The Bloodbath of the Automobile Age

05 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Peak Oil, Pollution

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America's Die-Hard Car Culture, Animal Extinction by Car, Capitalism, Consumerism, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Longest Traffic Jam in History - China, Peak Oil, The Carnage of Traffic Fatalities, Urban Sprawl

A picture I took off the highway in northern Arizona next to Dead River:

The age of the automobile has taken nearly three times as many American lives as has all the wars of this nation since 1899. Nearly 4 people died by vehicle every hour of everyday in just the year 2011 for a total of 32,310. That number excludes those countless victims who survived, impaired with injuries. Now if we add in the number of humans sacrificed in oil wars over the years for the gas tanks of the West’s automobiles, then we would have to add millions more to the list of dead. The number of car crash fatalities since 9-11 has been calculated by the site death-by-car whose findings are that Osama bin Laden doesn’t hold a candle to the carnage on our roads:

From 1/1/2002 through 12/31/2011, National Highway Traffic Safety [sic] Administration statistics show that 392,621 people were killed by motor vehicle collisions in the United States. So, that’s about 100 9/11s. (And it does not count those who died from automotive air pollution and physical deconditioning.)

Recently while driving on the northern outskirts of Lake Havasu City, something odd with a car driving just ahead of me grabbed my attention. When I caught up to the tracks of the preceding car, I realized that what had appeared to be a brown paper bag tumbling under the car’s wheels was actually a desert rabbit. As I passed I could see his back legs had been crushed and he was dragging himself off the road with his front legs. I imagine the number of animals becoming roadkill during the last 113 years is unfathomable, but a few organizations have taken a stab at it:

Driving Animals to Their Graves – Roadkill Takes One Million …

…During the late 1950s, in a roadside version of the Audubon’s Christmas bird counts, the Humane Society of the United States conducted some Fourth of July body counts. During the 1970s, again groping for numbers, the Humane Society compiled data from isolated scientific studies of single roads or single species. Its secondary sources yielded the same national death toll as its field studies: one million animals a day.

Two regional surveys during 1993 and 1994 offer updated species death counts. Called “Dr. Splatt” and coordinated by the preppy Pinkerton Academy, the ongoing project involves mostly pupils in grades six to nine from 40 schools throughout the Northeast U.S. Concerned readers of the monthly Animal People also participate. Reliable death data, however, still remains elusive…

In his essay ‘An American Tragedy the Candidates Need to Address‘, Carl M. Cannon describes the first human victim of what would become America’s die-hard car culture:

…The first victim was a New York City real estate agent with the appropriately ominous name of Henry H. Bliss. On Sept. 13, 1899, Mr. Bliss alighted from a New York City trolley car, then turned and offered his hand to assist a companion, identified in news reports only as “Miss Lee.”

In that instant, a speeding taxi cab hit the man and ran over him, crushing his chest and skull. He was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, where doctors said it was hopeless. Henry Bliss died the next day, the first known automobile fatality in U.S. history. Millions of his countrymen would follow him to the grave.

In the ensuing 113 years, vehicular traffic on the highways and byways of this country has taken a toll in human suffering that can be accurately described as a holocaust. The total number of dead from that September day in 1899 to this October day in 2012 is approximately 3,573,384.

For the first half of 2012, traffic fatalities in the U.S. have ticked back up!:

Traffic deaths in the U.S. jumped 9% in the first half of 2012, making it the biggest half-year jump since 1985.

More than 16,000 people have died on the roads so far this year, according to a new report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

“This news is very disturbing,” Lon Anderson, spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic, said in a statement, according to CNN. “We have worked decades to reduce fatalities in America… but this is a serious shot across the bow, a warning that as we drive more, our roads may not be as safe as we thought they were, CNN reports…

Now China has bought into the American car culture, with predictable gruesome results:

Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people in China under the age of 45, according to public health experts…

…China has nearly 70,000 police-confirmed traffic deaths a year, twice the figure for the United States. The actual discrepancy may be even greater. Chinese and Western traffic safety experts say that while the United States figures are extremely reliable and take into account virtually every death, only a small fraction of all traffic deaths in China show up in official figures because of widespread underreporting by the local police.

A comparison of government and industry data shows that the annual frequency of police-reported traffic deaths per million registered vehicles in China appears to be roughly six times as high as in the United States. And if the chronic underreporting by the police of China’s traffic deaths is factored in, the true annual rate of traffic deaths per million registered vehicles appears to be nearly 20 times as high.

A joint study last year by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore and Central South University in Changsha, China, of traffic deaths throughout China in 2007 found that nearly three times as many traffic deaths showed up in the Health Ministry’s death registration data than had been reported by the police…

If the above reasons don’t give you a clue, our highly individualistic mode of transport has another Achilles’ heel, among others, which gives real meaning to the term Carmageddon:

…Oil, the source of the car’s pervasiveness, is a rich soup of carbon-based compounds used in almost everything we see and use around us: paraffin, artificial fertilizers, all types of plastics, endless industrial chemicals, asphalt, pesticides, tires, medicine etc. Burning a lot of it on the road is a certain way to make these goods costly or hard to produce. However, while we could survive without asphalt, the same cannot be said about food. In 1940, it took one calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce 2.4 calories of energy in the form of food. 1974 was a turning point: that year, the ratio was 1 calorie of fossil fuel energy for 1 calorie of food. Today, huge amounts of energy and artificial fertilizers are used to work the land, irrigate and package food, transport it over thousands of kilometres to its target markets, refrigerate it etc. All this contributes to a ratio of 10 calories of fossil fuels for every calorie we get from the food itself. In terms of energy, we are eating oil and as it seems, there is not much of it left. As we hail the birth of the 7 billionth person alive today, we are looking in the face of a large scale humanitarian disaster in the decades to follow and the last thing we should be doing is burning up a key food production resource to get to the theatre on a Saturday night…

With India and China adopting America’s asphalt-laden, roadkill-smeared car culture…

…the day of Carmageddon reckoning is fast approaching.

Reality TV Has Become the Real World for Americans

04 Thursday Oct 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 4 Comments

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Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Financial Elite, George Farah - Founder and Executive Director of Open Debates, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Jeremy Scahill, Presidential Debates, Privatization, The Elite 1%, War on Terror

I was doing a little net surfing this morning and wondered what my buddy Jeremy Scahill has been up to. Shoot, it’s been 6 months since I’ve seen an article from him. A recent video of him reaffirms why I like him so much…

We live in this culture where we have this reality television which has become the real world, and what’s being done with our dollars, and with our soldiers, and in foreign countries in our name has become page seven.
~ Jeremy Scahill

He still has a sense of humor too.

Concerning those debates, which in this day and age are only another reality TV production brought to you by Wall Street, Democracy Now had a truly jaw-dropping show on the corporate takeover of the political debates over the last couple of decades. Secret agreements were formed between the two parties which framed the “debates” so that only predetermined, soft-ball questions would be asked and no third party candidates would be allowed to participate. When you watch a “presidential debate”, what you are seeing is pure fluff and staged answers. You might as well be hearing ventriloquist voices emanating from manikins. And to top it all off, one of the primary corporate sponsors of the debates is Anheuser-Busch. How fitting… Bud Light and cheesy made-for-TV “reality” shows constitute the method by which the American sheeple choose their ‘leaders’. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I urge you to watch this interview. It explains a lot about the development of the modern American Cororatocracy and the dumbing down of its population of “consumers”.

Here is George Farah’s Website (click the pic to go there):

Future Forecast: Rising Fascism, Expensive Food, and Social Unrest

03 Wednesday Oct 2012

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

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Capitalism, Car Culture, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Happy Fascism, Inverted Totalitarianism, Oxfam - Extreme Weather - Extreme Prices, Police State, Security and Surveillance State, Walmart, War on Terror, Yaneer Bar-Yam

I found the following story pathetic, predictable, and a microcosm of America’s inverted totalitarianism. This is the corporate state flexing its fascist muscles with for-hire private armies, replete with the latest face-stomping boots and weaponry from Homeland Security. You can never have too much police intimidation in the land of the fearful and home of the paranoid.

Basic rights are what the workers were requesting, but the corporations are working hard to ensure American workers are on the same footing as laborers of Third World sweatshops.

…and don’t forget the sonic cannons to completely suppress the oppressed:

Criminalizing dissent extinguishes free speech. The threat of a nightstick cracking open your head is a good silencer. I fail to see much difference between America and China at this point. A lot has been written recently about the rise of America’s ‘Security and Surveillance State’. Let’s recap:

Why Don’t Americans Care About Democracy at Home?

…the financialization of the economy and culture has resulted in the poisonous growth of monopoly power, predatory lending, abusive credit card practices and misuses of CEO pay. The false but central neoliberal tenet that markets can solve all of society’s problems has no way of limiting the power of money and has given rise to “a politics in which policies that favor the rich … have allowed the financial sector to amass vast economic and political power.”[24] As Joseph Stiglitz points out, there is more at work in this form of governance than a pandering to the wealthy and powerful: There is also the specter of an authoritarian society “where people live in gated communities,” large segments of the population are impoverished or locked up in prison and Americans live in a state of constant fear as they face growing “economic insecurity, health care insecurity [and] a sense of physical insecurity.”[25] In other words, the authoritarian nature of neoliberal political governance and economic power is also visible in the rise of a national security state in which civil liberties are being drastically abridged and violated.

