Periodically I will edit my RSS feeds and add to my videos/movies and notes/documents sections if I find something interesting. I came across the following documentary tonight and watched it in its entirety. It’s about renegade architect Michael Reynolds. He experiments with creating self-sufficient housing for the future. He’s fully aware of the unfolding global crisis and he funnels his creative energy into dealing with that reality. The film is well worth your time, but I found the latter half of the film even more interesting, especially his dealings with the sclerotic New Mexico State Legislature and the seemingly insurmountable hurdles of trying to pass a bill that would allow for new ideas in sustainable housing. The word games and wheel-greasing that goes on in government is in full display as Mike tries for years to get his bill approved.
A couple quotes from the film:
Politics does slowly, slowly grind things out, and that’s fine if we had hundreds and hundreds of years on this planet. We have decades left on this planet of life as we know it. And American politics is a fucking dinosaur that is not going to make it. It’s just going to come to a grinding halt…
…The American dream in my opinion is in the toilet. It’s history. It’s gone. The American dream is now how do we survive the future. It’s not having an eight bedroom home with eleven bathrooms. It’s not having a career and a lawn and all the amenities. It is simply how do our children and children’s children even have a chance at life.
Halloween is around the corner and it’s become a bit of escapism for me from the real monsters sitting at our doorstep. When I was a kid I never had any idea or warning from my peers that everyday life would be wrought with so many bloodcurdling terrors. Such realities as climate change and ocean acidification are ever-present boogeymen slowly and methodically stalking us. Compounding the fear was the revelation that the cause of such civilization-ending phenomena stemmed from our exploitation of energy sources serving as the very foundation for our economy. We were killing ourselves and no one could stop it! This is a scenario more frightening than anything dreamed up in a Hollywood horror movie.
Delving deeper into these subjects only brings more unease as we learn that our self-inflicted eco-collapse is happening concurrently with the depletion of our carbon-based energy sources. Good God! Our food supply is at risk! We’re running straight for a cliff! Surely if we turn on the television set we will be greeted with warnings of our impending calamity, and our leaders will be doing everything in their power to save us. Holy Christ! Television has devolved into a mere propaganda tool of corporations! The politicians are whores to big business! The democratic process and elections are no more than an ultra-expensive ‘reality tv’ series funded by monied interests! The Supreme Court, along with all other mainstream institutions, has become a puppet of the corporatocracy.
Well then certainly the captains of industry will be intelligent enough to steer us away from this approaching doom. For the love of God! They are corrupted as well! The masses are simply pawns in their game of profit accumulation and market domination! The purpose of the Security and Surveillance State is to protect the interests of the elite and crush dissent! The Earth is just another planet to be commoditized by the ‘Free Market’, a force looked upon as more tangible and important than anything in nature! We’ve constructed a dual reality in which money is more important than air, water, and soil! God help us!!!
My last hope is that I can talk to people about all this scary stuff and maybe get some consolation. For the love of God! They all think I’m a doomsday nut and don’t want to hear about any of it! They say that I’ll be locked up in a mental institution if I keep talking about such crazy things, or I’ll get caught up in the net of Homeland Security for rocking the boat! Everyone is going about their daily lives as if none of what I point out is real and that things will go on as they have in perpetuity! “Technology will solve everything,” they say. “Don’t worry about it!”
You see, I wasn’t kidding about the frights of Halloween being pretty lame when compared to what’s confronting us in the world of globalized industrial civilization.
It’s late and I’m about to nod off, but a few headlines caught my eye. The first is on plastics and its growing ubiquitousness in the natural world. If you read an earlier post I did on this subject, then you’ll know that plastics may well be the one thing that will persist long after industrial civilization has passed into the ether of history. Plastics and nuclear waste will be the lasting reminders of carbon man. As the following article explains, this stuff is showing up in the dark, cold depths of the melting Arctic.
