• About

Collapse of Industrial Civilization

~ Finding the Truth behind the American Hologram

Collapse of Industrial Civilization

Tag Archives: Climate Change

Ticking Off The Checklist For Mass Extinction

23 Thursday Jun 2022

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

≈ 1,031 Comments

Tags

Abrupt Climate Change, AMOC, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropocene Mass Extinction, Arctic Ice Melt, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, Blue Acceleration, Canfield Ocean, Capitalism, Carbon Dioxide, Climate Change, CO2, Cretaceous–Paleogene Extinction Event, Dr. Peter Ward, Fossil Fuel Dependency, Gerald Durrell, Great Acceleration, Gulf Stream, Hothouse Earth, Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S), IPCC, Jet Stream, K-T Extinction, Loss of Biodiversity, Megadrought, Methane, Micro-Plastic Pollution, Nate Hagens, Nicholas P. Money, Ocean Acidification, PETM Extinction Event, Sea Level Rise, Social Media Algorithms, Widespread Ocean Anoxia

Nate Hagens’ recent interview of Professor Peter Ward, entitled “Oceans – What’s the Worst that Can Happen?”, serves as a good overview of mankind’s destruction of the marine biosphere and our road to extinction. The title is a rather rhetorical question because very bad things have happened, are already happening, and even worse things are unavoidable and on the horizon despite hopes that humans will run out of ways to extract the dirtiest and most inaccessible fossil fuel deposits. We have seen how inextricably linked economic growth is to rising fossil fuel consumption, no matter the mounting disasters happening before our eyes and the steady stream of dire warnings issued from the scientific community. The most current of such warnings came from the UN last month, and it states that escalating synergies between disasters, economic vulnerabilities and ecosystem failures are increasing the risk of a “global collapse” scenario. Such a catastrophic scenario appears all but inevitable. Constricting fossil fuel consumption is like squeezing a balloon. If one country stops consumption, another takes up the slack. For example, efforts to cripple Russia’s fossil fuel exports for their unwarranted invasion of Ukraine don’t appear to be very effective since China and India have simply stepped in and increased their purchases. Rising oil prices have also more than offset a decline in Russia’s export volumes. Perhaps an unintended consequence of those higher energy prices will be the ripple effect through the economy, making food unaffordable for large swaths of the globe and destabilizing governments.

Getting back to the Peter Ward interview, the professor states matter of factly, “Every time we get into a car, it’s putting more of those CO2 particles into the atmosphere. And if this isn’t collective suicide by Homo sapiens, I don’t know what is.” Unfortunately for us, humans have created an unsustainable civilization supporting billions of people while at the same time destroying the very foundation upon which that system is dependent. Humans are by far outperforming the carbon-spewing volcanoes of past mass extinctions. Nicholas Money, renowned mycologist and author of many books, recently wrote:

Decades ago, Gerald Durrell, the famous conservationist, recognized that “the human race is in the position of a man sawing off the tree branch he is sitting on.” Thirty years after Durrell’s death, the human population has increased by 2 billion and the damage has intensified. The branch will snap now whether we keep sawing or not.

The timeline for extinctions is not known, but, sooner or later, the disappearing mammals will be joined by the other groups of animals. Almost everything will be leaving the metaphorical ark, creeping down the gangplank into oblivion. Millions of other species, seen and unseen, including plants, seaweeds, and fungi will be leaving, too. The tiniest of organisms will inherit the planet, but great gulps of the microbial world will also disappear in the depths of this planetary holocaust…

Exact dates are not known, but mankind’s final fate can be seen scrawled upon the familiar checklist for mass extinctions which we are quickly ticking off, one by one. As Ward points out, every time there has been a major disruption in Earth’s delicate biogeochemical carbon cycle, there has been a mass extinction. Today that disruption is happening on a timescale much faster than at any time in the past, even faster than the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs. During the K-T extinction, the immediate impact of the asteroid killed only the large animals. It took thousands of years for the consequent climate change to kill off smaller organisms. Current trends are exponentially faster, not only with anthropogenic climate disruption incinerating the biosphere within a lifetime but also by a multi-pronged attack from other human activities such as chemical and plastic pollution, the global spread of invasive species, and humanity’s massive overdraw on the planet’s resources.

If one were to equate Earth’s geologic history to a calendar year, modern humans have been around for a mere 37 minutes while managing to consume 1/3rd of Earth’s natural resources in just the last 0.2 seconds. The biomass of wild mammals has fallen by 83% since prehistory and it is projected that by 2050 humans will have eliminated 38–46% of all biodiversity from the planet. 70% of the planet’s land area has been altered by humans, with 40% considered degraded. By 2050, an area of land the size of South America will be further degraded. Nearly all of the marine biosphere has been degraded. Now Modern man has set his sights on wringing the last dollar of profit from the already dying oceans in what is being heralded as the “Blue Acceleration”, a not-so-clever play of words on the Great Acceleration referring to the period starting around 1950 when measurements of humanity’s impact on the planet’s resources went hyperbolic:

As pressures on Earth’s land grow and terrestrial resources look increasingly exhausted, governments and corporations are seeing the next big wins on, in and under the high seas. Whether it is mineral exploration, shipping, energy, tourism, desalination, cable laying, bioprospecting or more, ocean-based industries are picking up speed fast.

This “blue acceleration” has many people worried…With the power to profit from remote ocean resources growing rapidly, and the laws that govern their exploitation less than clear, we risk a free-for-all in the deep. “Our society has been based on the degradation of nature, destruction of nature,” says marine ecologist Enric Sala…

The new plunge into the ocean has come about in part because technologies – from ocean drilling and offshore wind turbines to desalination plants and factory trawlers – have made it possible. “A lot of offshore industries were unthinkable even just a few decades ago,” says Jouffray.

And so it goes, Homo sapiens onward march of eating the seed corn and leaving a husk of a planet for future generations …if there are to be any.

Back to Peter Ward and that checklist for mass extinction…The second step after a large release of heat trapping gasses is that Earth’s poles will start warming up much faster than the rest of the globe, melting the polar icecaps and reducing the heat differential between the equator and higher latitudes. A recent study found that the Arctic is heating up as much as seven times faster than the global average. The Antarctic is warming four times faster than the global average. This diminishing heat differential between the higher latitudes and the equator leads to the third step which is that ocean currents and atmospheric jet streams slow down and become stagnant and swampish. As professor Ward points out, swamps have a lot of nasty, toxic aspects to them such as hydrogen sulfide. This has happened to the oceans many times in Earth’s history with deadly consequences, the most recent being the PETM extinction which was associated with the largest deep-sea mass extinction event in the last 93 million years. Less than 5% of sea creatures survived. The oceans became a poisonous and miasmic brew of acidification, hypoxia and sulfide gases. Deep ocean upwellings injected hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere, laying waste to plants and animals. This killer gas rose to the upper atmosphere and also attacked the ozone layer, allowing deadly ultraviolet radiation from the sun to amplify the destruction of plant and animal life. Fossil spores contained in strata from the PETM extinction show deformities consistent with damage from UV radiation. Major disruptions in the hydrologic cycle occurred with evidence of increased continental runoff. Land suffered extreme precipitation events. Dinoflagellates, tiny organisms that ooze toxins and create deadly algal blooms called ‘red tides’, flourished in the nearly 100°F surface water of the equator. Less than a third of the large animal species made it. Nearly all trees died. No ice existed on the planet during that time. Sea levels were around 300 feet higher than now.

Today we are pumping heat trapping gases into the atmosphere nine to tens times higher than during the PETM extinction. We are just four generations away from matching the chemical composition of the atmosphere that caused that die-off event. However, we are already seeing major changes in the Earth’s climate system that align with the third step toward a mass extinction. Proxy data (like coral data, ocean sediments, and land-based data) along with modern-day instrumentation show an intense weakening of the AMOC, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, in the past 200 years. And the Gulf Steam, a component of the AMOC, is also showing signs of collapse. We are in the process of turning off the global ocean conveyor belt that keeps the ocean oxygenated and helps regulate the Earth’s climate. Ocean acidity has increased about 30% from preindustrial times to the early 21st century, a pace faster than any known in Earth’s geologic past. The volume of anoxic ocean waters has quadrupled since the 1960s, and evidence suggests that temperature increases explain about 50% of oxygen loss in the upper 1000 meters of the ocean. Ocean stratification due to climate change has increased 18% in the top 150 meters of the oceans since 1960. Stratified ocean layers have a number of negative effects such as preventing the mixing and transport of heat, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nutrients to the lower depths of the oceans. It was only recently, November 2021, that a group of scientists issued a plea to governments for establishing a global monitoring system to track the loss of oxygen in the oceans causing dead zones:

“There is a pressing need to document and predict hypoxic episodes and hotspots of low oxygen in order to take protective actions for aquaculture, put in place precautionary measures for affected fisheries, and monitor the wellbeing of important fish stocks,” Limburg said.

“Without this understanding, we are in the dark about impacts that have large economic-ecological implications.”…

“These problems are getting worse because we are not solving the problems of nutrient run-off and our waters are continuing to warm.

Stalled Rossby waves in the Jet Stream linked to extreme weather events have increased significantly in the last twenty years. U.S. crop losses due to drought and flooding have trippled since 1995. Onward we march into oblivion.

Despite the horrors described thus far, what really scares Professor Ward is sea level rise. Ward believes that the volcano of mankind will sputter out before we reach the levels required for a full-fledged Canfield Ocean, and negative feedback loops in the climate system will pull Earth back from the brink. The “Canfield Ocean”, a sulfidic and partially oxic ocean, existed for more than 40% of Earth history, between the Archean and Ediacaran periods. It would take millennia to reach that state again, but humans are supercharging the process to get there by releasing into the ocean vast quantities of nutrients from agricultural fertilizer, soil erosion, industrial waste and sewage, in addition to the ever-growing release of CO2 and methane emissions. Humans have become a geologic force breaching most if not all of the planetary boundaries that make Earth hospitable for life. The mechanisms required for Earth to return to a dead, toxic planet may have already been irreversibly set into motion.

Getting back to Ward’s fear, the most recent report on sea level rise states that it is accelerating with an increase of one foot expected along U.S. coasts by 2050. And that is only if emissions are curbed now. Otherwise, expect up to 5 feet. The researchers say that one foot of SLR over the next three decades is equal to the total that occurred over the past century. Just one foot of vertical rise in sea level will swallow up 100 feet of shoreline if the slope is just 1% or more, a typical slope for most coastlines. To make matters worse, most coastal cities are sinking at a rate faster than the seas are rising. Thus within the next few decades, we could see several hundred feet of shoreline swallowed up along coasts of America and around the world, creating the largest human migration in history. Ward believes we’ll have six feet of sea level rise by 2080 which will destroy a big percentage of the world’s rice production, primarily through salinization. Rice is the number one food source for a majority of the world population today. Sea level rise alone could devastate global trade, not to mention the inevitable damage to ports from stronger storms. The latest IPCC report made it clear that parts of the planet are fast becoming uninhabitable:

Life in some locations on the planet is rapidly reaching the point where it will be too hot for the species that live there to survive, international climate experts said in a report Monday.

“With climate change, some parts of the planet will become uninhabitable,” said German scientist Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of Working Group II for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produced the report released in Berlin…

…Increased heat waves, droughts and floods are already exceeding plants’ and animals’ tolerance thresholds, driving mass mortalities in species such as trees and corals, according to the report…

…Sherilee Harper, a lead author on the North American chapter and an associate professor at the University of Alberta’s public health school, said she was personally struck by the effect climate change already is having on the “physical and mental health of many Americans.”

Peter Ward then brings up something I don’t remember hearing about global warming. The higher temperatures are disrupting the sperm fertility of organisms. Ward says it’s an existential threat to the amount of food we can produce. Recent studies show this to be true and the damage continues across generations:

…according to new research. New findings reveal that heatwaves damage sperm in insects – with negative impacts for fertility across generations. The research team say that male infertility during heatwaves could help to explain why climate change is having such an impact on species populations, including climate-related extinctions in recent years.

Nate and Peter then get into the societal ignorance preventing humans from addressing any serious problem, let alone the existential threat of anthropogenic climate disruption. Peter says, “How could we, as a species, take something as simple as masks and turn it into a political ploy where the level of ignorance will kill you, will kill you?!?” Nate then explains how social media algorithms are set up to highlight the most polarizing content in order to generate more user activity since their business model is based on user engagement. In order to keep users online, the social media platforms are also designed to be very addictive such as with the infinite scroll feature and the “like” button.

In 2017, Facebook’s former president, Sean Parker, said publicly that the company sought to consume users’ time as much as possible, and that the act was “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology”…”That means that we needed to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever… It’s a social validation feedback loop… You’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology…” – link

There is no fixing this dysfunctional social media ecosystem because it is operating exactly as intended. Our profit-driven economic system is rooted in inequality, exploitation, dispossession, and environmental destruction. And encouraging the public to turn off the horror show of climate chaos and biodiversity annihilation are essential for this system to continue. Exploiting tribal biases is a good way to keep the plebs fighting amongst themselves as the last dollar is extracted from a dying planet. Nate asks, “If we can’t have a discussion on what’s real or not with COVID, how are we going to have one about the ocean’s ecosystems and Earth systems and our collective future?” Indeed.

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Heads-Up! Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

26 Wednesday Jan 2022

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

≈ 321 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Adam McKay, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropogenic Mass Extinction, Arctic Ice Albedo, Arctic Ice Melt, Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Celebrity Worship, Chemical Pollution, Climate Change, Climate Change Feedback Loops, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Commercialization, Commodification of Nature, Cryosphere, Don't Look Up, Doomsday Preppers, Dr. Randall Mindy, Ecological Overshoot, Elon Musk, Fossil Fuel Industry, Global Forest Die-Off, Global Warming, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Interstellar Colonization, Janie Orlean, Jason Orlean, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Kate Dibiasky, Leonardo DiCaprio, Loss of Biodiversity, MAGA rallies, Mark Rylance, Meryl Streep, Persecution of Environmental Activists, Peter Isherwell, Planetary Boundaries, Prof Tim Garrett, Professor Harold R. Wanless, Sea Level Rise, Techno-Fix, Techno-Utopians, Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctic Ice Sheet Melt

“I’m telling you that we’re putting our kids onto a global school bus that will with 98% probability end in a deadly crash.” ~ Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director Emeritus of Potsdam Institute

I recently saw the movie ‘Don’t Look Up’ after avoiding it since its release and I must say, that movie mirrors the tragic state of our society to a T. When you see Dr. Randall Mindy (DiCaprio) finally losing his cool, raging against a shallow, celebrity-idolizing, commercialized society on some glib TV talk show, this was not a stretch for the actor (an ardent environmental activist) who simply had to replace the oncoming fictional comet with the asteroid of abrupt climate change currently bearing down on us. At first, no one will listen to the scientist’s warning, not even the President of the United States Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) who is more worried about her polling numbers and keeping her campaign contributors happy than being bothered by an existential threat to civilization. Once tech guru Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) plants a bug in the President’s ear about how the comet could be exploited for its trillions of dollars worth of rare earth minerals, then all bets are off for deflecting the oncoming catastrophe. The creepy Techno-Utopist Isherwell reflects our own society’s blind worship of technology and consumerism as the answer to all its ills, when in reality they are only further alienating us from the natural world that underpins our survival. Throughout the movie, there are beautiful clips of nature that briefly flash across the screen, reminding me of what we are losing in our ongoing sixth mass extinction. Modern man and the havoc he is wreaking on the planet is happening in a microsecond when viewed in geologic time scales, but humans have trouble seeing it because we live an ephemeral existence, easily inured to an ever impoverished world.

Labeling the comet’s collision course with Earth as mere fear-mongering, politicians and TV talking heads manage to politicize the threat amongst the population, hence the title of the movie. Throngs of mindless people attending political rallies while wearing trucker caps with the slogan ‘Don’t Look Up’ reminded me of scenes from the MAGA crowd in thrall to their grift-scheming conman. Those who speak too much about the reality of the approaching comet are ziptied, blinded with a hood over their head, hauled off to an undisclosed location, and compelled to stay quiet by the authorities. In our real world, a fate much worse than that awaits those who oppose fossil fuel companies, miners, loggers, and others who are destroying the planet. Only when the comet and its long tail become clearly visible in the sky do people take the threat seriously, but by then it is too late. Back to reality, there’s no indication that such a tipping point in public consciousness has changed our trajectory towards ecological disintegration and collapse of civilization. Near the end of the movie as the planet-killing comet is colliding with Earth, Dr. Mindy’s family and a few of his colleagues are holding hands at their last supper and Dr. Mindy says, “We really did have everything, didn’t we?” The same can be said of what we are losing in today’s unfolding anthropogenic mass extinction. A thousand species a day, each a product of eons of evolution and designed for a specific purpose, being permanently erased from this planet along with any sort of stable and predictable climate means we are trashing Eden and descending into the hellscape depicted in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. This most recent study confirms past warnings:

“Drastically increased rates of species extinctions and declining abundances of many animal and plant populations are well documented, yet some deny that these phenomena amount to mass extinction,” said Robert Cowie, lead author of the study, in a press release. “This denial is based on a highly biased assessment of the crisis which focuses on mammals and birds and ignores invertebrates, which of course constitute the great majority of biodiversity.”…“Dedicated conservation biologists and conservation agencies are doing what they can, focused mainly on threatened birds and mammals, among which some species may be saved from the extinction that would otherwise ensue,” the paper said. “But we are pessimistic about the fate of most of the Earth’s biodiversity, much of which is going to vanish without us ever knowing of its existence.”…The researchers write that it is crucial to fight against the crisis and manipulating it is an abrogation of moral responsibility.

Of course the ones in charge, blinded by their greedy dream to profit from an oncoming disaster, surreptitiously escape Earth on a rocket ship, cryogenically preserved until they reach a distant Earth-like planet in the Goldilocks Zone of another solar system. This colonization of some other habitable planet by Earth-bound humans is a fetish amongst techno-optimists and futurists, but it is a pipe-dream not only because it is impossible due to basic biological constraints and technological infeasibility but also for the simple reason that if we cannot keep our house in order here on the planet that gave birth to us, we don’t deserve another chance. And for God’s sake, can Elon Musk stop ranting that humans have to get off Earth because all life will be snuffed out after the sun theoretically expands into a giant red star five billion years from now? Just as in the movie, our tech demigods will lead us over the cliff while planning their own getaway to a private underground bunker or second homes far away in some distant country. It is frightening to think that we are only seeing the beginning of this unfolding global ecological apocalypse that will affect every living thing on Earth. Nearly all past mass extinctions have occurred due to a disruption of the carbon cycle, only now it is happening at a rate of speed multiple times faster than previous ones and with humans serving as the architect of their own demise. In the last 500 million years, across 6 mass extinctions and the countless rise and fall of global temperatures and sea levels, the only time the climate changed faster was 66 million years ago when Earth got hit by a 10km asteroid that killed off 75% of all species. Mass extinction events turn freshwater bodies into toxic soup, and we’re seeing the same thing happen today. But fret not, technology will save us and stock prices are up this week, not to mention that our social media rankings are going gangbusters.

It has been said that when civilizations begin to die, they go insane. Perhaps Stoicism and Buddhism are the most useful philosophies in an age where the future is bleak and no one seems to be facing reality. After half a century of dire warnings from noted scientists, numerous Climate Action Inaction Summits (rigged to fail), revelations of decades-old climate studies from Fossil Fuel Corporations themselves proving all along that they knew, and worsening extreme weather events as well as the planet’s quickly disappearing cryosphere (what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic), here is where we stand today:

The world’s insatiable appetite for electricity is setting up a climate disaster

A report published Friday by the International Energy Agency found that global demand for electricity surged 6% in 2021, fueled by a colder winter and the dramatic economic rebound from the pandemic. That drove both prices and carbon emissions to new records.

The growth in demand was particularly intense in China, where it jumped by about 10%…

…Electricity generated by renewables grew by 6% globally last year, while coal-fired generation leaped 9% due to high demand and skyrocketing natural gas prices, which made it look like a more attractive option.

Carbon dioxide emissions from power generation rose 7% as a result, reaching an all-time high after declining the previous two years…

…The IEA found that emissions from the power sector will “remain around the same level from 2021 to 2024,” even though they need to decline “sharply” for the world to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the worst effects of climate change.

As physicist Tim Garrett has pointed out, “Any new energy source adds impetus to the conversion of raw resources into the stuff of civilization, accelerating growth and future demands for all energy types. Renewables add to the consumption, they do not replace.” Also, gains in energy efficiency are simply supplanted by more growth.