As the war on terror becomes a normalized state of existence, the most basic rights available to American citizens are being shredded. The spirit of revenge, militarization and fear now permeates the discourse of national security. For instance, under Presidents Bush and Obama, the idea of habeas corpus with its guarantee that prisoners have minimal rights has given way to policies of indefinite detention, abductions, targeted assassinations, drone killings and an expanding state surveillance apparatus. The Obama administration has designated 46 inmates for indefinite detention at Guantanamo because, according to the government, they can be neither tried nor safely released. Moreover, another “167 men now confined at Guantanamo … have been cleared for release yet remain at the facility.”[26]

With the passing of the National Defense Authorization Act in 2012, the rule of legal illegalities has been extended to threaten the lives and rights of US citizens. The law authorizes military detention of individuals who are suspected of belonging not only to terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda but to “associated forces.” As Glenn Greenwald points out, this “grants the president the power to indefinitely detain in military custody not only accused terrorists, but also their supporters, all without charges or trial.”[27] The vagueness of the law allows the possibility of subjecting US citizens who are considered in violation of the law to indefinite detention. Of course, that might include journalists, writers, intellectuals and anyone else who might be accused because of their dealings with alleged terrorists. Fortunately, US District Judge Katherine Forrest of New York agreed with Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky and other writers who have challenged the legality of the law. Judge Forrest recently acknowledged the unconstitutionality of the law and ruled in favor of a preliminary barring of the enforcement of the National Defense Authorization Act.[28]

The anti-democratic practices at work in the Obama administration also include the US government’s use of state secrecy to provide a cover or prevent being embarrassed by practices that range from the illegal use of torture to the abduction of innocent foreign nationals. Under the rubric of national security, a shadow state has emerged that eschews transparency and commits unlawful acts. Given the power of the government to engage in a range of illegalities and to make them disappear through an appeal to state secrecy, it should come as no surprise that warrantless wiretapping, justified in the name of national security, is on the rise at both the federal and state levels. For instance, the New York City Police Department “implemented surveillance programs that violate the civil liberties of that city’s Muslim-American citizens [by infiltrating] mosques and universities [and] collecting information on individuals suspected of no crimes.”[29] And the American public barely acknowledged this shocking abuse of power. Such anti-democratic policies and practices have become the new norm in American society and reveal a frightening and dangerous move toward a 21st century version of authoritarianism.

This police state the über wealthy are building better live up to all the hype that’s been advertised about it. There are too many horsemen (Climate Change, Peak Oil, Neoliberal Economic Policies, 6th Mass Extinction, Water Scarcity, Ocean Acidification) bearing down on humanity to even entertain the idea that the starving masses will go die quietly in some dark corner.

If There Are Riots In New York, You Can Blame Ethanol And Index Funds…

…Yaneer Bar-Yam, a physicist, complex systems theorist and general man-about-town with a pleasing CV that includes writing a book called “Making Things Work” and telling Slate that “the shortcomings of the U.N. humanitarian-response system in Haiti have a lot to do with a 50-year-old mathematical theorem known as Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety.”

He and some friends wrote a paper, released yesterday, arguing that increases in food prices over the last few years can be explained almost entirely by two factors: financial market speculation and the growing use of corn for ethanol production rather than food.

Now these arguments have been made before, and also disputed or minimized. The new paper rejects a lot of those criticisms; more interestingly, it constructs a fairly simple four-parameter model that can pretty closely match the actual trends in food prices over the last few years:

So, neat. Also disturbing. And more disturbing is this:

That’s from their companion, non-mathy paper that proposes “that protests may reflect not only long-standing political failings of governments, but also the sudden desperate straits of vulnerable populations. If food prices remain high, there is likely to be persistent and increasing global social disruption.” The main graph is food prices, the red dotted lines are incidents of rioting. Charmingly the numbers in parentheses are death tolls. They predict global doom in 2012-2013.

We apparently value feeding our cars over alleviating worldwide hunger and misery as well as preventing global unrest. A little unrest is always good for the bottom line of the Military Industrial Complex.

“Food prices (blue) and food price model (red) including projected increases in coming months. The social unrest threshold, corrected for inflation (purple dashed line) is a level of food prices that is likely to cause food riots of impoverished populations and social disruption. Parameters as in July update, modified to include larger recent reported FAO food price index increase of 6%.” – link

And a new report buy Oxfam, Extreme Weather, Extreme Prices, looks into the grim future of food production in a world of extreme climate change:

Even under a conservative scenario, another US drought in 2030 could raise the price of maize by as much as 140 per cent over and above the average price of food in 2030, which is already likely to be double today’s prices.

Drought and flooding in southern Africa could increase the consumer price of maize and other coarse grains by as much as 120 per cent. Price spikes of this magnitude today would mean the cost of a 25kg bag of corn meal – a staple which feeds poor families across Africa for about two weeks – would rocket from around $18 to $40.

A nationwide drought in India and extensive flooding across South East Asia could see the world market price of rice increase by 25 per cent. This could see domestic spikes of up to 43 per cent on top of longer term price rises in rice importing countries of such as Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.

My prediction is that we will continue to sacrifice land and human lives at the altar of American, and now Chinese, car culture. Walmart, the enduring symbol of happy fascism in America, will enjoy a growing pool of cheap labor amid cut-throat competition to ensure stellar profit margins. And a new reality TV series featuring climate change survivors will air on America’s propaganda box. Why not? We’ve already got a reality TV series to promote our perpetual war economy.

The Technomass of Industrial Civilization Vs the Biomass of the Living Planet

30 Sunday Sep 2012

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

≈ 1 Comment

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Alf Hornborg, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Machine Fetishism, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Poverty, Resource Wars, War on Terror

Here is the interview with Alf Hornborg along with a couple of essays of his. To understand our predicament, you must understand that the flow of energy, fossil fuels, humans have tapped into for running our economy, machinery, and energy-intensive mode of living has some serious environmental drawbacks, namely climate change and ocean acidification, which will certainly lead to our own destruction with the business-as-usual path we are so determined to follow. Some of the other consequences of basing our way of life so heavily upon fossil fuels are resource wars, support of brutal dictatorships in resource-cursed countries, hypocritical foreign policies based on resource control rather than the publicly professed mantra of human rights and democracy, the fomentation of resentment and terrorism towards the West, etc. So if you couple fossil fuels with capitalism, then you have a truly planet-destroying system. Capitalism is coerced competition for finite wages and resources, pitting person against person, company against company, and nation against nation. What the State calls Terrorism is really defined as those who have grievances with the plunder of their homeland’s resources to support the unsustainable lifestyles of OECD countries. If China continues to follow the same arc of resource consumption as America, the ‘War on Terror’ will be theirs as well. My favorite quote from Horborg:

Is the war on terrorism and climate debate two sides of the same coin? Imports of cheap oil are just as crucial as exports of carbon dioxide for a high-energy future. Both are confined to the parts of the world that have amassed the most purchasing power.

Alf Hornborg on How We Have Been Mystified by Technology …

14 July 2011, 12:54 PM
Alf Hornborg on How We Have Been Mystified by Technology
by Adam Robbert & JP Hayes
Alf Hornborg, professor in the department of Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden has long been untangling the tightly fused networks that merge the material dimensions of the environment with the cultural processes of society. “Machine Fetishism” Hornborg’s term for the way in which we have been mystified by technology highlights the links between technology and asymmetries in global exchange and uncovers the relationship between ecology and power. As technological devices multiply exponentially in a vain attempt to make our lives “efficient,” “luxurious” and “productive,” Hornborg, restless in his critique of technocapitalism, reminds us that on planet earth everything is a zero-sum game – one person’s gain is always another’s loss. Last January we caught up with Professor Hornborg to see where his latest thinking on machines, money and climate change stand and how we, as the concerned and informed, can intervene to make a difference.

Q: You have suggested that the difficulties in understanding the relationship between the environment, the economy and technology arise partly out of the separation between the social and natural sciences within the university. Bringing the natural and social sciences together implies entangling material dimensions of the environment with the cultural processes of society. How has this split mystified our understanding of the relationships between ecology and economics, and how is this affecting our ability to respond to major events such as the mass extinction of species, climate change and global inequality?

It is becoming increasingly obvious that material processes in the biosphere are very much intertwined with cultural aspects such as our ways of thinking and our consumption patterns. The most obvious example is perhaps climate change, which we know is largely driven by our patterns of consumption. If ecologists look at the biosphere as if there were no human societies in it, and economists look at societies as if they didn’t depend on the biosphere, none of them will know how to handle things like climate change. As long as economists continue to think that the only relevant metric for measuring global trade is money, they will not see the asymmetric net transfers of real resources such as energy and matter that make technological expansion possible within some areas of the world.

Q: Your analysis of technology as a globally situated event that requires the establishment of multiple asymmetric economic linkages to be in place raises questions about the role of technology in current ecological problems. If technology, and in particular machine technology, requires inequalities in the terms of global trade, how are we to assess the appropriate use and level of technology employed in solving ecological problems?