Click to go to original article…
In other news, the ominous threat of a cataclysmic global release of methane from ocean floors is continuing to develop, increasing the possibility of runaway climate change…
A changing Gulf Stream off the East Coast has destabilized frozen methane deposits trapped under nearly 4,000 square miles of seafloor, scientists reported Wednesday. And since methane is even more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas, the researchers said, any large-scale release could have significant climate impacts.
Using seismic records and ocean models, the team estimated that 2.5 gigatonnes of frozen methane hydrate are being destabilized and could separate into methane gas and water.
It is not clear if that is happening yet, but that methane gas would have the potential to rise up through the ocean and into the atmosphere, where it would add to the greenhouse gases warming Earth.
The 2.5 gigatonnes isn’t enough to trigger a sudden climate shift, but the team worries that other areas around the globe might be seeing a similar destabilization.
“It is unlikely that the western North Atlantic margin is the only area experiencing changing ocean currents,” they noted. “Our estimate … may therefore represent only a fraction of the methane hydrate currently destabilizing globally.”
The wider destabilization evidence, co-author Ben Phrampus told NBC News, includes data from the Arctic and Alaska’s northern slope in the Beaufort Sea.
And it’s not just under the seafloor that methane has been locked up. Some Arctic land area are seeing permafrost thaw, which could release methane stored there as well.
An expert who was not part of the study said it suggests that methane could become a bigger climate factor than carbon dioxide.
“We may approach a turning point” from a warming driven by man-made carbon dioxide to a warming driven by methane, Jurgen Mienert, the geology department chair at Norway’s University of Tromso, told NBC News.
“The interactions between the warming Arctic Ocean and the potentially huge methane-ice reservoirs beneath the Arctic Ocean floor point towards increasing instability,” he added.
OK that’s enough information to put me soundly to sleep. Wake me up when the ‘Methane Time Bomb’ nightmare is over. The pot starts to boil, but the frogs are still comfortable…
Below is an interesting video documenting the issue of climate change over the last 25 years amongst our ‘talking head’ politicians. It amounts to a lot of lip service while global fossil fuel usage escalates. Could it be that our present way of life just isn’t possible without carbon energy? Without some unforeseen breakthrough in energy and a way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, the answer is yes. Current alternative energy sources won’t fill the gap. Can we power down from the globalized industrial economic model to a more sustainable, smaller human-scale economy? Yes, but it would be radically different from what we have now and social power would have to decentralized into the hands of local communities. Even with an environmentally benign energy source, we would still be running into other planetary barriers with our infinite growth economic model.
The “C” Word: Climate Change Goes Missing From 2012 Election:
In this short video, science historian Naomi Oreskes gets at the heart of why we fear withdrawal from our carbon-based way of life.
The price of inaction is obviously too great to ignore – possible runaway climate change, mass starvation, and the collapse of modern civilization. Yet the inertia of the system, corporate dominance of the global economy, and the self-interests of our elite prevent the steps required to avert disaster.
Commodification, economic growth, financial abstractions, corporate power: aren’t these the processes driving the environmental crisis? Now we are told that to save the biosphere we need more of them. ~ George Monbiot
Certainly building personal resilience and preparedness may help you in the short-term, but what about your children and grandchildren? We are all at risk from a global ecological collapse, no matter how big your food vault or how robust your off-the-grid homestead. Getting involved with those who want to change the system is not a waste of time.
