Capitalism in an Age of Scarcity & the Fate of Man

06 Thursday Dec 2012

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

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Are Wars Inevitable, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Darbikrash, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Gail of Wit's End, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Nine Inch Nails, Ocean Acidification, Peak Net Energy, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Superabundance, Thermonuclear War, William T. Hathaway

In this post I want to elaborate more on DK’s comment from my last entry:

…Pre-capitalist tribes had examples of both success and failure, perhaps equal measure of both. The key principle to these types of cultures succeeding is the principle of superabundance. There is strong correlation to the disappearance of superabundance and destructive tendencies…

In his essay ‘Are Wars Inevitable?‘, William T. Hathaway explains that modern research has shown that scarcity of resources acts as a trigger for social strife and that violence and war is NOT a genetic predisposition of humans:

…research, however, led to a key discovery: The chimps who invaded their neighbors were suffering from shrinking territory and food sources. They were struggling for survival. Groups with adequate resources didn’t raid other colonies. The aggression wasn’t a behavioral constant but was caused by the stress they were under. Their genes gave them the capacity for violence, but the stress factor had to be there to trigger it into combat. This new research showed that war is not inevitable but rather a function of the stress a society is under. Our biological nature doesn’t force us to war, it just gives us the potential for it. Without stress to provoke it, violence can remain one of the many unexpressed capacities our human evolution has given us. Studies by professors Douglas Fry, Frans de Waal, and Robert Sapolsky present the evidence for this.

Militarists point to history and say it’s just one war after another. But that’s the history only of our patriarchal civilization. The early matriarchal civilization of south-eastern Europe enjoyed centuries of peace. UCLA anthropologist Marija Gimbutas describes the archeological research in The Civilization of the Goddess. No trace of warfare has been found in excavations of the Minoan, Harappa, and Caral cultures. Many of the Pacific islands were pacifistic. The ancient Vedic civilization of India had meditation techniques that preserved the peace, and those are being revived today to reduce stress in society...

Now DK goes on to say that in the absence of plentiful resources, the only logical and sane option is to give up our current exploitive and pathological economic model of capitalism and replace it with something that reflects today’s reality of rampant resource depletion and environmental collapse. Modern weapons of war are infinitely more destructive and, in and of themselves, pose a danger to all of mankind and global civilization; hence the need to get rid of capitalism is even more imperative:

…When superabundance is (inevitably) rendered invalid, it must be supplanted by a means to re-appropriate surplus in a fair and equitable manner- devoid of exploitation and informed by tangible limits, such as those posed by the environment and population limits. Such a system is not compatible with profit seeking, as many in the environmental movement are now discovering- nor has it ever been put successfully into practice.

One could say that mankind’s ability or inability to successfully transition away from the self-destructive nature of capitalism will determine the fate of the whole human species. Tragedy of the commons, as I said previously, is on a global scale now. Hathaway goes on to elaborate a little on capitalism’s dog-eat-dog tendencies and the need to move away from this paradigm:

Our society, though, has a deeply entrenched assumption that stress is essential to life. Many of our social and economic structures are based on conflict. Capitalism’s need for continually expanding profits generates stress in all of us. We’ve been indoctrinated to think this is normal and natural, but it’s really pathological. It damages life in ways we can barely perceive because they’re so built into us…

…We can create a society that meets human needs and distributes the world’s resources more evenly… But that’s going to take basic changes…

These changes threaten the power holders of our society. Since capitalism is a predatory social and economic system, predatory personalities rise to power. They view the world through a lens of aggression. But it’s not merely a view. They really are surrounded by enemies. So they believe this false axiom they are propagating that wars are inevitable.

In the past their predecessors defended their power by propagating other nonsense: kings had a divine right to rule over us, Blacks were inferior to Whites, women should obey men. We’ve outgrown those humbugs, and we can outgrow this one.

Of course, as Gail of ‘Wit’s End’ pointed out, we will inevitably need to address the problem of overpopulation:

…although once upon a time some tribes (arguably) may have lived cooperatively and harmoniously (although the opposite is certainly more common) the only reason they could do so is because their numbers were so low and food was plentiful and relatively easy to obtain. Once human population outstrips resources, things get ugly no matter what social or cultural system is in place. And I don’t know of a place where human population didn’t eventually overrun the environment, with the possible exception of cultures that practiced infanticide, or had the ability to export people willing to emigrate.

It seems to me the problem is that we have filled every corner of the globe that is remotely habitable, and then some, and yet our population and levels of consumption continue to increase. There is no place left to emigrate to. It can’t last.

Resource constraints(i.e. peak oil, peak fertilizer, peak water) on our fossil fuel based agricultural system as well as environmental degradation(i.e. climate change and ocean acidification) are going to cause an epic population crash during this century before we have time, or for that matter the cooperation and agreement, to implement any sort of voluntary population reduction.

As far as implementing this egalitarian distribution model, I also agree that the odds of that happening are slim to none, as DK said:

…Such a system[egalitarian and respective of resource limits] is not compatible with profit seeking, as many in the environmental movement are now discovering – nor has it ever been put successfully into practice.

Nor is it likely to be.

Unfortunately, the world’s stockpile of thermonuclear weapons may not stay on the shelf forever, especially in a world where the Four Horsemen of Industrial Civilization are quickly converging: Climate Change, Peak Net Energy, Ocean Acidification, and Peak Water. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try everything we can to stop what seems to be our inevitable fate; I’m just saying that the prognosis is grim.

For my family…

Saving Capitalism at the Expense of the Planet

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

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Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Economic Collapse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Inverted Totalitarianism, Julian Assange, Mass Die Off, Police State, Privatization, Regulatory Capture, Security and Surveillance State, Slavoj Žižek, The Elite 1%, The Growth Imperative of Capitalism, Tragedy of the Commons, Turnkey Totalitarianism, Wall Street Fraud

Wrapping your head around the seemingly unstoppable upward march of CO2 emissions is like trying to comprehend all those zeros in the expanding global debt bubble; both are so far beyond human scale that people cannot put them into a frame of reference or perspective. They have taken on a life of their own, a force of nature that defies all attempts to control and subdue them. Brian Merchant takes a stab at trying to frame the CO2 numbers behind industrial civilization’s conundrum of catastrophic climate change:

And 2012 is on track for another 2.6 percent increase. Why can’t we stop it? Perhaps the problem is structural and embedded in our economic system.

