We’ll Have Nothing Left to Lose!!!

05 Sunday Jan 2014

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

≈ 61 Comments

Tags

Banksy, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate Espionage, Corporate Lobbyists, Corporate Shills, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Disneyfication of Society, Eco-Apocalypse, Economic Collapse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Financialization of the Economy, Globalization, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, McDonaldization of Society, Military Industrial Complex, Near-Term Extinction, Nine Inch Nails, Peak Oil, Philip K. Dick, Police State, Ponzi Schemes, Poverty, Propaganda, Pseudo-Realities, Public Relations, Ralph Nader, Resource Wars, Revolution, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, Stephen Fjellman, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, Vinyl Leaves:Walt Disney World and America, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit, Worship of Mammon

Rejoice: McDonald’s to open up first restaurant in Vietnam in 2014. Disneyland can’t be too far behind.

The . . . metamessage of our time is that the commodity form is natural and inescapable. Our lives can only be well lived (or lived at all) through the purchase of particular commodities. Thus our major existential interest consists of maneuvering for eligibility to buy such commodities in the market. Further, we have been taught that it is right and just—ordained by history, human nature, and God—that the means of life in all its forms be available only as commodities. . . . Americans live in an overcommodified world, with needs that are generated in the interests of the market and that can be met only through the market.
~ Stephen Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves:Walt Disney World and America

From the Amazonian tribe driven off its land by fossil fuel companies to the wage-enslaved city dweller dependent on mass-produced food and other commodities, no place on Earth has escaped the planet-wide reach of capitalist industrial civilization’s profit-extracting mechanisms. The oligarch’s of industry and banking shape public thought through an all-pervasive mass media monopoly, control legislation and regulation by pulling political purse-strings and commanding an army of lobbyists, sew death and mayhem with the global arms trade, sacrifice the next generation in resource wars, decimate ecosystems for short-term gain, manipulate and devalue currencies, create economic bubbles, and sell this entire vile process back to the masses as “progress” and “development” with measurements of inflated stock prices and skewed GDP figures. The untold human and environmental costs are now bursting at the seams with societal disintegration, epidemic mental illness, wide-scale resource depletion, industrial pollution and contamination, and the on-going collapse of the Earth’s biosphere.

If you’re wondering why there can never seem to be any significant action taken on climate change, don’t look for honest answers from those whose livelihood is tied to capitalism. If the true costs of the global industrial economy were calculated in terms of environmental damage, the ill-health effects on workers and the public, as well as the fraying of the Earth’s web of life, industries would find the costs too great to bear. The honest truth is that this ecocidal economic system would have to be dismantled for there to be any hope of humanity preserving a living planet and averting extinction.

“…big-time corporate capitalism is an omnicidal momentum. I mean, it just has one thing in mind, and it will destroy or weaken or co-opt anything in its way that is civic, that is democratic….corporations have been very clever A) in distracting people, especially young generation, with entertainment, with professional sports, turning them into spectators. Now you’ve got, you know, 24/7 entertainment. There’s no end to it. And they’ve also been very good in making people internalize a sense of powerlessness.” ~ Ralph Nader

Perhaps the three biggest crises facing civilization are unrestrained financialization of commerce and society, climate change, and peak oil (or peak net energy). Let’s take a quick look at how America is handling each of these crises:

Employing paid shills for the financial industry is now simply standard operating procedure in the U.$.A.:

…Consumer advocates and independent analysts do their best to weigh in as well, but they are outgunned. Meanwhile, consulting firms dedicated to playing matchmaker between corporations and hired experts have flourished in the new regulatory environment. Director Charles Ferguson, whose film Inside Job highlighted the role of sponsored professors in supporting the deregulatory policies that led to the financial meltdown in 2008, says the business of economic consulting firms that work to “source” academics for expert testimony and regulatory filings “has been going on for quite a while, and it’s now quite a large industry.”…

Of course anthropogenic climate change, the existential threat of modern times, would seem to be a catastrophe deserving of mankind’s attention, would it not? Well, as you can see, the capitalist only views it as a public relations war:

An extensive study into the financial networks that support groups denying the science behind climate change and opposing political action has found a vast, secretive web of think tanks and industry associations, bankrolled by conservative billionaires.

“I call it the climate-change counter movement,” study author Robert Brulle, who published his results in the journal Climatic Change, told the Guardian. “It is not just a couple of rogue individuals doing this. This is a large-scale political effort.”

His work, which is focused on the United States, shows how a network of 91 think tanks and industry groups are primarily responsible for conservative opposition to climate policy. Almost 80 percent of these groups are registered as charitable organisations for tax purposes, and collectively received more than seven billion dollars between 2003 and 2010.

How about peak oil? Again, the energy industry has its PR machine in full swing touting America’s imminent energy independence along with many other myths, but commenter James of this blog cuts to the chase:

Now, which ponzi is most despicable, a religious or financial one? Both are based upon deceit and both serve primarily the enrichment of the scheme officialdom. One promises a payoff in eternal life while the other promises financial success. One examines your credit score while the other applies tick marks in you behavioral ledger of good and evil. Both systems of fleecing are based upon human fear and herd mentality. Society shuns the heretic of either ponzi and damnation awaits those that do not participate fully. Ponzis collapse when increasing numbers of fools, resources and energy can no longer be sucked into their cancerous growth schemes. The religious structures will be more enduring as they can always find plenty of poor dolts to give their last penny to gain a chance at the big after-life payoff. The financial schemers, faced now with meeting the absolutely unbelievable limits of growth will have to leave all those little nest eggs of promises, unhatched. The key is to convince the ponzi participants that the U.S. is the new Saudi Arabia, that fracking oil and natural gas is the future and we can get enough oil from shale to last a million years. “Just relax folks, you’re all gonna get your money back”. Not. What a miraculous world we live in.

As you can see, America is handling all three crises like a sleazy car salesman unloading a lot full of lemons.

And if anyone was spooked by the Snowden revelations of government spying, the implications of corporate espionage on social-change organizations that threaten to impede unfettered access to profits is truly terrifying.

Although I’m not a particularly religious person, all evidence does point to a civilization which has completely succumbed to the worship of Mammon:

…The fruits of such idolatry are clear: the injustice and unemployment and waste of human talents; the corruption of our political leadership and their collusion with immoral financial practices; the depredation and degradation of our natural environments and the exhaustion of our natural resources; the inevitable wars and other crises that arise from the systematic fostering of base human appetites and the refusal to compromise our ways of life, and pursue a more equitable sharing of the gifts bequeathed to us…

I would not blame anyone for wanting to seek comfort in a bottle or some other form of self-medication, but perhaps doing something more dramatic to escape this nightmarish reality of a thoroughly corrupted, money-worshipping society is in the cards. When your back is against the wall and you’ve lost faith in everything, then revolution is the antidote for the “pseudo-realities” that plague us.

“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.” ~ Philip K. Dick

The specter of death, near-term extinction, haunts us as we silently endure the evil and decay all around us, going along just to get along in the belly of the American empire. One day pent-up anger and hunger will burst forth, pushing us into the streets. Blood and emotions will flow freely. Inept and crooked governments will fall. We’ll have nothing left to lose.

Smoke ’em if ya got ’em.