Having lived in the Mohave desert for about a decade, I had the dubious pleasure of enduring its scorching summer temperatures which can push 130° Fahrenheit. Without the usual creature comforts of modern industrial civilization like air conditioning, refrigerated foods and drinks, and piped-in water, life is such inhospitable places would be brutal if not impossible. What if such desert heat was the norm across the land surface of the planet? Then extreme places of desert heat like the Mohave desert would become dead zones for any living plant or animal we have known. Instead of peaking at around 130° F, it would reach unthinkable, Venus-like temps of greater than 200° F. Depending on the source you use, the average land surface temperature that we humans have enjoyed is 13° to 17° Celsius or 55.4° to 62.6° Fahrenheit. For the ocean surface, the average is about 17 °C (62.6 F). According to new research concerning the time of the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction or ‘mother of all extinction events’, there occurred yet another mass extinction within that time span called the Smithian-Spathian extinction in which lethal global warming developed. The average land temperature in the tropics was an unimaginable 122-140°F (50-60°C)with average sea surface temperatures of 104°F (40°C). Such intolerable temperatures resulted in a massive ‘dead zone’ belt around the Earth:
Plant and animal life had it rough 250 million years ago. As if to add insult to injury, the end-Permian mass extinction was quickly followed by yet another mass extinction, what’s called the Smithian-Spathian extinction. New research suggests that the Earth got excruciatingly hot during this period, creating a veritable ‘dead zone’ in tropical areas, what forced the remaining animal life to head to the poles. And it lasted for nearly 5 million years.
According to research done by Yadong Sun and Paul Wignall of the University of Leeds, UK, this was hottest era on Earth since it cooled down from its initial molten formation. Their study has reset notions of just how hot our planet can get — a disturbing bit of insight that could reset current models of climate change on Earth.
The Smithian-Spathian extinction was time that characterized the shift from the Permian era to the Triassic, just before the emergence of the dinosaurs. By this point, the mysterious Permian Extinction had reduced the life on Earth to a select group of insects, plants, marine life (like fish, coral, sea lilies, and ichthyosaurs), and terrestrial animals (like insects and the reptilian tetrapod).
Sun and Wignall’s research indicates that during this time, the heat at the tropical regions reached an astounding 50 to 60°C (122°F to 140°F) on land, while the waters at the surface reached 40°C (104°F). They were surprised to discover that the water could get that hot; previous estimates assumed that sea-surface temperatures could not surpass 30°C (86°F). Moreover, at 40°C, most marine life dies and photosynthesis stops…
…What happened? Essentially, the superhot Earth was caused by a breakdown in global carbon cycling. Normally, plants help regulate temperature by absorbing CO2 and burning it as dead plant matter. But without plants, the CO2 levels rose unchecked, causing a spike in temperatures. Specifically, the researchers estimate that at least 12×103 gigatons of isotopically depleted carbon as methane was injected into the atmosphere…
…My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.
These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming…
Are we in the beginning phases of walking headlong into another mass extinction of our own creation, altering the chemistry of the oceans and atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels? If you’ve been reading this blog, then you know about feedback loops and tipping points and their consequences if humans continue to force changes in the delicate ecosystems of this planet. Monthly reports from the NOAA are not very comforting:
…The average global temperature across land and ocean surfaces during September was 0.67°C (1.21°F) above the long-term 20th century average. This temperature ties with 2005 as the record warmest September in the 133-year period of record. The Northern Hemisphere tied with 2009 as second warmest on record, behind 2005. The Southern Hemisphere also ranked second warmest on record, behind 1997. It was also the highest departure from average for any month in the Southern Hemisphere since May 2010…
The difference between now and 250 million years ago is that profit-seeking corporations were not around to hoodwink the denizens of the planet into perpetuating their own extinction…
…despite its history and today’s unprecedented riches from science, the U.S. has begun to slip off of its science foundation. Indeed, in this election cycle, some 236 years after Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, several major party contenders for political office took positions that can only be described as “antiscience”: against evolution, human-induced climate change, vaccines, stem cell research, and more. A former Republican governor even warned that his own political party was in danger of becoming “the antiscience party.