In a recent interview, dissident Julian Assange commented on the degree of intertwinement between government and corporations, i.e. fascism or more aptly called inverted totalitarianism in our times. Regulatory capture, the revolving corporate/government door, and K Street lobbying(legalized bribery) are examples of the monied interest$ of capitali$m having taken over government.

There’s not a barrier anymore between corporate surveillance, on the one hand, and government surveillance, on the other. You know, Facebook is based—has its servers based in the United States. Gmail, as General Petraeus found out, has its servers based in the United States. And the interplay between U.S. intelligence agencies and other Western intelligence agencies and any intelligence agencies that can hack this is fluid. So, we’re in a—if we look back to what’s a earlier example of the worst penetration by an intelligence apparatus of a society, which is perhaps East Germany, where up to 10 percent of people over their lifetime had been an informer at one stage or another, in Iceland we have 88 percent penetration of Iceland by Facebook. Eighty-eight percent of people are there on Facebook informing on their friends and their movements and the nature of their relationships—and for free. They’re not even being paid money. They’re not even being directly coerced to do it. They’re doing it for social credits to avoid the feeling of exclusion. But people should understand what is really going on. I don’t believe people are doing this or would do it if they truly understood what was going on, that they are doing hundreds of billions of hours of free work for the Central Intelligence Agency, for the FBI, and for all allied agencies and all countries that can ask for favors to get hold of that information.

William Binney, the former chief of research, the National Security Agency’s signals intelligence division, describes this situation that we are in now as “turnkey totalitarianism,” that the whole system of totalitarianism has been built—the car, the engine has been built—and it’s just a matter of turning the key. And actually, when we look to see some of the crackdowns on WikiLeaks and the grand jury process and targeted assassinations and so on, actually it’s arguable that key has already been partly turned. The assassinations that occur extrajudicially, the renditions that occur, they don’t occur in isolation. They occur as a result of the information that has been sucked in through this giant signals interception machinery.

Corporations are the ultimate expression of capitalism. Libertarians decry that what we have is not capitalism, but a corrupted form of it, aka crony capitalism. The opposite is true – unfettered, unregulated capitalism is the purest form of this profit-driven system where economic activity is structured around the accumulation of capital. This is what we get when economic power(money) inevitably usurps all branches of government. Corporate greenwashing, carbon credit schemes, privatization of the commons, and externalizing environmental costs are examples of capitalism’s incompatibility with sustainability and its inability to deal with the degradation of the planet. Corporate power rules the world and it’s what is destroying the planet:

Ecocide is permitted (as genocide was in Nazi Germany) by the government and, by dint of the global reach of modern-day transnational business, every government in the world. Corporate ecocide has now reached a point where we stand on the brink of collapse of our ecosystems, triggering the death of many millions in the face of human aggravated cataclysmic tragedies.
Over the passage of time, tyranny revisits. Tyranny is the cruel, unacceptable, or arbitrary use of power that is oblivious to consequence. Whilst the use of coal stations may not be deemed an intentional cruelty, it is certainly an unacceptable use of corporate power. Our governments collude by encouraging excess emissions, contrary to their UNFCCC commitment to stabilize “greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” 60 years ago the tyranny was Nazism. Today it is pursuit of profit without moral compass or responsibility.

All the hand-wringing and cynical views of our evident inability to deal with the problem fail to take into account the inherent properties of capitalism which prevent realistic solutions:

…There are several points to make in response to the belief that capitalism is compatible with a flourishing environment. Firstly, environmental activism can’t alter capitalism’s integral growth dynamic, it’s “grow or die” impulse, as the social ecologist Murray Bookchin put it. As a result the best environmentalism can do is ameliorate the worst effects. “Things getting worse at a slower rate”, is how the late environmental activist, Donella Meadows, described the situation.

Secondly, in the low or no growth world we are entering, environmental priorities are being sacrificed to meet the short-term need to revive growth. “We can’t be ambivalent about growth,” is how the UK government’s “planning” minister, Greg Clark, justified reducing regulations to make it much easier to approve building development in the countryside.

Thirdly, many polluting practices in western countries that have become culturally unacceptable have been exported to poorer countries, where people have less power to make their objections count.

Lastly, the experience of the 21^st century has shown that when environmental activism directly confronts huge capitalist industries like oil, automobiles and mining, it does not win. The 1987 Montreal Protocol was the last successful international agreement to change capitalist behaviour. The protocol called for strict restrictions on chemicals that deplete the ozone layer (chlorofluorcarbons) and the results have been impressive. But, says Schweickart, the industries affected had substitutes to hand, and the protocol “should not lull us into thinking capitalism can accommodate all sensible environmental solutions.”…

…The consequence of the conflict between environmental sanity and profit has been that many capitalist countries – most notably the US – have been unable to change course to ameliorate climate change. Not only this, a political culture has developed that denies the existence of climate change even when its effects become harder and harder to ignore.

Also here:

Of course the prospects of thinking outside-of-the-box on economic and foreign policy issues has always been heresy. As long as we think we can fix the ecological problem with the same tools that caused the problem, we can expect the Eco-Apocalypse, a tragedy of the commons on a global scale, to unfold as predicted:

Zizek:…………… the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its ‘four riders of the apocalypse’ are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.

On a smaller scale…

Burning the Candle at Both Ends

01 Saturday Dec 2012

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

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Antarctic Ice Melt, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Evolutionary Dead End, Extinction of Man, Fossil-Fuel Based Economy, Greenland Ice Sheet Melt, Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE), Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Runaway Climate Change

The claims of near term extinction for mankind are getting stronger and stronger as new scientific evidence is released. Sometime before the end of this century, we’ll all be toast, so any measures we take now at “building resilience” will only be short-lived exercises in self-preservation. That’s how short-sighted we humans are: no consideration for the children and future generations. As long as we can stay comfortably cocooned within the wasteful amenities and faux culture distractions of industrial civilization, we’ll keep sucking on the great ‘carbon energy’ cigar to keep the illusion going, despite the fact that we’re committing species suicide. We are like the domesticated animal that can no longer survive in the natural world. Our addiction to fossil fuels has literally become an ingrained trait, selectively advantageous in the short-term but ultimately leading to our own evolutionary dead end.