28 Saturday Dec 2013

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

≈ 75 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, American Horror Story, Arctic Ice Melt, Ayn Rand, Capitalism, Chandran Nair, China's One-Child Policy, Climate Change, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Inverted Totalitarianism, Jörg Friedrichs, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Natalia Shakhova, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Peter D. Ward, Police State, Prison Industrial Complex, Resource Wars, Robert Hunziker, Techno-Optimists, The Elite 1%, War for Profit

“One of my psych professors told me that people tell stories to cope with their fears. All art and myths are just creations to give us some sense of control over the things we’re scared of. Afraid of dying? Create reincarnation. Afraid of evil? Create a benevolent God who sends evil doers to Hell. I’ve treated soldiers with PTSD by having them draw pictures of what happened over there.”
~ Ben in American Horror Story

Seething just below industrial civilization’s thin veneer of normalcy lies an ocean of grim reality – overpopulation, peak oil, poverty and starvation, hormone-altering pollution and cancer clusters, nuclear radiation from the mishaps of distant countries, pandemics from mutagenic viruses, climate chaos, mass extinction, etc. Working to suppress the fear of such real-world nightmares is an assortment of psychological and cultural defense mechanisms such as the myth of technological progress, religious dogma, Madison Avenue propaganda, and the unconscious tricks of self-deception we are all vulnerable to (emotional detachment, rationalization, retreating into fantasy, etc.). All the while and in the background is the constant hum of the global consumerist machine churning out endless promises of satisfaction and happiness if only you buy this or that product. Most have bitten the fruit of materialism and swallowed whole the false truism that human progress is always on an upward trajectory with science and human ingenuity solving all problems. Citizens of ‘developed’ countries are blissfully unaware their life of leisure and comfort is supported by dozens and dozens of energy slaves working day and night all year long, year after year. Grocery store shelves brimming with food, a high animal protein diet, personalized auto transport in and out of sprawling suburbs, globetrotting air travel, and a machine-dependent society powered at the convenient flip of a switch have all been made possible by a fast-depleting source of cheap, energy-dense fossil fuels.

We were born into this energy-rich cocoon of modern industrial civilization with each successive generation growing more and more accustomed to its skyscrapers, concrete sidewalks, asphalt roads, and cacophony of automation until it is now all simply taken for granted. Restless and agitated, we no longer are connected to the natural cycles of the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun and moon, and nature’s own biological clock which measures time with the migration of animals, the blooming of plants, birth and death. Instead, time is measured in quick sound-bites on TV, the hours in a workday, the quarterly profits of corporations, and the microseconds of high-frequency stock trading. Time is money, and the bottom line reigns $upreme. Social and environmental consciousness has been paved over with consumer icons, and the future is a barcode ~~stomped~~ stamped into your forehead. Industrial civilization’s coveted energy resources, frantically ripped out of the ground and burned up into the atmosphere, have irrevocably disrupted the stability of a climate that has allowed life to flourish. The Earth itself has been thrown off kilter and its natural clock has been broken. Plants are blooming when they shouldn’t, succumbing to invasive pathogens and insects, and withering from drought or unusual cold snaps. Animals are migrating north earlier and earlier and dying off from disease and starvation in a warming world. People are losing their homes to freak storms and rising tides. The word “extinction”, when uttered in a public forum, is treated as mere hyperbole, and the fragility of the biosphere is neither acknowledged nor truly appreciated.

“…The so-called Holocene climate is “the only state of the Earth system that we know for sure can support contemporary society” (Stephen et al. 2011, 739). It is the linchpin of humanity’s life-support system and stands at the core of its safe operating space (Rockström et al. 2009). It can even be argued that keeping the Holocene climate resilient is an essential system function not just for human society but for the planetary system as a whole (Lovelock 2000)…”
~ Jörg Friedrichs, The Future Is Not What It Used to Be

“…there is no worldwide plan on how to move forward to avoid an extinction event. As a consequence, except for a few scientists, the world community will be shocked by the carnage because nobody anticipates it really happening. Otherwise, the governments of the world would be furiously working on solutions, but they are not…”
~ Robert Hunziker, Looming Danger of Abrupt Climate Change

Ah, but Peter Ward just said humans are more than “average” and won’t go extinct:

“Species don’t age out of existence, species are killed off, lose competition, they go extinct because they’re driven to extinction. It’s not inherent. It’s not within them.

So if we keep track of Mother Earth and do some good engineering then we’re not going to go extinct. But extinction and misery are two different things. Not going extinct doesn’t mean you’re not going to be miserable, and by misery I mean, wholesale, enormous human mortality.”

Do some “good engineering”? Christ, Peter Ward has fallen for the technological progress myth just as has scientist Natalia Shakhova, a leading expert on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.

Technology has not created a utopian nirvana; it has created a capitalist dystopia:

“…The inability of most developing countries to meet the basic needs of its population, whilst somehow being swept up in the euphoria of new technologies that cater to more individualistic needs and pursuits (not all socially useless or destructive), has its origins in flawed governmental policies that have defined progress as the quest for productivity gains and economic growth rather than human development. Policy-makers in the developing world adopted a fundamentally invalid economic system that has led to the crisis of capitalism the world is experiencing and the questioning of the perpetual growth mantra. These decision-makers have put their faith in consumption-led growth with its emphasis on technology, and abdicated their responsibility to meeting people’s basic needs and protecting natural resources. This approach is rooted in the Western economic model of the past two to three centuries, when a minority saw the world as their oyster and plundered other countries to create prosperity. As such economic growth through externalizing cost, underpricing resources and promoting relentless consumption has become the world’s one and only economic model, a recipe for disaster in Asia…

…Despite the rhetoric about the pressing need for development and the emphasis on primary education, health care and even resources management, the Washington Consensus has exclusively focused on economic growth. It has advocated broad trade liberalization through privatization and the increase of foreign direct investments, amongst other structural adjustment strategies, as a “first stage policy reform” for developing countries to boost economic growth. The promotion of this set of policies is primarily driven by the desire to secure markets for multi-national companies and Western economies. Local elites benefited from it too…

…From the standpoint of this economic paradigm, the relentless pursuit of technological innovation is supposed to solve global challenges such as poverty and even resources depletion. In reality, technological progress has, in many instances, accelerated resources depletion rather than reduce it. Technological innovation might have served the needs of the global population in terms of productivity and efficiency but not in terms of sustainability.

Forestry technology, for example, allowed harvesting on hitherto unimaginable scales. Whilst cutting trees was mainly done by hand until World War II, advance in engineering led to the development of small and powerful chainsaws, hence transforming the logging industry. Lumberjacks can now cut down trees between a hundred and a thousand times faster than they could with axes. Fisheries are another sector where the lack of strong policies has allowed people and companies to exploit the oceans thanks to technology.

To go further deep into this model’s misconception of the role of innovation, one must cast doubt on the contention that green technology will come to the rescue and create a more sustainable environment. “Greening” the economy by just producing more so-called “green” consumption is actually an intellectual lie. Zero-emission vehicles will remain toys for the rich because they require exotic material and thus will keep being expensive. In addition, they do not address the issues of externalized costs, which more and more cars will impose on Asian cities. This problematic can be extended for a whole range of consumer goods where “greening” and “innovation” are used to camouflage the reality, which is the pursuit of producing more goods cheaply and encouraging relentless consumption….”
~ Chandran Nair, The Myth of Technological Progress

Capitalism certainly feeds off the overpopulation crisis. More people means more potential customers, more consumption, and more profit. I searched in vain to find an article explaining how capitalism would solve the crisis of overpopulation, I found this video by Yaron Brook who appears to be a very ardent supporter of laissez-faire capitalism and Ayn Rand. I recommend watching the video for the sheer amusement of watching this guy execute every mental gymnastic trick he can think of to delude himself into believing that overpopulation is a nonissue. No more land? No problem, we can stuff more people out on the oceans or up in outer space. Of course he too also grasps at the quixotic techno-fix of the future.

I see China is worried about the economic ramifications of its barbaric social engineering project:

It’s a “free market” and the military industrial complex sees a lucrative future in war, famine, pestilence, and natural disasters. Overpopulation will provide more cannon fodder for when America’s war economy goes into hyperdrive for the last remaining resources on the planet. America’s captive pool of dirt cheap labor will be stitching the uniforms.