Or the fact that the belief in an unfettered free market has become sacrosanct…
…In order to understand the fervor of this continued popular support for failed policies, it is important to grasp the utopian, quasi-theological nature of neoliberal ideology. In the neoliberal worldview, the self-regulating market is not a merely human construct, but a form of naturally-occurring “spontaneous order” that produces optimum outcomes and maximum individual freedom if left completely unfettered. (13) It is, as Karl Polanyi pointed out in “The Great Transformation,” a radically utopian vision that rests on a blind faith that markets are essentially part of the natural order. (14)
On the political right, this faith has reached its fullest expression, ultimately moving markets into the realm of the sacred, where their legitimacy cannot be questioned. In this utopian setting, regulation is not merely ill advised; it is a violation of natural law that is nearly sacrilegious…
We’re not wiser, just more manipulative and conniving…
Locked within the Earth for millions of years was an energy source that fueled the rise of Humans and gave them dominion over every last inch of the planet. With traces of industrial chemicals and junk even finding its way into orbit around Earth, no corner of the planet escaped the tinkering hand of man.
His large brain gave him the ability to invent and build an army of machines to do his bidding. From their creation and until the last day of their operation, these fossil fuel-powered machines served man tirelessly in every conceivable manner, from personal transportation to food production.
Soon the lifeblood of this automated empire began running short, driving man to evermore extreme measures of securing carbon energy in order to feed his world of machines. Water, air, and land were sacrificed to keep the system going.
But For every force, there is a counter force. For every positive, a negative. The counter weight to man’s unrelenting urge for carbon was the inexorable build-up of atmospheric CO2 as the rest of the world rushed to join industrial civilization. The world’s leaders flew to popular vacation spots and drank cocktails while discussing the growing menace of climate change:
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” That is precisely what global leaders entrusted with the stewardship of the world are doing. Their lives revolve around glittering banquets and long and dreary conferences, where they listen to each other in endless process-driven negotiations – so far from the reality of the day-to-day hardships of more than half of humanity.
A domino of numerous climate tipping points was set into motion, upsetting a once-benign climate. At first, fire seasons grew longer with more frequent and intense conflagrations. Ocean corals turned white from warming waters. The Arctic melted with astonishing speed, unleashing a host of warming feedback loops. Small, imperceptible temperature changes that took decades to occur were now happening more rapidly.
A warming planet opened the door for exotic tropical diseases to spread northward and around the globe. Talk of adaptation to human-induced climate change became a cruel joke. Torrential floods and crop-withering droughts of biblical proportion occurred more regularly, propelling the hungry masses to riot. The food vaults of impoverished countries were the first to be raided, followed soon after by those of wealthy nations. Weaker nation states fell first as their resource-strapped and overwhelmed governments collapsed under the weight of climate-induced starvation and energy blackouts. Various desperate geoengineering schemes were carried out in a hail Mary attempt to save man and his fossil fuel-addicted way of life, but to no avail. The master had become the slave; servile devotion to an unsustainable mode of living turned around to bite us in the ass. An overdrawn Earth had come calling to collect on humanity’s debt and close the account. Within the blink of a geologic eye, the habitability of the planet for humans as well as most other creatures had disappeared.
The following excerpt is from a recent U.N. assessment on the state of the world and food production. It’s not a pretty picture, but despite alarm bells ringing, our trajectory of ecological collapse is still firmly on track…
Click to go to full letter:
The human rights of people and well-being of the planet first? Don’t make me laugh. There’s that oxymoron again – sustainable development. Given the track record of the U.N. on solving problems, rest assured there won’t be any radical ideas coming out of that institution that might threaten capitalism’s death grip on the planet. If there’s no money to be made, resource to be exploited, or economic growth to be had, then it won’t get done. Period.
…From the UK Guardian article discussing the above U.N. assessment:
…Failing harvests in the US, Ukraine and other countries this year have eroded reserves to their lowest level since 1974. The US, which has experienced record heatwaves and droughts in 2012, now holds in reserve a historically low 6.5% of the maize that it expects to consume in the next year, says the UN.