If you missed it, the latest news is that, contrary to the propaganda put out by climate change deniers, the Antarctic is not gaining ice, but losing ice:

Global warming is melting Greenland and Antarctic ice and …

This is not good news. A new international study—done by 47 experts using data from multiple satellites and aircraft—shows that the Earth is losing ice at an ever-increasing rate from both poles. We’ve known for years that the Arctic has been suffering massive ice loss, with the record low broken more than once in recent years. What’s devastating about this new report is that it shows unequivocally and quantitatively that the Antarctic is also losing land ice, with the critical West Antarctica ice sheet losing on average 65 billion tons of ice every year.

Measuring ice is difficult to do and uncertainties are generally pretty big. By combining several different methods from several different sources, the scientists were able to get the best, most accurate measurements ever made. These new data show that the ice loss from both poles has increased by a factor of three since the 1990s. Just Greenland—the largest source of fresh water ice in the Northern Hemisphere—is losing ice at a rate five times what it did just in the 1990s: about 142 billion tons per year.

Together, since 1992, this ice melt has added over a centimeter (about a half inch) to sea level rise. That may not sound like much, but it doesn’t take much rise in sea levels to start causing catastrophic changes in erosion, storms, and flooding. Worse, this accounts for only about one-fifth of the total amount of sea level rise. Much of the rise is due to the water in the oceans expanding due to warming and other sources.

There’s a double whammy for you: Global warming is increasing the amount of water in the oceans from melting ice, and also increasing the sea level rise by heating up the water itself…

…This new study wipes out yet another false claim from climate change deniers, too. A common refrain from them is that Antarctic ice is increasing, not decreasing. However, this is not true for two reasons. The first is that they count sea ice in that measure. However, Antarctic sea ice tends to melt away completely every year in the spring and summer, and then it reforms in the winter. It therefore on average does not contribute to sea level rise or to the heat budget of the Earth. Second, this new study shows the claim is wrong anyway. We are losing ice from Antarctica every year, and it’s the critical land ice…

I’m sorry to say this, but all the ghastly visions of runaway climate change may very well come to fruition, wiping any trace of humans off the face of the Earth. In the end, man wasn’t really any different from lowly bacteria overwhelming the confines of a petri dish and extinguishing themselves. I’m sure we’ll have amassed an amazing trove of video, literature and other media documenting the horrors to come so that when some alien race visits the planet in the future, they will be able to watch bemused at how humans killed themselves off in the name of “progress” and a dollar.

World’s Youth Call for Urgent Action at U.N. … – Democracy Now!

Michael Sandmel:
“We make up half the world’s population, and frankly, we’re being screwed. We’re being denied a future by a lack of ambition, a lack of vision, and governments that are far too beholden to the interests of big fossil fuel companies, big coal companies, the banks that fund them.”

News for the Final Coffin Nail of Mankind

29 Thursday Nov 2012

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

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Doha Qatar, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Inverted Totalitarianism, John Hofmeister, John Hofmeister - Former President of Shell Oil and Currently the Head of Citizens for Affordable Energy, Mass Die Off, Maya Civilization's Collapse, Ogallala Aquifer, Peak Water, The Elite 1%, UN Climate Talks in Qatar

If you’re not really going to do anything about our omnicidal alteration of the planet, then it would make sense that you would host such a climate talk charade in the most profligate, fossil-fuel dealing, energy-gorging city on the planet – another irony for the ages as this blog below points out. Isn’t that like holding an alcoholics anonymous meeting inside a liquor store?

In Guy McPherson’s talk which was the subject of my last post, he said that those living in the inner part of the American Empire, the Great Plain States, would be in a whole lot of trouble in the coming decades. To elaborate on that statement, read the article below to see how things are literally fading away, soon to give new meaning to the term “dry county” (emphasis in red by the energy skeptic):

And history repeats itself, despite all our fancy techno-gadgetry and state-of-the-art instruments giving us unparalleled warning signs of our impending demise. The ApocoDocs recently quipped something to the effect of, “If we can foresee the collapse, then we can prevent it. Right? RIGHT!”

When you have at your disposal all the tools and knowledge to avert your own death, but collectively choose not to utilize them, that just makes it all the more tragic:

And in a banner year of environmental tipping points, we have this final gem of a story (excerpt):

Now if that story doesn’t illustrate to you the ingrained, institutionalized insanity of the people running the show, I don’t know what will. I told you in a previous post they think the planet is one big ShamWow towelette for man’s endless flow of waste. A commenter on the above story gives a laundry list of examples illustrating how humans are complete failures at managing waste, concluding with the following statement:

…Unfortunately, industrial humans have always “managed” their wastes by throwing it away. This works well in a world with low population, or with a largely poor population that can’t object to living in someone else’s toilet. In the modern world, though, “away” is going away. (It’s worth noting that it does NOT have to be this way. Current conditions pertain because it is convenient/profitable, not because responsible waste management is impossible. But that’s another topic entirely.)

Hofmeister is proposing that we apply the same approach that we use for other industrial wastes – one which is failing, which preferentially exploits the poor, and is damaging our planetary life support system – to CO2. This is not a recipe for success or even survival – this is apologia for continuing business as usual.

I couldn’t end this post without this song:

Comments on Guy McPherson at Bluegrass Bioneers 2012

28 Wednesday Nov 2012

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

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Capitalism, Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Guy McPherson at Bluegrass Bioneers 2012, Mass Die Off, The Elite 1%

Gail from Wit’s End referred me to Guy McPherson’s presentation above. I just finished watching it a few minutes ago. Here are my thoughts on the talk.

This is the big wild card which may well bring everything down since the IPCC assessments and climate models either don’t factor in these feedback effects or, if they do, don’t do it with much accuracy. For example, the Arctic is melting three times faster than predicted and that will have implications for the entire planet. The Arctic melt, as well as Greenland melt, makes all global climate change predictions unreliable. Another example just came across the news today:

Doha, Nov 27 (Prensa Latina) The rapid increase in temperature in the Arctic has caused a loss of ice in the subsoil of the region, a fact that should be considered in climate models, experts said today. If the “permafrost” melts, it will free all the carbon accumulated for centuries, said Kevin Schaefer, of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) at the 18th Conference on Climate Change held in Doha, Qatar.