Keep in mind that even if we were to magically reduce our CO2 emissions overnight, the opposite of what is happening, we will never again see the climate we grew up in. It is never returning. Realize that the current level of CO2 equivalent GHGs already exceeds 500 ppm. The increased pace of extreme weather events we are now getting from climate change is shocking even those scientists who predicted it. The Arctic is greening with the treeline advancing northward 40 to 50 meters every year from what was once an annual increase of only a few centimeters. Adding yet another pernicious feedback loop to the climate crisis, beavers are moving into the warming Arctic in greater numbers and radically transforming the landscape with their dams, further accelerating the thaw of permafrost that releases methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A worrying new study shows Earth’s ability to reflect solar radiation is weakening — as the ocean is heating it is failing to generate clouds that reflect back sunlight. Astoundingly, half of that weakening has happened in the last four years:

“The albedo drop was such a surprise to us when we analyzed the last 3 years of data – many scientists hoped that a warmer Earth may lead to more clouds and higher albedo which would then help to moderate warming and balance the climate system But this shows the opposite is true”

If this trend of Earth dimming due to climate change continues, climate models will have to (once more) be significantly revised to include this additional net warming. We are headed for a Miocene climate during which the Antarctic ice volume was half of what it is today and the Arctic Ocean was ice-free in winter. Sea levels were 130 feet or higher and temperatures were about 5 to 8ºC warmer. Our ancestors were apes at that time. The European shoreline was 120 miles inland from today’s coast and dense swamp-forests resembling modern Louisiana clogged coasts and estuaries in Denmark and Germany. Nothing living in its region today is adapted to what will come. Remember those trees in the Pacific Northwest that sizzled in the heatwave of last year’s summer? A new study paints a dire picture for their future, as well as ours:

“By some estimates, it’s probably the largest scorch event in history,” Oregon State University researcher Christopher Still told OPB’s “Think Out Loud” on Monday. “I mean this is a new thing for us to be seeing on Earth, so it’s sort of a dubious milestone.”…

…“If this just keeps going, if these are happening every five or 10 years, it’s gonna be really grim I think for most of the forests of the Pacific Northwest.”

As the saying goes, “Lessons in life will be repeated until they are learned.” And so humans have yet to understand their place in the world, punch drunk on more than a century-long bacchanalia of fossil fuel burning. In the end, nature will put us in our place, and not in a good way. It is interesting to note that right around the peak of industrial civilization’s collapse, humans will have evidently lost their biological ability reproduce due to chemical pollution. We have saturated the Earth with so many and so much chemicals that we have breached another planetary boundary:

The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet now threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, scientists have said.

Plastics are of particularly high concern, they said, along with 350,000 synthetic chemicals including pesticides, industrial compounds and antibiotics. Plastic pollution is now found from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans, and some toxic chemicals, such as PCBs, are long-lasting and widespread.

The study concludes that chemical pollution has crossed a “planetary boundary”, the point at which human-made changes to the Earth push it outside the stable environment of the last 10,000 years.

“There has been a fiftyfold increase in the production of chemicals since 1950 and this is projected to triple again by 2050,” said Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) who was part of the study team. “The pace that societies are producing and releasing new chemicals into the environment is not consistent with staying within a safe operating space for humanity.”

Pfft!!! Just another fancy-schmancy warning by some pedantic scientists for the world to ignore. No need to worry, we can live in hermetically sealed bubbles that filter out all that nasty stuff, can’t we? All of our socializing and entertainment take place indoors on digital screens anyway, doesn’t it? But wait, there’s more. The Doomsday Glacier is coming for us. The Thwaites Glacier is the size of Florida and it is cracking apart on the surface and melting from below, loosening its anchor on the undersea mountain that holds it in place. If this glacier goes, it could unleash much more ice from the West Antarctic ice sheet that is held in place behind it, causing an immediate and catastrophic effect (10 feet) of sea level rise. One scientist says it could go within a few years. This development falls in line with what another expert, Professor Harold R. Wanless, had said years ago about sea level rise and climate change—that sea level rise does not happen in a gradual and linear fashion but rather as sudden, large pulses. I blogged about him six years ago, and what he said back then in the context of what is happening now gives me chills:

…Subsequent ice melt was not a gradual acceleration and then deceleration process. Rather it was a series of very rapid pulses of sea level rise followed by pauses. These rapid pulses of rise, from three to thirty feet, were fast enough to leave drowned reefs, sandy barrier islands, tidal inlet deltas, and other coastal deposits abandoned across the continental shelf. That is what happens when climate change warms enough to destabilize some ice sheet sector. It rapidly disintegrates, resulting in a rapid rise.

Just a couple years ago, a study of ancient ice in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet showed that multiple meters of sea level rise occurred from less than 2ºC of warming at the beginning of the last interglacial period. As we are once again witnessing today, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is highly sensitive to collapse from slight temperature increases.

Circling back to the movie I was discussing earlier, there is a scene in which junior astronomer and Ph.D. student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is with a group of disaffected youth who are discussing conspiracy theories regarding the global elite, and Dibiasky says in an exasperated voice, “You guys, the truth is way more depressing. They’re not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for.” Perhaps the truth is even more depressing than that. In the grand scheme of things, free will appears to be nothing more than a figment of our imagination. Like microbes proliferating in a Petri dish and dying off after overshooting their confines, humans are essentially replicating the same process albeit on a planetary scale. Evidently, we are biologically programmed to eventually crash and burn. Just as with all other species, humans have the imperative to expand their numbers, exploiting all resources until stopped by environmental constraints, and those limits to growth are fast approaching as we speak.

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

We’re All Just Temporary Passengers on Spaceship Earth.

23 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by xraymike79 in Peak Oil

≈ 46 Comments

Tags

Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Donald J. Trump, Ecological Overshoot, Entropy, Ernst Mayr, Evangelical Right, Fossil Fuel Dependency, Global Pandemic, Global Warming, Haber–Bosch Process, Human Exceptionalism, Jevons Paradox, Joe Biden, Joseph Tainter, Mass Extinctions, Omnicide, Prof Tim Garrett, QAnon, Second Law of Thermodynamics, Sedition, Techno-Fix, White Nationalists, White Supremacists, William Catton

I recently asked a scientist on Facebook how he copes with the knowledge that we are destroying the planet within the geologic blink of an eye. Here is his answer:

Pot helps! 🙂 But psychologically, I reread Catton’s Overshoot recently, where he talks about how once humans started burning fossil fuels, we evolved (devolved?) into detritivores, species that depend on dead organic matter for our sustenance. This led me to think about Human Exceptionalism. The classic view is that humans’ assumed superiority has caused us to not consider the welfare of other species and blinded us in our ignorance to how our lifestyles were jeopardizing life support systems worldwide (including for us); I agree with this view. But I’ve also come to challenge another view of Human Exceptionalism; namely, that we have the intelligence and capacity for compassion to override what is every species’ imperative (humans and all other species): that is, to continuously consume available resources with no concern for future sustainability, with its concomitant and inevitable population boom and bust. Thus, I try to cope by accepting, with sad resignation, that we’re not any more special than other species – we’ve just lacked apex predators to keep our population in check and have used hundreds of millions of years of stored solar energy (i.e. fossil fuels) to temporarily shield ourselves from our population crash. This final kicking us off our superiority pedestal has helped me “let go” and inspired me to aspire to be more in tune with natural processes (such as organic gardening, which also helps on a very small scale to restore the soil biodiversity we’re regularly destroying with the Haber-Bosch process). How do you cope? 🙂

I replied later that day…

To cope, you first must know the truth. Our modern global civilization is a heat engine, subject to the second law of thermodynamics just as every civilization that came before. Our massive burning of fossil fuels has not only blanketed the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases and acidified the oceans, it has given humans the unfortunate ability to disrupt all the major biochemical processes of the planet, thus making the current civilizational collapse one of global proportions. There is no putting that genie back in the bottle and the environmental disorder it has unleashed. Thus we are firmly in the grips of entropy and no amount of techo-fixes, such as walls to hold back the rising sea or geoengineering schemes to blot out that fiery orb in the sky, will change this stark fact. As Jospeph Tainter argued, further complexity only brings more unforeseen problems that must be solved. Higher efficiency only leads to increased consumption (i.e. Jevons paradox). As you say, humans are no different than any other organism in that they will expand to consume all available resources until reined in by environmental limits. Our superior problem-solving capabilities have allowed us to dramatically overshoot the planet’s natural regenerative systems. And so it seems that Ernst Mayr was correct when he said human intelligence is a fatal mutation in the evolutionary process. According to Mayr, intelligence is a double-edged sword, serving as a tool for our survival or rapidly carrying out our own annihilation. How do I cope with all that? Other than adopting a stoic attitude towards our predicament, there is no coping. It is what it is. Find simple joys in nature while nature is still around. I love hummingbirds and watch them at the feeder when I am home. Live in the moment when you can. Enjoy mankind’s ability to create beautiful art. Be kind to your fellow human and nonhuman. We’re all just temporary passengers on Spaceship Earth.

Now that America’s wannabe dictator has vacated the White House, maybe we can get back to pretending we’re doing anything of significance about climate change and the ghastly future bearing down on us. I’m sure we’ll get right on that existential crisis as soon as we tamp down the current global pandemic, sort out Trump’s QAnon and white nationalist seditionists, and bring together a country where half the population believes their cult leader’s endless lies and the evangelical Right idolize Trump as a vessel anointed by God. So much for heeding warnings against idolizing false prophets. Despite all those minor details, we’ll all be on the same page, right? Well won’t we???

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

A Second Trump Term Will Prove Even More Deadly For Americans

25 Friday Sep 2020

Posted by xraymike79 in Peak Oil

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Carl Sagan, Censorship, Center for Disease Control (CDC), Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Conspiracy Theories, Coronavirus Pandemic, COVID-19, Deregulation, Dicatorships, Donald Trump, Fake News, Fascism, Gerrymandering, GOP, Herd Immunity, Joe Biden, Jordan Klepper, Louis DeJoy, MAGA rallies, MegaFires, Police Brutality, Politicization of Science, Regulatory Capture, Sea Level Rise, Vladimir Putin, William Barr

 

“It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle – it will disappear.” ~ Trump

Who would have guessed that a reality TV “star”, con-artist, and political hack would be the one person to shake America’s institutions of government to their core? Then again, Hitler was a down-and-out artist before he became a dictator. Lots of people warned that this time with D.J. Trump would come even before he finagled his way into the White House. From his days of swindling hundreds, if not thousands, of small business contractors and workers to laundering money and defrauding the U.S. government, his tenure as president has been no less riddled with corruption, back-stabbing, lying, and cheating. Since Trump cannot retain power through the traditional means of tinpot dictators via military coup, he is using an army of lawyers who will question every mail-in ballot and use every legal maneuver in an attempt to render the 2020 election results null and void. This summer, Trump began a campaign to sabotage mail-in voting after falsely claiming it was fraught with fraud and then hiring one of his unscrupulous cronies, GOP Megadonor Louis DeJoy, to cripple the U.S. postal service. However, the GOP plan to destroy majority rule really kicked into gear with their ‘gerrymandering on steroids’ strategy which was hatched more than a decade ago when right-wing strategists concluded that taking over state legislatures would enable them to redraw districts and control the outcome of elections.

Over the last four years, Trump has amassed a laundry list of skuldugery such as abusing his high office to delegitimize any reporting critical of his administration by labeling it “fake news”, exacerbating an atmosphere of doubt, mistrust, and suspicion of the government by perpetuating numerous conspiracy theories, stoking racial tensions with incendiary rhetoric while ignoring the mounting anger over police brutality, perverting the rule of law by stacking the courts with unqualified GOP-friendly judges, installing a henchman named William Barr to run the DOJ and help give the president autocratic powers, and politicizing science by censoring government researchers and dismantling science-based health and safety protections. All of these tactics have been used by dictators of foreign countries to eliminate opposition leaders and control the population. Muzzling of scientists is a global problem that is getting worse. Trump has single handedly made the US a pariah on the world stage as he cozies up to dictators while belittling and undercutting traditional Western allies. In fact, America’s reputation in the world is the lowest it’s been since such surveys began two decades ago. There’s no hiding that Trump would love nothing more than to turn America into a Russian-style dictatorship where he could rule for life, rob the public purse at will, and kill dissidents with impunity.

Had Trump properly handled the pandemic that continues to upend the economy and ravage people’s lives, 90% of U.S. coronavirus pandemic fatalities could have been prevented. Life would be drastically different from what we are experiencing today. By January 2021, pandemic fatalities in the U.S. are projected to more than double from their current number of over 200,000. This will be Trump’s macabre achievement for his criminally negligent handling of this pandemic. He was able to do much more than when he proclaimed he could stand on 5th Avenue, shoot someone, and get away with it. In fact, due to his lack of leadership, downplaying of the virus, obfuscation of CDC reporting, and failure to enact a coherent national plan, he will have killed more Americans than whom died in World War II. By comparison, that’s twenty-five to fifty times the number of Americans who die on average in any given year from the flu. Trump may blame China, the WHO, Democrats, or anyone else for unleashing this plague, but it was his deliberate and willful abdication of his duty as president to protect public health and safety that has created his coronavirus killing fields. Who hasn’t heard the Bob Woodward tapes from early February 2020 of Trump explicitly saying that the virus is much more deadly than any strenuous flu and extremely contagious? All the while he has downplayed the danger to the public, even going so far as to say it was a “hoax” by the Democrats? To this very day, he perpetuates these lies while corralling his cult followers into close quarters for his self-aggrandizing MAGA rallies. His followers are oblivious to the fact that they serve as nothing more than disposable props at these grotesque events. He mocks masks, the most effectiive tool we have against the virus. He likes to claim that his China travel ban saved many lives but, like so many things he says, the opposite is true. His ban had many holes and actually may have worsened the outbreak in the United States. In addition, Trump’s downplaying of the virus has allowed it to fester in the U.S. and likely mutate into a more contagious strain; whether it transforms into something more deadly is all a matter of a genetic roll of the dice. Experts are fearing a double whammy from both the flu and the COVID-19 coronavirus this winter.

With historic megafires raging along the entire west coast in the new normal of inferno seasons, Trump tells climate scientists directly to their face that “it will get colder, just wait and see” and “I don’t think science knows about climate.” In the meantime, he’ll be spending millions shoring up his golf course properties from the rising seas. Over eight feet of sea level rise is already locked in from Antarctic ice melt alone, even if Paris climate agreements are fulfilled. As Biden says, Trump is a “climate arsonist.” At this point, I cannot help but view anyone who supports this catastrophic president as anything other than a traitor to their own country.

At a time where compassion and honesty are most in need as our civilization runs headlong into the limits of a finite planet, the world appears to be going in the opposite direction of more magical thinking, selfish nationalism, and diminishing human rights. The destruction Trump has done is real and four more years of him will guarantee further damage for decades to come. For instance, many of the dozens of environmental regulations that Trump has rolled back will likely be permanently cemented into place by Trump-appointed judges. These rollbacks are already causing countless premature deaths in the U.S. The amount of carbon his legislative actions will have put into the atmosphere by 2035 is estimated to be the equivalent of Russia’s annual emissions. The EPA will become a shell of its former self, having been completely usurped by corporate interests to pollute without restraint. Other countries are already following America’s lead of completely disregarding the threat of anthropogenic climate disruption. Any semblance of democracy will be shredded as Trump’s swamp of greed, corruption, and white nationalism runs amok. Conspiracy theories will run rampant as daily life becomes ever more precarious in a climate of fear and science becomes completely subjugated by economy, polity, and religion. There is a prescient quote from Carl Sagan that warns of the dystopian world we are well on our way to creating:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark 

I shudder to think of the hellscape that awaits us with another term of Trumpian chaos. There are only two choices before us in our American corporatocracy, so let’s be pragmatic about our dire situation. I’ll take take Biden, the corporate friendly centrist who has a plan to contain the virus and a two trillion dollar climate change strategy, any day of the week over Trump, a corporate fascist masquerading as a populist who never had any national plan to effectively contain the virus and believes climate change is a hoax. Of course there are many other issues that make Biden the sane choice between the two. It’s comical how the Right-wing propaganda machine has painted Biden as some sort of bumbling socialist puppet, especially when you consider that Wall Street’s own analysts say that a Biden administration would be neutral to positive for them. Under Trump’s direction, the very wealthy were given big tax breaks that allowed them to pay less than the working class for the first time in history. And due to Trump’s gross mismanagement, our government’s budget deficit will soon exceed the size of the nation’s entire economy for the first time since World War II. A growing body count of dead Americans that rivals the biggest war fatalities in our nation’s history is happening as a result of Trump’s sociopathic response. Trump’s latest hairbrained scheme is to allow the American population to build herd immunity to the novel virus. Never mind that in the process we would incur fatalities in the millions and collapse the healthcare system which would raise the death toll even higher, or the fact that scientists doubt the population would even ever be able to reach such levels of immunity. Someone, please tell me how Trump has made America great again.

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Age of Annihilation

04 Friday Sep 2020

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

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Amazon Fires, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropocene Mass Extinction, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Coronavirus Pandemic, COVID-19, Greenland Ice Melt, Greenwashing, Heatwaves, Marine Heatwaves, MegaFires, Pyrocene, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Berry, Zoonotic Diseases

“We must now understand that our own well-being can be achieved only through the well-being of the entire natural world around us.” ~ Thomas Berry

As governments stared glass-eyed at what was unfolding in China earlier this year, the fragility of modern life’s interconnectedness was soon to be laid bare by a microscopic organism. Within a couple months of the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, airline travel from China had spread the novel virus to more than 60 countries. Despite decades of warnings about the inevitability of such an event, politicians had paid about as much lip service to preventing the next pandemic as they had to dealing with climate change. As has been warned by health experts, the best we can hope for is to blunt the effects of the COVID-19 disease on the global population; eradicating it will be futile. Something similar could be said of the legacy effects of our CO2 emissions which will haunt life on Earth for time immemorial.

A study from 2014 found the total number of infectious disease outbreaks has more than quadrupled between 1980 and 2010. Approximately 75% of all emerging infectious diseases originate from animals and chances for pandemics are increasing as humanity’s growing assault on the natural world disrupts what remains of the planet’s ecosystems. If you need further evidence that we are annihilating life on Earth, consider that the microscopic mite, among the oldest and most plentiful invertebrates on the planet and a keystone species in many ecosystems, is disappearing at least 1,000 times the natural rate. More novel zoonotic diseases will eventually be unleashed into the bloodstream of the globalized economy as corporations revive parasitic growth at the expense of a habitable planet. The coronavirus pandemic is a symptom of our unfolding Anthropocene Mass Extinction which is accelerating.

The current pandemic may well mark the beginning of the end for growth as we knew it. In the U.S. right now, there are 29 million unemployed and tens of thousands of small businesses that have closed during the pandemic will never reopen. In the Age of Environmental Breakdown, there can never be a return to normal. For the normal that industrial civilization has become accustomed to is the very thing ripping to pieces those white picket-fenced lives in suburbia. A Biden presidency may bring back some sense of sanity and order to those pursuing the illusion of the American Dream, but it won’t alter global civilization’s current trajectory toward an increasingly chaotic world of never-ending disasters. The synergistic effects of biodiversity collapse, climate change, and industrial pollution will act as a growing weight on the economy.

We just learned that Greenland’s ice sheets crossed a tipping point two decades ago and will never recover, as far as human timescales are concerned. Nothing will bring them back except another ice age, and humans have managed to erase the next one scheduled to have occurred some 50,000 years hence. 100,000 years will have past before the planet completely rids itself of the CO2 humans have loaded into the atmosphere. Second only to Antarctica in terms of ice volume, Greenland’s melt-off could eventually contribute 23 feet of global sea level rise. Antarctica’s ice sheets have also been found to be much more vulnerable to collapse than previously known, as rising atmospheric temperatures melt their surface and a warming ocean destabilizes them from below. Coastal erosion, flooding, and soil salinization from sea level rise are growing drags on the economy. About 40% of the global population lives near the coast and will account for the largest mass migration in human history. Indeed, billions of U.S. tax dollars are now being used in a new strategy to relocate entire neighborhoods from coastal regions persistently hit by flooding in recent years.