Gulf of Despond

24 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by Brutus in Climate Change

≈ 72 Comments

Tags

Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Eco-Apocalypse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Gross Inequality, Runaway Climate Change, Social Unrest

Newcomers to the subject of industrial collapse have a lot of catch-up to do behind those in the vanguard. If the abundant evidence, collected over several decades by this late date but foreseen long ago, is evaluated honestly and soberly, the realization might reasonably stun the collapse ingénue into silence. But in the era of instantaneous communications, emotional promiscuity, oversharing, and careerist news reports logged in real time (before events are fully known), who has the good sense to refrain from adding one’s idiotic voice to the din — especially to ask questions and subsequently provide answers that have already been gone over thoroughly and discarded by others? None too many, I venture to say.

Having struggled to understand industrial collapse now for six years or so myself, it has been curious and demoralizing to witness how even the most hopeful optimists and problem-solvers have yielded to the conclusion that what solutions may have existed some decades ago are now long behind us. Given the nature of our institutions and individual characters, we’re actually accelerating toward doom rather than braking. Thus, old-timers often descend into what might be called a Slough of Despond, but collapse newbies still desperate to cheat reality would rather name it a Gulf of Despond. To the old guard, the Slough looks like an abyss, a black hole, a bottomless pit that gobbles insatiably all energies dumped into it. To late-comers, the Gulf, by virtue of its spin-doctored name, must be somehow manageable, bridgeable, traversible, often with a glorious opportunity to establish a new, utopian social order (within a generation, of course, because that’s how history works) using all the wisdom we’ve accrued about imbalances and abuses of power. I have some empathy for those just now getting on board, but for those with a pulpit from which to preach, I suspect misdirecting our energies may be worse than just letting things unfold. Hard to know.

So what exactly produces the Slough/Gulf? The short course is that we’re already in the midst of an epoch-changing shift — a process advancing with alarming celerity compared to precedence found in the geological record — due to rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases (released from burnt fossil fuels) that have initiated climate change and the sixth great extinction event, to which we humans are most certain to fall prey. Without bothering to assess blame, the numbers indicate that it is not something about to happen; it’s already in the process of happening and will only get successively worse as delayed effects and feedback loops come fully into play. Let me repeat: this is already happening and there can be no pullback, pullout, stall, or reverse. The worst case scenario is, well, the worst, and we appear to be on track to spring that trap on ourselves. Three foreseeable planet-wide effects are (1) runaway global warming and climate chaos, (2) collapse of the biosphere (basically, anything that lives except for a few extremophiles), and (3) total irradiation from hundreds of nuclear sites that will melt down after being left unattended.

But because the future has not yet happened, though it is laid out before us with inevitability if one is honest, all the preferred hedges and escape hatches in language are utilized (might, could, perhaps, potential, possible, probable, likely, etc.) about what’s occurring all around us. No doubt this quells panic that would ensue if a credible voice began telling the truth, but it also prevents adoption of moral choices still available to us for taking our leave gracefully while demonstrating some concern for the rest of creation. That would be for me the most global moral choice, but there are others far more specific. For instance, we could stop the mad, greedy hustle for more — power, riches, resources, extravagance — and instead live modestly so that those who follow in our wake before the end of it all have something other than abject misery and desperation. We could stop inflicting utterly tortuous lives in cages, feedlots, and industrial barns on animals that eventually become our McNuggets, Whoppers, and bacon. We could share what we have with those truly in need rather than hoarding, doing so without self-serving expectations. We could ease suffering and mistreatment inflicted on others by the pursuit of ever-greater efficiency and profit. We could stop doubling down on all the schemes and antisocial values that have landed us, knowingly or not, in a death spiral. Lots of options out there.

However, again, given our nature, we seem intent on ending none of the stupidity, profligacy, and cruelty done by us, on our behalf, or with our complicity at least partly because Judeo-Christian values that inform industrial capitalism are still revered as sacred. (This is why the radical right has been attacking the center right — including St. Ronnie — for not being ~~righteous~~ doctrinaire enough. It knows its vision of salvation is broken but doubles down in desperation to validate itself.) The most important individual choice, considering our powerlessness to put a stop to the industrial juggernaut and those very real hatchetmen who perpetuate it, may be simply to do our best to understand the world that history has delivered us, represent the truth as well as possible, and go forward while we can with clear eyes and conscience. That means treating others, both villains and victims in this living nightmare, with compassion rather than universal condemnation.

This may be just about the darkest view out there, and it gives me pain to express it, just as all doomers out there struggle with what to do with their awful foreknowledge, but it’s not nihilistic. It’s not Charleton Heston at the end of one of the Planet of the Apes movies saying, essentially, “fuck it” and triggering the ΑΩ Bomb. Rather, honorable moral choices in the face of self-annihilation offers an opportunity to achieve one last, satisfying bit of grace that helps ease the pain of knowing what humans have done to the planet.

Questions for Abby Martin Interview

21 Saturday Dec 2013

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

≈ 133 Comments

Tags

Abby Martin, Abrupt Climate Change, Climate Change, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate Espionage, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Guy McPherson, Inverted Totalitarianism, Investigative Journalism, Mass Media Manipulation, Mass Media Propaganda, Media Roots, Near-Term Extinction, Russia Today, Security and Surveillance State

“…when denial threatens society, the Earth’s ecosystems, and a sustainable future, it has become not only a delusion, but a dangerous pathology… Possibly some Romans did the same as Attila the Hun marched into Rome, or some Chinese may have sipped tea as Genghis Khan marched his Mongol hordes into their cities…” ~ Haydn Washington

After discovering the website Media Roots a few years ago, I worked with its owner Abby Martin on a small project connected with my ‘Graffiti Philosophy’ video. If I remember correctly, I believe Abby worked for a short time as a newscaster for mainstream media in southern California, but became disenchanted and quit. From my brief experience, she struck me as nothing but sincere and dedicated to the cause of social change. Besides her TV work with RT, she is no different from you or I. I’m aware that RT serves as a “soft-power tool to improve Russia’s image abroad,” but it has also been extremely effective in providing alternative viewpoints to American corporate hegemony. Some of the more discerning readers of this blog have expressed exasperation at the incompleteness of Guy McPherson’s recent interview with investigative journalist Abby Martin. I thought it was rather short and could have been expounded upon if sufficient time were allowed.

No one in my immediate social circle really believes that humans will be extinct by 2030, but if I say circa 2100, then that seems to be sufficiently far enough off in the future for most to safely agree with me. With amplifying positive feedbacks loops just starting to kick into gear, the climate could spiral completely out of control within a short time span as expressed recently by the concern of a number of scientists over catastrophic and abrupt climate change. After all, we humans are doing things to the planet that have never been done before at such a rapid pace, so the ‘unknown unknowns’ are sure to surprise us.

We all know what our response should be — should have been — in response to climate change, resource depletion, and environmental destruction, but all the evidence points to the system perpetuating itself until it crashes like a speeding train with its conductor sound asleep. I personally think we need an entirely new socio-economic system that is completely counter to the current ecocidal paradigm. We know that corporate espionage against activists is insidiously preventing any sort of large-scale grassroots movement from forming and that the power of mass manipulation by corporate media is unprecedented in the history of civilization, so what are we, the few awake amongst us, to do. Some still feel it is worthwhile to invest time in the current political carnival with the ‘hopes’ of effecting incremental change while others feel that any meaningful decisions should have taken place decades ago. Still others feel our fate could never have been altered to any great degree due to biological imperatives and human psychology, and some humanely ask for mankind to save what biological diversity it can in these last days of the Anthropocene Age. In any event, our descendants will have quite a mess to deal with, that is if they are lucky enough to have been left with a planet that accommodates any sort of human population.

So we get to the purpose of this post. Suspend your jaded cynicism for a moment. Abby Martin, a dedicated activist, artist, and investigative journalist, has agreed to an internet interview for this site concerning the previously described state of the world. Abby has interviewed quite a few intelligent people including many we quote here, so this has the potential to be interesting. I’ve been told Brutus has an essay in the draft format and have asked him to hold off until next week. Help me formulate some intelligent questions for Abby. What questions should she have asked Guy? Does she believe in the possibility of humans going extinct? What does she envision the future to be? Has she ever been censored on RT? Hopefully, Guy McPherson and others will join in once the final interview is published. If you don’t want to post your questions here, send them to me at collapsitarians@gmail.com.