“Once it starts happening, the process is irreversible. There is no way to recapture the carbon released. And the process wil continue for centuries, due to the organic matter being very cold and descomposing slowly”, said the scientist.

This excess of carbon released into the atmosphere was never included in the projections of global warming, which is why the UNEP recommends that the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on the Evolution of the Climate specifically take into account the growing impact of permafrost thawing on global warming…

All of these uncertainties should give everyone pause because it means that the most dire predictions could very well be correct, as Guy points out in his talk.

Towards the end of the video, the camera spanned the auditorium and I could see all the empty seats. There were perhaps a few dozen people in attendance of Guy’s talk. That’s a sad commentary on society, but it also points to something else – catastrophe fatigue or the normalization of catastrophe. The slow and steady stream of doomsday news along with the popularizing of such themes in mainstream entertainment and pop culture has served to desensitize people to catastrophe and violence:

source – Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth

Guy doesn’t really talk explicitly about the link between capitalism and the environmental crisis. He should. Capitalism feeds off of crisis. As they say, capitalism is crisis. It is the primary root cause of the civilization-ending eco-collapse we are facing:

source – Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth

Those are my observations and quick notes.

Industrial Civilization’s Last Frantic Binge on Carbon Energy

27 Tuesday Nov 2012

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

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, ApocaDocs, Bunker Mentality, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Fossil-Fuel Based Economy, Imagine Dragons, Inverted Totalitarianism, Jonas De Ro, Mass Die Off, Michael Klare, Ocean Acidification, Optimism Bias, Peak Oil, Post-Apocalyptic Art, Resource Wars, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, Tokyo Genso, Vladimir Manyuhin

Post-Apocalyptic Illustration by Jonas De Ro

Post-Apocalyptic Illustration by Vladimir Manyuhin

Post-Apocalyptic Illustration by Tokyo Genso

Madison, WI Post Apocalypse

I thought I’d post a few pictures of what the world will look like before the end of this century. Artists have the intuitive imagination to conjure up such visions the general public can only imagine through Hollywood zombie flicks which seem to be all the rage these days. Why do I feel this vision is inevitable? Just look at the daily news to see what I mean:

It used to be that the mentally insane, flailing their arms and talking to invisible people in the streets, were the ones ranting and raving about the end of the world, but now it’s scientists who, in an attempt not to offend the beliefs of the scientific illiterati and free-market faithful, downplay their findings as much as possible. Optimism bias infects even the scientific community.

…we are the most tragic species. We not only destroy all of the world around us, we are aware of doing it but unable to stop ourselves. We have faith and hope that things will get better, that we can turn around at the last second what we’ve screwed up over years and decades. Which of course is nothing but an excuse to keep on screwing up. All courtesy of our optimism bias.

What better exemplifies the delusional optimism of man than the belief that he could hide out in a bunker to survive the ravages of a nuclear war? I’ll tell you what tops that fantasy – the belief that man can continue to do what he has done and expect the planet to unfailingly absorb all the environmental assaults we can throw at it via the endless growth of capitalist production and consumption. The planet is not some massive ShamWow towelette for man’s nonstop flow of excrement.

Excerpt from Michael Klare, A Thermonuclear Energy Bomb in Christmas Wrappings…

No Hope for Averting Catastrophic Climate Change

Of all the findings in the 2012 edition of the World Energy Outlook, the one that merits the greatest international attention is the one that received the least. Even if governments take vigorous steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the report concluded, the continuing increase in fossil fuel consumption will result in “a long-term average global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees C.”

This should stop everyone in their tracks. Most scientists believe that an increase of 2 degrees Celsius is about all the planet can accommodate without unimaginably catastrophic consequences: sea-level increases that will wipe out many coastal cities, persistent droughts that will destroy farmland on which hundreds of millions of people depend for their survival, the collapse of vital ecosystems, and far more. An increase of 3.6 degrees C essentially suggests the end of human civilization as we know it.

To put this in context, human activity has already warmed the planet by about 0.8 degrees C — enough to produce severe droughts around the world, trigger or intensify intense storms like Hurricane Sandy, and drastically reduce the Arctic ice cap. “Given those impacts,” writes noted environmental author and activist Bill McKibben, “many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target.” Among those cited by McKibben is Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes. “Any number much above one degree involves a gamble,” Emanuel writes, “and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up.” Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Bank’s chief biodiversity adviser, puts it this way: “If we’re seeing what we’re seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much.”

At this point, it’s hard even to imagine what a planet that’s 3.6 degrees C hotter would be like, though some climate-change scholars and prophets — like former Vice President Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth — have tried. In all likelihood, the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets would melt entirely, raising sea levels by several dozen feet and completely inundating coastal cities like New York and Shanghai. Large parts of Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the American Southwest would be rendered uninhabitable thanks to lack of water and desertification, while wildfires of a sort that we can’t imagine today would consume the parched forests of the temperate latitudes.

In a report that leads with the “good news” of impending U.S. oil supremacy, to calmly suggest that the world is headed for that 3.6 degree C mark is like placing a thermonuclear bomb in a gaudily-wrapped Christmas present. In fact, the “good news” is really the bad news: the energy industry’s ability to boost production of oil, coal, and natural gas in North America is feeding a global surge in demand for these commodities, ensuring ever higher levels of carbon emissions. As long as these trends persist — and the IEA report provides no evidence that they will be reversed in the coming years — we are all in a race to see who gets to the Apocalypse first.

Enjoy industrial civilization’s fossil fuel blow-out sale while it lasts. This is a one-time-only, circus-like ‘liquidation event’. Everything must be commodified regardless of ecological loss or intrinsic value to the web of life. The Human species won’t want to miss these deals! There will be no returns or exchanges available as we are going out of business for good due to bankruptcy proceedings with Mother Earth. All life forms and resources on the planet must go!!!

The Future Horror Show of Capitalism

26 Monday Nov 2012

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

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A Clockwork Orange, Austerity, Campaign To Fix The Debt, Capitalism, Chris Hedges, Climate Change, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Empire, Financial Elite, Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein, Gross Inequality, Honeywell's David Cote, Inverted Totalitarianism, Koch Brothers, Peter Peterson-backed Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, Political Economy of Aristocracy, Poverty, Professor David McNally, Security and Surveillance State, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud, Walmart, War for Profit

I find it interesting that we are living in a time where the average person can, with a little research every night, have a good idea of what is going on globally with the economy, the environment, and societal structures. But with that knowledge comes the realization that you are essentially powerless to change the big picture. And so it is with our slide into a truly barbaric future. Having avoided any news this past week, I slept well. Tonight, however, is a different story as I start back into reading up on the latest world events and perspectives from prominent authors. It’s a real horror show developing these days.