I don’t think modern technology will be of much use in solving ecological problems, because modern technology is basically a way of shuffling around resources and problems between different social groups. For example, by shifting to ethanol European car drivers may think they are becoming sustainable, but Brazilians engaged in growing sugar cane may be growing less sustainable as a result. Solving ecological problems should not be about finding new technological solutions, which generally means shifting the problems onto someone else, but about developing new economies and lifestyles which reduce environmental degradation.

Q: You advocate a “zero-sum” approach to your analysis of the relationship between ecology and economics, with technology acting as a kind of basin within which material exchanges of the biosphere and economic or political policies churn. In this way, what you call “machine fetishism” produces the image of a machine that exists without its connections to culture, power and ecology. Could you elaborate on how the illusion of machine technology came to take hold and what relevance unmasking machine power for what is –a globally situated object- has for encouraging a more politically just and environmentally sound society?

Our faith in technology emerged most markedly in the early nineteenth century, as colonial Britain was accumulating resources from all over the world and investing its economic surpluses in new machinery. To British economists of the time, it seemed as if ecological (land) constraints had been overcome once and for all, and the magic wands of labor and capital would suffice for economic progress to continue. That is exactly the time when modern economic ideology was born. What these Europeans could not grasp was that their capital was built on the exploitation of land and labor elsewhere in the world. In other words, the factors of production were NOT substitutable in an absolute sense. We are all ultimately dependent on land.

Q: Following David Harvey’s analysis of money, you have suggested that money is a social institution that generates “space-time” in such a way that is both an “objective, political ecological framework” and a “subjective experience.” In other words, money becomes the medium by which society, technology and even the whole biosphere are transformed within a particular set of cultural ideas. Given the latest financial crises, what do you foresee the role of currency to be in the transformation of the relationship between ecology and economics?

The financial crises illustrate the risks a society takes when it permits monetary assets and real, biophysical resources to become so thoroughly dissociated from each other. Our current problems with overconsumption would not have been possible if money had not become so completely disconnected from material resources. I am not saying that the gold standard that we abandoned in the seventies was a solution, but at least it limited the possibilities of printing ever more money to keep the treadmill of consumption (and production) spinning at a pace that satisfies the corporate demand for profits. But the real problem with money is not that it is fictitious, as all money must be, but that it embodies the idea that everything can be exchanged for everything else. What we need is an economy with at least two incommensurable currencies, to distinguish between values that should not be interchangeable, such as local subsistence and survival versus globalized entertainment.

Q: In your analysis of the industrial revolution you suggest that the “technomass” of industrial civilization is now competing with the “biomass” for living space on planet earth. How are we to approach the reality that we are already thoroughly enmeshed within a technosphere that now seems to require our continued maintenance (so as not to leak the wrong toxic substances into the wrong environments) and the fact the we need to be equally attentive to the livelihood of the biosphere which we depend upon for life?

The sooner we stop prioritizing the metabolic needs of our “technomass”, at the expense of human and other biomass, the better. Our technological fixes are no less absurd than the fetishism that brought earlier civilizations to collapse, whether through overinvestment in armies (Rome), temples (Maya), or megalithic statues (Easter Island).

Q: Given that you believe that an integration of the social and natural sciences would lead to better policy strategies, could you comment on the differences or similarities between these two spheres? Do the cultural, political and economic relations that social scientists study differ in nature from the ecological and material systems that a natural scientist study? Their conjunction seems necessary, and yet problems of integration seem numerous. What is our way forward here?

Yes, the social and natural sciences study different kinds of phenomena and need to respect the limitations of either approach. Societies have always implicated questions of power, unequal distribution, and collective processes of meaning-creation and ideology. Ecosystems can be studied and understood without insights about any of these things. On the other hand, as economists and others illustrate, social systems can be studied (if not understood) without any regard to the flows of matter and energy that preoccupy the ecologists. To understand the interface between social and ecological systems we need to understand POWER as partly material, partly symbolic. Social power is based on unequal access to material resources, but also on the ideological mystification of such inequalities.

Q: Uncertainties of measurement and misleading methodological approaches characterize current economic attempts to manage the world system. Such a measurement/theory mismatch creates uncertainty and error in understanding what is occurring in the present state of economic-ecological affairs. As a result of these poor methodologies, modern bureaucracies have created a routine of socioeconomic functioning that is notable for its lack of applicability to social & environmental reality. How can we characterize and develop change that ensures the development of a truly sustainable world system? How can we, as academics, activists, and concerned citizens, best intervene, as you say, “in the destructive logic of our current economic system?”

First of all by recognizing the dilemma as I have outlined it in my earlier responses. Second by using their political agency (ultimately as voters in democratic political systems) to choose representatives who are prepared to reorganize the economy for the long-term good of all people and ecosystems, rather than for the short-term benefits of corporate interests.

Q: Could you comment on the role of emergent popular discourses on the environment such as “green capitalism,” “sustainable development” and “ecological economics?” Though each is different in character and always subject to a variety of uses, do you think that these movements, in general, are adequate to the tasks they set out to solve?

I don’t believe in “green capitalism” or “sustainable development” the way they are currently conceived, as both are oxymorons. “Ecological economics” is a very important arena for discussion, but will lead to real changes in our thinking only if it is able to radically transcend the assumptions of conventional economics.

Q: What, in your opinion, are the most effective modes available with which to express a need for change within the current political and economic regimes? If traditional models of education, politics and economic theories are not serving the urgency of the crises at hand, what action do you advise concerned peoples to take?

The best we can do is to develop awareness of our global predicament and resort to it as opportunities for real change appear, not least as we confront crises of various kinds in the future. Crises, whether financial, environmental, or other (or a combination of them), can offer possibilities of change, and it is important for society not to be confused by such events, but to understand what is happening and be prepared to safeguard the health and security of citizens.

Q: If you are correct in asserting that “mainstream” thinking about the environment is fundamentally flawed and will not lead to positive change (as advocated by the sustainable development movement, for example) where do we start? Must we begin from scratch so as to completely re-interpret the ingredients and causes of our crises, or do we in fact have something like a base or foothold from which we can begin a renewed attempt to make a difference in the world? Who are the primary thinkers involved that provide us with tools that the 21st century can believe in?

The Internet has provided humanity with a unique chance to globally communicate about crises and how to handle them. I will not mention any specific thinkers, only note that the social and natural sciences both have rich traditions of thought that attempt to show how social power and inequalities are interconnected with natural circumstances such as land constraints, soil fertility, and thermodynamics. We need more current researchers working on how these different kinds of knowledge can be stitched together. Unfortunately, a very small minority of researchers is dedicated to such challenges.

click to enlarge…

“The last sigh of the fossil-fueled global economy” (translated)

Published January 6, 2010 – 10:00
Updated January 7, 2010 – 09:31

What will future historians say about the early 2,000’s? That it was the turning point. In the course of that decade were visualized the unsustainable contradictions within global fossil fuel-driven industrial capitalism.

First came 9/11. We sat glued in front of the television screen and saw the towers fall, again and again. We were just as shocked as the European upper classes two hundred years ago when the mob guillotined the royals in Paris. How could such a hit happen to us? Where did all this hate come from? Are there really such contradictions in the global community? Could it have to do with oil, this stored solar energy from the ancient landscape that drives most of our lives, that we can afford to continue paying for it? And to whom then is this resource so critical that some countries are prepared to go to war for it.

Then came the Peace Prize of Al Gore, a person who appeared to have become the world’s most powerful man able to say that we were destroying the planet, and be rewarded for it. If a U.S. Vice President, Nobel Committee and the UN climate panel agree on the reality of global warming, may we take it seriously? Should we stop using fossil fuels?

Then came the financial crisis – the worst stock market collapse since 1929. Is the world economy really so vulnerable? And how is it that economists could not predict it? Are there contexts in the world that economists have not understood?

The early 2,000’s was the decade when we passed the peak of conventional oil production, that which in English is called peak oil. We now, therefore, use the remaining oil faster than we can find new deposits. We realize that oil prices will rise in the future, making our current lifestyle increasingly untenable… a two hundred year old bubble approaching the breaking point.

In two centuries we have been able to forget that the earth’s land surface is the resource that limits us. We have become used to deriving our energy from drilled holes in the earth’s crust instead of from our landscape. We have lived in the former solar energy of epochs instead of the annual insolation stored in living plants.

What should we do when we can no longer afford oil? How will the land be sufficient when it once again will have to support both people and vehicles? It used to be horse feed we had to compete with, now it is the cane for ethanol.

Not only do biofuels take up land space needed for food for a growing world population, but they also can not be nearly enough to sustain the consumption levels that the rich world has become accustomed to.

The early 2,000’s was also the decade when we definitely realized that the balance of power in the world would not be forever. China became an economic power by cashing in on cheap labor and lax environmental laws. We buy Chinese goods like never before. But is continuing to wallow in their products the best thing we can do for the Chinese, their environment and our common atmosphere?

The early 2,000’s was also the decade when a new kind of president moved into the White House. A whole world had understood that the American people could no longer hope to solve global conflicts by taking up arms. But what options are there really for Obama?