“We’ve not been producing as much as we are consuming. That is why stocks are being run down. Supplies are now very tight across the world and reserves are at a very low level, leaving no room for unexpected events next year,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist with the UNFood and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). With foodconsumption exceeding the amount grown for six of the past 11 years, countries have run down reserves from an average of 107 days of consumption 10 years ago to under 74 days recently…
…In a shocking new assessment of the prospects of meeting food needs, Lester Brown, president of the Earth policy research centre in Washington, says that the climate is no longer reliable and the demands for food are growing so fast that a breakdown is inevitable, unless urgent action is taken.
“Food shortages undermined earlier civilisations. We are on the same path. Each country is now fending for itself. The world is living one year to the next,” he writes in a new book.
According to Brown, we are seeing the start of a food supply breakdown with a dash by speculators to “grab” millions of square miles of cheap farmland, the doubling of international food prices in a decade, and the dramatic rundown of countries’ food reserves.
This year, for the sixth time in 11 years, the world will consume more food than it produces, largely because of extreme weather in the US and other major food-exporting countries. Oxfam last week said that the price of key staples, including wheat and rice, may double in the next 20 years, threatening disastrous consequences for poor people who spend a large proportion of their income on food…
…“The geopolitics of food is fast overshadowing the geopolitics of oil.”
…“The situation we are in is not temporary. These things will happen all the time. Climate is in a state of flux and there is no normal any more.
“We are beginning a new chapter. We will see food unrest in many more places.
“Armed aggression is no longer the principal threat to our future. The overriding threats to this century are climate change, population growth, spreading water shortages and rising food prices,” Brown says.
Further reading…
Food prices from 1990 to the present…
And an open letter(10-12-2012) by Professor Christopher Rhodes on our looming problem of Peak Phosphorus…
Our politicians should be running on a platform of issues concerning basic survival at this point.
The U.S. military industrial complex is the single biggest leech upon society. Both parties unquestioningly support it. While many view a Romney in the White House would be like adding an accelerant to the flame of U.S. militarism, Obama has proven himself one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades. The military industrial complex sucks up more than half of every tax dollar and enriches weapons manufacturers at the expense of this country’s citizens. If you look back in history and read some of the essays of William Blum, you’ll have all the proof you need that the capitalists of America are not a stabilizing force in the world, but a destabilizing one. As others have noted, empires collapse from within. While they continue expanding outward and investing in their reach of hegemony, the needs of the citizens back at home are overlooked and neglected. We have an empire at the expense of democracy:
…In the first minutes of the debate, Biden gloated about how the economic blockade of Iran orchestrated by Washington had devastated the Iranian economy and caused widespread suffering among the people. He boasted of the US role in aiding the Syrian forces seeking to overthrow the Assad regime. And he repeatedly defended the administration by declaring that it had the full support of the Pentagon brass—accepting Ryan’s premise that the generals should have veto power over foreign policy.
The questions offered by debate moderator Martha Raddatz—an ABC News foreign correspondent with close ties to the US military-intelligence apparatus—took as their point of departure the unchallengeable legitimacy of the operations of American imperialism abroad and the profit system at home.
Many of them touched on foreign and military policy, in every case tacitly assuming that the United States has the right to bomb, invade and conquer any country it chooses. The discussion between the candidates dealt with the expediency of such military actions, not whether they were legally or morally justifiable.
Similarly, the parts of the debate that touched on domestic policy—the economy, health care, taxes and social issues like abortion—took for granted the existing division of the wealth of society between the tiny minority that controls nearly all of it and the large majority who are struggling to survive.
In the entire 90 minutes, there was not a single question or answer about the conditions of life of the working class—about cuts in wages, pensions and other benefits; the growth of poverty, homelessness and hunger; the spreading plague of evictions and foreclosures; the deterioration of public services such as education; the collapse of the social infrastructure…
Do you see a problem with this picture of the U.S.?