We know that our ‘political economy of aristocracy‘ is a major impediment in moving away from our fossil fuel-based system and creating a socially just society, but the elite will do whatever is within their power to hold onto their place in the capitalist hierarchy:

…It is in any individual’s self-interest to preserve that in which they are most invested; but the rich pose a particular danger because their self-interest often leads them to attempt to protect and preserve entire modes of economic activity that society needs to move past in order to avoid colliding with the limitations of natural resources inherent in any specific mode of technology. No more clear example can be imagined that the Koch family interest pouring hundreds of millions and billions of dollars into conservative think tanks and political lobbies that not only deny global climate change, but also actively oppose the development of clean energy technologies. But a more instructive example may be the Walton family interests, which seek to avoid the development of public understanding of how the Wal-Mart business model shifts much of its employment costs onto the government – a modern twist on the methods by which the wealthy “pauperize the multitudes” identified in the Founders’ political economy of aristocracy…

Professor David McNally has an insightful new essay spelling out the machinations of capitalism which the elite have and will continue to carry out in order to preserve the status quo and gross inequality of our political economy. Some excerpts:

…Of course it is better for businesses if there is lots of demand for their goods. But the purpose of a capitalist enterprise is not to make sales; it is to make profits. The ability of firms to accumulate, invest, grow and beat out their competitors depends on profitability. And once capitalism gets into a systemic crisis of the sort that broke out in 2008, profitability cannot be restored without enormous destruction. There are two key mechanisms by which this happens.

The first involves destroying excess or unproductive capital. If firms in one industry after another are forced into bankruptcy and/or gobbled up by the competition, those that remain will eventually restructure and reorganize themselves to produce at lower cost (and higher profits). Having bought up bankrupted assets on the cheap, and having taken over the market shares of failed companies, they will be in a position to invest again.

The second capitalist mechanism for exiting a crisis involves driving down working people’s living standards. Put simply, by devaluing human life and the costs of reproducing people – via lower wages and benefits and reduced “social wages” (the public services available by way of pensions, social assistance, health care and education) – capital reduces its costs of doing business. And it is the latter strategy, reducing the costs of reproducing people, that has dominated thus far.

The reason for this is simple. In addition to funneling trillions of dollars to bail out the financial sector, the world’s central banks, particularly those in the Global North, have lowered borrowing costs to just a hair above zero. This means that faltering companies can stay alive by borrowing money that is virtually free. That is why there has been nothing so far like the wave of corporate bankruptcies witnessed during the Great Depression or across the 1980s. And because such a wave of bankruptcies would once again rock the financial system, nothing like it should be expected in the short term.

That leaves austerity as the capitalist class’ principal strategy. Here, they have racked up considerable success. Not only have public services been drastically curtailed, so have living standards generally. In the U.S., median incomes contracted more than four percent during the “recovery” since 2010 and have now declined to where they stood in 1995. That represents the elimination of all wage gains in the past 17 years. In the U.K., meanwhile, living standards have been pushed 13 percent below their 2008 levels.[4] Now, all of this may be bad for “the economy” in the abstract: reduced incomes mean less spending and less employment. But we don’t live in an economy in the abstract. We live in a capitalist economy whose imperative is profit. And reduced incomes are highly functional for capital.

To that end, governments everywhere have embarked on programs designed to increase the precariousness of everyday life. They know that insecurity makes it harder for workers to fight back, and so they are using every weapon in their arsenal to render workers less comfortable, confident and secure. They are attacking labour rights, undermining job security, driving down wages, benefits and social entitlements, and relying heavily on migrant labourers. Indeed capital’s ideal precarious worker for the age of austerity is the migrant who enters a country bound to a single employer, with no rights to live and stay beyond the length of their employment contract. In Canada, the proportion of entrants admitted under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program is skyrocketing, and the same is true for similar programs elsewhere.

Not surprisingly, austerity and growing precariousness have done wonders for corporate profits, which have risen persistently since 2009. However, in the absence of significant destruction of capital, those profits are sitting idle rather than being invested in new means of producing wealth. By early 2012, U.S. corporations were sitting on nearly $2 trillion in cash, a record amount. European firms were doing the same, holding around two trillion euros. And that is the dilemma capital faces at the moment. Austerity has boosted profitability, but it has not made investment attractive. Moreover, the lack of a new investment boom sets limits to just how high profits can rise (indeed, by mid-2012 corporate earnings seemed once again to be faltering). Consequently, the system keeps spinning its wheels unable to acquire the traction required for a sustained recovery and expansion.

And so, the capitalist class and their governments continue to do what they know best: enforce ever-greater sacrifices on working people. Greece, of course, is the center of the austerity storm. Pensions there have been cut in half, wages slashed by a third. Homelessness is soaring and soup kitchens struggle to keep up with those in need of food. Suicide rates have risen alarmingly. Notwithstanding all that, the “troika” – the European Central Bank, the IMF and the European Commission – demand more blood. Already, the Greek government has tabled a budget for 2013 that will cut billions more from pensions, wages and social benefits, notwithstanding their own forecast that the Greek economy will contract once again by nearly five percent. The whole purpose of these cuts is to prove to international capital that Greece will abide by the discipline of financial markets and that, should it receive new “loans” from the troika, it will use this money only to pay back global banks. Perish the thought that some of these funds might find their way to teachers, nurses or pensioners. Indeed, to say the money is “loaned” to Greece is entirely false: these funds enter a special account through which they are channelled directly to banks. And for that purpose the Greek people are being bled dry.[5]…

We now see the corporate elite in America, the beneficiaries of taxpayer bailouts, off-shore tax havens, government contracts, as well as near zero Fed loans, sharpening their blades to cut the throats of the American people:

The corporate CEOs who have made a high-profile foray into deficit negotiations have themselves been substantially responsible for the size of the deficit they now want closed.

The companies represented by executives working with the Campaign To Fix The Debt have received trillions in federal war contracts, subsidies and bailouts, as well as specialized tax breaks and loopholes that virtually eliminate the companies’ tax bills.