There Will Be No Miracles Here

09 Monday Dec 2013

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

≈ 117 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Climate Change Feedback Loops, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, George Carlin, Hubris of Man, Mass Die Off, Overpopulation, Peak Oil

Even with all the environmental reports I read about the numerous species man is pushing off the face off the Earth, the biospheric havoc he is wreaking, and the violence he inflicts upon his fellow man, I still find the idea of human extinction surreal when I flip on the TV and see commercials for Viagra, breast augmentation, and ‘Hoveround’ power wheelchairs. I mean, we’ve managed to walk on the moon and send out exploratory space crafts and robots to other planets, yet we cannot even manage ourselves adequately enough here at home to keep from irrevocably fouling things up?!? How can that be? That we can achieve such feats of genius, but end up shooting ourselves in the proverbial foot with greenhouse gases just seems like one enormous and macabre cosmic joke to me. Doesn’t it strike you as tragically humorous? Oh, but the word is that we humans would be crazy if we didn’t reach deep down into our bag of technological tricks, if only for one last desperate time, to try to fix this doozy of a problem we’ve gotten ourselves into. Why not? We’ve already FUBARED the planet as it is, what with the chain of climate feedback loops irretrievably out of the genie’s bottle, making any mitigation and adaptation plans a day late and a dollar short. Faith in technological progress is certainly a myth that will not go down easily. We’ll keep trying to right this plane even as it does barrel rolls into the side of a mountain. What a horrible accounting error humans made by ignoring depletion and pollution in their calculations. Governments pretended that peak oil and global warming were simply figments of our imagination. If only their jobs didn’t depend on maintaining such an epic falsehood. Who knew 9 billion humans would become the next deposit of fossil fuels.

We had other things on our mind though, didn’t we. Money and the ability to generate it became the raison d’être for humans. Saving the environment simply was not profitable, unless you could convert it into some sort of tourist attraction. Wealthy people could hop on a CO2-belching airline and traipse around in those “protected areas” with their safari hat on and an assortment of modern electronic paraphernalia to record the momentous occasion, not too dissimilar to those annual climate change conferences the industrial world would put on. Humans always were great at maintaining appearances, even if it did cost them an entire civilization that spanned the planet. They were so good at detaching themselves from their surroundings that they could literally monitor a species into extinction while calling the whole process conservation. How’s that for self-delusion! As long as someone was getting paid, no one really cared about the end results. Biostitutes indeed!

So one could say that the human path to extinction was paved in greenbacks, if not gold. Nobody dared whisper that all the wealth humans had built up and accumulated over the last several hundred years since the industrial revolution was simply a grand illusion, a phantasmagoria of the fossil fuel age. It is said that there are two things certain in this world, but actually there are three: death, taxes, and ecological balance. Man may exploit, pollute, exterminate, and plunder all he wants, but in the end Mother Nature will always claw back what was taken without forethought or reflection. The first mistake made by man was to proclaim dominion over nature. From that point onward many other bonehead maneuvers were orchestrated by humans, but perhaps the biggest one was when they gave personhood to an economic entity devoid of feelings, morals, or conscience. How could anyone seriously think corporations were people??? Homo sapiens must suffer from an inferiority complex to have labeled its kind “wise”.

So this is my second eulogy to man, my first being ‘The Short Story of Carbon Man and Industrial Civilization‘. There are no Hollywood happy endings or cliff-hanger climaxes. Mother Earth will slowly take back what was stolen while billions of tiny humans scurry around to higher ground and find ways to temporarily hold off the gathering forces, but no mercy will be given to those who brushed off decades of warnings and prescient predictions. There will be no miracles here for a species that believes itself separate from and above the natural world.

In Memory of Man

2,000,000 B.C. – 2060 A.D.

He who once dominated the Earth with his technology and ingenuity,

but whose overwhelming numbers and psychopathic leaders

pissed it all away in a sea of radiation,

toxic chemicals, and plastics

“The planet is fine. The people are fucked.”

― George Carlin

My Home is a Dystopia

07 Saturday Dec 2013

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

≈ 33 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Complexity Trap, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Cyberwarfare, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP), Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, Global Nuclear Meltdown, Inverted Totalitarianism, Kurt Vonnegut, Mass Die Off, Nuclear Proliferation, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Police State, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, Steve Matthews, the Achilles Heel of the Electric Grid, The Elite 1%, Wall Street Fraud

As media spin and political rhetoric of the corporatocracy diverge further and further from reality, modern society appears more and more to have been lifted from the pages of dystopian fiction. While the majority of the population succumbs to a serial-bubble economy, a disintegrating social safety net, and extreme weather, The elite are wasting scarce resources in an effort to hold together the cracking and buckling foundation of our sprawling industrial civilization. It’s in the short-term interest of the elite to construct a police state that will protect the gamed system they have created for themselves even though we know such short-sightedness sets us all up for a more spectacular fall. Capitalism has enslaved the world to the lifelong pursuit of little bits of paper and metal in order to buy the mass-produced products and food that have become essential to the survival of billions of people. Money and the illusion of material wealth are now perceived as more important than preserving the habitability of the planet. We live in a pathological dystopia of money worship.

Punch-drunk on fossil fuels, humans have been more destructive than a bull in a china shop; the true cost of fossil fuels continues to be externalized and downplayed as ever more ecological debt racks up, revealing itself in an increasingly destabilized biosphere and collapsing web of life. Sadly, the ‘climate emergency‘ has become yet another excuse for the elite to accelerate their looting by treating CO2 emissions as one more capitalist market tool — tax/trading policies as well as the costly and impractical capture and storage of carbon. In the end, any such market schemes will fail due primarily to the harsh consequences of human ecological overshoot and the complexity trap modern civilization has created for itself.

“…Societies struggling with the dilemmas of complexity are vulnerable from two directions. First, systems that are too tightly coupled or too efficient are fragile; they lack resilience. Thus they risk being toppled by a cascade of failure. That is how region-wide electrical outages propagate. The failure of one sector brings down another and another until the grid itself fails, and once down it takes a heroic effort to get it up and running again.

Second, they are exposed to simultaneous failure. When formerly separate problems coalesce into a problematique, a nexus of interlocking problems, the society does not face one or two discrete challenges, as in simpler times, but instead a swarm of simultaneous challenges that can overwhelm its capacity to respond, thereby provoking a general collapse.

Take climate change as a current example. To address this overall problem will require us to surmount a host of challenges in many different sectors (e.g., agriculture, forestry, public health, energy production, infrastructure and so on) not only in one country or economy but in every country—to varying degrees…”

In the geological blink of an eye — 20, 40, 60, or 80 years from now, ghostly ruins will be all that remains of the most technologically advanced civilization that once spanned the globe. I don’t believe there will appear any sort of Hail Mary invention to solve the gauntlet of problems facing mankind — peak fossil fuels, climate change, ocean acidification, keystone species extinction, water scarcity, peak antibiotics, chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, capitalism, and the complexity trap. Just a few weeks ago, a drill was conducted between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico in order to simulate a large-scale electric grid failure:

“…The vulnerability of our power grid due to solar flares or electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is getting new attention. Our system of interconnected power generation, transmission facilities, and distribution facilities are more vulnerable to cyber attacks than ever before. It would cost $3.6 trillion to fix everything, and would not be completed until 2020.

Smart grid systems make the power grid more accessible to cyber hackers so the upgrade can increase the risk. Electric car charging stations are essentially an accessible computer that cyber hackers can access the power grid. Right now, America has relatively few electric car charging stations, but we will be seeing a significant increase in government and privately funded vehicle charging station projects…

…It is estimated that a long-term failure of the power grid would likely be so catastrophic to society that casualties would be in excess of 60% of the population, according to the Chairman of the EMP Commission. With the grid vulnerable to solar flares, cyber attacks, EMP’s and weather related events it is important that we have supplies in stock to reduce the waiting time for overseas shipments and manufacturing delays. Currently we lack the inventory.