With the meltdown of the Earth’s cryosphere, we are witnessing a large-scale catastrophic disruption to a critical part of the Earth system under which all life has adapted. In particular, the relatively stable climate of the Holocene is what allowed for the development of agriculture and human civilization. We no longer live in that era; We have entered the chaos of the Anthropocene, a time of deadly climate disruption, social upheaval, mass extinction, and ultimately collapse of industrial civilization. With arctic amplification weakening jet streams, larger and more intense heat domes now form over geographic regions to help spark megafires, power grid blackouts, and heat-related deaths. In Phoenix AZ, a heatwave just obliterated a previous record of most days over 110°F (50 plus), and another record-breaking heatwave is on its way as I speak. California’s Death Valley just recorded the highest temperature on Earth since reliable records began. The six most recent years (2014-2019) and 2020 have been the hottest ever recorded, with each decade since 1980 being hotter than the previous.

The recent heatwave that thawed Siberia’s tundra, set it on fire, and caused an ecological disaster by collapsing a diesel fuel reservoir, could never have happened without the massive spike in CO2 emissions from mankind’s fossil-fuel binge. Summer wildfires in the Arctic set a record this year, emitting 34% more CO2 than in the prior year. Fires in the Amazon jungle are the worst in a decade. Wildfires in Arizona this year have already scarred more land than in the prior two years. Colorado just logged the biggest fire in its history and California’s wildfires are already on track to break records even though the fire season has just begun. Globally, wildfires have increased 13% over the prior record-breaking year of 2019. A more apt name for the Anthropocene might be the Pyrocene – Age of Fire.

Heatwaves aren’t just striking on land; they are also cooking the oceans. Increasingly severe and frequent marine heatwaves(MHWs) have surged by more than 50% in recent decades. Warming oceans help create more destructive and more frequent hurricanes and typhoons. They also threaten biodiversity and ecosystem function on a global scale. Scientists have observed that stony corals around the world are hunkering down into survival mode, exhibiting the same traits as they did prior to the last great extinction. Let that sink in for a moment…Yes, a relatively primitive organism with a rudimentary nervous system is actually preparing for a mass extinction while the so-called ‘Wise Ape’ blissfully carries on destroying his very own life-support systems.

“It was incredibly spooky to witness how corals are now exhibiting the same traits as they did at the last major extinction event,” said Professor David Gruber, a researcher and marine biologist with The Graduate Center, CUNY and Baruch College. “Corals seem to be preparing to jump across an extinction boundary, while we are putting our foot further on the pedal.”

Apparently, coral are not hampered by politics in their decision-making processes. These creatures of the primordial seas will likely outsurvive the Self-Absorbed Ape who has insulated himself in a technological cocoon of false security, oblivious to the harsh physical laws of nature indifferently working to take him down. Hell, scientists are now finding microplastics in every human tissue they examine, and the health effects are unknown. How’s that for forethought?

Scientists can issue warnings about our impending demise until they are blue in the face, and they have, but they and the public are at the mercy of economic, financial, and political forces beyond anyone’s power. Couple that with the fact that the average person on the street has a Trump-level of comprehension about these existential crises and is being bombarded on social media by fake news that plays on emotions and deep-rooted inter-group distrust. Cheap energy and the individualistic consumer culture have created an illusion of abundance and destroyed any sort of communal cooperation which was once the basis of everyday life. I’ve walked this Earth for over five decades and have seen a steady and continuous degradation of the natural world; corporate greenwashing is rampant. The growth in ‘green energy’ has not displaced fossil fuel fuel consumption to any great degree; fossil fuels still supply 84% of global energy consumption. Worse yet, just to maintain our current growth in energy consumption would require an unattainable expansion in alternative energies. If one connects all the dots on our current state, then there is no refuting this most clear-eyed of scientific assessments:

“Given the momentum in both the Earth and human systems, and the growing difference between the ‘reaction time’ needed to steer humanity towards a more sustainable future, and the ‘intervention time’ left to avert a range of catastrophes in both the physical climate system (e.g., melting of Arctic sea ice) and the biosphere (e.g., loss of the Great Barrier Reef), we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse.”

The end of the world is the ‘cha-ching’ of a cash register as the last vestiges of nature are converted to dollars. Lest we forget, 71% of global emissions come from just 100 companies and more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988 originated from 25 corporate and state-owned entities. While the ultra-wealthy reap the profits of a poisoned ecology, the rest of the world is left to take the brunt of consequences from a world that grows more dangerous by the day. Those living on the edge who lost their livelihood during this pandemic are the collateral damage of an out-of-control socio-economic system whose incompatibility with life on Earth becomes more evident with each passing year. There’s nowhere to escape for most people because, to one degree or another, we are all entrapped in this system. The immutable laws of biology, physics, and chemistry have set an expiration date on America’s non-negotiable way of life, ensuring that many more will soon fall victim to the short-term greed of capitalism. As Stephen Hawking warned, “Stupidity and greed will kill off humans.”

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Evolutionary Dead-Ends

19 Monday Mar 2018

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

≈ 95 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Arctic Blue Ocean Event, Capitalism, Carl Sagan, Climate Change, Collapse of Civilizations, Donald Trump, Dr Charlie Veron, Ecological Overshoot, Elizabeth Kolbert, Herman Daly, Jared Diamond, Micro-Plastic Pollution, Noam Chomsky, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Stephen Boyden, Svante Arrhenius, Techno-Fix, U.S. National Climate Assessment, Wealth Inequality, William Rees

“It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.” ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

Have things improved since I wrote my last essay a year ago for this blog? Have we miraculously transformed our entire energy system into one that does not poison and degrade the natural world? Have we slowed the onslaught of plastic pollution choking the planet’s rivers, lakes, and oceans? Have we done anything meaningful to halt the deterioration of the planet’s biodiversity toward mass extinction? Has this global, hi-tech civilization done anything significant to avert its own demise? Despite a constant flow of warnings from the scientific community and even a letter signed by more than 20,000 scientists, the simple answer is no. We have failed to address the complexity of our rising population and a degrading environment. Yes, we are self-conscious and thus able to recognize the fact that we are destroying the only home we have, but will the end result differ much from a population overshoot of bacteria in a Petri dish? Dependent on a continuous stream of finite resources imported from across the globe, modern megacities contain the seeds of their own destruction and that of all other life forms upon which humanity depends for its survival. The exponential growth of modern civilization ensures that one of the next doubling times will produce an absolute increase in overshoot that tips the world into unavoidable collapse. Enough damage may well have already been done; we’re just waiting for inertia to catch up to the impacts.

2017 set a global record for the most skyscrapers built in a single year and 2018 is predicted to eclipse it. The fossil fuel energy spent to construct those concrete and steel buildings translates into a melting cryosphere. Not to mention the fact that the carbon footprint of some of the world’s biggest cities is 60% bigger than previously estimated. “Renewable energy” still only comprises a tiny fraction of global energy consumption and plans for a total transition will take decades, if it’s even possible. Any growth in ‘renewable energy’ has been offset by increased consumption of fossil fuels in the developing world. 2017 marked a new record high in CO2 emissions with 2018 set to break that record. Global CO2 emissions have yet to peak, and the UN has warned that we are on course for a 3C world. It doesn’t help that the current U.S. administration plans to cut funding for alternative energy R&D, with the Energy Department expecting no drop in the U.S. carbon footprint through 2050. Having embedded itself in the U.S. government over a century ago, the fossil fuel industry has consistently worked to block climate change action and undermine environmental laws. A UK shipping executive recently admitted his industry is guilty of doing the same to protect their bottom line. The utilities companies knew the dangers as well. Like most corporations, the viability of their business model depends on perpetuating an unsustainable way of life. With warnings ignored since the late 1800s starting with the work of Svante Arrhenius, it should be obvious by now that intelligence without sapience has produced deadly results. A new study finds “the most accurate climate change models predict the most alarming consequences.” The recently released U.S. National Climate Assessment has similar findings:

While climate models incorporate important climate processes that can be well quantified, they do not include all of the processes that can contribute to feedbacks (Ch. 2), compound extreme events, and abrupt and/or irreversible changes. For this reason, future changes outside the range projected by climate models cannot be ruled out (very high confidence). Moreover, the systematic tendency of climate models to underestimate temperature change during warm paleoclimates suggests that climate models are more likely to underestimate than to overestimate the amount of long-term future change (medium confidence). (Ch. 15)

In a new ominous research finding, the evil twin of climate change(ocean acidification) is threatening the base of the marine food chain by disrupting the production of phytoplankton. This is yet another positive feedback loop increasing the rate of global warming. Climate feedback loops and ice sheet modeling are two weak areas of climate science, which means many unpleasant surprises. This is why researchers are constantly astonished. Adaptation is not a luxury most organisms have at the present rates of change. Techno-fixes are but a pipe dream.

A diet reliant on animal agriculture is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gases, biodiversity loss, and oceanic dead zones, yet global per capita meat consumption is increasing rapidly in both developing and industrialized countries. Investments have been made to increase global plastic production by 40% over the next decade, even as all the world’s natural bodies of water become inundated with microplastics. Coca Cola alone produces 110 billion throwaway plastic bottles every year – an astounding 3,400 a second. Plastic waste from the military is another massive contributor that cannot be overstated. Half of all plastics have been made in just the last thirteen years. Over 90% of the so-called purified bottled water sold to the public has been shown to be contaminated with hundreds and even thousands of microplastic pieces. A byproduct of petroleum and the epitome of our throw-away society, plastics have truly become ubiquitous in the environment, entering the food chain at every level.

A study published last year pulls no punches by describing the mass extermination of billions of animals in recent decades as a “biological annihilation.” Extinction risks for many species are vastly underestimated. Insects, the base of the terrestrial food chain, are faring no better. With the steep loss of invertebrates, multiple studies indicate the world is “on course for an ecological Armageddon”. Trees are dying at an unprecedented rate from extreme weather events, portending profound effects to Earth’s carbon cycle. Coral bleaching events are now happening four times more frequently than a few decades ago. Dr Charlie Veron, a renowned scientist specializing in corals and reefs, said this last year:

“Half of all coral colonies on the Great Barrier Reef died over the past two years due to coral bleaching,’’ Dr Veron said.

“It’s going to be a horrible world. Young people now are going to curse the present generation for what we’ve done. We’ll have left them a planet in dire straits.’’

“Between a quarter and a third of all marine species have part of their life cycle in a coral reef. Taking away the reefs precipitates ecological collapse of the oceans. It’s happened twice in the past due to volcanoes releasing carbon dioxide and lava flows, but that was nothing like the amount of carbon dioxide being released now.’’

No one thought that ecosystems such as The Great Barrier Reef would be circling the drain this soon. How these changes are affecting flora and fauna as well as human societies is critical, but it’s like trying to predict the outcome of a high speed car crash as it’s happening. Hindsight is 20/20, but it only serves a purpose if you are still around to learn from it. Abrupt climate change is happening now and we’re not prepared for it. Fighting to protect the very life support system we all share, environmentalists are under attack worldwide and being murdered in record numbers. The problem of poaching is so bad that scientists are advising people to scrub all GPS data from their nature photos before publication to help protect endangered species from being ransacked. The voracious consumption and defilement of the planet continues unabated, despite clear signs the once-stable biosphere that enabled the establishment of human civilizations is quickly unraveling(Puerto Rico, Houston, never-ending wildfire seasons, melting Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, widespread glacial retreat, shrinking lakes, and many other signs of a destabilized climate). The following picture taken in Oregon last summer illustrates my point; seemingly oblivious to the massive wildfires raging in the background, a group of golfers continues playing a round…“We’re trading a habitable climate for a few generations of easy living.”

Climate change is just one of many factors in mankind’s planetary overshoot. We even have a day designated in recognition of our oversized ecological footprint which comes earlier every year, with nary a mention of it in official economic reports. As Herman Daly has explained, the global economic system treats the earth as a business in liquidation. The destruction of the natural world is enshrined in our positive economic indicators, i.e. rising GDP. And if need be, those numbers will be massaged to meet expectations. On a subconscious level, the growth imperative applies to all species including humans:

Humans share two behavioral traits with all other species that are critically important to (un)sustainability. Numerous experiments show that unless or until constrained by negative feedback (e.g., disease, starvation, self-pollution) the populations of all species:

• Expand to occupy all accessible habitats.

• Use all available resources.

Like mindless bacteria bent on their own success, humans are victims of their own DNA and ingenuity. Any civilization that develops energy harvesting technologies allowing for rapid population growth will generate entropy which will in turn almost certainly have strong feedback effects on the planet’s habitability. Our exponentially growing economy is on a collision course with an immovable ecosphere.

The end of the world is coming for the naked ape, not by a cabal of bankers or any sort of cockamamie conspiracy tale like chemtrails, but by us –the entire human race– and the economic system we have developed. We’ve become hostages to the complex structures and ever more intricate specialization of an economic system designed to exploit diminishing resources. Pollution and waste are of little concern for capitalism until they become a significant drain on overall profitability and new frontiers to exploit are exhausted. When profitability on a global scale is finally threatened by climate change, it will be far too late. The response will be militarized and authoritarian.

On a more insidious note, capitalism is driven by a deep instinctive drive to accumulate which was a very survival-positive compulsion during our several million years of evolving into Homo sapiens to overcome dry periods and other threats. Capitalism hits on this genetic proclivity, and when we get a clear opportunity to grab a big time accumulation, get rich and all, social good be damned. Our big and powerful cerebral cortex is hard-pressed to find a cure.

“I am rather pessimistic. The maladaptive assumptions of prevailing cultures are deeply ingrained. The notion that economic growth must take precedence over all other considerations and general ignorance of biological and ecological realities do not augur well for the future.” ~ Professor Stephen Boyden, human ecologist

In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond found that a common factor was the myopic and self-serving decision-making of elites who believed they could insulate themselves from the consequences of societal disasters. As the elites reaped the rewards, the resulting damage to everyone else built up over time until calamity struck. The grim reality is that history has proven such cycles of extreme wealth inequality have only been broken by catastrophes –plagues, revolutions, massive wars, and collapsed states. The U.S. has now reached a degree of wealth disparity unequaled in history:

Overall, the highest-ever historical Gini the researchers found was that of the ancient Old World (think Patrician Rome), which got a score of .59. While the degrees of inequality experienced by historical societies are quite high, the researchers note, they’re nowhere near as high as the Gini scores we’re seeing now…”it is safe to say that the degree of wealth inequality experienced by many households today is considerably higher than has been the norm over the last ten millennia,” the researchers write in their paper.

The crisis of civilization is planet-wide this time. We’ve turned a utopian world of plenty into a dystopian world of fascist-leaning governments, industrial disasters, collapsing ecosystems, and technological addiction. We have a Commander in Chief who tweets bizarre debunked conspiracies at 3 am, gets his intel briefings from right-wing TV shows, dismantles any remaining hindrances to unbridled capitalism, and doesn’t know the difference between weather and climate. Public discourse has been dumbed down to the level of Fox news talking points and tribal groupthink. Those who can discern actual ‘fake news’ from scientific fact are left to watch in horror as mainstream scientific projections continue to prove overly optimistic. Not only are regulations being cut left and right, they are not being enforced. Government science advisors are being purged and replaced with mouthpieces for industrial polluters. In fact, this administration is actively working to delegitimize and destroy government institutions. A sizable population of low information voters supports such actions, but it’s only to their own detriment. Although both major parties are under the sway of corporate power, Trump and company represent an exceptionally predatory class of people. The Union of Concerned Scientists is monitoring the current administration’s war on science and public health; their latest report is here:

The administration’s one-year record shows an unprecedented level of stalled and disbanded scientific advisory committees, cancelled meetings, and dismissed experts. The consequences for the health and safety of millions of Americans could be profound.

We live in an age of unparalleled technological advancement, while at the same time we turn a blind eye to the disintegrating natural world that gave birth to us, having forgotten that our destiny lies in our relationship with the earth. Like Icarus who, in his exuberance, ignored his father’s warnings and flew too close to the sun, modern man with his technology has ascended to great heights without heeding sound advice.

“We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.” ~ Carl Sagan

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Sic Transit Imperium

02 Tuesday May 2017

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

≈ 55 Comments

Tags

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

…. The passing of empire.

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

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

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

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

Exactly as the instigators intended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here is where it gets really interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For around 20 years.

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Stanley Jevons 1860

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

There is No ‘Easy’ Way to Avert the Collapse of Civilization

16 Wednesday Nov 2016

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

≈ 39 Comments

Tags

Antibiotic-Resistant Pathogens, Authoritarianism, Automation, Carrington Even, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Complexity Trap, Cyberwarfare, David Eagleman, Digital Dark Age, Donald Trump, Global Surveillance Network, Hyper-Nationalism, Jonathan Huebner, Joseph Tainter, Militarized Police Force, Net Energy and Societal Complexity, Peak Antibiotics, Peak Oil, Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization

Six years ago David Eagleman, a neuroscientist and American writer, delivered a lecture entitled ‘Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization’. I got the urge to review his advice and critique how well we have followed it. Below are his abbreviated steps along with my commentary on each one:

[1.] “Try not to cough on one another.”

Over the course of numerous microbe generations amounting to a small fraction of a single human lifetime, pathogens have mutated and adapted faster than the antibiotic defenses human’s have built. Through a combination of factors—medical, social and economic—our war on pathogens is being lost, and these superbugs could be the next global pandemic. The danger grows with mankind’s expanding ecological footprint: a rising world population, the widespread use of antibacterial drugs in humans and agriculture, the speed and intensity of an international transport system, and so on. As history has shown, pandemics have always been a consequence of humans breaking down the interface between man and Earth’s wilderness. A recent study highlights this fact:

Tackling antibiotic resistance on only one front is a waste of time because resistant genes are freely crossing environmental, agricultural and clinical boundaries, new research has shown.

Analysis of historic soil archives dating back to 1923 has revealed a clear parallel between the appearance of antibiotic resistance in medicine and similar antibiotic resistant genes detected over time in agricultural soils treated with animal manure…

…”Unless we reduce use and improve stewardship across all sectors — environmental, clinical and agricultural — we don’t stand a chance of reducing antibiotic resistance in the future.”

As of yet, humans are not heeding this advice in any coordinated manner as another new study reveals that antibiotic use and resistance is increasing globally while new antibiotics discoveries have nearly halted. China and India, for instance, have poor regulatory and environmental enforcement:

The NHS is buying drugs from pharmaceutical companies in India whose dirty production methods are fueling the rise of superbugs, write Andrew Wasley & Madlen Davies. There are no checks or regulations in place to stop this happening – even though the rapid growth in antibiotic resistant bacteria in India is spreading across the world, including to the UK and NHS hospitals… government-commissioned study found superbugs would kill more people than cancer by 2050 if no action is taken, and cited pollution in pharmaceutical supply chains as a major problem. – Link

“If you want to see where resistance is occurring in animals, look across the pond to China. They play by a whole different set of rules,” he[Dr. Larry Hollis] says. “Whenever a new antibiotic is developed, the Chinese see the patent filings, figure out how to make it, and without any regulatory structure, it goes straight to animals. By the time it’s available here, the antibiotic is already showing resistance.” – Link

India is a global center of antibiotic manufacture. 80% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients used by pharmaceutical companies worldwide, including the United States and Europe, are made in China. Following their manufacture, most of these ingredients are exported to India for processing and subsequent worldwide sale. The good manufacturing practices in China and India do not include environmental safeguards. “Unfortunately, environmental regulations are currently left up to national regulators, who are not inclined to do much. In India, the effluent discharge load of ciprofloxacin in 2007 was 45 kg per day – the amount consumed in Sweden, which has a population of 9 million, over 5 days,” said Dr. Gandra. – Link

Our hospitals can’t even keep track of how many people are dying from these superbugs. So it seems disease-carrying bacteria shall inherit the Earth, but truth be told, they have always been the dominant forms of life. A population of eight billion people provides a rich substrate for them to colonize and feed upon.

[2.] “Don’t lose things.”