During the past decade, two of America’s most powerful politicians received the Nobel Peace Prize, the one for his warning us of what can happen to the climate if we continue to burn oil, the other in hopes that he will refrain from war… always for oil.

And just before the decade is over, we will experience COP 15. Fifteen thousand delegates and a hundred heads of state will gather in Copenhagen to discuss whether there is any hope. We know that carbon dioxide emissions are only continuing to increase despite all the warnings and promises. We recognize that emissions are as unevenly distributed in the world as money. An average American emits 18.7 tons of carbon dioxide per year; an average of 1.3 tons for Indians.

Perhaps we can imagine a connection between these various trends and events? Is the war on terrorism and climate debate two sides of the same coin? Imports of cheap oil are just as crucial as exports of carbon dioxide for a high-energy future. Both are confined to the parts of the world that have amassed the most purchasing power.

Economic growth is basically about earning money to expend resources. And the more money we earn today, the more resources we can afford to consume tomorrow. No wonder it is difficult to reduce carbon emissions.

But this is a logic that economists are not trained in. Can we hope that the next decade offers more insight – and more power shifts?

Alf Hornborg
Professor of Human Ecology, Lund University

Life in a Zero-Sum World: Capitalism, Socio-Ecological Crisis and Alternatives

30 Sunday Sep 2012

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

≈ 3 Comments

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17th World Congress of the IUAES, Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Gross Inequality, Peak Oil, Poverty, Social Unrest, The Socio-Ecological Crisis

For my own records and for your curious minds, I’m posting some abstracts on papers that were written for an upcoming symposium called the 17th World Congress of the IUAES (Manchester, UK; 5th-10th August 2013). Many of these papers sound very interesting:

Papers

That Big Slow Curve: Fossil Fuel Based Growth meets A Prosperous Way Down

Author: Thomas Abel (Tzu Chi University) email

LONG ABSTRACT

This century and the last may someday be called the Oil Years. Many who view our human economies in biophysical terms have come to conceive the peak of oil production as a turning point for peoples of the world. For the Odum’s, A Prosperous Way Down (2001) is in no part inevitable as oil production peaks and declines. Their book offers guidelines for a preferable future, a hopeful scenario, but with clear recognition that there are many less desirable and more likely directions that the world may take. In this paper I will reprise the Odum’s preferred scenario as it relates to undesirable alternatives. I will place these scenarios along the path of a big slow curve—the 80-year curve of world oil consumption. At human time scales, we might think that the big slow curve is difficult to detect or attend to. However, I will argue that the effects of asset growth and decline are indeed attended to, and have dramatically affected cultural trends in these oil years. This is because the detection of the growth (or its absence) of cultural assets is of central concern to all ‘consumers’ within ecosystems, but especially to human consumers who produce and manage their own food in various ways. These issues will be explored with mini-model simulations.

Accumulation by Displaced Emission: On Climate, Consumers, and the Rhetoric of Confidence

Author: Cindy Isenhour (Centre College ) email

Long Abstract

Whether referred to as ecological modernization, bright green environmentalism, or the rationalization of lifestyles, technological improvement has long been presented as a “win-win” strategy resulting in both economic growth and improved environmental health. Yet significant and mounting research suggests that these strategies have not delivered on their promises. Efficiency gains are being rapidly outstripped by sustained net growth in consumption. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research, this paper explores a series of reports published by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and their subsequent impact on other nations. The report authors advocate a zero-sum approach to understanding green house gas emissions – recognizing that while Sweden has reduced domestic emissions since 1990 — simultaneous growth in the consumption of imported goods and services has resulted in net increases elsewhere. The Swedish “consumption approach” to global GHG emissions accounting helps to elucidate the zero-sum reality of outsourcing emissions to nations where the need for economic development results in environmental injustice. While it is certainly more just to attribute all environmental costs to the consumers who benefit from the products associated with emissions, this perspective was contentious in Sweden where many saw it as anti-market. Its logical conclusion implied moving past economic and environmental de-coupling, toward de-growth. While these reports have had a substantial impact on several other nations, I argue that the approach they advocate is unlikely to gain much traction within UN climate talks until the pro-growth rhetoric surrounding consumer choice, responsibility, and freedom are challenged.

Cornucopianism and the image of limited good

Author: Richard Wilk (Indiana University) email

Long Abstract

In this paper I argue that the metaphors that we use to think about global economic processes suffer from inherent limitations. The metaphors come from early moral and vitalistic thinking about the economy, and from modernist mechanical models which have now been enhanced with systems thinking, nationalism, and what I call “ecologism” which fetishizes nature. I propose that both cornucopian and zero-sum limited-good ideas about the future are fundamentally flawed, and are incapable of projecting a credible imagination of sustainability. I focus particularly on the language and metaphors of temporality and boundaries, both of which incorporate assumptions which we know to be false. I also discuss the prevailing dualism in discourse about the economy, and the way it limits our thinking and blinds us to what Latour calls “the proliferation of hybrids.” The economy is a cyborg, partially human and partially machine, and the sooner we recognize this, and stop fighting the pre-determined wars of modernism, the better we will be capable of thinking about a planet with 10 or 11 billion human beings on it.

Rethinking Economy

Author: Stephen Gudeman (University of Minnesota/ Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) email

Long Abstract

Most economists see material life as consisting of markets surrounded by market-like behavior: everything else is a positive or negative externality on market exchange. The anthropological perspective is different. I see economies as fields of value defined by crosscutting coordinates. One axis locates economies on a scale from High Relationship to Low Relationship transactions; the other positions economies on a measure from High Markets to Low Markets. Set diagonally to this “graph view” are five, increasingly abstract and encompassing institutional spheres that shift from the House, to Community, to Commerce, to Finance, to Meta finance. This view offers a comparative way to understand economies, change, and the contemporary crises. It suggests that economy is built on a material base whose uses change and are differentially valued. The more abstract spheres, through cronyism, oligopolies, information control and other devices, extract “value” that is first achieved through production and innovation. Unless mollified by communal action, this power of abstraction heightens unequal distribution and leads to environmental degradation seen in terms of entropy and pollution. I contest the belief in growth that is generated by market competition and consumption desires, as well as the ideology that growth, with its increasing toll on the environment, is the remedy to unequal distribution. Placing limits on the growth of inequalities in wealth counters the entropic toll we are incurring, and the reverse.

Revisiting the Image of Limited Good: On Sustainability, Thermodynamics, and the Illusion of Creating Wealth

Author: Paul Trawick (Idaho State University) email

Long Abstract

This paper focuses on worldview, examining two cultural models that are now contending for dominance on the world stage: the open-system model long promoted by economists, referred to as the ‘image of unlimited good’, and a closed-system model, the ‘image of limited good’ made famous by George Foster, who attributed it to members of peasant societies throughout the world. The former worldview is based on the idea that people ‘create’ wealth, an illusion arising from a fundamental confusion about the respective properties of real wealth and virtual wealth, or productive capital and finance capital. This perspective ignores the near-total reliance of the global economy on fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources, finite forms of real wealth whose exploitation is governed by the laws of thermodynamics. The alternative “zero-sum” worldview rests on the axiom that most of the ‘goods’ that people value in life are inherently scarce, being derived from those limited resources and raw materials, a scarcity that must somehow be shared. Based on an ethnographic and ethnological argument, a radical shift toward the closed-system view is said to be necessary if people are to act collectively to impose sustainable limits on their expanding consumption, a cultural change that may already be underway.

The moral economy and moral ecology of organic food in Western Sicily: from growth to degrowth?

Author: Giovanni Orlando (Independent Scholar) email

Long Abstract

For almost a century now the dominant socio-ecological regime of the world agri-food system has rested on the two pillars of productivism and mass consumption. An idea of limitless growth is thus intrinsic to it. Such growth has resulted in the degradation of ecosystems and the exploitation of farmers and consumers. The organic food movement has sought to counter this situation by developing agri-food systems that renew, rather than deplete, natural resources, and that do justice to farmers and consumers. Potentially, then, organic food can be grounded in non-accumulative paradigms such as agroecology and degrowth. From a cultural point of view, what values and symbols would underpin these ‘sustainable’ paradigms? This paper tries to answer this question in Western Sicily, Italy. By looking at the practices and discourses of people who grow, sell and eat organic foods, it explores the degree to which subjects hold values about nature and people that speak to notions of degrowth and agroecology. The paper uncovers a common thread in people’s emphasis on what might be termed ‘excess’. From the fear of the dietary abominations created by an excessive use of technology in food manufacturing and processing, to the outrage for the abuses caused by a desire for excessive profits in food retailing, the paper shows how the ideal of sufficiency, documented by anthropologists in a variety of non-Western societies, creates a moral economy-ecology of organic food.

