6 Lessons From How the FBI and Media Treat Militia Groups January 12, 2016
  • Here’s How One Activist Convinced the FBI to Leave Him Alone December 7, 2015

RSS Green on Huffington Post

  • Elusive Wildcat Found To Be Living On Mount Everest January 28, 2023
  • Taiwan Is Retreating From Nuclear Energy. At What Cost? January 27, 2023
  • Officials In Colorado Treated To 400 Bear 'Selfies' On Wildlife Camera January 27, 2023
  • Biden Administration Cements Mining Ban Near Minnesota's Boundary Waters January 26, 2023
  • Biden Reinstates Logging Ban In America’s Largest National Forest January 25, 2023
  • Tucker Carlson Says 'What Is That?' To Lenticular 'Vagina Cloud.' Twitter Erupts. January 24, 2023
  • New Pill Treats Diabetic Cats Without Daily Insulin Shots January 23, 2023
  • Dolphins Make A Splash In The Bronx River For First Time In 5 Years January 23, 2023

RSS Greenpeace Blogs

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RSS Greg Palast

  • The Words That Could Convict Trump January 25, 2023
  • Is Santos the “Manchurian Candidate” for Brazil’s Bolsonaro? January 10, 2023

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RSS Grist

  • Documents show how 19 ‘Cop City’ activists got charged with terrorism January 27, 2023
  • How Pittsburgh found a secret climate weapon in ‘the thrilling world of municipal budgeting’ January 27, 2023
  • Oil refineries are polluting US waterways. Too often, it’s legal. January 26, 2023
  • The best way to save forests? Legally recognize Indigenous lands. January 26, 2023

RSS Growth Busters

  • Now HERE’S What We Call an Eco-Superhero January 15, 2023
  • A Vasectomy Could Save Herschel Walker a Lot of Money December 28, 2022
  • Bleak Friday, 8 Billion Post-Mortem and Damage Done by Guilt December 1, 2022
  • 8 Billion is Too Many: Don’t be a Twit About Overpopulation November 9, 2022

RSS Guernica Mag

  • The Shape of Vodou in Diaspora January 23, 2023
  • I Am the Ghost Here January 16, 2023
  • Extraction January 9, 2023
  • Wajo December 15, 2022

RSS Guy McPherson’s Blog

  • Livestream: Ask an Ecologist Anything January 23, 2023
  • Science Snippets: On the Rate of Environmental Change January 23, 2023

RSS Health After Oil

  • Public Health’s Response to Decline: Loyalty to the 1% December 15, 2014

RSS Hot Topic: Global Warming and the Future of New Zealand

  • Postcards from La La Land #132: time warps and twaddle June 7, 2018
  • The final cut: crank paper on NZ temperature record gets its rebuttal – warming continues unabated May 2, 2018
  • Anthropogenic climate change is real: pithy post-punk anthem for the Trump generation December 9, 2017

RSS How to Save the World

  • Walking in the Dark January 26, 2023
  • Hope, on the Balance of Probabilities January 23, 2023
  • Making Sense of Scents January 21, 2023

RSS I am Not a Number

  • THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE? May 19, 2022
  • Alt-Right conspiracy theories are obviously true… except they are not. January 24, 2022
  • The civil war in the LP was NEVER about antisemitism. November 20, 2020

RSS I Cite

  • "Feudalism Lives on in the Delta" -- Ray Sprigle August 17, 2020
  • Critical Theory and Climate Change 2 April 2, 2020
  • Critical Theory and Climate Change 1 March 23, 2020
  • Untitled July 18, 2019
  • America's obsession with rooting out communism is making a comeback September 25, 2018

RSS Iamronen

  • Religiousness in Yoga Part 17: Nirodha October 4, 2022
  • Religiousness in Yoga Part 16: Jñāna, Bhakti, Mantra, Rāja, Kriyā, Karma, Laya, Tantra, Haṭha, Kuṇḍalinī October 1, 2022
  • Religiousness in Yoga Part 15: Antarāya, Iśvara-praṇidhāna September 24, 2022
  • Religiousness in Yoga Part 14: Bandha September 20, 2022
  • Religiousness in Yoga Part 13: Antaraṅga Sādhana, Saṃyama, Kaivalya September 16, 2022