In modern times there has been a large decline in hard-copy forms of record-keeping with ever more material being transferred onto digital formats, especially news reports and visual/auditory records, but the ephemeral nature of our digital media makes it prone to disappearing. Virtually all of the most useful and important artifacts of our time are digital and very little of it is intended to survive. Much of the 20th Century and beyond will be a vast gaping historical black hole except for the plastics, radiation and soot entering the geological record:

Digital information itself has all kinds of advantages. It can be read by machines, sorted and analyzed in massive quantities, and disseminated instantaneously. “Except when it goes, it really goes,” said Jason Scott, an archivist and historian for the Internet Archive. “It’s gone gone. A piece of paper can burn and you can still kind of get something from it. With a hard drive or a URL, when it’s gone, there is just zero recourse.”…

…If a sprawling Pulitzer Prize-nominated feature in one of the nation’s oldest newspapers can disappear from the web, anything can. “There are now no passive means of preserving digital information,” said Abby Rumsey, a writer and digital historian. In other words if you want to save something online, you have to decide to save it. Ephemerality is built into the very architecture of the web, which was intended to be a messaging system, not a library… – Link

The slow creep of technological obsolescence or a sudden cosmic disaster like a Carrington Event could usher in a ‘Digital Dark Age’, making any historical electronic documents unreadable. Google’s Vint Cerf says we’ve grown complacent in how media is stored. He warns that we may find ourselves lost in a bit-rot future unable to access important media documents, scientific data, etc., but leaving behind any kind of record on an overheated world could be a moot point if there’s no one left to read it.

[3.] “Tell each other faster.”

Communication speed has increased exponentially with technology but the infrastructure that supports it is very vulnerable. Aside from the growing threat of cyber-attack, it’s been documented that the most common cause of communication failure is due to the destruction of physical infrastructures. Roughly 200 undersea fiber optic cables link the world’s telecommunications, but they are “poorly armored, rarely patrolled and only occasionally monitored.” The possibility of human saboteurs is ever-present for landlines as well. These systems are usually the first sites to be targeted in wars and crackdowns by authoritarian governments.

Telecommunication infrastructure is also threatened by natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and severe weather which can sever cables and flood underground equipment. A study from a couple of years ago found an increase in severe weather has led to a doubling of major power outages across the country in the past decade.

Telling each other faster has not made one iota of a difference in preventing the unmitigated disaster of global warming and climate change. If after decades of climate conferences, libraries filled to the brim with studies and data, and now the imminent death of the largest organism on the planet—the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, we still cannot collectively take this existential threat seriously, then failure and death will be our just deserts.

[4.] “Mitigate tyranny.”

Hyper-nationalist movements are on the rise around the world, and they can be a precursor to authoritarianism. A country by country guide and analysis of fascism and the far right in Europe can be found here. Hyper-nationalism can lead to racism, vicious cycles of revenge, and genocide in which a segment of the population is scapegoated for society’s failures. With the appointment of Steven Bannon to Trumps’s presidential inner circle, the darkness of Trump’s worldview should be evident to most. Trump will soon have America’s militarized police forces at his behest and the world’s surveillance network at his fingertips, enabling him to act on his penchant for vindictiveness in far-reaching ways.

Trump won’t bring back coal because it would mean destroying the natural gas industry which has grown to displace the use of coal in recent years. Trump is going to learn how hard it is to change the dynamics of our energy system. Previous presidents have hit that same wall. Besides, automation is taking over all the blue-collar jobs of Trump’s supporters. All those “big league jobs” promised by Trump just went up in smoke:

…research shows that the automation of U.S. factories is a much bigger factor than foreign trade in the loss of factory jobs. A study at Ball State University’s Center for Business and Economic Research last year found that trade accounted for just 13 percent of America’s lost factory jobs. The vast majority of the lost jobs — 88 percent — were taken by robots and other homegrown factors that reduce factories’ need for human labor. – Link

[5.] “Get more brains involved in solving problems.”

Physicist Jonathan Huebner says in his study that rates of global innovations judged significant to human beings have been declining in recent decades, in fact it’s halved in the past hundred years. Joseph Tainter in his own study has come to a similar conclusion:

Over the last 40 years, the number of patents per inventor has decreased by 20% and the number of inventors per patent has increased by almost 50%. Although the quality of patents is unknown (it can not be measured quantitatively), it seems we nowadays get less bang for the buck compared to half a century ago. Larger, interdisciplinary research teams cost a lot more money as they need the support of administrative personnel and formal institutions. This decrease in productivity has been masked by the fact that the whole enterprise (research & development) has grown in absolute terms (i.e. more scientists and more money being poured into R&D). – Link

This decline in innovation is directly related to diminishing EROI of our energy resources and the limits of complexity. As Jonathan Miles said in Want Not, “This is our condition. We do not solve problems. We replace them with other problems.” The myriad of crises bearing down on us defies comprehension and certainly won’t be solved by applying more of the same techno-fix thinking.

[6.] “Try not to run out of energy.”

The EROI of fossil fuels, the master resource of industrial civilization, has been in decline for some time and a recent report sheds light on this:

A new peer-reviewed study led by the Institute of Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico has undertaken a comparative review of the EROI of all the major sources of energy that currently underpin industrial civilization—namely oil, gas, coal, and uranium.

Published in the journal Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, the scientists note that the EROI for fossil fuels has inexorably declined over a relatively short period of time: “Nowadays, the world average value EROI for hydrocarbons in the world has gone from a value of 35 to a value of 15 between 1960 and 1980.”

In other words, in just two decades, the total value of the energy being produced via fossil fuel extraction has plummeted by more than half. And it continues to decline… – Link

No other energy source has the energy density of fossil fuels and the existing alternative or “renewable” energy sources won’t power our current set of living arrangements. Although technology is extending the Fossil Fuel Age, running out of economically recoverable fossil fuels means a radical change in society, if such a thing as ‘society’ can persist in the aftermath of biospheric collapse. I suppose a seventh bullet point is in order and would say something along the lines of, “It’s an ill bird that fouls its own nest.”

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

The Autumn Breathes

09 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by td0s in Capitalism, Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Inequality, Peak Oil

≈ 44 Comments

Tags

Climate Change, Collapse, forest fire, Industrial Civilization, refugee crisis, superstorm, yemen

By TD0S at PrayforCalamity.com
___

Deep in the hardwood forest I watch the first orange light crest over the eastern ridge as dawn unfolds casting its warmth on the surface of the yawning Earth. Poplar trunks stand firm above the gold and brown leaf cover that now mulches the hopeful seedlings while granting the white tail deer an auditory advantage over those who would stalk them through the hollers. At this time of year the forest exhales and retreats from the above ground toil of photosynthesis to a season of focus within the dense and teeming skin of the planet. Without the brush and laden bough, one can see for miles across the waves of ridge and ravine. Sound is without obstacle, and seems almost propelled by the chill wind when it punctures the otherwise heavy silence. The feeling is one of calm, of that restfulness that comes when one crawls into bed and their leg muscles finally release the day’s tension. Autumn contains a library of lessons, none of which can be learned until one is still, patient, and not fucking talking.

My year was not what I had planned for it to be. Many tasks remain undone. Our family was interfered with by a local government body, and we are now in the process of installing an overpriced septic system for our cabin. It is a headache, to be sure, dealing with puffed up bureaucrats and their ad hoc adherence to antiquated and at times contradictory laws. As is often the case in this society, compliance is cheaper and faster than justice. Proving to a judge my case that I should not be required to acquire such a system would find me spending more money, time, and personal energy than just going along with the racket that the good old boys and connected families have established in these parts. I have made my peace with the conflict, and am calmly dancing through the hoops laid out for me. When all is said and done, the cabin I built with my two hands will be a legal residence in the event that we ever decide to move and to sell our land. Property value and all that, right?

Here we are again, dear readers, staring down another winter in which we can together reflect on the state of the world, both the portion that modern humans point their attention at, as well as to the far larger portion where, as Cormac McCarthy wrote, “Storms blow and trees twist in the wind, and all of the animals that God has made go to and fro.” Despite a massive downturn in the global economy, money moves and the smokestacks belch their poison. To be sure, man’s world of markets and digital notations percolates. An event is brewing that portends itself in plummeting rig counts and commodity prices. What grand show this event will perform for people rich enough to have a stake in it is to be seen. The rest of us will scrape by like the peasants that we are until even scraping fails, and only bloodletting remains.

Superstorms and hurricanes ravage from Texas to Yemen. Starved and hopeless human beings are playing the only card they have and abandoning the sure death that awaits their children in the war ravaged and drought plagued middle eastern and north African regions. Rich white people who are to blame for such wars, droughts, and famines are bellowing from the America’s, clear across Europe, and down to Australia about the brown victims of centuries of Anglo-capitalism and how they are not supposed to do anything but suffer their circumstances in place. Where these white adherents to national boundary and culture were as the US, UK, and other global powers were setting about to wage war and destabilize governments in these now uninhabitable places, I’m not exactly sure.

This is the crisis unfolding. This is what it looks like. Real life plays out a lot more slowly than the Hollywood scripts that have to crunch collapse adventures into one hundred and twenty minute films complete with explosions, comeuppance, and a love story for the girls. Tracking the decline of global industrial civilization is seemingly gaining in popularity, and it is all too common for those new to such a curiosity to expect an impending grand finale in which all bets are off; the power grid fails, store shelves empty, gas pumps get bagged, and all hell breaks loose in suburban cul-de-sacs where soccer moms in body armor pump 7.62 into hordes of urbanites (read: blacks and latinos…OK, and maybe a few white guys with neck tattoos get plugged for good measure) who are scouring the once idyllic portions of America in search of condensed soup and cheerleaders for their rape rooms.

Instead another year grinds by in which forest fires destroyed more than they ever had in North america, heat waves killed thousands in Pakistan, sea levels continued their upward march, and political institutions seemed ever more and more inept in the face of all the compounding emergencies that industrial civilization faces. Even my own humble region was affected by unseasonable levels of rain this July which were punctuated by a night of flash flooding that tested my mettle and resolve as I spent hours trying to find an unblocked path home.

Of course, we know that there are no solutions, not for the major crises. There is no putting back what is broken, and limits to growth are not optional. They are not suggested daily values. Sustainability isn’t a lifestyle choice. That which cannot be sustained will not be. For us as individuals, families, tribes, and communities, there is only endurance. How do we get by, and not just with the calories in our gut to labor forth, but with the joy in our hearts to make us want to carry on? Times of decline are times of darkening in the human heart and soul. Atrocity follows shortage. A world of hunger, hate, and blood is a world in which human conscience is called upon to rise, to shield, to burn brightly, despite less and less obvious motivation to do so.

The year draws down and grants us all yet another season to breathe. Let us use the time wisely.

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

And you thought Greece had a problem?

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

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

≈ 256 Comments

Tags

American Empire, China Ghost Cities, Climate Change, Decline of Detroit, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Fiat Money, Greece, Industrial Revolution, Infinite Growth Paradigm, Money = Energy, Norman Pagett, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Roman Empire, Saudi Arabia Skyscraper Bubble, Sectarianism, The End of More

Author: Norman Pagett (The End of More)

Petroleum-Highway

While we might think of money as supporting our economy, only energy can support the solvency of a nation, and only surplus energy can fulfill the aspirations of its rulers and the desires of its citizens. Until the advent of the industrial revolution, and in particular the universal availability of cheap oil, that energy could only come from territory that could produce sufficient food and other essentials for any level of civilized living. We might ‘demand’ that our leaders provide new hospitals, schools, roads and all the other things that make life comfortable, but without the necessary surplus energy to do it, it is impossible. No political posturing or promises or taxation can change that.

Most deny it, but we live in an energy economy, not a money economy. Without the continually increasing forward thrust of energy input, no economy can exist in the context that we have become used to.

Not just the Greeks, but those charged with governing every nation on Earth, have lost sight of the fundamental law of collective survival: if a nation doesn’t produce enough indigenous surplus energy to support the demands of its people, they must beg, buy, borrow or steal it from somewhere else, or face eventual collapse and starvation until their numbers reach a sustainable level.

Our lifestyle support system has been based on that premise since prehistory. Nomadic tribesmen, probably in the region of present day Iraq, had the bright idea of fixing borders around land, then growing their food supply instead of chasing after it. Fences and borders meant land could be owned and given value that could be measured in energy terms.

What we know as civilization is based on that simple concept. Land and its potential energy became capital, and our genetic forces ensured it was exploited to the full. Primitive farmers knew nothing of calorific values, or capitalism; only that too little food meant starvation, sufficient food averted famines, and surplus food offered prosperity. No one wanted to starve, few were content with sufficient, so the drive for surplus became relentless. It still is; only the scale has changed, it has become the profit motive in everything we do. Everybody wants a payrise, few refuse one. We are all capitalists, we differ only by a matter of scale.

Enclosed land needed strong control and the will to fight for it. Strength prevailed while weakness went under as resource competition ebbed and flowed across tribal territories. If land produced enough spare food and other necessary commodities, it was possible to equip and feed an army, and use it to occupy more territory. In that way collective energy could rapidly roll up small territories into a nation or an empire, create warlords and kings, and give credence to gods who were invariably on the winning side.

cool-oil-gas-war-graffiti

Possession of land and what it produces is the hidden support of what we now understand as our economy and the viability of our infrastructure. Conflict makes that economy even more profitable and one that is built on power and aggression provides the potential for endless resource warfare, whether bloody or political. In 1941 Germany invaded Greece using the bloody version. In 2015 Greece is experiencing the political version. As a small weak country Greece lacks the resource strength to resist.

The more land that could be held and ruled, the more food-energy could be produced. Surplus energy that came in the form of meat and grain and timber was too big to carry around, so tokens of gold and silver became an accepted measure of energy value.

Different civilisations arose and used different monetary systems, but all broadly followed the pattern we are locked into now: those who controlled the land controlled the energy that supported the prevalent economy, whether primitive or sophisticated, warlike or peaceful. With sufficient surplus and a big enough labour force held in some kind of serfdom or dependency, tokenized energy could be diverted to pay for the construction of cities, castles and cathedrals. While the labour of men to build them, the allegiance of soldiers to guard them, and the faith of priests to pray over them might be bought with gold and silver, the system depended on a supply of food and basic commodities well above subsistence level, ultimately provided by the heat of the sun. That’s why the great early civilisations and empires began in the warm tropical and sub tropical regions of the world. And why Eskimos did not field armies, build cities, or inflict the hysteria of mass religion on themselves; they didn’t get enough sunshine to provide the energy resources.

That gave rise to the factors we still live with today: warm productive stable land sustains a bigger healthier population. People eat and procreate, need more sustenance, and demand that their leaders provide it, so the thrust of constant expansion is inevitable in order to feed them. This was as true for small farming settlements between the Tigris and the Euphrates, as it was for the Roman Empire. It was the force that drove the European industrial powers outwards to carve up Africa, the Americas and the Far East to give a privileged section of humanity a prosperity that has been unique in our history. Those of us who enjoy those privileges have lost sight of where they came from, and how fragile they are.

Consequently we are still locked into the same energy-hungry capitalist dynamic, only now we believe that money has not only been substituted for the energy that created it, it has replaced it. In most people’s minds, the illusion of money has supplanted tangible, hard resources. Energy is no longer regarded as necessary to sustain prosperity; we can print it, or better still, make it appear electronically.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Who needs oil? Keynesian economics says that perpetual growth will come through passing bits of coloured paper or plastic from hand to hand at an ever-faster rate.

The leaders of every advanced industrial nation are driven to promise this kind of ‘growth’ to their people, for no better reason than because there has always been growth, so our future will be growth driven too; they and we know no other way. We believe the lie that money itself has taken on an intrinsic worth of its own.

The Greeks fiddled their accounts, joined the EU and accepted the common currency of the Euro and the collective certainty of the money-driven nature of growth, at a time when oil was $25 a barrel. With oil so cheap, any concern about indigenous energy sources was irrelevant. They had a world class (oil dependent) shipbuilding and sea transport industry, and (oil dependent) tourism was booming. In the late 90s, when oil had fallen to $18 a barrel, they borrowed $11 billion to buy still more energy to burn in order to stage the 2004 Olympic games. Greek prosperity depended on infinite supplies of hydrocarbon fuel, but they followed the common belief in infinite money.

When the price of oil peaked in 2008, the crash was inevitable. The certainty that money represented wealth was destroyed by the price of oil, but they borrowed billions more to try to prove it hadn’t. Any reason was better than reality: that you can’t run a cheap energy economy on expensive energy.

The latest clutch of Greek politicos got themselves voted into office because they told the Greek people what they wanted to hear: that prosperity could be voted into office, as if the availability of indigenous energy within their borders was a matter of political choice. Alexis Tsipras believed the Keynesian fantasy and convinced himself that borrowed money put into endless circulation will generate wealth and ‘growth’. $11 billion spent on the now derelict Olympic stadium should have served as a warning, but it didn’t.

070795-eb65ca3e-2347-11e4-b035-3276a1bc3645

More ‘bailouts’ have been agreed; the Greeks will now settle back into their soporific lifestyle and the headline writers will find something more newsworthy. But the hammer of reality has only been lifted temporarily from the anvil of their economy. In a year or so, when the Greeks have spent their latest loan, it will crash down again, harder.

The Greeks are not money-bankrupt, they are energy-bankrupt.

But so is every other nation, to a greater or lesser degree. Saudi Arabia is in a worse state of energy bankruptcy than the poverty stricken Greeks, they just don’t know it yet.

A century ago, Greece had a population of around 5 million, and had only partially freed itself from control by the Ottoman Empire. Despite wars, revolution, hyperinflation and foreign occupation during the 20th century, it remained poor but largely self sufficient as a pastoral country. During that period, the population doubled, due in a large extent to reclaiming Turkish held territories in the early 20th century. In a worst-case scenario, if Greece defaults on its debts, and drops out of the EU and the European currency, 11 million Greeks will be left to feed themselves at a very basic level. They will have no choice but to fall back on a more primitive lifestyle, forgo the luxuries bought by oil consumption and live on the energy sources within their own borders. When they do that, their energy bankruptcy will disappear.

100 years ago, Arabia had a population of 1.5 million, and was also a region of the Ottoman Empire. The term Saudi had not been prefixed to it and the Gulf States did not exist. Their people were basically nomadic, with no concept of national identity, or civilization approaching the Greek level. Though under nominal control of the Turks, they were effectively protected by their hostile desert. Living was primitive, but like the Greeks, self sufficient on their terms.

Then in 1938 oil was found in Arabia, now the population is over 30 million. The current excesses of Saudi Arabia are too familiar to need recounting here. We’ve all watched the Saudis use their oil to build unsustainable cities in deserts, where previously there had been none. They have used their oil to suck finite water out of aquifers and desalinate seawater to maintain the fantasy of endless prosperity. They buy in every conceivable luxury and try to outdo each other with meaningless towers of vanity that they see as expressions of wealth and status. They build because they can, believing the economic nonsense that spending energy-based tokens, i.e. money, creates profit and wealth. Just like the vanity of the Greek Olympic venues, the glittering towers of Riyadh and Mecca and Jeddah are seen as a source of commercial prosperity that will deliver and provide cashflow long after the oilflow has dried up.

Vertropolis-3

As the Greeks discovered when the energy flow stopped going into their arenas, they began to disintegrate. Without constant energy input, money embedded in concrete, glass and steel can only show a return if more money (energy) is constantly added to resist the ultimate certainty of entropy. No one has pointed out that while Saudi towers may be designed to last 100 years, the oil-energy that supports them will run out in less than 30, maybe as few as 20 years. (It has been suggested that Saudi might become an oil importer by 2030, though exactly where the imported oil will come from, or how it might be paid for, is not clear). Then the towers will start to fall apart just as the Saudi economy will fall apart because the oil-energy they use to fuel such vanities is borrowed from their own future. And they will have no means of repaying it; their creditors are not foreign bankers, but their own young and dispossessed. They will violently reject the certainty of a life as goat herders and camel traders if only for the reason that they wouldn’t know how.

Just like the Greeks they will demand that the lifestyle they know carries on unimpeded by the reality of energy shortage. They will try to borrow money to maintain it, with the same result. Bankruptcy on the Saudi scale will make the Greek version look like a small bank overdraft. Unlike Greece, the desert is hostile to human life at the current Saudi density, and needs constant input of food, water and air conditioning to survive 50o C summer heat.

11 million Greeks can feed themselves from their own land. 30 or 40 million Saudis are going to have to face the brutal truth that they can’t. The Saudis currently produce about 10 million barrels of oil a day, and they have to use one third of that to keep themselves alive and in the luxury they think they need. They have created an artificial existence entirely dependent on trading oil for food, and face a future of actual starvation, because there will not be sufficient surplus food energy available anywhere in the world to prevent it once the oil has gone. At current rates of growth their population is projected to reach 60 million by 2050 so between now and then a sudden and catastrophic end to the oil-excess is certain. That life-subsidy of one barrel of oil in three will rapidly disappear, with Saudi using constantly depleting oil to buy food at constantly increasing prices in a race to stay alive. Unemployable young men face a non-future where their luxurious privileges are stripped away by forces beyond their control and understanding. With the oilwells sucked dry, the US fleet will sail away from Bahrain, and discontent will manifest itself into riot. In perhaps only 10 or 15 years, Saudi Arabia as a viable nation will not have sufficient indigenous energy to prevent collapse. There will be nowhere to buy, beg, borrow or steal it from, and no oil for export. Which is where Greece is right now.