The Revival of Survival: Pioneering a Post-Financial America

Author: Eliza Jane Darling email

Long Abstract

The financial crash of 2008 precipitated the renaissance of a primordial American tradition: survivalism. Often stigmatized as an eccentricity, the survivalist ethos is in fact deeply ingrained in American cultural production, from post-apocalyptic film to millenarian religious movements, as well as in American capitalism, generating millions of dollars in annual profits through the production of demand for palliative commodities. In recent years survivalism has indeed infiltrated mainstream American politics at multiple scales, from New York City’s “go-bag” scheme to Wyoming state’s “doomsday bill” to the CDC’s “zombie-preparedness” initiative. Like its historical predecessors, Great Recession survivalism is predicated upon a zero-sum logic simultaneously economic and environmental, entailing fears of an imminent collapse of finite financial and ecological resources as well as alternative visions for post-crisis continuity. This paper examines the history of survivalist ideology as a heterodox response to capitalistic crisis that is cyclically subsumed by its alleged antithesis: a cultural manifestation of deep-seated doubts about the propensity for endless growth which has itself been absorbed into the warp and weft of capitalist expansion through commoditisation.

Why Solar Panels Don’t Grow on Trees: Technological Utopianism and the Uneasy Relation between Ecomarxism and Ecological Economics

Author: Alf Hornborg (Lund University) email

Long Abstract

Ever since the Industrial Revolution saved Britain from ecological crisis in the early nineteenth century, visions of miraculous new technologies have alleviated Euro-American anxieties about the impending doom of the fossil-fuelled capitalism that it inaugurated. Although Malthus’s worries about land shortages were transcended by world-historical events as well as by Ricardo’s and Marx’s different versions of technological optimism, they were soon reincarnated in Jevons’s warnings about the depletion of coal. Today economists generally dismiss the pessimism not only of Malthus and Jevons, but also of current concerns over peak oil, by expressing faith in human ingenuity. To retrospectively ridicule pessimists by referring to technological progress that they did not anticipate has become an established pattern of mainstream thought. Almost regardless of ideological persuasion, the seemingly self-evident concept of “technological progress” inherited from early industrialism has been resorted to as an article of faith serving to dispel the specter of truncated growth. The increasingly acknowledged threats of peak oil and global warming are thus generally countered with visions of a future civilization based on solar power. In this paper I discuss this technological scenario as a utopia that raises serious doubts about mainstream understandings of what “technology” really is, and what it means to say that something is “technologically” feasible. The technological utopianism professed, for instance, by ecomarxists raises difficult but fundamental analytical questions about the relation between thermodynamics and theories of economic value.

Decoupling waste from growth

Author: Catherine Alexander (Durham University) email

Long Abstract

The correlation between increased waste production and increased wealth
headlines the EU’s environmental strategy. On the basis of trends so far,
the OECD projects a 45% increase in waste from 1995. The need for
continual economic expansion is taken as an unproblematic given. The
question that therefore seems to present itself is how to continue to
increase wealth without environmental despoilation. The EU’s Sixth
Environment Action Programme identifies waste prevention and management
as one of its top priorities. Its primary objective is to decouple waste
generation from economic activity, so that EU growth will no longer lead
to more and more rubbish. In the paper I make three points in response.
The first is that the desirability of growth remains unquestioned,
alternatives unexplored. The second is that environmental justice or
equity seems now to be foregrounded, often at the expense of other
inequalities produced by capitalist relations. The answer to waste
production, however, appears to be shifted away from economic rationales
of constant expansion to technocratic solutions or campaigns to change
consumers’ ‘attitudes and behaviour’ or the sleight of hand involved in
reclassifying wastes as energy (with the potentially bizarre prospect of
an economy that demands more waste in order to feed energy demands). I
suggest that the production of wastes is intimately tied to every aspect
of mass economic activity from extraction, through production,
distribution and consumption to disposal, and crucially, capitalist growth
depends on things breaking down, the inability to repair things, fashion.
One of the first steps forward might be to recognize that this kind of
growth is inseparable from social and environmental degradation.

Global Ecological Collapse Unfolding in Plain Sight, Yet the Establishment Can’t be Bothered

21 Friday Sep 2012

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

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Inverted Totalitarianism, New Zealand's Kennedy Graham MP, The Elite 1%

Epic ice melt in the Arctic puts on a spectacular demonstration illustrating the consequences of our orgy on fossil fuel consumption, yet the global bureaucrats’ and corporatists’ only reaction is to race northward for further resource plundering.

Russia suffers its most severe wildfire season in recent history and discovers over 200 massive methane fields bubbling up from their seas, yet the Russian bureaucrats and corporatists plan to increase their coal exports to China by 50%.

Compared to forty years ago, American forests now succumb to twice as many conflagrations in burn seasons lasting over two months longer, yet the bureaucrats and corporatists proclaim that the development of the Keystone oil sands pipeline is inevitable.

The U.S. bread basket gets decimated by unrelenting drought, yet bureaucrats and corporatists institutionalize taxpayer-funded subsidies and insurance bailouts for Big Ag which is resposible for up to 30% of CO2 emissions.

“Much of the world’s photosynthesis, the basis of all of our food, comes from the ocean’s plankton. The oxygen in every other breath we take is a product of phytoplankton photosynthesis.” Yet we continue to burn ever more coal and other fossil fuels and carry out bottom trawling of the oceans, the end result being the death of the cradle of life on Earth.

You have cancer; please stop smoking.

New Zealand’s Kennedy Graham MP, who has tried to raise such points with his country’s bureaucrats and corporatists, has an interesting article out which questions whether these business suits he deals with are living on the same planet he is:

Climate change and human psychoses…

…A quarter century, actually, since the US Senate and the Brundtland Report put the issue on the international agenda. We’ve had, since then, Rio and Cairo, Kyoto and Marrakesh, Copenhagen and Cancun and Durban, and Rio again.

But the past week has been especially intensive, and this for two reasons. The NZ Parliament is conducting hearings on the Government’s bill to amend the ETS[emissions trading scheme], in response to the Advisory Panel’s report of 2011. And, concurrently and with no strong causal link, the latest scientific findings of climate change are reported in.

So, in the past week, I have asked two questions of the Government on climate change. Taken together, they traverse the range of the issue – the NZ Government’s domestic instrument for combating climate change, and its appreciation of the global reality out there.

The first questioned the Government on what the Green Party critiques as a weak emissions trading scheme, ‘subsidising polluters’ and incurring considerable net fiscal cost to the taxpayer.  The second queried whether, in drafting the latest amendments to the ETS, the Government had sufficiently taken into account the latest scientific findings.

In short, the Government’s response was as follows:

– The amendments defer any strengthening of the ETS because we live in fragile economic circumstances and it is ‘not a stellar time’ to increase charges and taxes. The changes did not amount to ‘subsidies’, and indeed New Zealand was on track to more than meet its five-year Kyoto obligations.

– The Government had, indeed, adequately accounted for the latest scientific findings, but it has to take into account a whole range of factors such as the global developments and employment levels in New Zealand.

This is as close as it gets to a meaningful exchange in the NZ Parliament on the future of the planet. I acknowledge that Ministers Groser and Bridges are well-meaning and competent. I count them as friends. Tim Groser, in particular, has huge international experience and reputation.

That does not make them necessarily right in what they are doing. It is possible for such people to be egregiously wrong, fatefully, fatally.

Effectively, the ministers are acknowledging that the amendments weaken the ETS in the sense of deferring sectoral obligations, and seek to explain why – protection of jobs, firms and investment at home against risk competitiveness during tough global economic times.

That is circular logic, and it rests on an erroneous premise. We are entering the Global Ecological Crisis. An ecological crisis means an economic crisis. They are one and the same thing. You do not defer measures to combat an ecological crisis because you are in an economic crisis. You deal with them as one crisis, and seek to resolve ‘it’ immediately.

The latest scientific findings are alarming. They possibly portend a new era for humanity – one where dangerous anthropogenic climate change may arrive within half a decade out, not half a century.

–          Arctic ice extent, as measured this month by the US Snow & Ice Data Center, is 49% below the past 30-year average. Between 2007 and ’11 it has dropped from 4.17 m. sq. km to 3.41 m. sq. km., an 18% drop in four years. The different trends in Antarctica, where there is some cooling and ice-accretion, is understood by scientists to be consistent with an increase in average global temperature.

–          Russian scientists on the Viktor Buinitsky research vessel have found methane fields in the Laptev Sea of 1 km. in diameter. Methane deposits in the seabed near Spitzbergen are effervescing to the surface.

–          This has been described by Cambridge University scientist, Prof. Wadhams, as ‘terrifying news’. It facilitates the release of potent methane gas from land-based tundra and seabed floor, reducing Earth’s albedo effect, risking a positive feedback loop on temperature increase that can breach unpredictable tipping-points. While we must await the IPCC’s 5^th assessment report in 2013, the latest specific findings are of far-reaching concern.

I confess I experience my share of surreal moments in the NZ House of Representatives when I ask these questions and receive the answers I do. It is as if we truly are, my National MP colleagues and I, on different planets.

For I am asking questions, in as measured tones as I can, of what appears to me to be about the future of the planet and humanity, and they are answering as if (a) it is just another problem and (b) I am something of an irritant.

No-one will be more relieved than I shall, if the science proves to be wrong or excessively ominous. I shall simply look stupid. That will be my preference, since my grand-children will have a decent future.

But I do not see how that can be the case.

Browbeaten Scientists Not Telling the Public the Full Truth

19 Wednesday Sep 2012

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

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Feedback Loops, Climate Scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, David Roberts, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Free Market Ideologues, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, The Elite 1%

Is it still possible to limit climate change to a 2 degree increase? If we don’t take into account the loss of sulfate parasols as a result of our emissions controls and if we close our eyes to the multiple feedback loops that have already been unleashed and which, in and of themselves, could dwarf anthropogenic emissions, then it might be possible in such a theoretical and hypothetical world.