The CEOs are part of a campaign run by the Peter Peterson-backed Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, which plans to spend at least $30 million pushing for a deficit reduction deal in the lame-duck session and beyond.

During the past few days, CEOs belonging to what the campaign calls its CEO Fiscal Leadership Council — most visibly, Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein and Honeywell’s David Cote — have barnstormed the media, making the case that the only way to cut the deficit is to severely scale back social safety-net programs — Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — which would disproportionately impact the poor and the elderly.

As part of their push, they are advocating a “territorial tax system” that would exempt their companies’ foreign profits from taxation, netting them about $134 billion in tax savings, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies titled “The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks” — money that could help pay off the federal budget deficit.

Yet the CEOs are not offering to forgo federal money or pay a higher tax rate, on their personal income or corporate profits. Instead, council recommendations include cutting “entitlement” programs, as well as what they call “low-priority spending.”

Many of the companies recommending austerity would be out of business without the heavy federal support they get, including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, which both received billions in direct bailout cash, plus billions more indirectly through AIG and other companies taxpayers rescued.

Just three of the companies — GE, Boeing and Honeywell — were handed nearly $28 billion last year in federal contracts alone. A spokesman for Campaign To Fix The Debt did not respond to an email from The Huffington Post over the weekend…

Now this brings me to Chris Hedges’ last essay which I just read tonight. He’s becoming more apocalyptic as time goes on. Chris knows what I know: we are headed towards a hellish future in which a tiny elite will try to hang on to their wealth and power at the expense of everyone else, including the planet. High tech weaponry and surveillance technology will be used to enslave and control the masses while maintaining capitalism’s grip on society:

…The impending collapse of the international economy, the assaults on the climate, the resulting droughts, flooding, precipitous decline in crop yields and rising food prices are creating a universe where power is divided between the narrow elites, who hold in their hands sophisticated instruments of death, and the enraged masses. The crises are fostering a class war that will dwarf anything imagined by Karl Marx. They are establishing a world where most will be hungry and live in fear, while a few will gorge themselves on delicacies in protected compounds. And more and more people will have to be sacrificed to keep this imbalance in place…

…As the world breaks down, this becomes the new paradigm—modern warlords awash in terrifying technologies and weapons murdering whole peoples. We do the same in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Market forces and the military mechanisms that protect these forces are the sole ideology that governs industrial states and humans’ relationship to the natural world. It is an ideology that results in millions of dead and millions more displaced from their homes in the developing world. And the awful algebra of this ideology means that these forces will eventually be unleashed on us, too. Those who cannot be of use to market forces are considered expendable. They have no rights and legitimacy. Their existence, whether in Gaza or blighted postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., is considered a drain on efficiency and progress. They are viewed as refuse. And as refuse they not only have no voice and no freedom; they can be and are extinguished or imprisoned at will. This is a world where only corporate power and profit are sacred. It is a world of barbarism…

Evil unencumbered by the slightest conscience seems to me to be what has been described above. By comparison, the droogs in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ appear quaint.

The Invisible (and Thieving) Hand of Capitalism’s Free Market

24 Saturday Nov 2012

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

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A Nation of Hustlers and Swindlers, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Darbikrash, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Globalization, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Military Industrial Complex, Oliver Stone's U-Turn, Paul Mattick: Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism, Peak Oil, Poverty, Resource Wars, The Elite 1%, War for Profit

In my previous post I quoted Professor Charles Hall’s assertion that the current economic paradigm is ill-equipped to account for and address externalities such as resource depletion and environmental degradation. Peak oil as well as climate change/global warming are just two in a long list of biophysical constraints which neoclassical Keynesian economics, i.e. mainstream economics, overlooks:

…the crisis looming before us is likely to be, if anything, more terrible than the Great Depressions of 1873-93 and 1929-39. The continuing industrialization of agriculture and urbanization of population—by 2010, it is estimated, more than half the earth’s inhabitants lived in cities—has made more and more people dependent upon the market to supply them with food and other necessities of life. The existence on or over the edge of survival experienced today by the urban masses of Cairo, Dhaka, São Paulo, and Mexico City will be echoed in the capitalistically advanced nations, as unemployment and government-dictated austerity afflict more and more people, not just in the developed world’s Rust Belts but in New York, Los Angeles, London, Madrid, and Prague.

Left to its own devices, capitalism promises economic difficulties for decades to come, with increased assaults on the earnings and working conditions of those who are still lucky enough to be wage earners around the world, waves of bankruptcies and business consolidations for capitalist firms, and increasingly serious conflicts among economic entities and even nations over just who is going to pay for all this. Which automobile companies, in which countries, will survive, while others take over their assets and markets? Which financial institutions will be crushed by uncollectible debts, and which will survive to take over larger chunks of the world market for money? What struggles will develop for control of raw materials, such as oil or water for irrigation and drinking, or agricultural land?

Gloomy though such considerations are, they leave out two paradoxically related factors that promise further dire effects for the future of capitalism: the coming decline of oil—the basis of the whole industrial system at present—as a source of energy, and the global warming caused by the consumption of fossil fuels. Even if continuing stagnation should slow greenhouse gas-caused climate change, the damage already done is extremely serious. Elizabeth Kolbert, a journalist not given to exaggeration, called her soberly informative account Field Notes From a Catastrophe. The melting of glaciers threatens not only Swiss views but the drinking supplies of whole populations in such areas as Pakistan and the Andean watersheds; droughts have ravaged Australian and Chinese agriculture for years now, while floods periodically devastate the low-lying South Asian homes of tens of millions of people. The rolling parade of disasters is, unfortunately, only getting started. It will accompany a stagnant economy and only be exacerbated by the increased greenhouse-gas emissions that a return to true prosperity would bring… – essay adapted from Paul Mattick’s book ‘Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism‘

The mandatory growth requirement of mainstream economics also precludes the concept of sustainability. I have not yet read the above referenced book ‘Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism’, but a prominent socialist speaking of peak oil and global warming in the same paragraph is always intriguing. However, a brief critique of the book by a reader finds that Mattick does not go nearly far enough in incorporating these two realities into his analysis of our current crisis:

All mainstream institutions have subscribed to the near religious belief of the infallibility of the capitalist economy which itself is considered a self-regulating system governed by the “invisible hand” of the free market as explained by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Market ‘value’ is produced by the optimal use of capital, labor, and production. Mainstream economics operates under the assumption of a world with freely available and unlimited resources. It divides and reduces all resources into units of monetary value, not taking into consideration the value such resources hold in maintaining the ecological balance of the planet.