Since the oilwealth kicked in and the population exploded, Saudi now has a youth bulge in their population. 37% are under 14, 51% are under 25. Already the unemployment rate in the 16 to 29 age range is reported as 29%, possibly much higher. Of those with graduate level jobs, most have been absorbed by the public sector, with Shias being actively discriminated against by the dominant Sunnis. Jobs requiring technical skills are filled by foreign workers. Effectively this means that virtually all wages and unemployment benefits are paid out of oil revenues. This is where violent unrest will come from when the oil flow begins to dry up. Already Saudi has paid out $billions in freebies to pacify their unemployable young men, while maintaining the unreality of gasoline at 16c a liter, effectively using oil to subsidise itself.

With its oil wealth diminishing, Saudi is a ticking time bomb, split by religious factions and sectarianism, confined by repression at a medieval level and surrounded by religious zealots who see infidel industry being supported by the holy oil that rightfully belongs in the land of the prophet. Compared to that, Greece is an oasis of tranquility.

Masked Sunni gunmen pose for a photo during a patrol outside the city of Falluja April 28, 2014. Iraqi soldiers say they have been trapped in and around the western city of Ramadi. They say they have run low on tank shells, lack aerial cover and armoured vehicles, and have been hit by high casualties and desertion rates. In March and April, ISIL seized a dam in Fallujah, flooded farmland on the outskirts of Baghdad in Abu Ghraib, and drained offshoots of the Euphrates river; the Iraqi government evacuated the main prison for Sunni detainees in Abu Ghraib because of the ongoing clashes; and militants, thought to be from ISIL, bombed the country's oil pipeline to Turkey.  REUTERS/Stringer (IRAQ - Tags: CIVIL UNREST POLITICS CONFLICT) - RTR3MZIX

For a different energy/economy collapse scenario, move on to China.

There, energy is being locked into unusable real estate on a truly colossal scale, concentrated on building cities in places where there are no people to live in them. City after city is being constructed right across the country, creating an illusion of ‘Gross Domestic Product’, where officials can only achieve recognition by the rate at which infrastructure is built. A building without people in it is disregarded as irrelevant. 6 million people enter the Chinese job market every year. Construction creates employment, GDP means everything and urbanization targets must be reached.

Employment is the biggest thing for well-being. The government must not slacken on this for one moment … For us, stable growth is mainly for the sake of maintaining employment. Prime Minister Li Keqiang, November 2013

If an apartment block or shopping mall costs $10 million to build, then that is the ‘value’ of the building on the ledger of national prosperity. If it stands empty for years, the ‘value’ is somehow retained. In China, the motivation is different to that in Saudi Arabia or Greece, but there is the same determination to spend money on projects that are intended to deliver infinite commercial prosperity based on the imagined value of the building itself.

They are building dozens of fully functioning cities on the assumption that workers will show up to fill them. But of course those workers will need food as well as ongoing and permanent employment, which isn’t going to be there, so the ghost cities will not have the means to exist. The cities are where people are supposed to live, the countryside is where food is supposed to be produced.

OB-ZA324_0924gh_G_20130924011534

But both need vast quantities of oil to function. At the current rate of growth of around 8% a year, by 2035 China will (in theory) be using the same volume of oil currently consumed in the world now. That won’t happen of course, because the world oil supply is the same for China as it is for Saudi Arabia, twenty years, maybe much less, no matter how much they buy in and hoard. The Chinese desperation for oil will become critical, just as Saudi exports begin to become unavailable. As supply tightens, so conflict over it will increase, thus restricting supply still further until conflict brings oil production to a virtual standstill. But the Chinese ‘ghost cities’, just like Saudi towers, are intended to last a hundred years.

The figures don’t add up; it’s arithmetic too frightening for most to contemplate. China is dependent on its ever increasing production system to generate new jobs. That drives suicidal pollution and insatiable resource consumption because like capitalist governments everywhere, growth must be prioritized over the environment. Growth without oil is impossible so while the ghost cities of China have a value according to government statistics, they produce nothing; and until they do, will have no value at all. Even if some workers do manage to occupy parts of the ghost cities, without oil there won’t be sufficient power to keep them functioning. Under the inflexible second law of thermodynamics, without constant energy input, entropy takes over and buildings begin to deteriorate from the moment they are completed.

Detroit has followed a different path to bankruptcy.

Detroit Ruins

Ruins at the abandoned Packard Automotive Plant (September 4, 2013 in Detroit, Michigan) serve as canvas for graffiti artists. 78,000 abandoned buildings are strewn across Detroit’s 142 square miles.

Whatever the causes of Detroit’s demise, and there can be said to be many, the overall picture is one of declining energy input. People moved out and no longer spent money on making the city a viable entity. The car plants closed, removing the need for people to be there, the loss of inhabitants removed their collective energy, and the city began to fall apart. The result is unequivocal: remove energy input, and any artifice declines, decays and collapses at an accelerating rate.

Detroit is a bankrupt microcosm of the USA: a nation of 330 million people built entirely on the capitalist system needing infinite expansion, drawing on finite energy borrowed from a future that is unsustainable.

America differs little from the disaster scenarios of Saudi Arabia and China. Finite water is being relentlessly pumped out of depleting aquifers, and finite hydrocarbon is being turned into fertilizer to produce food while cities are forced to grow in hostile deserts. The products of Detroit and cheap fuel allowed suburban sprawl to spread 50 miles out from city hubs across the nation because food and water could be delivered, sewage disposed of and climate altered to personal taste. Declining oil supply will render suburbia hostile to modern living as we know it; the local environment may look different, but the effect on human existence will be the same as the excesses of Saudi or China.

Saudi Arabia, China and America are examples of what our future is going to be. But every nation is promising itself a prosperous future while borrowing from it at an ever-increasing rate, making certain that it cannot exist.

The input of oil into national economics has not exempted humanity from the laws of physics. The trappings of civilization have not altered our fundamental rule of existence: whether your station in life is humble or exalted, if you don’t produce food from the earth on a personal basis, your life depends on someone, no matter how many stages removed, converting sunlight into food on your behalf. Not only that, it must be sold at a price you can afford within a stable environment. Essentially, civilization is just that. Remove it and most will starve while those with enough personal resilience will have no option but to revert to hunter gathering or even scavenging, because what we call civilization is as fragile as the oil it sits on. For the millions of homeless people living on the streets in our ‘civilised’ cities, civilization is over. For them there is little hope of a return to prosperity, with a good job, a warm home and security.

History shows that a radically destabilized environment results in war, famine, disease and death. Any one of those four can and will exacerbate the other three.

Our civilization is becoming increasingly unstable, and right now the four horsemen are getting restless.

In one hundred years time, would you prefer to be living in the United States, China, Saudi Arabia…..or Greece?

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...
← Older posts

Connect with me on Twitter:

Connect with me on Tumblr:

Who really pulls the strings?:

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

Preserving the Status Quo

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

A Kabuki Play

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

Climate Change & Global Warming Myths (Click on Icon)

Climate Change Videos

Topics

  • Basic Rules of this Website
  • Capitalism
  • Climate Change
  • Consumerism
  • Corporate State
  • Cyber-Warfare
  • Cyberwarfare
  • Ecological Overshoot
  • Empire
  • Environmental Degradation
  • Inequality
  • Intro
  • Military Industrial Complex
  • Neo-Colonialism
  • Peak Oil
  • Pollution
  • Wall Street Fraud
  • Weekend Funnies for the Depressed Collapsitarian
  • Year-End Review

Doomsday Clock Stats

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Archives

  • June 2022
  • January 2022
  • July 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • September 2020
  • January 2020
  • September 2019
  • June 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • March 2018
  • May 2017
  • February 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012

Movies and Videos

  • 1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed
  • 1976 Hubbert Clip
  • A meteorite is not the greatest danger of environmental change – The Sixth Extinction
  • After Armageddon – A SHTF scenario
  • American Blackout 2013 National Geographic
  • American Coup
  • An Unreasonable Man (Ralph Nader)
  • Anima Mundi
  • Answering Climate Change Skeptics, Naomi Oreskes
  • Apocalypse, Man (Full Documentary)
  • Apologies Of An Economic Hitman (Full Documentary Movie)
  • Arctic Death Spiral and the Methane Time Bomb
  • Arctic Emergency: Scientists Speak
  • Are Humans Inherently Unsustainable? …Yes.
  • Are Humans Smarter Than Yeast?
  • Atomic Wounds
  • BBC Global Dimming Documentary About Geoengineering & Global Warming
  • Blind Spot
  • Born Into This – Charles Bukowski Documentary
  • Cabot Institute Annual Lecture 2012
  • Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction
  • Capitalism Hits the Fan – Richard Wolff
  • Capitalism is the Crisis (Full Movie)
  • Cinema Politica
  • Clive Hamilton 'Requiem for a Species'
  • Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
  • Conspiracy Rising
  • Consumed – Is Our Consumer Culture Leading to Disaster?
  • Conversations with Great Minds – Climate Scientist Dr. Curt Stager
  • Dark Days – Documentary by Marc Singer
  • David Fridley – Green Dreams: Future or Fantasy?
  • Developing a Sustainable Community – Simon Michaux
  • Do Fox News Viewers Understand Basic Science At All?
  • Do Fox viewers understand the propaganda they are watching?
  • Earth 2100 – Full Documentary / Movie Full HD
  • Earth Days (2009) – Full Movie
  • Earth Under Water – Worldwide Flooding | Sea Level Rise (SLR)
  • END CIV Resist Or Die (Full)
  • END:CIV 2011
  • Facing the Anthropocene: fossil capitalism and the crisis of the earth system
  • Final Warning Limits to Growth
  • Four Horsemen
  • Garbage Warrior [Full Length Documentary]
  • Gasland Part II
  • Geo Scarcity – Geo Destinies in the Coming Age
  • Geologic and human time scales: How can we salvage our global civilization?
  • Green Illusions
  • Green Illusions: "Solar Cells and Other Fairy Tales"
  • Guy McPherson – Earth Extinction 2030
  • Guy’s Climate Chaos Presentation from Pauline Schneider
  • Harvest of Empire
  • Hoodwinked: Who Stole Our World – Presented By John Perkins
  • Into Eternity ( A Nuclear Waste World )
  • Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers • FULL DOCUMENTARY
  • Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs, & Steel
  • Jeremy Jackson: Ocean Apocalypse
  • Joseph Tainter: The Energy Crisis and the End of The Industrial Age
  • Journeyman Pictures
  • Koch Brothers Exposed
  • Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance
  • LAST CALL: the untold reasons of the global crisis
  • Last Hours for Humanity?
  • Lecture on Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter
  • Life After People
  • Manufacturing Consent
  • Modern Black Death – The Next Pandemic – BBC Horizon
  • Nate Hagens – Limits to Growth: Where We Are and What to Do About It
  • Noam Chomsky – Propaganda & Control of the Public Mind
  • Obey
  • Ocean Acidification
  • Ocean Acidification in Earth's Past: Insights to the Future – James Zachos
  • Oil, Smoke & Mirrors
  • Peak mining & implications for natural resource management
  • Permian – Triassic Mayhem: Earth's Largest Mass Extinction
  • Peter Ward Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps
  • Peter Ward The Medea Hypothesis II
  • Peter Ward: The Medea Hypothesis I
  • Photographing the Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima
  • Pirate Television: Financializing America with Randy Mandell
  • Professor Al Bartlett – Arithmetic, Population and Energy
  • Professor Kevin Anderson: Real Clothes for the Emperor – Facing Climate Change
  • Rick Wolff // A Cure for Capitalism
  • Six degrees could change the world
  • Somewhere In New Mexico Before The End Of Time
  • Submedia TV
  • Surplus: Terrorized Into Being Consumers
  • Surviving Progress
  • Techno Fix – Why Technology Won’t Save Us Or the Environment
  • Techno-Fix – Dr. Michael Huesemann interview
  • The Age of Stupid
  • The Big Fix
  • The Century Of The Self
  • The Chomsky Videos
  • The Coming Famine
  • The Corporation : The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
  • The Crash Course
  • The Crisis of Civilization : Full Movie
  • The Day the Earth Nearly Died
  • The Domino Effect – Overpopulation
  • The False Solutions of Green Energy – Wilbert & Foley (PIELC 2014)
  • The Flaw
  • The Fuck-it Point
  • The Long Emergency
  • The Man who Quit Money
  • The Methane Ticking Time Bomb has Struck Again…..
  • The Myth of Capitalism with Michael Parenti
  • The Myth of Sustainability – Guy McPherson
  • The Myth of the Liberal Media: The Propaganda Model of News
  • The Ordinary Madness of Charles Bukowski
  • The Overview Effect
  • The Permian–Triassic Extinction Event [FULL VIDEO]
  • The Planet by Johan Söderberg
  • The Power Principle: (Full Length Documentary)
  • The Secure & the Dispossessed: How the Military and Corporations are Shaping a Climate-Changed World
  • The Shock Doctrine 2009
  • The Sixth Extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert)
  • The Twin Sides of the Fossil Fuel Coin – Guy McPherson
  • There's No Tomorrow (peak oil, energy, growth & the future)
  • Threads (Nuclear War)
  • Tom Murphy: Growth has an Expiration Date
  • TOXIC: AMAZON – FULL LENGTH
  • Up & Coming Liquid Fuel Crisis by Tom Murphy
  • VICE Documentaries
  • What A Way To Go: Life at the end of Empire
  • Who's Afraid Of Machiavelli?

Notes and Documents

  • 'Conspiracy Theories' and Clandestine Politics
  • (2019) UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’
  • 2019 UN Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services(One Million Species At Risk of Extinction)
  • American Empire and Killing Hope – The Essays of William Blum
  • An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security
  • An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for US National Security
  • An Anarchist FAQ Webpage
  • An Inconvenient Truth: Does Responsible Consumption Benefit Corporations More Than Society?
  • Animal Minds and the Foible of Human Exceptionalism
  • Averting Collapse: 6 Steps
  • “Are Humans Unsustainable by Nature?”
  • Book review of Turchin’s “Secular Cycles” and “War & Peace & War”
  • BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED
  • Burning Energy to Keep Cool: The Hidden Energy Crisis in Saudi Arabia
  • Capitalism cannot solve our ecological collapse: articles by Richard Smith
  • Capitalism's Ideological Crutches
  • Carmageddon and Karl Marx
  • Carmaggedon or Rational Discourse?
  • Charles Eisenstein Essays
  • Chatham House: Sustainable Energy Security
  • Christopher Clugston ~ Research Papers and Essays
  • Climate and collapse: Only through the insurrection of civil societies will we avoid the worst
  • Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis (2012)
  • Climate Change is Simple – We Do Something or We're Screwed
  • Climate Change: Just the Facts.
  • Consistency in American Foreign Policy
  • Could the 'Black Death' Strike Again?
  • Dangerous Climate Warming: Myth & Reality
  • Dangerous Speech Project
  • Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis
  • Dennis Meadows: “There is nothing that we can do”
  • Desert
  • DieOff.org
  • Dinosaur, We
  • Dispelling myths about oil
  • Dr. Steven Best – Writings
  • Drill, Baby, Drill
  • Earth may be 140 years away from reaching carbon levels not seen in 56 million years
  • Ecoglobe: Requiem
  • Edward Morbius
  • Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) for photovoltaic solar systems in regions of moderate insolation
  • English version of German military peak oil study
  • Entropy and Economics
  • Eric R. Pianka: The Vanishing Book of Life on Earth
  • Fleeing Babylon
  • FOURTH NATIONAL CLIMATE ASSESSMENT Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States
  • FRACKING GONE WRONG: FINDING A BETTER WAY
  • Getting to the Nearest Star? Not in Our Lifetimes…If Ever!
  • Gleanings for an Understanding of the Endgame
  • Global Drought Monitor
  • Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism
  • Global Warming & Climate Change Myths
  • Globalization and the Emergence of a Transnational Oligarchy
  • Green Capitalism: the God that Failed
  • Green Capitalism: The God That Failed (Updated)
  • GRIFFIN: The political writings of G.S. Griffin, activist and author
  • Hirsch Report
  • How a Culture Dies
  • How Many Gigatons of Carbon Dioxide?
  • How to Avoid Population Overshoot and Collapse
  • Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind
  • Humans will not 'migrate' to other planets, Nobel winner says: The 77-year-old said he felt the need to "kill all the statements that say 'OK, we will go to a liveable planet if one day life is not possible on earth'."
  • Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future
  • Implication of our technological species being first and early
  • Intentional Ignorance
  • Interview with Jay Hanson
  • Is Global Collapse Imminent?
  • Jason W. Moore: Essays
  • Johnny Reb's Freethought Website
  • Julian Cribb
  • Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II – Part I by William Blum
  • Le Monde interview with Dr Robert Hirsch from September 2010
  • Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
  • Living Dangerously: Stories of Climate Change
  • Living for the Moment while Devaluing the Future
  • Lloyd's adds its voice to dire 'peak oil' warnings
  • Looking Back on the 'Limits to Growth'
  • MARY BOOTH ON THE MYTH OF “GREEN” ENERGY FROM WOOD
  • Michael E. Mann
  • Mysterious Siberian Crater Found at "End of the World" May Portend Methane Climate Catastrophe
  • NATURAL CAPITAL AT RISK: THE TOP 100 EXTERNALITIES OF BUSINESS
  • Natural Law
  • Natural Way of Farming Masanobu – Fukuoka Green Philosophy
  • Nature’s Laws No Longer Apply…
  • Net Energy and The Economy
  • New scientific study predicts that plastic pollution and toxic chemical-induced ocean acidification will cause a trophic cascade collapse of the entire marine ecosystem, destroying human society within the next 25 years.
  • NOAA & U.S. Geological Survey Interactive Sea Level Rise Map (up to 25 ft)
  • Noam Chomsky on human extinction: The corporate elite are actively courting disaster
  • Oil and gas industry using military psyops techniques to reduce opposition to fracking
  • OilCrash.com
  • On Human Nature
  • Partnership for Civil Justice
  • Peak Energy, Climate Change, and the Collapse of Global Civilization
  • Peak Oil – A Turning Point for Mankind by Dr. Colin J. Campbell
  • Peter H. Gleick : Has the U.S. Passed the Point of Peak Water?
  • Plastic and toxic chemical-induced ocean acidification will cause a plankton crisis that will devastate humanity over the next 25 years, unless we stop the pollution.
  • Poles Threaten “Climate Chaos” from Continued Warming
  • Policy Makers Slow to Take Peak Oil Action
  • Power Point Presentation on “Corporate Globalization, Corporate Power, Free Trade, Mega Trade Agreements and the Negative Impacts of TPP” by Janet M Eaton, PhD
  • Power Shift Away From Green Illusions
  • Primitivism
  • Professor Charles Hall
  • Renewable energy – Hope or hype?
  • RENEWABLE ENERGY – THE ARGUMENT AGAINST ITS CAPACITY TO SUSTAIN AN ENERGY-INTENSIVE SOCIETY
  • Richard Reese on 'Near Term Extinction'
  • Saudi Arabia May Become Oil Importer by 2030
  • Searching for a Miracle: 'Net Energy' Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society
  • Secular Cycles, Chapter 1
  • Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter planet, by Mark Lynas
  • Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
  • Stephanie McMillan's 'Capitalism Must Die'
  • TED talks – a recipe for civilisational disaster
  • The Anarchist Library
  • The Authoritarian Personality
  • The Bichler & Nitzan Archives
  • The climate threat: What our children can expect
  • The Coming Reality of Sea Level Rise: Too Fast Too Soon
  • The Consumer Trap
  • The Current Mass Extinction
  • The Damage of Current Human Activities Without Precedent in Past 'Mass Extinction' Fossil Records.
  • The Discovery of Global Warming
  • The End of Growth, Seven Years Later
  • The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
  • The evolution and psychology of self-deception
  • The Final Empire THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION
  • The Final Empire: THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION
  • The Free Press
  • The Future of Ice Sheets and Sea Ice: Between Reversible Retreat and Unstoppable Loss
  • The Gore Vidal Pages
  • The Great Oil Swindle
  • The human brain is in Denial.
  • The Human Nature of Unsustainability
  • The Idiot's Guide To Buying A Congressman
  • The Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & U.S. Policy
  • The Last Great Global Warmıng
  • The Limits to Growth (PDF scanned version)
  • The Loss of Biodiversity: a Dangerous Game
  • The Meritocracy Myth
  • The moral environment on Wall Street is pathological — money rules all
  • The Myth of the 1970′s Global Cooling Consensus
  • The myth of US self-sufficiency in crude oil
  • THE NEED FOR A NEW ECONOMIC SYSTEM: "…he feared that human society is headed for a crash."
  • The Network of Global Corporate Control
  • The New Middle Ages
  • The physics of long-run global economic growth
  • THE POPULATION PROBLEM AND SOCIALISM
  • The Power Elite
  • The Principle of Imminent Collapse
  • The Science of Apocalypse
  • The Story of P(ee)
  • The Story of Phosphorus: 7 reasons why we need to transform phosphorus use in the global food system
  • The Temptation of The Technofix (The Quest for “New Nature”)
  • The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
  • There Is No "Green" Energy
  • Thomas Homer-Dixon
  • Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar Photovoltaics
  • Tipping Towards the Unknown
  • Too many bodies? The return and disavowal of the population question
  • Trade-Off: Financial system supply-chain cross contagion – a study in global systemic collapse
  • Twenty Premises on Industrial Civilization from Derrick Jensen
  • Twenty-First Century Collapse
  • Underminers: A Practical Guide to Radical Change
  • We Are All Madoffs
  • Wealth and Inequality – Pareto, Gini and Contingency
  • What Evolution Is?
  • Who Rules America: An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%
  • Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power
  • Why shale gas won’t end our energy woes
  • Why Space Opera Won't Fly
  • Why won't planting trees stop global warming?
  • Zygmunt Bauman