When, not if, the power grid fails, not only will the citizens of the U.S.A. be at risk of interrupted supplies of water, fresh food, fuel and the shut down of communications, but our very own military will suffer the same affects. Civil unrest would inevitably overwhelm the police department’s ability to respond…”

Back in August of this year, Outgoing DHS Director, Janet Napolitano said the following:

“A massive and “serious” cyber attack on the U.S. homeland is coming, and a natural disaster, the likes of which the nation has never seen is also likely and on its way.”

Of course the extreme weather events of climate change are also a factor in the fragility of the power grid. And ironically, converting to ‘green energy’ to supply power to the grid could compound the problem:

…”Energy officials worry a lot these days about the stability of the massive patchwork of wires, substations and algorithms that keeps electricity flowing. They rattle off several scenarios that could lead to a collapse of the power grid — a well-executed cyberattack, a freak storm, sabotage.

But as states, led by California, race to bring more wind, solar and geothermal power online, those and other forms of alternative energy have become a new source of anxiety. The problem is that renewable energy adds unprecedented levels of stress to a grid designed for the previous century.

Green energy is the least predictable kind. Nobody can say for certain when the wind will blow or the sun will shine. A field of solar panels might be cranking out huge amounts of energy one minute and a tiny amount the next if a thick cloud arrives. In many cases, renewable resources exist where transmission lines don’t.

“The grid was not built for renewables,” said Trieu Mai, senior analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The frailty imperils lofty goals for greenhouse gas reductions. Concerned state and federal officials are spending billions of dollars in ratepayer and taxpayer money in an effort to hasten the technological breakthroughs needed for the grid to keep up with the demands of clean energy”…

The electric grid truly is the Achilles heel of industrial civilization:

…”Outside of the electricity industry, few fully understand the centrality of the grid to life in America today. The most graphic realizations occur when the grid goes down. It’s not just a matter of light and comfort in our homes. Without electricity, citizens may have no access to potable water, sewage treatment, safe food, fuel supplies, traffic control, or health care…

…Not only is the electrical grid central to modern life, but the grid also has multiple vulnerabilities that make keeping it safe a very difficult task. Weather outages are common, although some, such as an ice storm, can do enormous damage. A January 1998 ice storm destroyed much of Hydro-Québec’s massive 765-kV transmission system, blacking out more than 3 million Canadians, causing 30 fatalities, and leaving many customers in the dark for weeks. Tropical storms, such as 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, can also cause long-term and widespread destruction.

Human error can also take down the grid in a hurry, as was the case with the massive August 2003 blackout that turned off power for 55 million people in the Northeast, Midwest, and Canada…

…The 2003 blackout also highlighted another chilling aspect of grid failure: the propensity of the system to suffer from a cascading failure. Because of the grid’s interconnectedness, grid failures can spread quickly, concatenating across the system. This same effect occurred during the 1965 blackout that slammed most of the eastern U.S., an event that began with a simple hardware failure in Canada.”…

And lastly, without electricity for an extended period, we would have hundreds of Fukushima nuclear disasters unfolding all over the planet:

…”Unfortunately, the world’s nuclear power plants, as they are currently designed, are critically dependent upon maintaining connection to a functioning electrical grid, for all but relatively short periods of electrical blackouts, in order to keep their reactor cores continuously cooled so as to avoid catastrophic reactor core meltdowns and fires in storage ponds for spent fuel rods….

What do extended grid blackouts have to do with potential nuclear catastrophes? Nuclear power plants are designed to disconnect automatically from the grid in the event of a local power failure or major grid anomaly; once disconnected, they begin the process of shutting down the reactor’s core. In the event of the loss of coolant flow to an active nuclear reactor’s core, the reactor will start to melt down and fail catastrophically within a matter of a few hours, at most. In an extreme GMD [geomagnetic disturbance], nearly every reactor in the world could be affected…

If an extreme GMD were to cause widespread grid collapse (which it most certainly will), in as little as one or two hours after each nuclear reactor facility’s backup generators either fail to start, or run out of fuel, the reactor cores will start to melt down. After a few days without electricity to run the cooling system pumps, the water bath covering the spent fuel rods stored in “spent-fuel ponds” will boil away, allowing the stored fuel rods to melt down and burn [2]. Since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) currently mandates that only one week’s supply of backup generator fuel needs to be stored at each reactor site, it is likely that, after we witness the spectacular nighttime celestial light show from the next extreme GMD, we will have about one week in which to prepare ourselves for Armageddon.”…

The Energy Skeptic reports that Russia is on a crusade to spread these ticking time bombs all around the world.

“For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn.”

02 Monday Dec 2013

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

≈ 80 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Arctic Ice Melt, Canfield Ocean, Capitalism, Climate Change, CO2 Emissions, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Droughts and Fire in Australia, Ecocide, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, Gary Bedford: Regional Environment Officer, Great Permian Extinction, Infinite Growth Paradigm, International Energy Agency (IEA), Jellyfish Plague, John Key: New Zealand Prime Minister, Kevin Moore, Mass Die Off, Methane Time Bomb, New Plymouth District Council (NPDC), Nuclear Radiation, Ocean Acidification, Overpopulation, Pathocracy, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Political Ponerology by Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Runaway Climate Change, The Elite 1%, Typhoon Haiyan

Despite mounting evidence of our grim reality, the world’s psychopathic leadership remains willfully deaf, dumb, and blind to the unfolding global ecocide and humanicide. A persistent sounding of the alarm by a tiny minority of the population only seems to have irritated and offended those in the elite class who are pressing the fossil-fueled industrial machine onward, full steam ahead. However, it’s not a cliff we are headed towards because surely the psychopaths would have hidden their parachutes underneath their business suits. There will be no Bottleneck for humans because we’re headed toward the black hole of extinction from which nobody gets out alive. Yes, they’ll be a few hangers-on for a brief period until there is only one lone straggler… and then darkness for the human species along with 99% of all other life. We’re doomed by a pathocracy:

…from Greek pathos, “feeling, pain, suffering”; and kratos, “rule”

A totalitarian form of government in which absolute political power is held by a psychopathic elite, and their effect on the people is such that the entire society is ruled and motivated by purely pathological values.

A pathocracy can take many forms and can insinuate itself covertly into any seemingly just system or ideology. As such it can masquerade under the guise of a democracy or theocracy as well as more openly oppressive regimes…

Kevin Moore, a frequent commenter on this site, has provided us with an excellent summation of current factors which clearly spell extinction for the “wise” ape. Certainly if a reasonable person in charge studies his list, they would want to turn this ill-fated ship around before it quite literally takes everyone down into a deep, watery grave. On the contrary, Kevin points out that they are “throwing the compass and fishing gear overboard” and “boring holes in the hull while distributing all the rations for immediate consumption.” I’m afraid those who have managed to work their way into political positions are forbidden from making any decisions jeopardizing business-as-usual; but as the memes go, there is no business on a dead planet nor is there a planet B. The least these politicians and corporate heads could do is be honest with their own children by telling them their future is not as important as the short-term profits to be had right now by ripping up the Earth’s last remaining resources and fouling the biosphere. If they cannot be truthful to their own offspring, how could we expect them to be forthright and unbiased with us?

At any rate and for posterity’s sake (however brief that may be), here is Kevin’s detailed and ‘hopium-free’ list:

Yesterday I sent out an email to a long list of people concerning the meeting I had with the local council’s climate change officer, during which I pointed out we are in the early stages of complete meltdown of planetary systems. And ‘nobody’ is at all bothered.

Here is what I sent as a summary of the meeting: .

I raised the following points with Colin Comber, New Plymouth District Council climate change officer, at our meeting on Friday, 29th November, 2013. On most points he had nothing to say.

1. The forcing factor for methane has been raised from 23 times CO2 to 34 times CO2. Even that multiplier understates the warming potential in the short term, and a figure of at least 100 times should be used for methane bursts.