Isn’t it the height of hypocrisy that those wealthy nations trumpeting the superiority of the free market are also the same countries which dominate global resources and world markets by military superiority as well as the subversive and coercive tactics of their economic hitmen?

…war is integral to imperialism. Imperialism – and especially the imperialist powerhouse, the USA – needs the threat of war to sustain itself: ideologically, militarily, geo-politically and also financially. The arms and defence industry is a major part of the US economy. In 2011, the defence budget was a staggering $698 billion, or 4.8% of the US GDP (link). Add to that the cost of increased security concerns – for example, to combat the ‘terrorist threat’ within imperialist countries – and you have a major chunk of the economy being reliant on the continued existence of enemies within and without.

It’s a form of military Keynesianism to keep a faltering economy going. The further capitalism sinks into decline, the more irrational the drive to war becomes and the more ludicrous are the reasons presented by imperialism (weapons of mass destruction, nuclear capability, etc).

…a very naive view of how the world is run [is to hold the belief that] David Cameron, Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu just ‘happen’ to be spending ‘too much’ on military, which on the surface seems deeply illogical at a time of official austerity. But, of course, the opposite is true: it is their way of staying in power.

Of course, we should fight against such ridiculous spending on increasingly refined machinery to exterminate humanity. But we should be clear why. – link

Moreover, America’s military has become a self-perpetuating industrial complex for profiting from war and instability.

Another problem with the world’s dominant economic system is that GDP is a misguided and inaccurate gauge for measuring the standard of living and well-being of the general populace:

…History shows that democratic forms are no proof against a slide into repressive forms. In Germany in the 1930’s, a declining standard of living contributed to the rise of the Nazi party; Hitler was democratically elected to the office of Chancellor (and then proceeded to establish himself as Fuehrer).

As America’s perpetual-growth economy faces the reality of ecological limits, as climate change imposes costs and decreased well-being on us, as food and energy and other resource prices increase because of the inexorable logic of a declining Energy Return on Energy Invested at the physical foundation of our economy, we face the prospect of a widespread decline in our standard of living. This dynamic lies at the root of this fact: Americans coming of age today are among the first generation who can’t be confident that they will be better off than their parents. By one widely used measure of well-being (the genuine progress indicator, which deducts loss of ecosystem services and other “disamenities” from the national accounts), the American standard of living has flatlined since the 1970s, despite continued strong growth in GDP.

Thus the cautionary lessons from Egypt and Tunisia. GDP is a measure of the commotion of money in an economy, not a measure of delivered well-being. If sustained or rising well-being is what is economically and politically desirable, we should measure it directly, instead of counting on GDP to do the job. And if we accept the idea of popular sovereignty—that governments rule with “the just consent of the governed,” as Jefferson put it in our Declaration of Independence—we must recognize that as the middle class goes, so goes the legitimacy of the regime in power. No system of government—despotic or democratic—fares well when the majority of its citizens experiences a declining standard of living… – link

For those who have not read Darbikrash’s last post, A Nation of Hustlers and Swindlers, it lays bare the big con game of capitalism. Similarly, the mechanic scenes in Oliver Stone’s U-Turn represent, for me, capitalism’s exploitive process of getting something for nothing:

New C.I.A.-Commissioned Report on Climate Change Stresses to Civilization

12 Monday Nov 2012

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

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Arctic Ice Melt, Capitalism, Center for International and Security Studies, Central Intelligence Agency, Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis, Climate Change, Climate Feedback Loops, Climate Tipping Points, Cluster of Extreme Events, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Drought in America's Bread basket, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Frankenstorms, Inverted Totalitarianism, John D. Steinbruner, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Water, Resource Wars, Sea Level Rise, Social Unrest

A newly released study commissioned by the C.I.A. entitled Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis highlights the vulnerabilities of our globalized economy to climate change. Of particular interest is the section on energy. To summarize:

1.) Oil is the most highly integrated commodity of globalized trade. Its tightly interconnected market was created in the aftermath of the OPEC embargoes of the 1970’s to prevent its manipulation by political actors. Its integration is said to be fully complete to the point that any disruption in the global oil system will cause an economic ripple effect throughout the world. Rapid oil consumption in China and India without a corresponding increase in production has left the oil market extremely tight (i.e. Peak Oil).

2.) Due to the facts stated above, any changes in climate could easily disrupt the world’s energy system. For example:

(a.) Tropical storms and sea-level rise can disrupt production, refining, and transport of petroleum since a large percentage of oil refining and processing are located in coastal areas vulnerable to such storms and floods. This is true in the U.S., Europe, China, and India. An example would be Hurricane Katrina and Rita in 2005 which disrupted oil and gas operations of off-shore rigs, coastal refining, and transport via sea ports and pipelines.

(b) Drought will cause oil refining disruptions since that process requires large amounts of water. If the drought is accompanied by higher temperatures, the scarcity of water will be exacerbated because the oil refineries will require even more cooling by water. A warming planet will also cause infrastructure damage (pipelines and drilling platforms) in Arctic operations due to collapsing earth from the melting of permafrost.

We are entering an era in which not only the global energy system is vulnerable, but the social, agricultural, and technological infrastructure is also at the mercy of climate disruptions. They were all designed around assumptions of moderately stable climate conditions, and as climate exceeds boundary thresholds, these infrastructures will break. As was demonstrated by Hurricane Sandy recently in New York/New Jersey with the power outages, gas shortages, and Nuclear plant shutdowns. The droughts this past summer in the U.S. midwest show the fragility of our food system whose development assumed fairly stable weather patterns and rainfall.