RSS 3 Quarkes Daily

  • 3 Quarks Daily has moved!
  • polixeni papapetrou (1960 - 2018)
  • bob dorough (1923 - 2018)
  • charles neville (1939 - 2018)
  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘This could be the beginning of a revolution’
  • Sunday Poem
  • Why Only Art Can Save Us: An Interview with Santiago Zabala
  • Cell by Cell, Scientists Map the Genetic Steps as Eggs Become Animals
  • The Islamic State’s Lingering Legacy among Young Men from the Mosul Area
  • Where the wild tales are: how stories teach kids to nurture nature

RSS A Closer Look

  • Cookies
  • The structure of this blog
  • Pseudo-Patriots
  • Everyone's Irrational
  • The Mathematics of Inequality
  • The Arctic may be sea ice-free in summer by the 2030s, new study warns
  • Good news on energy
  • Spanking and crime rates
  • World likely to breach 1.5C climate threshold by 2027, scientists warn
  • Animals Are Not Things’: Brazil Bans Live Cattle Exports

RSS A Prosperous Way Down

  • A really inconvenient truth
  • Energy ethics for survival of people in nature
  • Don’t come around here no more
  • Systems thinking and the narrative of climate change
  • Nuclear power and the collapse of society
  • A systemic perspective on life
  • The Asian Miracles: Free renewables made it all possible
  • Responsibility for regeneration
  • Treatment wetlands equal cleaner water and more birds
  • Reflections on scientific illiteracy

RSS Adam Curtis Blog

  • SAVE YOUR KISSES FOR ME
  • WHILE THE BAND PLAYED ON
  • HE'S BEHIND YOU
  • MENTAL CHANNEL NUMBER ONE - THE MAN FROM MARS
  • HOW TO KILL A RATIONAL PEASANT
  • IF YOU TAKE MY ADVICE - I'D REPRESS THEM
  • WHITE NEGRO FOR MAYOR
  • RUPERT MURDOCH - A PORTRAIT OF SATAN
  • BODYBUILDING AND NATION-BUILDING
  • WHO WOULD GOD VOTE FOR?

RSS Adam Vs The Man

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS AdBusters

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Against the Grain

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Aljazeera

  • Trial begins for deputy accused of inaction in US school shooting
  • Five facts about Inter Miami, Lionel Messi’s club to be
  • Canada’s Trudeau pans Google and Meta for ‘bullying’ to stop bill
  • The ‘complex’ legacy of US professional wrestling’s Iron Sheik
  • In Japan, embarrassed employees pay agencies to quit for them
  • BBC, BA, Nova Scotia among first big-name victims in global hack
  • Arms depot battle rages in Sudan as fuel facility burns
  • Ethiopia says it foiled al-Shabab attack near border with Somalia
  • UK Prime Minister Sunak talks trade, AI and Ukraine on US trip
  • Jailed Tunisian opposition leader’s health deteriorating: Wife

RSS Aljazeera – Opinion

  • Canada’s Trudeau pans Google and Meta for ‘bullying’ to stop bill
  • The ‘complex’ legacy of US professional wrestling’s Iron Sheik
  • In Japan, embarrassed employees pay agencies to quit for them
  • BBC, BA, Nova Scotia among first big-name victims in global hack
  • Arms depot battle rages in Sudan as fuel facility burns
  • Ethiopia says it foiled al-Shabab attack near border with Somalia
  • UK Prime Minister Sunak talks trade, AI and Ukraine on US trip
  • Jailed Tunisian opposition leader’s health deteriorating: Wife
  • Wiretapping scandal thrusts Colombian government into crisis
  • What does Antony Blinken hope to achieve during visit to Saudi?

RSS All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go

  • Another Christmas
  • Objective Crisis, Subjective Crisis
  • Jesse Jackson on poverty
  • Quote of the day
  • Voting and the ‘rule by law’
  • Wendy Brown on neoliberalism and democracy
  • Thomas Ferguson discusses our situation
  • This way doth dictatorship lie
  • Quote of the day
  • President Kamala Harris

RSS Alternative Radio

  • [Arundhati Roy] India: On the Road to Theocracy

RSS AlterNet

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Anarchist News

  • Numerous incendiary outbreaks in active memory of ‘Punky Mauri’
  • Words for Compañero Punki Mauri
  • ANews Podcast 316 – 6.2.23
  • TOTW: Joy
  • VIDEOS FROM THE TRASH DIMENSION EPISODE 6
  • Next Phase
  • Resistance to Franco: The Anarchist Air Force...
  • Van Burnt in Solidarity w/ Giannis Michailidis
  • Deeds and Propaganda
  • Unknown and Essential. Forgers and the Libertarian Underground

RSS Antony Loewenstein

  • Background Briefing interview on Palestine, Wikileaks and war crimes
  • Chatham House reviews The Palestine Laboratory
  • “The Harvard of anti-terrorism”
  • The Canadian role in Israel’s endless occupation
  • How Israeli phone hacking tool conquered the world
  • Israel’s democracy deficit on crack
  • ABC Adelaide talks The Palestine Laboratory
  • Talking Palestine with the South China Morning Post
  • Recommending The Palestine Laboratory
  • TRT World’s The Newsmakers discuss Palestine as a laboratory

RSS Apocadocs

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Arctic Emergency Institute

  • Declining Summer Sea Ice Threatens More than Arctic Wildlife

RSS Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG)

  • AMEG Strategic Plan
  • Breaking the Chain
  • AMEG Policy Brief
  • The biggest story of all time
  • Getting the picture
  • Storm exacerbates Arctic predicament
  • Food security threatened by sea ice loss
  • Supplementary evidence to the EAC from John Nissen on behalf of AMEG
  • Message from the Arctic Methane Emergency Group

RSS Arctic News

  • A Climate of Betrayal
  • Arctic sea ice under threat
  • Nuremberg trials for imperiling all and bringing on mass extinction of species
  • Will there be Arctic sea ice left in September 2023?
  • Humans may be extinct in 2026
  • High sea surface temperature in North Atlantic
  • Temperatures rising fast March 2023
  • IPCC keeps downplaying the danger even as reality strikes
  • Sea surface temperature at record high
  • We are now in the Suicene

RSS Arctic Sea Ice

  • PIOMAS December 2019
  • PIOMAS November 2019
  • PIOMAS October 2019
  • PIOMAS September 2019
  • PIOMAS August 2019
  • Comparing
  • PIOMAS July 2019

RSS Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis

  • Springing into summer
  • A slow start to the Arctic spring
  • From polar dawn to dusk
  • Arctic sea ice maximum at fifth lowest on satellite record
  • Transition time
  • Antarctic sea ice settles on record low extent, again
  • Antarctic sea ice extent sets a new record low
  • Arctic sea ice low, Antarctic lower
  • December lows
  • Lingering open water areas

RSS Around the Coast Mountains

  • The name’s Mark… Mark BC
  • Packrafting / Fatbiking Buntzen Lake
  • My New Surly Pugsley Fatbike Build
  • Salsipuedes Canyon by Fatbike
  • Bridge River Recon Part 3 — Chilcotin Mountains Park
  • Bridge River Recon Part 2
  • Bridge River Recon, Part 1
  • Chilcotin Bikerafting Route
  • May 25 to 28 — Long Beach, California to Alfonsinas, Mexico
  • Ring Pass, Attempt #2

RSS Arthur Silber

  • Moving Interruptus, and Why Hospitals Suck
  • Crisis
  • How Many Damn Fucking Times Do I Have to Explain This?
  • So Close, Yet So Far
  • Very Sick, Very Scared
  • Help! Please
  • Mama's Last Hug
  • Twilight Zone America
  • Concerning Moral Judgment, and Moral Monsters
  • SERIOUS TROUBLE: Pain. Hospital. ???

RSS Arundhati Roy

  • Modi’s model is at last revealed for what it is: violent Hindu nationalism underwritten by big business | Arundhati Roy
  • This is no ordinary spying. Our most intimate selves are now exposed | Arundhati Roy
  • ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe – podcast
  • Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe: ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’
  • Modi's brutal treatment of Kashmir exposes his tactics – and their flaws | Arundhati Roy
  • Arundhati Roy extract: 'The backlash came in police cases, court appearances and even jail'
  • Literature provides shelter. That's why we need it | Arundhati Roy
  • Amid arrests and killings, Bangladesh and India must fight censorship | Arundhati Roy
  • An exclusive extract from Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness
  • Edward Snowden meets Arundhati Roy and John Cusack: ‘He was small and lithe, like a house cat’

RSS Arundhati Roy Says

  • A perfect day for democracy
  • Arundhati Roy speaks about the issue of rape in India
  • We Call This Progress
  • ‘Those Who’ve Tried To Change The System Via Elections Have Ended Up Being Changed By It'
  • Roy Against the Machine
  • If we do not love people, what are we fighting for?
  • All roads lead to Sharjah book fair
  • ‘Fairy princess’ to ‘instinctive critic’
  • Arundhati Roy shuns 'activist' tag
  • State attacking tribals in name of Green Hunt: Roy

RSS ASPO – USA

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

RSS Avedon’s Sideshow

  • But only now my love has grown
  • You can't jump a jet plane like you can a freight train
  • Did you have to traumatize my kids?
  • And in your death's mask face there are no signs which can be seen
  • Don't let it slip away
  • And hope that my dreams will come true
  • You can not do that, it breaks all the rules
  • Twelfthnight
  • You just gotta call on me
  • There's too much confusion

RSS Bad Astronomy

  • Photos of Freaky Orange Sky Enveloping Entire Northeast Suggests End of World Will at Least Look Kind of Cool
  • The Slatest Jun 7: Wow, Jack Smith Has Been Busy Lately!
  • Chris Licht Failed at CNN. And So Did His One Big Idea.
  • Need Advice? Ask our columnists.
  • The Freedom Caucus Is Having Another Temper Tantrum
  • My Ex Has Me Trapped in a Sex Trance
  • The Unbelievable Orange Sky Northeasterners Are Staring at Today
  • Progressive Judges May Have Found a Use for Clarence Thomas’ Terrible Guns Ruling
  • The Team Trying Very, Very Hard to Be the Worst in Baseball History
  • The Curse of the Bravo Reality Show Has Come for One of Its Greatest Franchises

RSS Barbara Ehrenreich

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS BBC: Science & Environment

  • Crocodile found to have made herself pregnant
  • Climate change: How is my country doing on tackling it?
  • Could ultra-processed foods be harmful for us?
  • 'Extinct' butterfly species reappears in UK
  • Solar panels - an eco-disaster waiting to happen?
  • Are tornadoes in the US getting worse?
  • Conservationists tackle decline of Scottish coastal species
  • Peas that don't taste like peas could help the planet
  • Can ‘enhanced rock weathering’ help combat climate change?
  • Global warming set to break key 1.5C limit for first time

RSS Big Picture Agriculture

  • BIG PICTURE AGRICULTURE'S LATEST NEWS
  • How to Stay Informed About Agriculture, Food, and Farming Issues
  • Dr. Walter Falcon's 2019 Iowa Farm Report
  • Agriculture Reading Picks
  • The Merits of Amaranth
  • Global Food and Agriculture Photos October 28, 2018
  • Unloading Livestock in Ohio 1938
  • Agriculture Reading Picks
  • Managed Rotational Grazing with Profitable Dairy in Minnesota
  • Global Food and Agriculture Photos October 21, 2018

RSS Bill Moyers

  • PODCAST: Dr. Bandy Lee Saw It Coming – The Violence Foretold in Donald Trump’s Election
  • Trump-Russia-Ukraine Timeline
  • Insurrection Timeline
  • Juneteenth: America’s Other Independence Day
  • March 30, 2021
  • Letters From an American: Heather Cox Richardson
  • The Pandemic Timeline
  • Racism in America
  • Bill Moyers On Democracy Podcast
  • Stop Attacks on Asian-Americans NOW!

RSS Bit Tooth Energy

  • Waterjetting 37e - Using Cavitation to disintegrate rock
  • Waterjetting 37d - Underground Drilling with Waterjets
  • Waterjetting 37c - A Drilling Diversion
  • Waterjetting 37b - How safe is it?
  • Waterjetting 37a - Removing Explosives
  • Waterjetting 36d - Going through more complex walls.
  • Waterjetting 36c - Cutting walls
  • Waterjetting 36b - Katrina anniversary and the power of water
  • Waterjetting 36a - Jet stripping of tires
  • Waterjetting 35e - A low cost version of the soil sucker

RSS Bizarro Blog

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Brane Space

  • Can It Be True? There Is No "Inner Mental World" (Or Specific Knowledge) It's Merely Another Human Illusion
  • Solving Simple Problems In Linear Algebra (4)
  • Don't Blame Biden For Ongoing Inflation -- And Why Only An Idiot Would Make A Big Deal Over Biden's AFA Fall
  • Solution To Simple Linear Algebra Problem (3)
  • Newcomer Independent Yemi Mobolade Trounces Career Conservo To Become Colorado Springs First Black Mayor
  • Solving Simple Problems In Linear Algebra (3)
  • Cocky House Dems' Bravado During 2022 Lame Duck Is Partly Responsible for the Debt 'Pickle' We're In
  • Solutions To Simple Linear Algebra Problems (2)
  • Ignorant Attack On Amanda Gorman's Book (& Stature) Was Overt Racism, Pure And Simple
  • The Hard Truth: Without Math Even 'Basic Concepts' In "Popular" Physics Books Are Meaningless

RSS Brave New World

  • Islam: The Overlooked Aspect of Rumi’s Poetry
  • Remembering Nur ad-Din Zengi: The Light of Faith
  • Francophobia Among Muslims: Just Another Myth?
  • A Year in Kazakhstan: Some General Observations
  • ‘Dirilis Ertugrul’ — A History We’ve Forgotten?
  • Almaty, Kazakhstan: City of Tourists and Mountains
  • Nur-Sultan City (Astana): A Young and Futuristic City
  • Tashkent, Uzbekistan: The City with 2200+ Years of History
  • Remembering Berke Khan, 1209-66
  • Tbilisi, Georgia — The City Where (Almost) Everyone Owns a Hotel

RSS Breaking the Set

  • Abby Martin Breaks the Set One Last Time
  • Never Stop Breaking the Set!
  • Cuba Part III: The Evolution of Revolution
  • Cuba Part II: Ebola Solidarity & Castro’s Daughter on Gay Rights
  • Why Are Americans Getting Their Medical Degrees in Cuba?
  • Cuba Part I: Revolution, Sabotage & Un-Normal Relations
  • Why the CIA Won’t Give Up on Venezuela | Interview with Eva Golinger
  • [531] Bayer Infects Thousands with HIV, Clinton's Shocking Bedfellows & Netanyahu’s Cartoon Lies
  • CIA Torture Whistleblower John Kiriakou: Wake Up, You’re Next
  • Abby Responds to John McCain Promoting Breaking the Set

RSS Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  • Ukrainian dam is destroyed; nuclear plant lives in a ‘grace period’
  • One way attack: How loitering munitions are shaping conflicts
  • New START: To succeed, plan for failure
  • Scientists identify over 5,000 new species at future deep-sea mining site
  • Another warning from industry leaders on dangers posed by AI
  • Juan Manuel Santos: ‘[W]e will one day see the hands of the Doomsday Clock move backward’
  • Big hairy armadillos and COVID: A warning from the animal kingdom about our pandemic future
  • Q&A: How DARPA hacked a science writer’s brain and turned her into a sharpshooter
  • Canadian reactors that “recycle” plutonium would create more problems than they solve
  • ‘Right of boom’: Meet the experts who respond to nuclear disaster

RSS Business Insider

  • Apple's insane price tag for the Vision Pro is part of a brilliant and proven strategy
  • Wearing Apple's Vision Pro for 30 minutes put a big red mark on the forehead of WSJ's gadget reviewer
  • Ukraine's dam break disaster likely won't stop the big counter-offensive that has Russian troops on edge
  • OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says there's 'too much of an investor frenzy around AI in the short-term' in Silicon Valley
  • DeSantis breaks silence on migrant flights that landed on Newsom's turf, boasting that the program was 'very effective'
  • Sennheiser Ambeo Soundbar Max review: The best surround sound you can get from a standalone bar
  • Rudy Giuliani asks judge to toss 'salacious' references to his appearance in 'Borat' movie, denies making racist remarks and selling pardons in response to ex-staffer's sex-abuse lawsuit
  • 5 common survival myths that could get you killed in the wilderness
  • The worst liquidity crunch since the Lehman Brothers crisis will be the stock market's biggest obstacle this summer, JPMorgan's chief equity strategist says
  • A crocodile makes history with the first-ever virgin birth of its species, researchers say. But none of the 14 eggs hatched much to scientists' disappointment.

RSS C-Realm

  • Automation and SJWs: A Conversation with James Howard Kunstler
  • It's official. The Age of Limits gathering is on hiatus
  • Three Conferences in Three Weeks
  • Mantra and Collapse
  • Dirty Pool: A Response to Guy McPherson
  • Interview with Dmytri Kleiner, Venture Communist and Miscommunications Technologist
  • Epochs and Applecarts
  • The Smell of Betterness
  • Descent in Anarchy?
  • Has Charles Mann Turned to the Dark Side?