RSS Ian Welsh

  • Open Thread January 28, 2023

RSS Idea Explorer

  • Upgrades October 8, 2022
  • Learning As We Go October 29, 2021
  • Values and Responsibilities March 11, 2021
  • Habitat Loss November 9, 2020
  • Marginal Hope August 24, 2020

RSS Idea Explorer – Big Pic Explorer

  • Consumption Drop November 25, 2020
  • Habitat Loss November 9, 2020
  • General Update February 24, 2020

RSS Idea Explorer: Land of Conscience

  • Doubt December 4, 2022
  • Remembrance September 22, 2021
  • Seeking Miracles July 15, 2021

RSS If You Love This Planet – Helen Caldicott

  • Steven Starr, Bruce Gagnon and William Hartung at the Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction symposium April 18, 2017
  • Dr. Helen Caldicott, Ted Postol, Max Tegmark and Alan Robock at The Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction symposium June 23, 2016
  • Dr. Caldicott’s October 2014 speech: The Ukraine Crisis, Is Nuclear Conflict Likely? February 17, 2015
  • Dr. Helen Caldicott interviewed by Bob Herbert about her latest book, “Loving This Planet” December 28, 2012

RSS Indybay Features

  • Renewed Sense of Urgency Driving Reproductive Rights Actions
  • Time to Close Guantanamo Prison
  • Unholy Days and Nights in Bethlehem
  • ALF Action Leads to Closure of Largest US Mink Farm

RSS Indybay Newswire

  • There is nothing to fear from China
  • Oil Industry Seeks Supreme Court Review of California Offshore Fracking Ban
  • Turn of the times and Negotiations instead of truce
  • Biden 2024 Decision Pits the Party’s Elites Against Most Democrats
  • Russia's war against Ukraine and What are the war aims?

RSS Information Clearing House

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RSS Inside Left – The OFFICIAL Anti-Olympics Blog™

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RSS Institute for Public Accuracy

  • War is a Racket: Fox Guarding Hen House; Stock Buybacks Rip Off Taxpayers January 26, 2023
  • Regulators Could Break Up Wells Fargo — If They Stay Strong January 25, 2023
  • Confronting the Corporate Exploitation of Tweens January 24, 2023
  • Peru: Protests, Oligarchy and Racism January 23, 2023
  • New Dem Leader Jeffries “Has Record of Defending Human Rights Violations” January 19, 2023
  • Patient-Nurse Ratios: Chronic Problem Made Worse by Pandemic January 18, 2023

RSS International Debt Observatory

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RSS iWatch: Global Muckraking

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RSS Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer Blog

  • Five Things We Need to Know About the “Fiscal Cliff” December 10, 2012
  • Wasteful Pentagon Spending and Costly Wars Hurting Minnesota Communities November 6, 2012

RSS Jacobin

  • University of Chicago Graduate Workers Are Trying to Unionize January 28, 2023
  • As Democracy Fades in Port-au-Prince, Ottawa Is Backing Haiti’s Repressive Police January 28, 2023
  • Artist Romare Bearden’s Reckoning With the South January 28, 2023
  • For Workers, Hospitals Have Become the New Steel Mills — Minus the Strong Unions January 28, 2023
  • Ron DeSantis Prefers to Call His War on Workers a War on “Wokeness” January 28, 2023
  • The Hopeful Romanticism of John Keats January 27, 2023

RSS Jeremy Scahill

  • But What About Hamas’s Rockets? May 14, 2021

RSS Jill Stein

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RSS Joe Bageant

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RSS John Cook Video Uploads

  • The Science of Cranky Uncle Part 3: Fighting Misinformation with Critical Thinking December 29, 2021
  • The Science of Cranky Uncle Part 2: Inoculation Theory December 21, 2021
  • The Science of Cranky Uncle Part 1: Why We Can't Ignore Misinformation December 14, 2021
  • Climate misinformation: Will Happer on CO2 being plant food January 24, 2021

RSS John Hively

  • The War Over Global Warming is Class Warfare on Many Fronts July 24, 2021
  • How the Billionaires Corporate News Media Have Been Used to Brainwash Us May 1, 2021

RSS John Pilger

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RSS John W. Whitehead

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RSS John Zerzan: Anarchy Radio