2. Recent methane bursts in the East Siberian Sea have resulted in 2000ppb, which is equivalent to over 200ppm CO2 in the short-term, making the total global CO2 equivalence 600ppm (at least). The extraordinarily high concentration of greenhouse gases has resulted in rapid temperature increases in the Arctic (up around 1C since 2006, despite the huge amount of energy involved in melting ice.).

3. 2012 saw the lowest ever summer ice area.

4. The current Arctic ice area is hovering around two standard deviations below the historic average, but much of the ice is thin and new, making 2013 the lowest stable ice volume ever.

5. Atmospheric CO2 hit 400ppm earlier this year. It troughed at 393ppm (photosynthesis cycle) and is on its way up; it is anticipated to reach 403ppm April-May 2014.

6. The heat forcing of current atmospheric CO2 is equivalent to around 400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs being exploded every day.

7. The present level of atmospheric CO2 is 40% above the pre-industrial level and corresponds to a sea level 23 meters above current; the reason we don’t have an immediate sea level rise is the thermal lag of warming deep oceans and converting ice into water. Such a level of CO2 has not been experienced any time in the evolution of humans over the past 2 million years. Indeed, for much of our recent history the CO2 level was around 180ppm and there were thick ice sheets as far south as central England.

8. The IEA has announced we are on track for a rise in average temperature of 3.5oC by 2035. Such a temperature rise puts temperatures beyond anything experienced in human history and most of the Earth into an uninhabitable zone. Interestingly, NZ governments quote the IEA as the best source of information when it comes to energy but completely ignore the IEA when it comes to unwelcome information about climate. The IEA is talking about a runaway greenhouse gas situation.

9. Acidification of the oceans [due to absorption of anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere] is proceeding at an unprecedented rate, leading to stress of organisms dependent on bicarbonate cycle for shell formation. Industrial activity is altering the chemical and biological composition of the oceans at a rate faster than that of the great Permian Extinction Event which wiped out 95% of life on Earth. Continuation on the current path of burning fossil fuels will render the oceans uninhabitable to most existing marine species, and then wipe out most terrestrial species.

10. I was personally shocked to see millions of jellyfish on a local beach recently. Although my observation has no scientific significance it is indicative of the ‘death of the oceans’ I have been reading about; we are transforming the oceans back to some primeval form, similar to that of 600 million years ago, wiping out the species (turtles, sunfish etc.) that feed on jellyfish and loading the oceans with toxins. I had previously noted the paucity of sea life in rock pools compared to 30 years ago (this is presumably not from over-collection, since the beach has been designated a maritime protection zone).

11. Whereas the previous five mass extinction events (other than the one that wiped out dinosaurs) were due to natural volcanic activity, the present mass extinction event is due to industrial activity and emissions from industrial activity.

12. An unknown amount of radiation is leaking from the crippled Fukushima reactors into the Pacific Ocean. People on the west coast of the US are now extremely concerned, particularly since mass deaths of sea life are now being frequently reported.

13. Australia recently reported the highest ever October temperatures (corresponding with the earliest severe wildfires).

14. Typhoon Haiyan was the biggest storm ever to make landfall and resulted in unprecedented damage. This was due to extraordinarily hot sea water associated with ocean warming. An excellent essay on Nature Bats Last highlighted the fact that prior to the Second World War people in the region lived without the ‘benefits’ of civilization, and when storms smashed things up they just picked up the pieces and rebuilt their huts, got water from lakes and rivers, and went back to fishing from small boats: now they are unable to do any of that because all the natural, sustainable systems have been ruined or covered with concrete and asphalt, and industrial civilization resulted in a population explosion that resulted in far more victims than there would have been if development had not occurred.

15. If we imagine the Earth totally covered with industrial civilization (no land available for food production) it is clearly not sustainable. 90% covered by civilization is not sustainable. Nor is 80%. Not even 50% is sustainable. The current level of civilization utilises about 43% of the primary production of the Earth and has resulted in a 0.85C rise in average temperature. That 0.85C rise is already having catastrophic effects (meltdown of the Arctic, super-storms etc.)

16. The fact that we already have meltdown (lowest Arctic ice, extraordinary storms, death of corals etc.) at 0.85C above the long-term average indicates that we are already in overshoot with respect to population and resource consumption. Despite the fact that we have reached the meltdown stage, governments persist with policies predicated on increased population and increased resource use, which is completely insane. NPDC [New Plymouth District Council] advocates the same kind of insanity on a daily basis.

17. The previously proposed ‘safe’ level of temperature rise of 2C is not safe at all, and was only ever an arbitrary number. But climate specialists now admit that warming cannot be restricted to 2C anyway, and that we are on track for a 4C or 6C rise in average temperature, i.e. a largely uninhabitable planet in a matter of decades, probably by 2060, which would be within the normal lifespan of children living today. If the International Energy Agency is correct, the Earth will be largely uninhabitable by 2040.

18. Nothing whatsoever is being done to curtail emissions. International negotiations are a farce predicated on ‘kicking the can down the road’ for as long as possible. NPDC policy, mirroring that around the world, is geared to increasing CO2 emissions, via increased population, increased use of concrete, increased dependence on internal combustion engines, etc. I quoted the incident I had witnessed of two petrol-powered vehicles being used to deposit and level gravel on a path in Pukekura Park when one person with a wheelbarrow could have done the job (and 50 years ago that was how the job was done); meanwhile, the mulching machine in operation in the park prior to our meeting would have consumed more energy in a few hours than the electric bikes the council promotes would save in a year.

19. Extraction of conventional oil peaked over 2005 to 2008, and the economic system is now being propped up by desperation measures centered around fracking, deep-sea drilling, extraction from tar sands, etc. as well as consuming ever greater amounts of energy, such activities increase the emissions associated with fossil fuel extraction, thereby exacerbating the climate catastrophe.

20. We cannot look to John Key* or Jonathan Young** or Andrew Little*** for leadership on environmental issues: they are simply opportunists acting as agents of global corporations and money-lenders; they implement policies favourable to global corporations and money-lenders which entail trashing the environment, generally as quickly as possible.

21. Currently, NPDC is fully committed to destroying the futures of the young people living in the district and elsewhere via resource depletion and environmental collapse, as indicated by the huge display in the council foyer which announces that NPDC spends 2c of every dollar collected promoting economic growth. (Economic growth equates to increased resource consumption and increased emissions.)

22. The present economy has no future because of energy depletion and because it is increasing the level of pollution, both locally and globally. Continuation on the present path of searching for and burning fossil fuels results in an uninhabitable planet within decades. Drastically reducing fuel consumption leading to total abandonment of fossil fuels is the only sane option. (It may be too late for that, but it is still the only sane option.)

23. This is not a matter of priorities. Surely there can be no priority higher than ensuring the next generation has a habitable planet to live on. The system ignores the most important priority of all, and therefore the system is INSANE.

24. Everyone within the system pretends nothing is wrong and that the system has a future even when a modicum of rational thought indicates it doesn’t (infinite growth on a finite planet is mathematically impossible.)

25. The composition of the new council give us no reason for optimism and many reasons for extreme pessimism.

26. The main reason the general populace of the district continues to ‘behave badly’ -purchase and use oversized vehicles, cover land with concrete and asphalt, consume at unsustainable levels etc.- is because they are encouraged to by NPDC. The only message they get from the council is that everything is rosy (when the reverse is the case and we are mightily close to collapse).

27. The overuse of internal combustion engines is causing severe health problems globally and within the district. Coupled with consumption of junk food, mechanized transport is causing obesity and other diseases. Consumerism is generating a freak society, and each week that passes the ‘freak show’ becomes more bizarre.

28. There is a culture of ‘spend, spend, spend’ amongst council officers, with utterly ridiculous projects being undertaken. Apart from being totally unnecessary, these concrete and steel projects put additional CO2 into the atmosphere and bring forward abrupt climate change and an uninhabitable planet, are financially crippling the district, and pushing those on low fixed incomes ‘off the cliff’.