(click to enlarge)

But a theoretical and hypothetical world and a world of brutal reality are two very different things. Humans must ultimately answer to brutal reality which discards all of the fabricated economic theorems and pie-in-the-sky myths about the techno-supremacy of modern man that we delude ourselves with. So the cold and hard reality is “No, we are well and truly fucked!” Despite decades of warnings by scientists, we have kept on burning fossil fuels and continue to do so as I write this post. As a matter of fact, growth in fossil fuel consumption is baked into our economic system as far into the future as we care to fantasize. We have backed ourselves into a corner where the only salvation left is some sort of globally coordinated Manhattan project of geo-engineering. And how likely is that to occur, let alone succeed? As David Roberts reports in his latest essay ‘Freaked-out climate scientists urge other freaked-out climate scientists to speak up, fight Man‘, our current enslavement to an infinite growth economic paradigm precludes such a possibility:

…Can we make the radical changes necessary to meet that challenge? No, say climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows in a recent commentary in Nature Climate Change, not “within orthodox political and economic constraints.”

There is no political or economic constraint more orthodox than the primacy of economic growth. No solution to climate change that threatens economic growth can get any traction at all — even the most “alarmist” climate hawks fear to tread there. Which is too bad, Anderson and Bows say, because “climate change commitments are incompatible with short- to medium-term economic growth (in other words, for 10 to 20 years).” What’s worse, “work on adapting to climate change suggests that economic growth cannot be reconciled with the breadth and rate of impacts as the temperature rises towards 4 °C and beyond.” In other words: We either give up economic growth voluntarily for a little while or suffer a climate that will reverse economic growth long-term…

…Anderson and Bows stress that, “within orthodox political and economic constraints,” hitting such a target is wildly unlikely. Absent some pretty revolutionary political and economic changes, it won’t happen. For obvious reasons, scientists shy away from saying this kind of thing in public. They don’t want to depress people or come off as “political.” However, say Anderson and Bows, “away from the microphone and despite claims of ‘green growth’, few if any scientists working on climate change would disagree with the broad thrust of this candid conclusion.”…

The article goes on to explain how our scientific community is hamstrung and browbeaten into reciting and presenting only evidence without expounding upon and revealing what the consequences of those findings will be for humanity:

…scientists remain reticent, often assuming that “the most effective way of engaging is by presenting evidence, without daring to venture, at least explicitly, broader academic judgment.” This kind of just-the-facts reticence, Anderson and Bows say, is neither warranted nor wise given the urgency of current climate circumstances:

[W]e need to be less afraid of making academic judgments. Not unsubstantiated opinions and prejudice, but applying a mix of academic rigour, courage and humility to bring new and interdisciplinary insights into the emerging era. This would be controversial enough in itself. Various social and professional incentives work against academic researchers speaking out beyond their narrow specialties. And there is an entire cottage industry devoted to scolding climate scientists for going “beyond the science” to political analysis or policy advocacy. These latter sins, they are warned, threaten their status as “trusted brokers.” (Because the trusted-broker thing is working so well so far, climate-wise.)

What else can you do, though, when danger of such unthinkable scope and permanence is looming and humanity’s actions in the coming decade will determine the fate of future generations? I mean, it sounds like a sci-fi movie, but it’s real. What can you do if you’re one of the scientists who understands how dire the situation is? These are not ordinary times.

And in conclusion, the article talks of something I have posted about here – the failure and inability of the free market to solve this civilization-ending problem of climate change:

Anyway, as controversial as it is to ask climate researchers to venture broad social and economic judgments, the specific critique that Anderson and Bows offer is even more likely to make some of their straight-laced colleagues wince. It has to do with the “catastrophic and ongoing failure of market economics and the laissez-faire rhetoric accompanying it.” Specifically, market economists (and the politicians and scientists in thrall to them) suffer the “misguided belief that commitments to avoid warming of 2°C can still be realized with incremental adjustments to economic incentives.” They urge their colleagues:

Leave the market economists to fight among themselves over the right price of carbon — let them relive their groundhog day if they wish. The world is moving on and we need to have the audacity to think differently and conceive of alternative futures.

One of the objectives of this blog was to speak truth to power and reveal where the human race is headed. Now that we know our final outcome, our predicament is analogous to being diagnosed with terminal cancer. You people reading this post are an infinitesimal percentage of the global population who are privileged, or perhaps cursed, to be in possession of such depressing knowledge. Where do we go from here? What do we do? How do we live our lives knowing what we know of the dismal future of the world’s youth? The entire edifice of human civilization will become a worldwide ghost city before this century ends. Perhaps the only thing left to do is live each day as if it were our last because there really is no future without some miraculous, radical, and global social change accompanied by unprecedented global cooperation. Those in charge of such matters have chosen temporary preservation of the current system over the long-term survival of our species. Evil and suicidal or foolish and ill-informed… Which is it that best describes the self-destructive choices that have been made?

A truly frightening time-lapse visualization by the NOAA of the Arctic Ice Melt:

Get Me Off This Crazy Ride!

15 Saturday Sep 2012

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

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Arctic Ice Melt, Capitalism, China's Massive Coal Consumption, Climate Change, CO2 Emissions and GDP, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Global Warming, Greenhouse Gases, Industrial Agriculture, Intensified Global Water Cycles, Methane Release from Thawing Permafrost, Peak Oil, Projected World Energy Consumption, Sir Robert Watson

Speaking on climate change in the video above is Sir Robert Watson, retiring chief scientist at Britian’s Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs. He is warning that governments cannot afford to do nothing about greenhouse gas emissions, irrespective of the current state of the economy. He says the hope of restricting the average global temperature rise to 2C is “out the window”.

If we continue the way we are, we’ve got a 50-50 shot of a 3 degree [Celcius] world – and I would not rule out a 5 degree [Celcius] world.
~ Dr Bob Watson

Hell on Earth is coming to a reality near you:

Here’s the edition of the Royal Society journal that came out of the conference on 4 degrees C of warming. Read through it and see if you think “hell on earth” is an exaggeration. Desertification, water shortages, agricultural disruptions, rising sea levels, vanishing coral, tropical forest die-offs, mass species extinctions, oh my. Kevin Anderson, one of the lead scientists involved, was moved to say that “a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.” ~ Grist

A new article in the Journal “Nature” reports an ominous finding that far more carbon dioxide and methane are being released from parts of Arctic Siberia than previously thought.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that lack of sea ice could drive heat up to 900 miles further inland and cause the melting of permafrost. Most scientists agree that is a recipe for runaway global warming. From the findings of the NCAR/NSIDC Study:

The findings point to a link between rapid sea ice loss and enhanced rate of climate warming, which could penetrate as far as 900 miles inland. In areas where permafrost is already at risk, such as central Alaska, the study suggests that periods of abrupt sea ice loss can lead to rapid soil thaw.

Thawing permafrost may have a range of impacts, including buckled highways and destabilized houses, as well as changes to the delicate balance of life in the Arctic. In addition, scientists estimate that Arctic soils hold at least 30 percent of all the carbon stored in soils worldwide. While scientists are uncertain what will happen if this permafrost thaws, it has the potential to contribute substantial amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Arid regions will become much more dry, and wet regions will experience much more rain due to the warming planet, according to scientists:

A paper in Science today finds rapidly changing ocean salinities as a result of a warming atmosphere have intensified the global water cycle (evaporation and precipitation) by an incredible 4 percent between 1950 and 2000. That’s twice the rate predicted by models.

These same models have long forecast that dry areas of Earth will become drier and wet areas wetter in a warming climate—an intensification of the water cycle driven mostly by the capacity of warmer air to hold and redistribute more moisture in the form of water vapor…

…But the rate of intensification of the global water cycle is happening far faster than imagined: at about 8 percent per degree Celsius of ocean warming since 1950.

At this rate, the authors calculate:

The global water cycle will intensify by a whopping 16 percent in a 2°C warmer world

The global water cycle will intensify by a frightening 24 percent in a 3°C warmer world

…The changes will not be uniform across the globe, but trend toward increased drying of arid areas and increased flooding of wet areas.

And the resulting changes in freshwater availability are likely to be far more destabilizing to human societies and ecosystems than warming alone.

“Changes to the global water cycle and the corresponding redistribution of rainfall will affect food availability, stability, access, and utilization,” says lead author Paul Durack at the University of Tasmania and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

When dealing with a crisis that threatens the very existence of the human species, a rational society would not put the issues of cost-effectiveness and inconveniences to the economy above all else as the deciding factors for taking action. But that is what we are doing, allowing the “ALMIGHTY MARKET” to decide our fate. As explained in another post, this deference to “THE MARKET” to solve such a seemingly abstract problem like climate change is essentially condemning our children to a horrible fate. Climate change is not going to respect or accommodate ‘THE MARKET’, our lifestyle, and mankind’s hubris; it will just wipe us right off the face of the Earth like the pesky and bothersome vermin we have become.