Other threats loom larger than the boogeyman terrorist. While we create enemies to fight, real manmade dangers like global warming and climate change are growing, threatening to wipe all of humanity off the face of the Earth. Humans don’t have that much time left on this planet, so it would probably be a wise decision to ratchet back all the war mongering, move away from a war-based economy, and try another approach to how we interact with the rest of the world before it all ends in more and more resource wars and the plume of a mushroom cloud.
Iran appears to be next on our bombing agenda. If we had not covertly overthrown their democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953 because he wanted to nationalize their oil resources, could we have averted this impending war?…
At a time where one of the few job choices for the youth of this country is to either flip hamburgers at a greasy spoon or line up as cannon fodder in oil wars, you have to wonder if the American dream has not become an American nightmare. Corporations enjoy record profits and little to no taxes while the next generation is kicked to the curb…
Sadly, suicide is the avenue many young people take to escape this parasitic and cut-throat political economy of ours. Yes, we eat our own young by way of the for-profit college industrial-complex.
Student loans can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. Credit card debt has even led to some untimely deaths. Why are we condemning our young people?
This week’s credit check: The average undergraduate student graduates college with $4,100 in credit card debt and $19,300 in student loans. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students…
President Obama’s recent budget proposal included ending an experiment that gave out Pell Grants for summer courses and eliminating a subsidy for paying interest on student loans for current grad students. That looks mild, of course, compared to what the GOP proposes to do — cut the maximum grant payment by $845, end funding to other aid programs, kill AmeriCorps entirely, and slash billions from agencies that support academic research.
But as explained in “Up to Our Eyeballs“, the cuts to grants isn’t exactly new. Grants have been declining over the last thirty years as loans came to replace them in financing college educations. Two-thirds of financing used to come from grants, in fact, and now two-thirds comes from loans — which is to say, taking on debt. The book notes, “The maximum [Pell Grant] award today covers about one-third the average expense of tuition and fees at a four-year private college, and only 22 percent of all grant recipients actually get the maximum.” Meanwhile, tuition is climbing — it rose 122% at public universities from 1986 to 2006. The average graduate leaves college with $19,300 in student loan debt, up from $9,250 about ten years ago.
And now loan defaults are on the rise. A new federal analysis shows that about one-quarter of students who took out loans to attend for-profit college defaulted within three years of starting repayment. That rate is also up for public colleges — at 11%, up 10% from the previous report — and private nonprofit colleges — at 8%, up from about 7%. This may come as little surprise with an unemployment rate of 9%. Indeed, while in some ways college graduates are better off than those without a degree, they’ve still seen the highest percentage increase in unemployment. It can be hard to keep up with loan payments when you can’t find a job. And unlike most forms of debt, student loan debt is with you forever — you can’t discharge it in bankruptcy. In fact, “Up to Our Eyeballs” notes that about 9% of Americas aged 45-64 still have student loan debt.
That’s all bad enough, but going to college also opens up another Pandora’s box of debt: credit card offers. Students graduated college with an average of $4,100 in credit card debt in 2008 and half of all undergraduates had four or more cards. In the 2006 movie Maxed Out, mothers Trisha and Jeanne recount how both of their children went off to school and were hit with tons of card offers — even though neither student had much income or any credit history. Neither parent had any idea what was going on, but eventually one of them had racked up 12 different cards and the other was behind on the very first card she got. In the end, both children killed themselves out of the desperation of not being able to pay off their debts. Suicide is disturbingly common among this age group: it is the second leading cause of death among those aged 15-24, and the rate has increased 200% for this group over the past 50 years. The reasons are complex and varied, but one cause can be financial strain…
We live in the age of bubbles. Condemning our children to suffocating debt right off the bat with little prospect of meaningful employment is another sign of a society that it morally and ethically bankrupt.
The Student Loan Bubble:
“Since 2009 student loans (non revolving consumer loans) have increased from 100 billion to 450 billion. The green dashed line shows where this debt should be based on the historical trend line and as shown below the student debt held by the US Federal government has ballooned in the past few years. This is what a bubble looks like.” – link
With all of the other problems we are leaving the next generation(climate change, an oligarchic economy, peak oil, the sixth mass extinction, etc), you would think that we would at least try to help them out in their education, but if we really cared about them and the future, then we would not be carrying along with business-as-usual, our heads planted firmly in the sand, while the very habitability of the planet hangs in the balance.