29. I pointed out that I spoke with Gary Bedford, regional environment officer, prior to returning to NP in 2006, and raised the matters of Peak Oil and Abrupt Climate Change; he ‘did not want to know’ and has done nothing whatsoever to protect the district. Indeed, he is on record as making absurd statements such as: “Climate change will be good for Taranaki.” I wish to have a follow-up session with him.

30. I have been proven right on practically everything I said in 2006 and subsequently to variously composed councils since 2006. Council officers have been proven consistently wrong. But it makes no difference how often council officers are proven wrong, nothing in the system changes and the insanity continues.

31. NPDC has been provided with the most accurate data and analysis available over many years (particularly my submission to the draft plan 2013), and NPDC has ignored it all. Hence, everything that matters has gotten worse and will continue to get worse by the day.

32. As far as I can establish, Colin Comber is the only council officer in a position to challenge the nonsense churned out by the bulk of the administration, in so far as all the policies advocated by senior council officers result in increased emissions and an ever faster meltdown of the global and local environment. I pointed out to him that he has ‘sat on his hands’ since our first meeting (around 6 years ago) and everything has gotten worse as a consequence.

Notes:

*John Key: NZ Prime Minister.

**Jonathan Young: MP for the city

***Andrew Little: List Labour MP for the city (MMP system).

Andre Judd: recently elected (October 2013) mayor of the city.

What is particularly interesting for me is that Jonathan Young, Andrew Little and Andrew Judd all have copies of my most recent book ‘The Easy Way’ (which details most of what is discussed on CoIC and NBL etc.) and that I had several sessions with Andrew Little on the content of TEW, and numerous sessions with Andrew Judd prior to his election.

Old habits die hard, but if you’re a smoker and you’ve got stage 3 cancer staring you in the face, the only two options are to radically change your behavior or die with your bad habits. We’ve already destroyed the Earth’s air conditioner which has altered the Jet Streams, unlocked the methane monster, and set off various other positive feedback loops ushering in a new normal of extreme weather. As a result, humans no longer enjoy a stable climate within which to cultivate food and can no longer depend on feshwater supply from seasonal snow melt. Yes, it’s rather a bit too late, but why keep digging when the hole you are in is already way too deep?

Disillusioned in Dismayland

09 Saturday Nov 2013

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

≈ 157 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Globalization, Gross Inequality, Idiocracy, Inverted Totalitarianism, Jeff Gillette, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Police State, Poverty, Privatization, Regulatory Capture, The Elite 1%, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit

Capitalism has, throughout its history, built itself off the backs of the weak through dispossession, slavery, colonialism, technology and military power. Protecting the capitalist system into the 21st century, U.S. military served as the all-powerful proxy force of the global corporate elite. In the waning days of modern-day civilization, transnational corporations found even more ways to amass power and squeeze out every last penny from the Earth to the gods of capital. In the name of ‘free trade’, secretive agreements with alphabet soup-acronyms like TTP and TPIP were concocted to protect and expand profits as well as investor returns at the expense of all else, including the sovereignty of nations and the very habitability of the planet. Corporations became the new kings and queens, tsars and tsaritsas, bishops and popes. The last grab for what was left could now be done more swiftly while circumventing the laws of nations.

“…Capitalism has an inbuilt wondrous capacity of resurrection and regeneration; though this is capacity of a kind shared with parasites – organisms that feed on other organisms, belonging to other species. After a complete or near-complete exhaustion of one host organism, a parasite tends and manages to find another, that would supply it with life juices for a successive, albeit also limited, stretch of time.

A hundred years ago Rosa Luxemburg grasped that secret of the eerie, phoenix-like ability of capitalism to rise, repeatedly, from the ashes; an ability that leaves behind a track of devastation – the history of capitalism is marked by the graves of living organisms sucked of their life juices to exhaustion…” ~ Zygmunt Bauman

In a world of finite resources controlled by a tiny capitalist class, there would eventually only be two classes remaining – the über-wealthy or global elite and the vast underclass of disposable workers who eked out a subsistence existence. The wealth of society continued to be funneled upwards to the corporate overlords by way of deregulation, privatization, low or nonexistent tax rates, control of the legal system, and the cutting away of any last scraps of a social safety net.

Preoccupied by their digital screen devices and satiated on mass-produced junk food, the plebs never really noticed they were living in an open-air prison. In the meantime, the walls of a police state rose up to protect the sociopathic elite. As long as the ‘consumers’ were kept in a continual state of ‘amusement madness’ and on the treadmill of work exhaustion, there would be no time for contemplating the reality of climate change, the ever-widening wealth gap, the rise of a corporate fascist state, or the disappearance of the natural world.

“Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.”
~ J. B. Priestley

This Ponzi scheme economy was so entrenched in the psyche of the general populace that essentially none questioned its validity, even in the face of increasingly chaotic weather and rising seas, mountains of toxic waste, lifeless oceans, epidemic industrial disease, and grotesque wealth maldistribution. The right to seek profit trumped the health and safety of humans, the stability of the environment, and the legal recourse of governments on behalf of their citizens. National borders were effectively erased and a global corporatocracy now ruled the planet. Ironically, the one world government feared by so many right-wing conspiracists had become reality without any protest from them.

Acid rain and erratic weather, the unintended consequences of half-baked geoengineering fixes, forced most food production into industrial greenhouses. Due to the chemical pollution levels in the environment, all water had to be treated before it was used for anything, and gas masks became ‘everyday outdoor wear’ like hats and umbrellas. Most stayed indoors to escape such hazards, immersing themselves in the artificial environments of virtual reality software. Zoos became the only sanctuaries for wildlife, their sperm safely kept frozen for the day humans might want to de-extinctify them. National parks were privatized and plastered with corporate logos. The ranks of the homeless and destitute swelled, but most soon found themselves living inside the cell of a private, for-profit prison where they toiled away as cheap labor contracted by the corporations. Such crises were always looked upon as business opportunities, a niche to fill in the profit-seeking mind of homo economicus. Commodification and commercialization of everything became completely normalized.

Taken to the extreme and turned into a rigid belief system, all ideologies can become dangerous. When the ethics of a society bow to laissez-faire capitalism, life in the U$A becomes a cruel joke:

War for profit (the world’s largest war machine eating up half of every tax dollar)
Healthcare for profit (the most expensive and least effective healthcare in the industrialized world)
Imprisonment for profit (most incarcerated individuals per capita in the world)
Higher education for profit ($1.2 trillion student debt and counting)
Corporate welfare (one of the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the developed world and subsidies for the giant transnational corporations costing the average American family $6,000 or more per year)
U.S. Now leading the world into climate chaos with unconventional oil & gas production (expensive extraction of dirty, low EROEI sources)
Corporate-controlled media (just 6 corporations own 90% of the media)
Corporate-controlled government (lobbying dollars just keep increasing)
Permanent quantitative easing (endless money printing did not work)
Gross wealth disparity (highest income gap of any developed country)

Need I go further? The day that the movie ‘Idiocracy’ is looked upon as genius and prophetic, civilization will have become a parody of itself. I think that day has arrived.

Our Consumptive Madness

06 Wednesday Nov 2013

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

≈ 57 Comments

Tags

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Capitalism, Carrington Event, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Democracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecocide, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, George Mobus, Greenpeace, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Overpopulation, Planetary Tipping Points, Robert MacNeil, Robert Scribbler, Russian Arctic Drilling, Security and Surveillance State, Terence Mckenna, The Elite 1%, unwashed public

The question of whether the human species is smarter than yeast is answered daily as the ecocidal and homicidal activities of industrial civilization continue apace. I learned a few days ago that September 2013 was the warmest in recorded history, and this morning I read that 2012 was a record breaker for GHG emissions:

“The laws of physics and chemistry are not negotiable,” said Michel Jarraud.