  • Anarchy Radio 01 24 2023 January 25, 2023
  • Anarchy Radio 01 17 2023 January 18, 2023
  • Anarchy Radio 01 10 2023 January 11, 2023

RSS Jonathan Turley

  • “I Water You, You Water Me”: High School Assistant Principal Under Fire for Raising Money to Pay Off Coyote January 28, 2023
  • The Pelosi Tapes: The Video of the October Attack Show New Details and Refute Sensational Theories January 28, 2023
  • Masterpiece Cakeshop Loses Appeal Over Gender Transition Cake January 27, 2023
  • And Then They Came For “The”: Associated Press Warns Use of the Article Can Be “Dehumanizing” January 27, 2023

RSS Karl Grossman

  • I've switched from this site to my website -- www.karlgrossman.com -- for my blog. November 29, 2015
  • The End of Police Raids -- at Long Last -- on Gays of Fire Island July 1, 2015
  • "Fire Island Was Paradise,Truly Paradise" June 21, 2015
  • My First Big Story June 1, 2015
  • Disaster Waiting to Happen at Indian Point May 12, 2015

RSS Karl North Eco-Intelligence

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RSS Kate Ausburn

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RSS Keith Farnish

  • Uprooting Civilization (Part 2) May 7, 2014
  • Uprooting Civilization (Part 1) February 21, 2014
  • The Problem With…Conspiracy Theories January 7, 2014

RSS Knight Science Journalism – MIT

  • The Tracker Now Lives Here … November 1, 2015
  • A farewell post: Three reasons why good science writing is worth defending. January 6, 2015
  • Globe story on non-invasive prenatal testing offers murky argument. December 31, 2014
  • (UPDATED/2*) What Ho? A 2014 List of Lists of best, worst, or otherwisest in 2014 December 30, 2014
  • Cancer & poverty: When a reporter’s journey becomes part of the story. December 23, 2014

RSS Kulture Critic

  • In the Folds of the Flesh: Philosophic Reflections on Touch November 6, 2021

RSS Kunstler Cast

  • John B. McLemore Email to JHK: Huffing gas fumes in shittown alabama June 1, 2017
  • Release: S-Town Podcast Prequel: KunstlerCast Ready for Binge Listening May 31, 2017
  • KunstlerCast: S-Town May 31, 2017
  • James Howard Kunstler on John B. McLemore of S-Town May 31, 2017
  • Transcript: KunstlerCast: S-Town May 31, 2017

RSS Kurt Kobb

  • Taking a short break - no post this week January 22, 2023

RSS Lack of Environment

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RSS Law and Disorder

  • Law and Disorder January 16, 2023 January 16, 2023
  • Law and Disorder January 9, 2023 January 9, 2023
  • Law and Disorder January 2, 2023 January 2, 2023

RSS Le Monde diplomatique – English edition

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RSS Le Monde diplomatique – Open Page

  • Is Venezuela back on its feet? January 20, 2023
  • Why Chinese thought matters January 18, 2023
  • Nepal-China relationship hinges on Tibetans January 18, 2023
  • January: the longer view January 11, 2023
  • Peru's permanent coup January 11, 2023

RSS Leaving Babylon

  • Even Iran is laughing at us November 9, 2020

RSS Lee Camp

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RSS Lee Fang

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RSS Leonardo Boff

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RSS Les Leopold

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RSS Life Itself

  • On Snowflakes, Blogs and Loneliness January 13, 2023
  • Why the Year 2022 Stood Out? January 6, 2023
  • Bad Karma April 9, 2022

RSS Limited, Inc.