RSS Cagle: Premium Cartoon News

  • PGA-LIV MERGER
  • Ready to fire up those Father’s Day memories?
  • LIV GOLF-PGA TOUR MERGER
  • 2024 GOP FIELD
  • TEAM ANTI-WOKE
  • BOOK BAN FAIR
  • WITCHES WITCHES EVERYWHERE
  • PGA SELLOUT
  • AIR QUALITY
  • APPLE VISON PRO

RSS Cassandra’s Legacy

  • Cassandra is Dead. Long Live Cassandra!
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect": The Collapse of Saudi Arabia's Water Supply
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect"
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest post on "The Seneca Effect"
  • Ugo Bardi's latest post on "The Seneca Effect"
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect". The Hydrogen Myth
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect." The Tunnel Vision Problem
  • Cassandra has Moved
  • Censorship: How the West is becoming more and more like the old Soviet Union
  • Donald Trump: The Sacrifice of the Sacred King

RSS Censored News

  • Ox Sam Camp Being Raided, Arrests Underway at Paiute Massacre Site
  • Choking with grief, Myron Dewey's family described their loss, as court hands down minimal sentence
  • Driver of Truck Killing Myron Dewey to be Sentenced Today
  • The Death of Paiute Journalist Myron Dewey: The Poisonous Destruction by the U.S. Government
  • Descendants of Ghost Dancers Protect Paiute Massacre Site from Canada's Lithium Americas
  • Mohawk Nation News 'Rocking Mohawk Mothers'
  • MNN -- INNU & GUARDIANS OF NITASSINAN EVICT LOGGERS
  • Foreign Mining Giants Enter Legal Fight to Destroy Oak Flat
  • Paiute Shoshone at Massacre Site Must Defend Themselves in Court from Lithium Americas
  • Mohawk Nation News 'Come to Akwesasne Kanonsesne Press Conference Wednesday'

RSS Center For Biological Diversity

  • Rare New Mexico Plant Proposed for Endangered Species Protections
  • Legal Intervention Defends Protections for Lesser Prairie Chickens
  • Legal Victory Gives Southern Hognose Snake Another Chance at Endangered Species Protections
  • Federal Judge Nixes Approval of Idaho Phosphate Mine
  • Supreme Court Denies Oil Industry Challenge to California Offshore Fracking Moratorium
  • Global Plastics Treaty Negotiations End in Paris With “Zero Draft” Still to Come
  • Embattled Puerto Rico Dredging Project Faces Court Hearing
  • Secretary Haaland Protects Chaco Canyon From Oil, Gas Drilling
  • Debt Ceiling Deal Stains Biden’s Legacy on Climate, Environmental Justice
  • Idaho, Wyoming Urged to Require Bear Identification Course for Black Bear Hunters

RSS Center for Investigative Journalism

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Center for Economic & Policy Research

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Charles Eisenstein’s Blog

  • Peace-building
  • FASCHISMUS UND DAS ANTIFESTIVAL
  • Das Fest ist tot, es lebe das Fest
  • Die Erde als Tempel
  • Time to Push
  • The Rehearsal is Over
  • Some Stuff I’m Reading
  • Beyond Industrial Medicine
  • A Temple of this Earth
  • The Sacrificial King

RSS Chomsky

  • The Kind of Anarchism I Believe in, and What's Wrong with Libertarians
  • Upcoming speaking event in Boston with Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, and Jeremy Scahill
  • Violence and Dignity: Reflections on the Middle East (2013 Edward Said Lecture)
  • How Noam Chomsky is discussed, by Glenn Greenwald
  • Profile of Noam Chomsky in the Financial Times
  • Brief profile of Noam Chomsky in The Guardian (UK), by journalist Charles Glass
  • Rare video of Noam Chomsky interviewed with Gore Vidal in 1991
  • Complete videorecording of 1971 debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault
  • Noam Chomsky profile in the Financial Times
  • Additional video excerpt of Noam Chomsky speech at East Stroudsburg University, Pennsylvania

RSS Chris Hedges

  • Festival of Riches: Cannes Premieres by Godard, Wenders, Scorsese and More
  • Backroom Deals Increase Public Cost of Cop City
  • Could Religious Charter Schools Upend American Education?
  • The Quickening Demise of CNN
  • In Wake of Animal Testing Scandal, Neuralink Nabs FDA Approval
  • Supreme Court Slashes Legal Protections for Striking
  • How AI Could Take Over Elections—And Undermine Democracy
  • Ken Loach Forever
  • What Lower Fertility Rates Mean for Climate Change
  • Ralph Nader: Congress Must Learn to Say “No” to the Defense Industry

RSS Class Warfare Blog

  • Was the Founding American Dream an Illusion?
  • It’s a Miracle I Tells Yuh!
  • The AIs are Coming for Us!
  • Free Will, Again . . . Again?
  • Signs and Portents
  • We’ve Had No True Christians™ for Millennia
  • Eighteen . . . Really?
  • We Need to Get Rid of the Elites
  • Christian Nationalists are Trying to Enslave Women!
  • Florida Has Not Yet Gone “All In”

RSS Cliff Schecter

  • The ‘complex’ legacy of US professional wrestling’s Iron Sheik
  • In Japan, embarrassed employees pay agencies to quit for them
  • BBC, BA, Nova Scotia among first big-name victims in global hack
  • Arms depot battle rages in Sudan as fuel facility burns
  • Ethiopia says it foiled al-Shabab attack near border with Somalia
  • UK Prime Minister Sunak talks trade, AI and Ukraine on US trip
  • Jailed Tunisian opposition leader’s health deteriorating: Wife
  • Wiretapping scandal thrusts Colombian government into crisis
  • What does Antony Blinken hope to achieve during visit to Saudi?
  • Canada’s record wildfires should be ‘wake-up call’, experts warn

RSS Climate and Capitalism

  • Industrial farming has killed billions of birds
  • Coverup: Industry hid dangers of ‘forever chemicals’
  • The ‘net zero’ hoax: Chevron’s fraudulent climate plan exposed
  • Ecological ruin or ecological revolution?
  • Global heat will hit new records in next five years
  • Has the ocean heat bomb been ignited?
  • Capital’s long war to dispossess the poor
  • Indigenous fighters resist forest destruction in Peru
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, May 2023
  • Land, sea and air: Climate change driving planetary crises

RSS Climate Central

  • The looming threat for Maine’s iconic potato industry
  • Ellis Island, lighthouses among historic NJ sites flooding as seas rise
  • Still rare in Iowa, electric car powers Des Moines family’s home during blackouts
  • Storied Maine ski resort bets future on reining in high costs of warmer winters
  • Hardly any past Winter Olympic host cities will have the snow to host in 60 years
  • Data may be Colorado’s best bet to mitigate increasing wildfire risk on the Front Range
  • How sea level rise is affecting your commute to and around Atlantic City
  • ‘A moral imperative’: Monastic sisters in rural Midwest make faith-based case for climate action
  • As flooding amplifies along the East Coast, Buddhist and Jewish faith leaders join the climate fight
  • ‘Preach now or mourn in the future’: How Key West faith leaders are confronting climate change

RSS Climate Change: The Next Generation

  • Historic Greenland ice sheet rainfall unraveled
  • Flip Flop: Why Variations in Earth's Magnetic Field Aren't Causing Today's Climate Change
  • Let's call climate change deniers what they really are: CLIMATE LIARS!
  • Amy Westerfelt: The Reason COVID-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation
  • Bill McKibben's response to Michael Moore's Planet of the Humans
  • WaPo: The Congo rain forest is losing ability to absorb carbon dioxide. That’s bad for climate change
  • Mark Carney of the Bank of England unveils climate stress test
  • Tropical forests may be heating Earth by 2035
  • Roger Harrabin, BBC: Bank of England chief Mark Carney issues climate change warning
  • Evidence that an ice-free Arctic Ocean allowed ancient CO2 and methane emissions

RSS Climate Citizen

  • Australia at Global Plastics Treaty negotiations in Paris #INC2
  • Importance of funding active transport infrastructure in Merri-bek budget to 2027
  • Logging Native Forests in Victoria to end by 1 January 2024, saving 14 million tonnes of carbon by 2030
  • Submission on Synthetic Turf to Moonee Valley Council for JH Allan Reserve
  • Guest Post: Despairing about climate change? These 4 charts on the unstoppable growth of solar may change your mind
  • Australia ramps up funding for energy efficiency in Budget 2023. Baba Brinkman: Insulate it
  • Melbourne Protest at Korean Government agencies funding the Santos' Barossa Gas project
  • Australia talking renewables at Petersberg Climate Dialogue 2023 while new gas projects launch
  • Email to the Treasurer for Budget 2023: stop subsidising fossil fuels
  • Guest Post: Labor’s scheme to cut industrial emissions is worryingly flexible

RSS Climate Code Red

  • James Hansen’s new climate bomb: Are today’s greenhouse gas levels enough to raise sea levels by 60+ metres?
  • Why markets fail on fossil fuel pollution, heralding an era of climate disruption
  • Are climate–security risks too hot to handle for the Albanese government?

RSS Climate Connections

  • Climate Connections Update
  • CIC’s environmental and social justice photography contest open for entries
  • FBI Harassing Activists in Pacific Northwest
  • Global Justice Ecology Project Executive Director Anne Peterman on the GE American Chestnut
  • Zapatistas Host Festival of Resistance and Rebellion
  • GMO Chestnuts Draw Scrutiny this Holiday
  • Photo Essay: The Pillaging of Paraguay
  • Greenpeace Chooses Marketing Over Ethics in Peru Action

RSS Climate Denial Crock of the Week

  • Music Break: RIP George Winston – December
  • Media Catching Up with Climate/Wildfire Pollution Connection
  • Meanwhile, In Florida, 40 Percent Jump in Home Insurance Premiums
  • Ukraine Dam Destruction has Implications for Nuclear Plant
  • Weather Casters Finally beginning to Make Smoke/Climate Connection
  • Haze and Health Warnings Across East as Air Quality Crisis Continues
  • In a Global Emergency, Do We Really Need More Fashion?
  • 2003: Filming the First Fire Tornado
  • “Apocalyptic” Skies as Wildfires Smoke Spreads
  • Raise Your Hand if You Knew the Gray Skies, Red Sun, and Asthma Attacks were All Part of Climate Change

RSS Climate Progress

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Climate Snapshot

  • "Carbon tsunami" lead by Enbridge Northern Gateway takes aim at BC
  • BC's tar sands? Thirteen proposed LNG projects equivalent to 13 times current BC emissions
  • Car Carbon series: cool new animation, plus the jaw-dropping impact it left out
  • Climate change fuels both California's record drought and "polar vortex" storms
  • Obama's Keystone XL delay forces Harper into the "choose first" hot seat
  • Four charts reveal gigantic climate impact from proposed Kinder Morgan mega-pipeline
  • Climate fail. Surging fossil fuels are leaving renewable energy far, far behind.
  • Twenty one ways America would destroy a safe climate -- and one way they won't: US govt. report
  • Fracking in America kills off clean energy, leading to higher emissions: EIA report
  • BP calls for global carbon price to avoid the "worst impacts of climate change"

RSS ClimateSight

  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia (Part 2)
  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia.
  • Talking, typing, and the social model of disability
  • We need your help! Share your views on climate change with us.
  • Ice sheet melting: it’s not just about sea level rise
  • How I became a scientist
  • How does the Weddell Polynya affect Antarctic ice shelves?
  • Climate change and compassion fatigue
  • The silver lining of fake news
  • Future projections of Antarctic ice shelf melting

RSS Club Orlov

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS ClusterFuck Nation

  • What’s Next
  • June 2023
  • Who Can You Trust?
  • Memorial Service
  • Trial By Ordeal
  • Fade to Black in Ukraine
  • Dum-Da-Dum-Dum…Dah
  • Dirty Secrets
  • KunstlerCast 377 — John Michael Greer on Magic and the Reenchantment of Daily Life
  • The Smell of Goose Cooking

RSS Cocktailhag – FDL

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Colin Tudge

  • Let's not bet the farm | Colin Tudge
  • Why the world needs a renaissance of small farming | Colin Tudge
  • Are modern British children suffering from 'nature deficit disorder'? | Colin Tudge and Aleks Krotoski
  • Let the country, not the City, drive the UK economy | Colin Tudge
  • Farming needs Adam Smith's invisible hand, not finance capitalism | Colin Tudge
  • Survivors by Richard Fortey - review
  • Why woodlands are wonderful
  • Fossil Ida's great big family | Colin Tudge

RSS Common Dreams: News

  • House Dems Revive Bill to Make Poverty-Eradicating Child Tax Credit Permanent
  • Progressives Fume After Colorado's Democratic Governor Vetoes Historic Affordable Housing Bill
  • Climate Orgs Launch Week of Action to End the Era of Fossil Fuels
  • Amid Scandal, Clarence Thomas Gets Extension on Financial Disclosures
  • Sanders to Biden: Don't Let Big Pharma Bankrupt Medicare With 'Unconscionable' Price of Alzheimer's Drug
  • Ukraine Dam Disaster Is the 'Horrific Price of War on People,' Says UN Chief
  • 'Declare a Climate Emergency': Biden Urged to Act as Wildfire Smoke Chokes Eastern US
  • 'Explosive': UAE Oil Firm Has Been Reviewing Internal COP28 Communications
  • Homophobic Mob Attacks Defenders of LGBTQ+ Equality Outside School Board Meeting in California
  • Fueled by Stock Buybacks, Pay of Top Insurance CEOs Surged to $335 Million Last Year

RSS Consortium News

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Consumer Energy Report

  • Death of the Florescent Shop Light – Energy Efficiency
  • Methanol VS Ethanol – Technical Merits and Political Favoritism
  • Bill Nye the Science Guy – Social Primate and Nuclear Energy
  • World’s Smallest Gasoline Engine – Technology Breakthrough
  • How Much Oil Does the World Produce? – Production Facts and Figures
  • World Sets New Oil Production and Consumption Records
  • What Makes Up the Cost of a Gallon of Gasoline? – Gas Price
  • Road Trip – Thoughts on the Satsop Nuclear Power Station
  • What Happened at Choren? – History & Events
  • Gasoline Prices Doubled Under Obama: True or False?

RSS Corp Watch

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS CorrenteWire

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS CorrenteWire – Quick Hits

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Counter Currents

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS CounterPunch

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

RSS Crooked Timber

  • Pew quits the generation game
  • Sunday photoblogging: Malbork Castle, Poland
  • In the Zone: Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism
  • Sunday photoblogging: Girona
  • Misogyny and Violence in Michigan Politics
  • Ban LLMs Using First-Person Pronouns
  • Sunday photoblogging: cloister
  • Utilitarianism comes to benefit-cost analysis
  • Huntington, the woke, and Radicalization
  • Reviving “Post-post-Fordism”

RSS Crooks and Liars

  • 'Fake Investigations RIGHT SMACK IN THE MIDDLE OF MY CAMPAIGN'
  • Pence 2024: Proud To Stand By Trump, Who Wanted Him Hanged
  • Why Did It Take Four Days To Arrest This Murderer? Florida
  • Least Self-Aware Person In The World Fat-Shames Chris Christie
  • Violence At School Board Meetings? Thank The Proud Boys
  • Supporting RFK Jr.'s Candidacy Is Promoting Disease And Death
  • House Republicans In Disarray, Petty Edition
  • Kristi Noem Jumps On The Anti-Target Hate Horse
  • Moms For Liberty Gets A Well-Deserved 'Major Award'
  • You'll Never Guess The Theme Of Tucker's New Twitter Show

RSS Cryptome

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Culture Change

  • Low Cost Polluting: The Real American Dream?
  • We Did It: Sailing Cargo in the Aegean
  • Cure for Depending on 90K Oil Spewing Cargo Ships: Sail Power Makes Inroads, Now in Mediterranean
  • The Trump Presidency: Celebration of the Little Boy, and Mass Awakening
  • Stepping Back from Trump's Election: Critique of underlying US Culture in a List - 25 Limitations
  • Dirty Fossil Fuel ‘Business-As-Usual’ Tactics Spew Out of the IMO at COP22
  • The Unconnected and Unrewarded in the New Divisive Dichotomy: Being Either Online Or Not
  • The Ameliorators: a possible coalition of progressives on (e.g.) NAFTA
  • It's the 21st, and this is what a growing movement is doing
  • Pro-Climate Actions - a community flier and poster

RSS Dahr Jamail

  • For a Worse Tomorrow
  • Covid-19’s Not Through With Us Yet
  • Living in a World in Which Nature Has Already Lost
  • Life in the US Has the Hallmarks of a “Low-Grade War Zone”
  • Fracking Company Has Made It Rain Toxic Water Upon New Mexico Without Penalty
  • Interview: TODAY IS BETTER THAN TOMORROW: A TIME OF ENDINGS; SHADES OF DENIAL W/ DAHR JAMAIL
  • Grieving My Way Into Loving the Planet
  • New York Times reviews The End of Ice
  • A Future Filled With Pathogens
  • Tested

RSS Daily Kos Comics

  • Cartoon: Mike Luckovich wonders WWJD about LGBTQ+
  • Cartoon: West
  • Cartoon: Junk jargon
  • Cartoon: Targets
  • Cartoon: Guardians of the Fallacy
  • Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on Ron DeSantis and 'woke'
  • Cartoon: The lib owners
  • Cartoon: Hate month gear
  • Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on Trump as rejected cartoon character
  • Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter

RSS Damn the Matrix

  • ERoEI, it depends…
  • Insanity rules….
  • Nuclear Fantasies
  • More Metabolic Syndrome news…
  • Empty Planet
  • On NOT joining the dots…
  • The Hydrogen fallacy explained
  • Yours Truly on the local FM radio station
  • Limits everywhere
  • Limbic Capitalism

RSS Dan Hagen

  • A Lesson in Humanity from Star Wars
  • A Wit Called Wanda
  • Ethics Begins in Empathy
  • The Devil is in the Dumbasses
  • 'Succession' Dramatizes a Death Knell
  • CNN Parades Primal Resentment
  • We Like What He Knew
  • CNN Bellyflops into a Moral Sewer
  • 'Guardians 3:' Ya Gotta Have Heart
  • Song of Spring

RSS Dangerous Intersection

  • Meaningful Conversation is Like Sex
  • San Francisco Crumbles
  • About “Transphobia”
  • Nord Stream Story Further Exposes the Washington Post as U.S. Propaganda Partner
  • New Study Regarding Tribalism in Politics

RSS Dark Ages America

  • Healing
  • Beating a Dead Horse Dept.
  • A Grotesque Bulvan. However...
  • The Sopranos, William Golding, and Contemporary America
  • 7 million and going strong
  • Karma City
  • Muddy Waters
  • The Midterms
  • Meatball
  • Permanent War for Permanent Peace

RSS David Bollier

  • The Revelations of 'Black Earth Wisdom'
  • Foster & Iaione Probe Commoning in the City
  • Expanding Regenerative Agriculture through Open Source Technologies
  • Binna Choi of the Casco Art Institute: Curating Art through Commoning
  • John Thackara on Designing for Life
  • Joe Brewer's Bold Quest to Help Restore a Bioregion
  • David Sloan Wilson on Evolutionary Science and Prosocial Behavior
  • Cecosesola of Venezuela Wins Right Livelihood Award!
  • Greg Watson's Bold Campaign for a World Grid
  • Pirate Care, a Syllabus

RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – National Memo)

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – Tax Analysts)

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS David Harvey

  • Video: David Harvey on capital, theory, and becoming a Marxist
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 12
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 11
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 10
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 9
  • Video: David Harvey in Dialogue with Jean-Luc Mélenchon
  • Video: The Geography of Capital
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 8
  • Book Talk: Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
  • Reading Marx’s Grundrisse | Session 7

RSS David Hilfiker

  • Welcome
  • Announcement
  • Racism in Our Small Faith Community?
  • Spirituality of Weakness
  • My Alzheimer's Disease
  • A Theology Out of my Life with Alzheimer Disease
  • More Than Surviving the Crisis
  • Facing Our Mistakes
  • Hope in an Environmental Wasteland
  • Geoengineering ... because we must

RSS David McNally

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS David Roberts

  • Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck
  • Please support Grist
  • There’s an emerging right-wing divide on climate denial. Here’s what it means (and doesn’t)
  • Everybody needs a Climate Thing
  • Jonathan Franzen is confused about climate change, but then, lots of people are
  • Turns out the world’s first “clean coal” plant is a backdoor subsidy to oil producers
  • A way to get power to the world’s poor without making climate change worse
  • “Climate change” vs. “global warming”? It really doesn’t matter
  • How American journalists deal with climate deniers
  • Nothing is nonpartisan any more

RSS Death by Car: Capitalism’s Drive to Carmageddon

  • Leading the way in preventing traffic accidents
  • Truck safety rate system 3 years
  • Traffic accident in the school zone
  • cerebral hemorrhage in a traffic accident
  • Uiseong-gun receives donations from children’s safety umbrella to prevent traffic accidents
  • 100% fruit delivery driver
  • a traffic accident
  • Prevention of traffic accidents on school buses for children
  • More than 80% of truck traffic accidents are “car-to-car” accidents
  • “Infusion truck”. Anger explodes. If you forget, you’ll get attacked again

RSS Decline of the Empire

  • Defending Reality
  • Fascism And The Uniparty
  • Apocalypse Now and Apocalypse Not
  • Fascism Marches On — Episode 1
  • There Is No Middle
  • The Elites And The Sheeple
  • For Your Own Good
  • America Is Finished, There Is No Way Out
  • The Whole World Is Watching
  • Glenn Greenwald Censored At The Intercept, Resigns