A quote from the study:

…The fundamental science of climate change suggests that continued global warming will increase with frequency or intensity (or both) of a great variety of events that could disrupt societies, including heat waves, extreme precipitation events, floods, droughts, sea-level rise, wildfires, and the spread of infectious diseases. Underpinning many of these extreme events is an acceleration of the global hydrological cycle. For each 1.8° F (1° C) increase in the global mean surface temperature, there is a corresponding 7 percent increase in atmospheric water vapor. Because warm air holds more water vapor than cool air, this leads to more intense precipitation. Essentially, warm air increases evaporation from the ocean and dries out the land surface, providing more moisture to the atmosphere that will rain out downwind. Water vapor is also a powerful naturally occurring greenhouse gas. As such it is the source of a very positive feedback to the coupled climate system that amplifies any external forcing by a factor of approximately 1.6…

We’ve passed a tipping point with the Arctic ice melt which has set off other feedback loops (Arctic amplification, methane release from permafrost melt, loss of the albedo effect, alteration of the Jet Stream, Greenland glacier melt, etc) and tipping points, some of which we are not even aware of, as the study acknowledges:

…there may be other processes in the Earth system, not yet identified, that have tipping points that could lead to abrupt climate change. Because of such gaps in knowledge, the possibility of such events occurring in the next decade or so cannot be totally discounted…

I would say “God help us” if the traditional farming lands -the bread baskets of nations- become dust bowls, but that’s exactly where we are headed with climate change and no miracle is going to fall out of the sky to save us.

Map Updated 11/07/12

Drought Disaster Designations Map (PDF, 504KB)
Text-only (accessible) version
Map shows designations due to drought across the country under USDA’s amended rule. Any county declared a primary (red) or contiguous (orange) disaster county makes producers in that county eligible for certain emergency aid.

The study talks about what it terms a “cluster of extreme events” resulting from large-scale climate processes, causing catastrophes in separate and distant areas of the globe. Trying to deal with such widespread and seemingly unrelated disruptions would quickly overwhelm the global community’s resources. An example given was in the year 2010 with the massive drought and forest fires in Russia and the epic floods in Pakistan:

…The two events were linked by more than just their proximity in time. The meteorological pattern that lead to the Russian heat wave, in which the large-scale upper-level wind flow developed a strong and persistent ridge, also contributed to the development of the meteorological pattern that resulted in the Pakistani floods —a downstream leading trough (Lau and Kim, 2012). The fact that these two extreme events corresponded in time with each other and with a single larger meteorological pattern was unusual but not totally unexpected. Circulation events like this one, which cause some event clusters, are known to occur but are not well resolved in current climate models…

…If climate events and extremes were independent in a statistical sense, the likelihood of a cluster or a compound event of any size could easily be estimated mathematically. But as the above example makes clear, extreme events in different parts of the world can be driven by common underlying forces and thus have an intrinsic relationship such that when one such event occurs, the likelihood increases that other extreme events linked to them by common causes will also occur. In statistical language, such events are called dependent.

The changing climate zones also enable the spread of tropical diseases and pests. Outbreaks of new virus strains would tax healthcare delivery systems:

…Climate events might also put stress on global health systems in various ways, most of them hard to predict. As discussed in the next chapter, climate change is expected to alter the ranges of disease vectors or pathogens in ways that expose large human populations to diseases to which they have not been previously been exposed. This could lead to a rapidly increasing demand for treatments and supplies that may not have been adequately stockpiled. If such health problems arise in combination with a disruption of supply chains for critical inoculations or medications, the potential for a severe health crisis could grow dramatically. Again, the effects might be felt far from the locations where the climate events occur. Climate events, especially when they occur in clusters, can also stress the capacity of international disaster response and humanitarian relief systems and thus cause harm in places that are not directly affected by the events but that need international assistance for other reasons…

A New York Times article, which talks about this study, quotes the author:

“You can debate the specific contribution of global warming to that storm. But we’re saying climate extremes are going to be more frequent, and this[Hurricane Sandy] was an example of what they could mean. We’re also saying it could get a whole lot worse than that.”

Mr. Steinbruner, the director of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, said that humans are pouring carbon dioxide and other climate-altering gases into the atmosphere at a rate never before seen. “We know there will have to be major climatic adjustments — there’s no uncertainty about that — but we just don’t know the details,” he said. “We do know they will be big.”

The study was released 10 days late: its authors had been scheduled to brief intelligence officials on their findings the day Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, but the federal government was shut down because of the storm.

How ironic is that? The authors of this study had to postpone their meeting with U.S. intel authorities because of a climate chaos event.

Here’s what else is ironic…

…as the need for more and better analysis is growing, government resources devoted to them are shrinking. Republicans in Congress objected to the C.I.A.’s creation of a climate change center and tried to deny money for it. The American weather satellite program is losing capability because of years of underfinancing and mismanagement, imperiling the ability to predict and monitor major storms.

This Circus Will Go On… Until It Doesn’t

05 Monday Nov 2012

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

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Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, David Roberts, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Frankenstorm, Gross Inequality, Hurricane Sandy, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Mayor Bloomberg, New York Marathon Run, Ryan Cooper, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, unwashed public

A nice example of the disconnection from reality that the elite reside within was exhibited this past weekend between NY Mayor Bloomberg and the survivors of the recent a pocalyptic manifestation of human-induced climate change. Apparently the New York climate refugees that Sandy left in its wake felt that diverting much-needed resources to a marathon run was a little heartless and misappropriated as far as priorities were concerned:

What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they know that acknowledging the historic and unprecedented nature of such monster storms will disrupt this big fossil fuel-burning party we have going on here at planet Earth. For Christ’s sake, these new Frankenstorms are just the free market’s way of weeding out the wheat from the chaff. So what if the sea levels are rising faster than expected?!? If you can’t afford a walled fortress that can withstand future climate chaos along with the sky-high insurance premiums that go along with living in such vulnerable seaside spots, then move inland along with the rest of the uncompetitive and undeserving peons. In such a dog-eat-dog world, the wealthy will retreat behind their strongholds, complete with small farms and an army of private security guards to fend off the starving masses.

Some people like to comfort us with the idea that the economy will collapse long before we humans can continue burning all that coal and other carbon energy into the atmosphere. I guess such bloggers forget about all those pesky feedback loops and ecological tipping points we have already unleashed which will come to fruition no matter what we do at this point, or the fact that global dimming by sun-blocking aerosols is masking an additional 2 degrees of warming by some estimates. That kind of thinking – expecting a complete economic collapse to avoid the worst of what is already in the climate change pipeline – is just as hopelessly delusional as those who put their faith in a techno-fix like geoengineering or believe that God would not allow humans to destroy themselves.

This circus will go on… until it doesn’t.