  • In what language do we read faces? January 28, 2023
  • what is wrong with Von Mises (Ludwig, not Richard) January 27, 2023
  • ChatGPT, Perceptual absorbance and machine dreams January 24, 2023

RSS Link TV – Earth Focus

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RSS Low-Tech Magazine

  • What if We Replace Guns and Bullets with Bows and Arrows? November 23, 2022
  • When Lethal Weapons Grew on Trees November 23, 2022
  • How to Build a Practical Household Bike Generator March 7, 2022

RSS LRB Blog

  • The New Weather January 27, 2023
  • Diplomatic Immunity January 27, 2023
  • Low Resolution History January 24, 2023
  • Crying Shells January 24, 2023
  • Escape from Love Island January 20, 2023

RSS Luis J. Rodriguez

  • Updates from Luis J. Rodriguez (Mixcoatl Itztlacuiloh) August 2, 2022
  • Help Luis J. Rodriguez become California governor January 5, 2022
  • Stand Firm on Election Day November 3, 2020

RSS Mabinogogiblog

  • If you oppose climate change, join the 50/60 campaign January 3, 2023
  • Democracy, Dictatorship and Journalism January 2, 2023
  • After Putin's war, the UN should introduce an Index of Democracy and Human Rights January 1, 2023
  • Current climate change denial memes December 29, 2022

RSS Manicore – Accueil

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RSS Marginal Revolution

  • Medical markets in everything? January 29, 2023
  • *Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes* January 28, 2023
  • Saturday assorted links January 28, 2023

RSS Mark Biskeborn – Underground Essays

  • Kafkaesque November 11, 2014
  • Larry Summers Still Living Large April 9, 2013
  • War and Corruption Deficits: Insects and Leviathans January 21, 2013
  • Breaking News: Lt. Col. Shaffer Accuses Former CIA Dir. Tenet December 29, 2012

RSS Mark Fiore

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RSS Mark Lynas

  • COP27 outcome begins to address ‘loss and damage’, but the 1.5 Paris goal is looking highly unlikely November 20, 2022
  • Misinformation in the media: global coverage of GMOs 2019-2021 November 17, 2022
  • Why I’m no longer lonely as a pro-science environmentalist October 3, 2022
  • 5 ways to face down Putin’s food blackmail tactics July 13, 2022
  • UKRAINE ENERGY SOLIDARITY PLAN: How we can stop funding Putin’s war machine May 13, 2022

RSS Martin Wolf

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RSS Matt Bruenig

  • Solar Panels Reduced My Electric Bill by $2,677 in 2022 January 1, 2023
  • The Contradictions of Deliberative Democracy December 30, 2022
  • Babies on Planes December 29, 2022

RSS Matt Taibbi

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RSS Matt Wuerker

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RSS Max Keiser

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RSS Media Lens

  • ‘End Stage Capitalism’: Collapsing Britain And The Climate Crisis January 26, 2023
  • Harry The ‘Traitor’ And Lynch ‘The Grinch’ – The Corporate Media’s Automatic Smear Machine January 19, 2023
  • ‘Nearly Every War Has Been The Result Of Media Lies’: Julian Assange, State-Corporate Media And Ukraine December 14, 2022

RSS Media Matters – Environment

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RSS Media Matters – Everything

  • Fox guest on possible troop withdrawal from Afghanistan: "The solution is more blood, sweat, and tears" 
  • Fox host defends Trump: "Just because you use harsh language doesn't mean your intent is to denigrate another race"
  • Fox News is talking more about abortion than the Democratic debates did

RSS Media Roots

  • Media Roots Radio: New Wave of Anti-LGBTQ Legislation, Manhattan Institute, CIA & Spooky Rufo’s Disney Leaks 2 of 2 August 6, 2022
  • Media Roots Radio: Coming Down from the Shock of Overturning Roe & J Peterson Unravels August 5, 2022
  • Empire Files: Abby Martin at RIMPAC War Games: The Inside Story [PREVIEW] July 22, 2022

RSS Methane Hydrates

  • Joint New Zealand - German 3D survey reveals massive seabed gas hydrate and methane system May 12, 2014
  • Noctilucent clouds: further confirmation of large methane releases December 10, 2013
  • Earthquake M6.7 hits Sea of Okhotsk October 2, 2013

RSS Michael Hudson

  • Introducing the Geopolitical Economy Hour January 18, 2023
  • Systemic Sponsors of Self-Interest January 17, 2023
  • China the Change Agent – Patreon Q&A #3 December 12, 2022

RSS Michael Miller – Viewpoint

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RSS Michael Parenti

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RSS Mike Philbin – Free Planet

  • STAR CITIZEN - HALF A BILLION DOLLARS - TEN YEARS AND COUNTING September 1, 2021
  • ELECTRO-BULLET: reinterpreting a classic... August 28, 2021
  • LAST OF THE CATHEDRA available in trade paperback from Amazon. October 24, 2020