You only have to look at the following graph(click to enlarge) from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2012 to understand how much industrial civilization is locked in to fossil fuels. Do you see that thin dark orange line just below the grey band representing coal? Yeah, that’s renewables.

We are so overly dependent on the high energy density of fossil fuels that the system resists change, with those in charge of it even spending large sums of money to alter public perception on the pernicious effects of burning these CO2-emitting energy sources. The advantages of hydrocarbons, summarized by Tom Murphy, have lured us into drinking an addictive and poisonous elixir:

Fossil fuels are cheap and reliable and are their own storage and allow transportation by car, truck, ship, airplane, and fit seamlessly into our current infrastructure.

Reasons for why carbon emissions will continue their upward trend are described in this article:

Worst ever carbon emissions leave climate on the brink …

• About 80% of the power stations likely to be in use in 2020 are either already built or under construction, the IEA found. Most of these are fossil fuel power stations unlikely to be taken out of service early, so they will continue to pour out carbon – possibly into the mid-century. The emissions from these stations amount to about 11.2Gt, out of a total of 13.7Gt from the electricity sector. These “locked-in” emissions mean savings must be found elsewhere.

“It means the room for manoeuvre is shrinking,” warned Birol.

• Another factor that suggests emissions will continue their climb is the crisis in the nuclear power industry. Following the tsunami damage at Fukushima, Japan and Germany have called a halt to their reactor programmes, and other countries are reconsidering nuclear power.

“People may not like nuclear, but it is one of the major technologies for generating electricity without carbon dioxide,” said Birol. The gap left by scaling back the world’s nuclear ambitions is unlikely to be filled entirely by renewable energy, meaning an increased reliance on fossil fuels.

• Added to that, the United Nations-led negotiations on a new global treaty on climate change have stalled. “The significance of climate change in international policy debates is much less pronounced than it was a few years ago,” said Birol…

…Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, said the global emissions figures showed that the link between rising GDP and rising emissions had not been broken. “The only people who will be surprised by this are people who have not been reading the situation properly,” he said.

Forthcoming research led by Sir David will show the west has only managed to reduce emissions by relying on imports from countries such as China.

Another telling message from the IEA’s estimates is the relatively small effect that the recession – the worst since the 1930s – had on emissions…

And what about that country that, to the shock of many, surpassed the U.S. in carbon emissions 3 years ago?:

In 2009 China consumed 96.9 quads. In 2012 their total is estimated to reach 110.7. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 4.54%. That’s twice as fast as the DOE has predicted going forward.

I’ll remind readers that my estimate for energy consumption in 2035 for China is 247 quads–more than twice what the DOE estimates. Recent growth supports my higher estimates.

Even if China succeeds in building the 150 nuclear plants they aspire to over the next 50 years, they will still be burning more coal in 2035 than the entire world burns now.

The Chinese economy, as I predicted, will start to struggle and even sputter at times between now and then. But if the history of other developing countries is any example, that won’t affect energy consumption nearly as much as one might think. In the United States, that Great Depression? Didn’t affect our energy consumption curve. – link

Lastly, how are we doing on transitioning away from our greenhouse gas emitting, industrial agriculture model of food production? As Stuart Staniford conjectured in his essay ‘Fallacy of Reversibility‘, industrial agriculture has become even more dominant in the age of peak oil, but with adverse effects to the environment:

Harvesting a Climate Disaster – The New York Times

…The farm bill is not only the centerpiece of United States food and agriculture policy, it is also a de facto climate bill. And in this respect, both the Senate and House versions of the legislation are a disaster waiting to happen…

…The proposed farm bill — Senate- or House-style, take your pick — would make American agriculture’s climate problem worse, in two ways. Not only would the bill accelerate global warming by encouraging more greenhouse gas emissions, it would make the nation’s farms more vulnerable to the impacts of those emissions…

…Except in a technical aside, neither the bill passed by the Senate or by the House Committee on Agriculture even mentions climate change.

Coal and cars are blamed, but agriculture is also a major contributor to global warming: by some estimates, it accounts for roughly a third of emissions globally. The industrialized, meat-heavy food system of the United States takes a heavy toll on the atmosphere; it takes an enormous amount of fossil fuel to run farm equipment and harvest the mountains of corn that fatten livestock. And most fertilizers contain nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 298 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a century.

Both of the farm bill proposals would maintain agriculture’s large climate footprint, mainly by continuing to skew subsidies toward a mere handful of commodity crops. The “big five” — wheat, rice, soybeans, cotton and above all corn — have received 84 percent of subsidies since 2004, according to the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group critical of the practice. Subsidies increase with output, encouraging farmers to run highly mechanized operations that plant “fence row to fence row” and apply oceans of fertilizer and pesticide, all of which boost emissions.

But industrial agriculture’s ability to produce gargantuan amounts of food also makes it exceptionally susceptible to climate change. Relying on vast monocultures — the miles and miles of cornfields one passes when driving in Iowa — captures economies of scale. But that lack of diversity invites trouble. A monoculture’s uniformity means that if temperatures spike or a new pest arrives, the damage is likely to spread throughout the entire planted area. By contrast, the diversified landscapes of organic agriculture — corn planted between, say, other vegetables and chicken pens — tend to limit damage.

Farmers can best boost resilience to climate change, scientists say, by improving their soil’s fertility and capacity to retain moisture. That means cutting back on chemical fertilizers, which kill many of the microorganisms that ventilate soil, and shifting to compost and manure fertilizers and crop rotations.

Instead, leading lobbyists for agribusiness want to retain the current production system but shift the mounting climate risks to the taxpayer. Both versions of the farm bill would expand the $11 billion crop insurance program, a move championed by the National Corn Growers Association. The Senate bill, for instance, would authorize $3.8 billion a year for additional insurance.

But neither version would require farmers to take other measures to reduce their climate vulnerability, like investing in healthier soil. In fact, the draft bills would actually make it harder for farmers to do that because the expanded crop insurance would be paid for by cutting the Conservation Stewardship Program, which helps farmers improve their land’s ecological health…

So it looks like we are going balls out in our race toward oblivion. A technologically advanced civilization, once known for sending spacecrafts to distant planets, looks to be headed toward a bleak existence of huddling in subterranean caves and scavenging for insects to eat.

Today Grab a Dollar that Results in Your Death Tomorrow

03 Monday Sep 2012

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

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Century Mine, Climate Change, Coal Mining, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporate-Controlled Media, Corporatocracy, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mitt Romney, Murray Energy Company, Privatization, Regulatory Capture, Rob Moore, The Fourth Estate, The Revolving Door Between Government and Corporations, Wall Street Fraud

This post features a couple of stories highlighting the total inner rot behind the facade of a free press, completely driven by the profit motives of corporations, and this country’s so-called democratic system with its fictitious “free work force”.

14 Year Ex-MSM ‘Journalist’: “None of it is Real.”

The financial elite and Washington have become a single entity, with the rotating door between lobbyists, industry, and positions of government operating more like an eight-lane autobahn highway. Under the stampede of corporations buying off the instruments of government, the news media or fourth estate has been completely flattened into the grease-palmed asphalt of that profiteering highway. Once in a while a flicker of ethical consciousness propels a few souls to climb out of the corrupt cesspool. A case in point is Andrea Seabrook, a 14-year mainstream media journalist who states, “None of it is Real.”

After 14 years at National Public Radio, Andrea Seabrook left in July and, to hear her talk about her experience covering Capitol Hill, it’s clear that she had one takeaway: It’s damn frustrating. “I realized that there is a part of covering Congress, if you’re doing daily coverage, that is actually sort of colluding with the politicians themselves because so much of what I was doing was actually recording and playing what they say or repeating what they say,” Seabrook told POLITICO. “And I feel like the real story of Congress right now is very much removed from any of that, from the sort of theater of the policy debate in Congress, and it has become such a complete theater that none of it is real. … I feel like I am, as a reporter in the Capitol, lied to every day, all day. There is so little genuine discussion going on with the reporters. … To me, as a reporter, everything is spin.

We’re still light years behind the eight ball of actually doing anything radical enough to save ourselves, but it is reaffirming to hear straight from the horse’s mouth that the system is total B.S..

Climate Change Denier makes it Mandatory his Minions of Coal Miners Attend a Romney Rally.

Earlier this month, Mitt Romney was welcomed for a campaign event at the Century Mine in Beallsville, Ohio, by hundreds of coal workers and their families. Now many of the mine’s workers are saying they were forced to give up a day’s worth of pay to attend the event, and they feared they might be fired if they didn’t, according to local news radio WWVA.

The claims have been mostly denied by Rob Moore, Chief Financial Officer of Murray Energy Company, which owns the mine. He acknowledges that workers weren’t paid that day but says no one was made to attend the event. Well, kind of.

The claims have been mostly denied by Rob Moore, Chief Financial Officer of Murray Energy Company, which owns the mine. He acknowledges that workers weren’t paid that day but says no one was made to attend the event. Well, kind of.