“Greenhouse gases are what they are, the laws of physics show they can only contribute to warming the system, but parts of this heat may go in different places like the oceans for some periods of time,” he said.

This view was echoed by Prof Piers Forster from the University of Leeds.

“For the past decade or so the oceans have been sucking up this extra heat, meaning that surface temperatures have only increased slowly.

“Don’t expect this state of affairs to continue though, the extra heat will eventually come out and bite us, so expect strong warming over the coming decades.”

Speaking candidly about the prospects of the industrialized world being able to reduce its GHG emissions and avoid catastrophic warming, the only three living diplomats responsible for leading past and present UN global warming talks had this to say:

“‘There is nothing that can be agreed in 2015 that would be consistent with the 2 degrees,’ said Yvo de Boer, who was UNFCCC executive secretary in 2009, when attempts to reach a deal at a summit in Copenhagen crumbled with a rift between industrialized and developing nations. ‘The only way that a 2015 agreement can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy.’”

Another study explains that not even the supposed eco-friendly state of California is likely to meet its GHG reduction targets by 2050. So you see, the ‘radical ecoterrorists’ were right all along. Industrial civilization has to go, or we go. The improbable list of actions needed to preserve any semblance of humanity was recently laid out by George Mobus. But as you know, even if we stopped everything right now, there is still a lot of pent-up manmade global warming in the pipeline from past industrial activity that will wreak havoc for millennia to come, as Robert Scribbler points out:

“…we’ve already released enough greenhouse gasses to at least return Earth to climates not seen in 3.6 million years. In this respect, the Baffin Island study adds to research conducted at Lake El’gygytgyn showing that levels of CO2 comparable to those seen today resulted in Arctic temperatures 8 degrees Celsius hotter during the deep past…

…Most likely, we are headed to at least the temperatures last seen during the Pliocene, in which global averages ranged 2-3 degrees Celsius hotter than the present and during which oceans were 25-75 feet higher. Unfortunately, these are the long-term consequences we have probably already locked in. But without rapid reductions in carbon emissions to near zero over the coming decades, we can expect far, far worse outcomes.”

Russia recently answered the concerns of environmentalists over Gazprom’s drilling plans in the Arctic by summarily arresting numerous members of Greenpeace and charging them with piracy. This is a high-profile case illustrating that ecocide is embedded and enforced within the system of capitalist industrial civilization. A further example of the system’s omnicidal nature is the construction of nuclear-powered ice-breaker ships by Russia to plow through the waters of the Arctic:

“Russia has started building the world’s largest universal nuclear-powered icebreaker capable of navigating in the Arctic and in the shallow waters of Siberian rivers. The unique vessel will further increase Russia’s dominance in the region…

…Powered by two “RITM-200” pressurized water reactors the “Arctic” is being built to generate 175MWe. Its efficiency and power allows the new model to crack ice fields 3 meters thick…”

Then you have Canada racing towards eco-apocalypse with its tar sands, and America exporting its coal into the maws of China and elsewhere as well as fracking the countryside into toxic wastelands, but of course the disease has spread globally. As Michael T. Klare clearly stated after weighing the PR propaganda with observable reality:

“…The result is indisputable: humanity is not entering a period that will be dominated by renewables. Instead, it is pioneering the third great carbon era, the Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas….”

Delicate ecosystems are ground up into commercialized and commodified pulp and fed into the machine of capitalism, lost forever in the fumes of our consumptive madness. A rash of mass wildlife deaths is occurring this year to further evidence the fact that industrial man is pushing the planet to the brink. It appears we may be reaching more tipping points in ecological breakdown:

Also…

and…

Robert MacNeil once observed, “Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” Our global self-destruction is not visible to the Television-hypnotised masses when they look out their window, but for the few environmentally conscious beings amongst us, the destruction is as personal and painful as wartime torture. How depressive it is to see the natural world being chewed up and spit out at such an alarming rate. We are part of the environment and its death is humanity’s suicide. Some hope for a super-Carrington event that would leave the machine dead in its tracks, but then there is the problem of those hundreds of nuclear plants scattered around the world like the bomb-rigged vest of a terrorist.

A sociopathic economic system that crushes democracy, decency, and justice in the name of growth and profits has led to the catastrophe we now see unfolding. When the masses are dumbed-down to mere ‘consumers’ and powerless to make meaningful change, then those sociopaths at the helm of the ship are free to pull us all down into the black hole of war, famine, disease, and extinction.

Citizen 3-141-592-653-5

03 Sunday Nov 2013

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

≈ 58 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Homeland Security, Inverted Totalitarianism, Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, NSA Spying, Overpopulation, Patrice Ayme, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Police State, Resource Wars, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, Tadeusz (Tad) Patzek, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, War for Profit, War on Terror

They were called ‘consumers’. Their every behavior became just another stream of data to be tracked, recorded, quantified, and analyzed by corporations for their vast, profit-seeking conveyor belt of production, distribution and marketing to a sea of mouths. The machine was global and its hungry tentacles wrapped the Earth. Wherever it turned its covetous eyes, the Earth shook and its creatures large and small fled for cover. Government and corporate rule were fully enmeshed and the birth of a worldwide surveillance state was born. All mass communication systems were controlled and grassroot uprisings within the Empire’s homeland could be cut off at the knees before they ever gained traction. Protection of the homeland from terrorism was the initial excuse by which the fascist state expanded its power. Knowledge is power; foreign countries and governments could be manipulated from a distance. Privacy was a quaint relic of a bygone era. With the awareness that Big Brother was watching, few voiced their true opinions. The charade of democracy played on as the consumers retreated into their fabricated world of digital screens and commercialization.

“[Citizens became] one-dimensional idiots; consuming pointlessly, obsessing about lifestyle, gawping at celebrities, gazing blankly at moronic TV game shows, forever grasping towards the next, vacuous, artificial ‘want’ created by Global Gobble Corporation.” ~ Philip Mirowski

The captains of industry were happy with their scheme of manipulating markets, printing fiat money, continuously uprooting industry to cheaper labor pools abroad, keeping well oiled the wheels of the military industrial complex by waging war-for-profit wherever possible, and ravaging the Earth for every last bit of ancient carbon and minerals. Vast sums of money were spent on public relations and greenwashing in order to ensure the unwashed masses would stay ignorant and subservient to the looting and destruction of society and the environment. The elite were quickly turning the Earth into a death trap for all living things, and few noticed or cared. As long as cheap, mass produced, nutrient-poor food was on tap to fill the stomachs of the teeming masses, revolt and bloodshed were averted. The elite, however, could see the writing on the wall. Plans were drawn up to use force when the inevitable time arose that fuel, food, and water became scarce. The heavy stick of Empire so often used to smash swarthy radicals abroad would, in due time, be turned inward on the homeland.

“The Will To Extermination is the very core of the Dark Side. It has been ignored at humanity’s own peril.” ~ Patrice Ayme

“Our technological abilities have made us tremendously successful animals, but also tremendously dangerous ones, glorified apes with nuclear capabilities. We tend to overexploit or destroy our resources, drastically modify or pollute our environments, overpopulate the planet, and wage war on our fellow inhabitants, all of which threaten our long-term viability as a species. Is self-induced extinction the ultimate fate of intelligent, tool-using organisms like ourselves? Are we smart, but not smart enough?”
~ Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth

“This is what I recently learned from my friend, Professor Bill Rees:
During individual development, repeated sensory experiences and cultural norms literally shape the human brain’s synaptic circuitry in patterns that reflect and embed those experiences. Patterned thinking acquires a physical presence in the brain.
Subsequently, people seek out compatible experiences and, “when faced with information that does not agree with their [preformed] internal structures, they deny, discredit, reinterpret or forget that information.”
(Brain and Culture, Bruce E. Wexler, The MIT Press, 2006).
Most people are genuinely unable to face the truth. Based on this premise, most if not all human civilizations have been built.
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error…”
(Gustave le Bon, 1896).
~ Tadeusz (Tad) Patzek