RSS Mondoweiss

  • Brad Sherman models the perfect pro-Israel Democrat January 28, 2023
  • A day of protest and resistance across Palestine following ‘massacre’ in Jenin January 27, 2023

RSS Mons Angelorum: Deadly Serious 3

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RSS Mons Angelorum: Waiting for Good Weather

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RSS Mother Jones

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RSS MR Zine

  • Yoshie Furuhashi, "After MRZine" January 1, 2017
  • Louis Allday, "Controlling the Narrative on Syria" December 14, 2016
  • Marta Harnecker, "Fidel, Today and Forever" December 11, 2016
  • Prabhat Patnaik, "Developing 'Infrastructure'" December 9, 2016
  • Susie Day, "Forward Ever, Normal Never: Taking Down Donald Trump" December 6, 2016
  • Samir Amin, "The Election of Donald Trump" December 1, 2016

RSS Musings on Iraq

  • This Day In Iraqi History - Jan 28 UK claimed Mosul province which it took after WWI ended January 28, 2023
  • This Day In Iraqi History - Jan 27 300-400 killed by police protesting against Anglo-Iraq Treaty January 27, 2023
  • This Day In Iraqi History - Jan 26 Saddam ordered most of Iraqi Air Force to fly to Iran to save it from Gulf War Never got planes back January 26, 2023

RSS Nafeez Ahmed

  • IDF's Gaza assault is to control Palestinian gas, avert Israeli energy crisis | Nafeez Ahmed July 9, 2014
  • World Bank and UN carbon offset scheme 'complicit' in genocidal land grabs - NGOs | Nafeez Ahmed July 3, 2014
  • The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy | Nafeez Ahmed June 19, 2014
  • Iraq blowback: Isis rise manufactured by insatiable oil addiction June 16, 2014

RSS Naked Capitalism

  • Links 1/28/2023 January 28, 2023
  • California’s Plan to Disappear the Homeless January 28, 2023
  • Rural Americans Aren’t Included in Inflation Figures – and for Them, the Cost of Living May Be Rising Faster January 28, 2023
  • Contesting The Ultimate Lockdown: Non-Vax Covid Prophylactic Home Remedies (Plus Bharat’s Nasal Vaccine) January 27, 2023
  • 2:00PM Water Cooler 1/27/2023 January 27, 2023

RSS Naomi Klein

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RSS Naomi Klein – Guardian.UK

  • Greenwashing a police state: the truth behind Egypt’s Cop27 masquerade – podcast November 4, 2022
  • Greenwashing a police state: the truth behind Egypt’s Cop27 masquerade | Naomi Klein October 18, 2022

RSS Nature Protects, As She is Protected

  • No Name Calling Please, Give Us Evidence Which Proves GM Crops Are Safe March 30, 2017
  • Let’s Be Honest About Genetically Modified Crops March 9, 2017

RSS Navdanya’s Diary

  • Food for health: the right to health is to live healthy lives June 3, 2020
  • Making peace with the Earth. 600 organisations urge a sustainable new start April 24, 2020
  • The Seed War March 20, 2020

RSS New Internationalist

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  • Observations on Work June 20, 2021
  • The GOP and the Dems: Hypocrisy and Betrayal June 13, 2021
  • Can Technology Save Us? June 8, 2021

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  • Qu’est donc la memoire? July 31, 2022
  • The Stench of Extinction July 20, 2022
  • Forget Wars on Covid and Terror: War on Climate Collapse Is the Only War of Necessity for Human Survival August 22, 2021
  • Covid Fear Management Policies: Distractions from and Tests for Looming Climate Collapse August 4, 2021
  • France Neoliberal Macron: Vanguard of a Covid Global Corporate Dictatorship? July 24, 2021
  • Magic Woman of Haiti’s Mountains July 18, 2021

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  • On Inequality July 27, 2015
  • Shameless is as shameless does July 21, 2015