The youth are on their own. Climate change has become a campaign slogan, nothing more…
Climate change is indisputably anthropogenic – human-made. The long deep-pocketed propaganda, public relations, and lobbying arms of the corporate carbon industrial complex have long insisted that global warming is a reflection of unalterable natural forces that operate independently of human control. But the preponderant majority of the climate-sentient world agrees with the overwhelming consensus finding of contemporary earth scientists that global warming is anthropogenic (“human made”) – that it reflects the visible hand of human practice, politics, and policy. It knows that the story of the world’s broken ecology is about the human release of greenhouse gases resulting from the uncontrolled extraction and use of carbon-based fossil fuels.[8]
The harsh reality has to be acknowledged in elite capitalist media. Reflecting its duty to provide its privileged readers with reasonably accurate information, even the neoliberal, arch-capitalist Anglo-American Economist magazine acknowledges the dominant role of human agency in a recent special supplemental report on “The Vanishing North.” According to The Economist last June, “The shrinkage of the sea ice is no less a result of human hands than the ploughing of the prairies. The cause is global pollution, and the risks it carries are likewise global. The Arctic, no longer distant or inviolable, has emerged, almost overnight, as a powerful symbol of the age of man.”[9]
“Accelerating the Catastrophe”
What do the two dominant U.S. business parties offer towards the goal of saving the planet – well, its living species – from the crisis of anthropogenic global warming? Less than nothing. An escalation of the assault, in fact, making the problem worse.
Writing about the drastic melting of “the earth’s air-conditioner,” Gillis notes a chilling lack of urgency in reacting to the problem the part of rich nation governments, whose “main response has been to plan for exploitation of newly accessible minerals in the Arctic, including more oil.”[10]
Instead of acting to limit greenhouse emissions, those governments see the retreat of the great northern ice cover as an opportunity “to accelerate the catastrophe…The reaction,” Noam Chomsky notes, “demonstrates an extraordinary willingness to sacrifice the lives of our children and grandchildren for short-term gain. Or, perhaps, an equally remarkable willingness to shut our eyes so as not to see the impending peril.”[11] …
…The Republicans and the Democrats both decline to take the great time bomb of climate change[18] with anything remotely like the seriousness it deserves since doing so would disrupt “the economy.” They both worship at the altar of growth and the notion that “a rising tide lifts all boats” – capitalism’s longstanding fake, eco-cidal answer to popular pressure for jobs, and end to poverty, and the downward redistribution of income and wealth.[19] They both refuse to let long-term considerations of livable ecology and human survival interfere with the short-term pursuit of material expansion and the bottom line, not to mention the short-term logic of the election cycle.
I often wonder why people, who know that climate change is real, refuse to discuss it. They refuse to discuss it because it will upset their regimen of making money and carrying along with business-as-usual.
Bill Mckibben was on some late night TV show and he mentioned that the executive of some oil company said that if we need to move our food production north, then we will. Here is why that won’t work. Climate change means widespread famine, wars for dwindling resources, the fall of States, and the final extinction of man. There’s no more pretending that economic growth is possible or even a sane path for us to follow. Yet the system continues on through coerced participation.
I wonder if our forebears from 100 years ago would alter their actions if they knew from scientific and observable evidence that their way of life would cause the extinction of their progeny. Do you think they were more sensible back then? At that time, Edward Bernays and the tools of mass media manipulation had not yet entered society. Are not climate change deniers and free market ideologues the flat-earthers or Salem witch hunters of the 21st century? Feel free to give me an answer if you have one.
If you destroy the oceans, the cradle of life, then they will overtake you, returning you from whence you came…
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 