“Our managers communicated to our workforce that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend,” he told local news radio WWVA, which has received several emails from workers claiming that the company records names of workers that don’t attend those types of events…

Murray, who is also a climate-change denier, has been an outspoken critic of President Obama’s stance on coal. That view may be why Moore told WWVA that having employees attend the Romney event “was in the best interest of anyone that’s related to the coal industry in this area or the entire country…

Better you not think about the civilization-ending reality of climate change because your job depends on this CO2-polluting substance. That’s got to be the epitome of short-term thinking – today grab a dollar that results in you and your children’s death tomorrow. Nobody ever said this living arrangement was sensible.

A Nation of Hustlers and Swindlers

02 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by darbikrash in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

America's Collapsing Middle Class, Capitalism, Class Consciousness, Corporate State, Differential Accumulation, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Karl Marx, Maldistribution of Wealth, Morris Berman, Offshoring, Poverty, Rentier Class, The Elite 1%, Trailer Park Boys, Wage Slave, Wall Street Fraud

I’ve never seen such an avaricious society……John Adams

Far from the valorized notion of job creators, father figure capitalists and the land of milk and honey, Morris Berman rightly points out the roots of a system that demands one sell their labor power for substinence wages must of necessity- at some point- redirect to a swindle.

The mandate of selling one’s own labor power in a system that requires exploitation to function reduces the calculus of survival to one of two options:

1.) The availability of plentiful jobs with wages ratcheting upwards over the years, allowing the worker to attain financial independence through an eventual participation in rent seeking retirement.
-Or-
2.) Hitting the big payoff, the mother lode, striking it rich-in other words achieving success at the envied goal of rich accumulation, usually through starting their own business, day trading or some other similar scheme of differential accumulation.

I suppose there is a third option, which is the life of crime, e.g. using criminal means to achieve sufficient accumulation to attempt to satisfy, in perpetuity, the need to sell one’s labor power for substinence. This is also the thesis that professional gamblers prefer, but as we shall see from this post, there is not much difference from these options and option # 2 above.

Great wealth unexplained is often the accumulation of a series of crimes and illegalities undiscovered, from insider trading to market manipulation, monopolies and official corruption, occasionally mixed in with sheer dumb luck and ruthless disregard for the law.

That is why the wealthy are rarely the great artists, athletes, or inventors who they hold up as the example of excellence to which they can hardly presume. The modern wealthy generally create nothing except a climate of injustice, fraud, and corruption.

When times are good, as in the period of most of the 19th and early/mid 20th century, when labor is relatively scarce and wages relatively high, option 1 provides passable solace to the American middle class worker. From about 1970 onward, roughly coinciding with the onset of neo-liberal capitalism, we have toggled to a relative surplus of workers with the onset of cheap labor in the Far East. Now we have too many workers competing with a highly discounted foreign labor pool, with entire industries “offshored” to China with the easily anticipated resultant of a hollowed out community structure left behind, with insufficient tax base to support itself.

In addition, the capitalist mode of production has at the same time affected a massive maldistribution of wealth, wherein entire segments are using accumulated profits for rent seeking endeavor, extracting as much money from the economy as fast as possible with no regard to the consequences. So we have vast numbers of affluent and wealthy individuals with no place to invest with consistent returns, as the low hanging fruit of reliable investment opportunities for this class has been consumed by simply too much wealth chasing too few investment opportunities.

The intersection of these two phenomena goes a long way to explain our current situation, how we got here and why we are not likely to leave. Of course, all of this has been written and discussed previously ad nauseum, but for me, the puzzling question is why do people go along with what must now be for most, a clear case of cause and effect?

Even a cursory look at income and wealth distribution shows a 3σ distribution of income, in statistics this means that 99.6% of all income is captured with average value of some $22,500 in annual wage earner income. None of the values within this 3σ distribution of income is sufficient to satisfy the basic objective of achieving enough of a “nest egg” to catapult oneself into a comfortable retirement, given the current FDIC insured interest rates typically used for most retirees.

The conclusion- you must be a statistical outlier to achieve financial independence, you must somehow, against all odds, land in the 4σ-6σ range of incomes, which is to say .4%-.0001% of total wage earners. These are the probabilities of lotteries, hence my declaration to “The Lottery of the Middle Class”.
Why do vast numbers of people accept a system of forced exploitation with such small numbers of possible positive outcomes? It is a near statistical certainty that you will die with insufficient money to take care of yourself and family-even after 30 or 40 years of labor- why roll the dice on this almost certain bust?

The answer lies partially in Marx’s theory of class consciousness, and to be sure, if times are good and sufficient standard of living upgrades are provided, usually through technology, then people are not likely to dig too deeply into the underpinnings of probabilities. But when times are not good, when a labor surplus is apparent, and when even so called “guaranteed” rates of return are fast evaporating, what then?

Sociology has shown us that class consciousness is not all it was cracked up to be, it turns out Americans don’t necessarily begrudge others –in fields other than their own- the realization of outsized incomes, profits, and wealth. On a street where all the residents are plumbers, the house on the end of the street owned by an attorney is not criticized, under the presumption that he has more education, more experience, and has taken more risk-supposedly- to the furtherance of his “well deserved” wealth. After all, each plumber had the option to choose a field in law, goes the rationale, and instead went in to plumbing, and you reap what you sow, so to speak.

So this is part of it. And class consciousness is also a part of it too.

But increasingly, it is becoming evident that other factors are influencing the relative success of others within our immediate frame of reference. Many freshly minted law school graduates can’t get a job. Many “blue chip” trades and vocations cannot get work- at all. So something is wrong with this narrative, and this specter of doubt and confusion intersects nicely with the emergence of pop culture figures in professional sports, reality TV shows, and other public spectacles of wealth and accumulation.

This leads us to the lottery mentality, the barely conscious realization that we had better come up with some huge and rapid “winnings” if we are to propel ourselves into the outlier category, and achieve financial independence.

The specific reaction to this notion varies by income stratification, but the underlying themes are always the same, get rich, get rich quick, and get it at the expense of someone else. But for this to work, we need the lottery equivalent of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, we need a tacit acceptance of the necessity of exploitation, as we need to allow it’s existence- at our expense-until such time as we can harness the very same exploitative skill sets against someone else to benefit ourselves.

For those in the middle to upper middle class, this usually means some type of business scheme, a Walter Mittyesque flight of fancy that the intrepid entrepreneur will someday cook up a batch of Kettle Korn or beef jerky to sell at the local swap meet, or who has an invention of a Pet Rock or similarly useless contrivance with no redeeming social quality. These fanciful daydreams are part of the illusion, the faintly obscure vision that within all of our grasp is the Big Reveal, that golden idea that will launch us into the glorious world of senseless accumulation.

But statistics are unkind to the dreamer, the probabilities of any of these “ideas” propelling the prospective entrepreneur into the outlier categories is slim indeed. In a world were aggregate demand has been obliterated by a near complete loss of disposable income, and private debt has choked off any semblance of borrowing for such trinkets, the “market” for many of the useless doodads is non existent. And of the more substantial contributions to society that might garner realistic revenue, such as a new pharmaceutical compound or medical device, the squadrons of scientists needed and tens of millions of dollars of capital required relegate any substantive ideas to the universe of monopoly scale corporations.

Like the gleam of the Powerball Lottery MegaMillions, the pull is too great and the desperation too profound to ignore. So the Faustian bargain of turning a blind eye to the accelerating exploitation intrinsic in the capitalist mode of production is undertaken with a sigh and a shrug of indifference, for someday, it will be your turn. To deny the exploitation is to quit 5 minutes before the miracle has happened, to close off any avenue of the Walter Mitty fantasy, because if no one else gets it, than neither do you.

At the other end of income stratification, the lower class, we see a strikingly similar protocol, these actors are quite a bit more likely to buy an actual lottery ticket, preferring to dispense with the tedium of writing a business plan. Or perhaps it is to aspire to professional sports, or a reality TV show, or perhaps a rap star. All with statistically similar outcomes. But surprisingly, the mnemonic of the Donald Trumps of the world, haranguing and extolling those to bootstrap themselves off the dole into the riches that capitalism offers does trickle down to the trailer parks and tenements of the world.

Nowhere is this sad and pathetic prophesy more humorously portrayed than the outrageous Canadian television show (now off the air) Trailer Park Boys. Filmed as a faux “mockumentary” this show, which ran 7 seasons in Canada (and sporadically on American cable) was brilliant in its over the top portrayal of life in a trailer park. Dismissed by some as just crude humor (and be warned it is crude and profane in the extreme) the opening scenes of bucolic wonder with golden sunsets and neatly manicured yards, children playing on the swings all goes very, very wrong. The characters represent what it looks like when a community either cannot- or will not- sell their labor power and cannot exist in a normative society. The characters are perennially down market, no education, no social mobility and no future, they bond together under a thick haze of alcoholism and drug use, the show uses side splitting humor as salve to an extremely pathetic covalence, with the characters unable to differentiate between petty crime and legitimate commerce, as the differentiation is reduced to shades of barely discernable grey.

At this level of stratification the difference between a “business” that involves stealing shopping carts for scrap metal is no more or less noble than a Harvard graduate selling financial derivatives.

Stripping away any overture of intellectual loftiness, absent any academic commentary, the Trailer Park Boys reduce those bucolic sunsets into the banal vision of life on the fringes of Capitalism- and expose a nation of swindlers and hustlers, relying on a lottery to survive.