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RSS Occupy.com

  • The National Debt Doesn't Matter, and It Can Go Unpaid Forever January 27, 2023
  • The GOP Speaker Battle May Have Been a Dry Run for the Next January 6th January 16, 2023
  • Who's to Blame for the New GOP House Majority, Part III: The Supreme Court December 9, 2022
  • Who's to Blame for the New GOP House Majority, Part II: Racial Gerrymandering November 23, 2022
  • Who's to Blame for the New GOP House Majority, Part I: Andrew Cuomo November 19, 2022
  • Occupy the Cinema: The First Attack Ads: Hollywood vs. Upton Sinclair November 11, 2022
  • The Threat of Republican Fascism, Part V: Preparing for a Wave of Mass Political Violence November 4, 2022
  • Green New Deal XX: A Just Green Future Needs Universal Basic Income November 4, 2022

RSS Occupy las Vegas

  • Cardano Blockchain Bridges Digital Divide with World Mobile-IOG Partnership January 27, 2023
  • Bitget Launches Zero-Fee EUR & GBP Deposits, Enhancing Crypto Mass Adoption January 20, 2023
  • Play-to-Earn in Meta Masters Guild! Get Your $MEMAG Tokens Now! January 13, 2023

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RSS Oddity Central

  • Tech Entrepreneur Spends $2 Million a Year to Regain His Youth January 27, 2023
  • Russian IT Specialist Has Been Hiding in Freezing Forest to Avoid Army Conscription January 27, 2023
  • Man Gets Wrongfully Arrested 3 Times for Having the Same Name as Notorious Criminal January 26, 2023
  • Man Fakes His Own Death to See Who Would Attend His Funeral January 26, 2023
  • Argentinian Farmers Plant Lionel Messi’s Face in Their Corn Fields January 25, 2023
  • High-School Lights Have Been On 24/7 for Almost Two Years And No One Can Turn Them Off January 25, 2023

RSS Of Two Minds

  • Heretical Thoughts on Orthodoxies January 27, 2023
  • The Race to the Bottom Accelerates January 26, 2023
  • You Want Truly "Sound Money"? A Thought Experiment January 24, 2023

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  • Organize – Or Else! November 4, 2022
  • They Snatch Our Rights – We Bite Back! June 26, 2022
  • DeSantis and the Florida Fasc June 6, 2022
  • We Scream for Change and They Respond by Supporting the Status Quo March 29, 2022

RSS Orion Magazine

  • Jessica Lee Answers the Orion Questionnaire January 24, 2023
  • Merloyd Ludington Lawrence: A Tribute July 22, 2022
  • Five Questions for Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of How Strange a Season March 29, 2022

RSS Our Finite World

  • 2023: Expect a financial crash followed by major energy-related changes January 9, 2023
  • The economy is moving from a tailwind pushing it along to a headwind holding it back December 16, 2022
  • Today’s Energy Crisis Is Very Different from the Energy Crisis of 2005 November 17, 2022

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RSS Paul Haeder

  • If We Ever Needed George Carlin January 28, 2023
  • The Power of the Written Word January 28, 2023
  • Mental Health Outcomes Tied to “Other Outcomes” January 24, 2023

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RSS Paul L. Street

  • Capitalism, Race, and the Tragic Decline of US-Black Baseball: It’s the Capitalism-Imperialism, Stupid December 16, 2022
  • Dear Liberals: Stop Your Smug Celebration of the Midterms December 16, 2022
  • Eight More Takes on the Mid-Terms Further Reflections on a Hot Mess December 16, 2022
  • Purple Haze: Seventeen Takes on the Mid-Terms December 16, 2022

RSS PBD – Progressive Blog Digest

  • 46 January 21, 2021
  • HIS LEGACY January 20, 2021
  • THE END GAME January 19, 2021

RSS PeakOil.com News

  • Visualizing U.S. Consumption of Fuel and Materials per Capita January 28, 2023
  • No, the World Is Not Heading Toward ‘Mass Extinction’ January 28, 2023
  • Gasoline Price More Expensive Than Year Ago January 28, 2023

RSS Peak Prosperity Blog

  • More Vaccine Shots Equals More Covid-19 January 26, 2023
  • The News Continues to Disappear January 24, 2023
  • It’s Either Capitalism or Failure  January 24, 2023

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RSS People Before Profit Blog

  • "Blacklisted Again" Michael Berkowitz on "Trumbo" by Norman Markowitz December 10, 2015