RSS Deep Green Resistence News Service

  • DGR France Visits Proposed Lithium Mine Site
  • Over 150 Groups Urge to Immediately Shut Down Line 5
  • Kangaroo Walks and Talks [Event Alert]
  • For the Sake of Nature
  • Ecosabotage: A Heroic Action Against Ecocide
  • Indigenous Women’s Camp Set to Block Water Supply to Peehee Mu’huh [Thacker Pass]
  • Call for Comments on Women’s Sex-Based Rights in Sports [Press Release]
  • Despite Warnings, Norway Proposes Deep Sea Mining
  • Tomorrow Is Ours
  • American Greed: A Corrupt Corporation is Destroying This Native American Sacred Site

RSS Deepak Tripathi’s Diary

  • Afghanistan Awaits Uncertain Future After US Withdrawal
  • UK’s Brexit Maze
  • Book Review: Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy
  • Book Review: How Democracy Ends
  • A Bloody Hot Summer in Gaza: Parallels With Sharpeville, Soweto and Jallianwala Bagh

RSS Democratic Underground

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Democratic Underground – Breaking News

  • Canadian fires polluting New York City air continue blazing out of control
  • Child labor investigation spreads to meatpacking, produce companies in 11 states
  • Trump's lawyers told he is target of classified documents investigation
  • George Winston, million-selling pianist known for his melodic style, dead at age 73
  • Trump ally Bannon subpoenaed in special counsel Jack Smith's Jan. 6 grand jury probe
  • GameStop fires CEO, names Ryan Cohen executive chairman; shares plummet
  • Pence opens presidential bid with denunciation of Trump over Jan. 6 insurrection and abortion
  • Harvard women's hockey coach retires amid allegations she verbally abused, hazed players
  • FAA lifts ground stop at NYC airport but delays flights due to smoke
  • Supreme Court justices release new financial disclosures - but not for Thomas, Alito

RSS Democratic Underground – Good Reads

  • Sanders to Biden: Don't Let Big Pharma Bankrupt Medicare With 'Unconscionable' Price of Alzheimer's
  • A non-pundit's observations of how the 2024 election is shaping up.
  • Mike Pence's misguided fantasy of baseball history
  • How one of America's most famous illustrators brought homoerotic ads to the masses
  • As US aims to bring back manufacturing, supporting women is key
  • 'Girls and Their Monsters': The Morlok Quadruplets and Mental Health With Audrey Clare Farley
  • Remembering Catherine Kassenoff and Continuing the Fight for Fair U.S. Child Custody Outcomes
  • Insurance providers lead climate change's 'managed retreat'
  • Iowa governor signs one of the most dangerous rollbacks of child labor laws in the country
  • Turns Out "Stand Your Ground" Didn't Stand for Ajike Owens' Shooter Story by Kalyn Womack

RSS Democracy Now

  • Cornel West on Running for President, Ending Ukraine War & Taking on "Corporate Duopoly" of Dems & GOP
  • A National State of Emergency: Human Rights Campaign Sounds the Alarm over Anti-LGBTQ+ Laws in U.S.
  • Headlines for June 7, 2023
  • Catastrophic Flooding Feared as Critical Ukrainian Dam Is Destroyed; Zaporizhzhia Nuke Plant at Risk
  • "Enough Is Enough": Australian PM Throws Support Behind Movement to Free Julian Assange
  • Cop City: Atlanta City Council OKs $67M for Facility Despite Mass Protests & Armed Raid on Bail Fund
  • Headlines for June 6, 2023
  • Ed Bisch Fights to Hold Sacklers Accountable for Opioid Epidemic 22 Years After Son Died of Overdose
  • David Sirota: Florida Lawmakers Help Ron DeSantis Shovel More Cash to Wall Street
  • David Sirota: Working Class Will Be "Deeply Harmed" by Biden's "Big Win" on Debt Ceiling

RSS Derrick Jensen

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Desdemona Despair

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Desertification

  • Climate change in Nigeria: Can youth activists turn the tide of inaction?
  • Tobacco-free farms: a healthier future for people and land
  • World Environment Day: Data shows China an important contributor to global environment protection
  • NAMIBIA DRIVES TO HALT, REVERSE THE TRENDS IN LAND DEGRADATION AND DESERTIFICATION
  • Middle East faces grave environmental challenges as world marks Environment Day
  • Forum to focus on combating desertification
  • Desertification is destroying fertile land. Here’s how we’re fighting it.
  • Understanding of diurnal gas exchange in order to exploit the dynamic coordination between the rate of carbon assimilation (A) and stomatal conductance (gs)
  • Untitled
  • Geo explainer: How are deserts formed?

RSS deSmog Blog

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Digbys Blog

  • Untitled
  • They can save the world by @BloggersRUs
  • Just drifting: R.I.P. Buck Henry By Dennis Hartley
  • It looks like he wants to take Iraq's oil money
  • Untitled
  • Let's not forget who worked with Suleimani's IRGC
  • You can't win if you don't show up to play by @BloggersRUs
  • Friday Night Soother
  • I'm just going to leave this here.
  • Who wants to be the next Andy McCabe?

RSS Disinfo – Ecology

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Dispatches from the Underclass

  • China’s Saudi-Iran Peace Deal Is a Major Setback for US Empire, w/ Prof. Mohammad Marandi
  • EXCLUSIVE | Interview with Mexico’s Leading Presidential Contender Claudia Sheinbaum
  • Bombshell w/ Seymour Hersh: US Blowing Up Nord Stream Was ‘Act of War’
  • Exclusive Interview w/ Hezbollah’s Second-In-Command Sheikh Naim Qassem
  • UN Official Calls for Lifting ‘Illegal’ Syria Sanctions After Seeing Devastation First-Hand
  • Europe Self-Destructing for U.S. Proxy War In Ukraine, w/ Prabhat Patnaik
  • US Brings World to Brink of Nuclear Armageddon As Europe Self Destructs, w/ Ali Abunimah
  • Reality vs Propaganda: Understanding Iran’s Protests, w/ Navid Zarrinnal
  • How the US Used Saudi Arabia to Fuel Fanaticism & Fight Progressive Movements, w/ As’ad Abukhalil
  • Round 2: Lula vs Bolsonaro, What’s At Stake In Brazil?

RSS Dissent Magazine

  • Know Your Enemy: What’s Wrong With Men?
  • Money Power
  • Belabored: How Workers Escape, with Saket Soni
  • Cruelty and Luxury:
  • Barcelona’s Experiment in Radical Government
  • Ultra Violence
  • The Lithium Problem: An Interview with Thea Riofrancos
  • Belabored: Reviving the Strike in Britain, with Morag Livingstone and Joe Rollin
  • The IRA Is an Invitation to Organizers
  • The Fight Against Cop City

RSS Dissident Voice

  • How Empire Fabricates Atrocities
  • Rehearsed Lives and Planned History
  • Deserving Each Other: The PGA Tour-LIV Golf Merger
  • The Emergency State’s Plot to Override the Constitution
  • D-Day = Disinformation Day
  • Coincidence Theory
  • Sharpen Your Machetes
  • Diluted Sovereignty: A Very Australian Example
  • Career Corruption Prosecutor in Moldova and in EU Quits Moldovan Gov’t., Saying It’s Too Corrupt
  • The Next Pandemic

RSS Do the Math

  • Keeping Up On Appearances
  • Holiday Haikus
  • The Simple Story of Civilization
  • Finite Feeding Frenzy
  • A Random Fix to Polarization
  • The Cult of Civilization
  • A Climate Love Story
  • Death by Hockey Sticks
  • Limits to Economic Growth
  • The Ride of Our Lives

RSS Dollars & Sense Blog

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Doug Stanhope

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Douglas Rushkoff

  • The Guardian: Douglas Rushkoff on why tech billionaires are in escape mode
  • Wired: Doug Rushkoff is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution
  • Team Human ep. 236: Fenton Bailey
  • Escape plans of the rich and famous
  • Cyber: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
  • Survival of the Richest
  • Duncan Trussell Family Hour Ep. 522: Douglas Rushkoff
  • In ‘Survival of the Richest,’ author Douglas Rushkoff examines the escape plans of the tech elite
  • Team Human ep. 213: Philip Rosedale
  • Team Human ep. 212: Lisa Lovebucket

RSS Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

  • The Evidence of Big Pharma’s Criminality is Overwhelming, but Nothing Is Being Done About It
  • Roman Balmakov on Epoch TV Explains how the FDA and Presstitutes Worked to Prevent Covid Treatment with Ivermectin
  • Be Forewarned:  Is This What Bill Gates & Company Are Going to Release Next?
  • Does a Presidential Candidate this Good Have a Chance?
  • PCR Interviewed by Sputnik International on US Economic Outlook
  • The Escalating Persecution of Truth Tellers
  • FBI Fails to Hand Over Document Alleging Biden Bribery Scheme; Republicans to Initiate Contempt Proceedings
  • Ex-US Intel Official Says Craft Of ‘Non-Human Origin’ Recovered, Reports Withheld From Congress
  • Of all races ONLY White People ARE NOT Permitted Pride or to Have their Votes Counted
  • Our Merit-Based Society Has Been Displaced by a Diversity-Based Society

RSS Dredd Blog

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Ear to the Ground – Truth Dig

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Early Warning

  • New York Not Close to Exiting Lockdown
  • Is New York Containing Covid?
  • New York vs Italy
  • NYC Update - 46.5% increase Sunday over Saturday.
  • We Are About to Lose New York City to Covid
  • Containing Covid-19 (Or Not)
  • Covid-19 update
  • Covid-19 Infection Rates
  • Global Carbon Sink Holding Up So Far
  • The Wake-Up Call from David Buckel

RSS Earth First

  • “UNC Dildo-Boy” accosts homophobic preacher, releases anti-technology declaration
  • Subpoena caps bad week for fossil fuel
  • Less Than 60 Hours Left to Support Indigenous Land Defenders!
  • Shh! That Zookeeper Is a Total *&^%#!
  • Marcellus Shale Earth First! Aerial Blockade Celebrates 2 Weeks
  • Sabotaging the Badger Cull
  • Occupied Abenaki Lands Desecrated by 9/11 Memorial Protesters Intervene to Address U.S. Imperialism & Genocide
  • The Earth First! Newswire Has Moved
  • Massive Mine Proposed at Oak Flat, Sacred Tribal Land
  • Wharton Coal Prep Plant Spill Turns Boone County, WV River White

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

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Earth Observatory: Image of the Day

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Earth Observatory: Natural Hazards

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Earth Policy Institute Blog

  • Data Highlight - Wind Power Beats Nuclear Again in China
  • Data Highlight - Plastic Bag Bans or Fees Cover 49 Million Americans
  • Plan B Update - Fossil Fuel Development in the Arctic is a Bad Investment
  • Data Highlight - Geothermal Power Approaches 12,000 Megawatts Worldwide
  • Data Highlight - China’s Solar Panel Production to Double by 2017
  • Plan B Update - The Swinging Pendulum of Population Policy in Iran
  • Eco Economy Indicator - China Leads World to Solar Power Record in 2013
  • Data Highlight - Denmark, Portugal, and Spain Leading the World in Wind Power
  • Plan B Update - The Downfall of the Plastic Bag: A Global Picture
  • Plan B Update - Plastic Bag Bans Spreading in the United States

RSS Ecocide Alert

  • What is a Slot?
  • What to Know When Playing at a Casino Online
  • How to Bet at a Sportsbook
  • How to Win at Poker
  • What Is a Lottery?
  • Togel Sidney Pasaran Togel Online Terkenal
  • What You Should Know About Online Casinos
  • What Does a Sportsbook Do?
  • Developing a Poker Strategy
  • What is the Lottery?

RSS Ecohuman World

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Eco-Shock News

  • Radio Ecoshock: Why Make a World Nobody Wants?
  • Radio Ecoshock: The Big Greenhouse Gas You Don’t Know
  • Radio Ecoshock: On Fire Again
  • Radio Ecoshock: Extreme Heat #2: How It Kills (replay)
  • Radio Ecoshock: Jean-Marc Jancovici: Whistling Past the Graveyard (replay)
  • Radio Ecoshock: Making $$ from Endless Record Heat
  • Radio Ecoshock: Nomad Century & Bad Banks
  • Radio Ecoshock: The Dirt Behind Betrayal
  • Radio Ecoshock: Climate: A Big Change Emerges Down Under
  • Radio Ecoshock: What I Really Think Will Happen Is Happening Already

RSS Ecological Headstand

  • Dilke, Chapman, and Dahlberg Pop-ups
  • For the Abolition of the Wages System!
  • The Incredible Shrinking Blog
  • Keynes "hadn't got round to it"
  • Napoleon Solow and the Phantom Mechanism
  • Mathiness, Growth and Increasing Returns
  • Viral Gyro Spiral
  • Untitled
  • Untitled
  • Never Mind the Bollocks. Here's the Gyro.

RSS Ecological Sociology

  • Commons Enabling Infrastucture
  • A Short History of Progress: Book Review
  • Foucault, Power, Truth and Ecology
  • Democratizing Capital at Scale: Cooperative Enterprise and Beyond
  • Stanford: Climate Change Ten Times Faster than Previous 65 Million Years
  • Beyond Market and State: The Renaissance of the Commons
  • What Then Must We Do? The Next American Revolution
  • John Thackery: Limits to Resilience
  • Timothy Mitchell: Carbon Democracy
  • The Informal Economy Blog

RSS Ecologise

  • Why this Maharashtra village is fighting for the long forgotten Gramdan Act?
  • Ignored health risks, bungled pilot projects, bonanza for Dutch firm: Modi Govt. forces fortified rice on poor
  • Protests against Ratnagiri Refinery: Skeletons in the Development Closet
  • What will be the history of India without the history of its plant life?
  • We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction
  • [WATCH] We are living in a deluded world: Interview with Iain McGilchrist
  • The Avocados of Wrath
  • How Mr Miyawaki Broke My Heart
  • On International Forests Day: Reality of Forests in India
  • P.V. Satheesh, the Original Millets Man of India

RSS Economic Hardship Reporting Project

  • Parajo’s Quest to Rebuild
  • Erosion and sea-level rise are coming for their Louisiana home. They’re staying anyway.
  • Ithaca Bets on Heat Pumps in Mobile Homes
  • Republican Debt Ceiling Proposals Could See Neediest Americans Lose Benefits
  • Wrecking Women’s Healthcare
  • What It’s Like to Have an Abortion Denied by Dobbs
  • Belabored: Reviving the Strike in Britain, with Morag Livingstone and Joe Rollin
  • School Support Staffers Stuck Earning Poverty Level Wages
  • EHRP-Grist comic on Kentucky disaster relief distributed as educational tool
  • LGBTQ Students Face Barriers to Getting Student Loans Without Parents’ Participation

RSS Economic Undertow

  • Z Marks the Spot
  • The Death of Economics
  • Cars and More Cars …
  • Repost From 2015: Pied Piper of Dumb Money
  • The Arc of the Moral Universe
  • Meet the New Year, Same as the Old Year
  • David Graeber Dead …
  • Frieden In Unserer Zeit, Peace In Our Time
  • Doing God’s Dirty Work
  • The Numbers Game

RSS EcoWorldView

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Empire Burlesque

  • Generation of Vipers: The Original Sin and Continuous Crimes of America’s Involvement in Afghanistan
  • Reich and Reality: Culture Wars of the Conquerors
  • On the 18th Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq
  • On the Acquittal of the Murderous Thug Donald Trump
  • Impeachment Cave-in: Dems Plumb New Depths of Perfidy
  • In Memoriam Richard Kastelein (1967-2021)
  • The Surrenderists: Dem Leaders Stand Down; No Consequences for Coup
  • Unwrung Withers: No Downsides for Trumpists From Their Coup Push
  • House of Death: Trump’s Endgame Plan to Kill Democracy
  • Brief note on a bleary post-election morning

RSS Empirical Magazine

  • From the Empirical Archives: Genius or Folly?
  • From the Empirical Archives: Nights Such as These
  • From the Empirical Archives: Second Time Foster Child
  • From the Empirical Archives: A Moment with Mary Nash-Pyott
  • From the Empirical Archives: In the Shade of a Cave
  • From the Empirical Archives: In Search of a Good Teacher
  • From the Empirical Archives: The Circle and the Pyramid
  • From the Empirical Archives: Why Human Rights Matter
  • From the Empirical Archives: Arizona
  • From the Empirical Archives: The Offer by Jennifer Hanno

RSS EmptyWheel

  • Dry Run: The Filing Room Came to Trump
  • NYT’s Pre-DOJ Meeting Attempted Rebuttal
  • Now Fully Normalized: Sportswashing the Bonesaw with Golf
  • The Dog Drained My Pool to Try to Destroy Surveillance Video
  • The Dishonest and Incompetent FBI Work John Durham Learned to Love
  • FBI Cyber Division’s Enduring Blue Pill Mystery
  • ONLY TIME WILL TELL: Seditionist Oath Keepers sentenced amid tears and promises of redemption
  • Tim Parlatore Quit After Trump Lawyers Couldn’t Find the Iran Document
  • In March, DOJ Asked Trump for the Iran Document; In April, DOJ Asked for His Saudi Business Records
  • John Durham Fabricated His Basis to Criminalize Oppo Research

RSS End of More

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Energy Balance

  • "Living the Change," Film Screening + post-film Q&A. 6 pm, April 17th (2023), Reading Biscuit Factory (Reading, UK).
  • "Living the Change," Film Screening + post-film Q&A. 6 pm, April 17th (2023), Reading Biscuit Factory (Reading, UK).
  • “The Oil Machine” and the Changing Climate.
  • Architects of Our Future: Energy and the Changing Climate.
  • The Energy War, and Climate Breakdown.
  • “Reading Hydro” – Microhydropower on the River Thames at Caversham Weir (Reading, UK).
  • “Four Meals From Anarchy” – We Must Grow More Food Locally.
  • Russia-Ukraine War and the Changing Energy Landscape.
  • Confronting the Changing Climate: COP26 - Scientists’ Warnings into Action, from Local to Global.
  • The Energy Crisis and the Climate Crisis.

RSS Environment & Food Justice

  • National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Statement on the Climate Crisis
  • La Lucha por La Sierra | Scion of Texas Oil Barons Seeks to Overturn Historic Use Rights to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant
  • Biopiracy in Mexico | Foundation stealing wild beehives in Yucatán
  • Deep Seeds at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues | April 2018
  • Exclusive Update - Monsanto in Mexico | Corporate impunity and the beekeeper struggle against transgenic soybeans
  • Student Blogs | Race, Gender, and Settler Colonial Violence
  • Notas de Campaña | Por una Tortilla 100 ciento Nixtamalizada
  • Campaign Notes | For 100 Percent Nixtamalized nonGMO Tortillas | Part One
  • Maize: Our Identity, Our Food | Photo Exhibit of Indigenous Corn Farmers Featured at UN Headquarters
  • Protecting the Sacred in Corn | Seed Sovereignty Documents | Berenice Sánchez Intervention on the Protection of Indigenous Agroecosystems presented to the UNPFII-2018 | 1 of 2

RSS Envisionation Blog

  • Dr Chad Briggs – Integrating disaster risk and national security with climate policy
  • “..colossal risks with the future of civilization” First study quantifying Earth System Boundaries
  • Archive: Michael E Mann, Michael Ghil, James E Hansen – Discussing Earth System Sensitivity
  • Dr Jennifer Francis – 2023’s symptoms of climate chaos, El Niño, Ocean Heatwaves, and Arctic Sea Ice lows
  • Archive: Dr Natalia Shakhova (& Igor Semiletov) Vienna Interview 2012 UNCUT 42mins
  • “Leave Africa Alone” – Solidarity With The Voices Of The Voiceless: Ina-Maria Shikongo
  • David Spratt: [Articulating &] Reclaiming the Climate Emergency
  • Archive: Professor James Hansen – EGU, Vienna, 2012 Unedited Interview
  • European Parliament Proposes Including “ECOCIDE” In EU Law
  • Capture6 CEO, Ethan Cohen-Cole, talks: SVB bank, climate tech & being bullish on gigaton’s of CO2 removal

RSS Extraenvironmentalist Blog and Podcasts

  • [ Episode #95 // Economy of Things ]
  • [ Episode #94 // Rocking the Google Bus ]
  • [ Episode #93 // Climate Agreements ]
  • [ Episode #92 // Decrypting Cryptocurrency ]
  • [ Episode #91 // Age of Stagnation? ]
  • [ Episode #90 // Missing Out ]
  • [ Autumn 2015 Interlude // Archaeoacoustics ]
  • The Energy Transition Show – [Episode #0] – subscribe @ energytransitionshow.com
  • [ Episode #89 // How on Earth ]
  • [ Episode #88 // Resilience Imperative ]