I’ve been at this blogging for about six weeks now, reading and researching industrial civilization’s demise. The more one goes back and looks at the wholesale destruction we have done and continue to do to this planet, and in turn ourselves, the more you come to realize how blind and foolish we have been. Entire ecosystems have been wiped off the face of the earth and whole environmental systems altered beyond their normal evolution. In place of forests, jungles, and deserts, we have constructed vast tracts of monoculture industrial farming, endless vistas of cookie cutter suburbia, thousands upon thousands of miles of asphalt roads, parking lots, and concrete paths, and cathedral-like malls for the citizenry to partake in the consumption of goods made by someone we’ll never meet and shipped from lands we may never visit.
What underpinned the creation of this entire edifice of modern man in less than two centuries? The power to transform the earth in our image came from cheap, energy-dense fossil fuel, i.e. oil. So highly dense in energy is oil that just one barrel of it equates to the labor of one man working forty hours a week for twelve years. Was all of this frenetic, ant-like labor worth it if, at the end of the day, we find that all of that effort to be for nought, cleared away by an escalating, civilization-ending climate chaos? It seems that we went to a party and drank so much of the intoxicating drinks offered to us that we ended up killing ourselves from the overdose and subsequent poisoning. For those sitting at the top of the capitalist hierarchy, do they not fully understand that a world thrown out of balance will not spare the elite sitting behind their barb-wire walled and guarded mansions? Is the desperate clawing at low EROEI fossil fuel sources worth the expense of further, unmitigated environmental destruction just to eke out a few more decades of what is inevitably a self-destructive system? What will we be left with but a completely poisoned and pillaged planet with no resources left to construct an alternative that might replace the current bankrupt system.
Right now we are in the intoxication phase, blind to the self-imposed eradication that comprises our present course in energy policy. So blind are the elite that they are willing to lie and propagandize in order to make sure the plans go forth. Having poisoned the biosphere, oceans, and land, the only place left seems to be deep beneath the ground beyond everyone’s sight where the remaining life-giving reservoirs of water rest.
The other day I saw the headline story ‘Injection Wells: The Poison Beneath Us‘ at ProPublica and wondered to what lengths we as a society will go to keep industrial civilization running before we come to our flippin’ senses figure out that our current way of life is neither sustainable nor the model for the rest of the world to emulate. BraneSpace did a post on this subject as another obvious sign that we have hit peak oil:
…I want to confine attention in this blog to the energy issue, that of Peak Oil certainly having passed in 2005, and the further evidence being what I call energy pursuit desperation. Evidence? Since 2005, 680,000 waste and injection wells have been drilled, of which nearly 150,000 have injected millions of liters of toxic industrial fluids below the surface to “frack” natural gas. None of this polluted water can then be incorporated back into the hydrological cycle because of the 190 -odd contaminants (most carcinogenic) that the fracked water contains.
“In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted,” according to Mario Salazar, an engineer who worked for 25 years as a technical expert with the EPA’s underground injection program in Washington. “A lot of people are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die.”
Another aspect to what I call “energy desperation”, in the sense of being willing (now) to put aside concerns for life quality to obtain energy: The 2005 Federal Energy Appropriations Bill which exempts the gas industry from compliance with:
– The Clean Water Act
– The Safe Drinking Water Act
– The Clean air Act
– The Superfund (CERCLA) Act
The last implying they can dump as much toxic crap as they want and there’ll be no “toxic release inventory'” to assay it, and hence, no need to ever clean it up. If this isn’t desperation, what is? The willingness to put our future health as a nation in dire risk to satisfy immediate energy demands – mainly to dredge whatever low EROEI (energy returned on energuy invested) sources from the ground since the high EROEI oil has peaked.
More signs of desperation in the western states, such as Colorado: According to a Denver Post report on the results of an analysis by the Western Resource Associates (WRA), “Colorado’s oil and gas drilling consumes enough water to sustain 79,000 households for a year- enough for a medium sized city.”
This despite the fact the state has been in the throes of drought for years (though the severity has waxed and waned) and now is as bad as it was in 2002, with wildfires occupying more land than the whole Florida panhandle. But how is our water being used? On oil drilling and fracking!
According to WRA, between 22,100 and 39,500 acre-feet are pumped into the ground each year for drilling wells and hydraulic fracturing to coax out oil and gas. Tens of thousands of wells now dot the Colorado countryside. Meanwhile, farmers in the state barely have sufficient water to bring one crop to market far less all of them.. (As much as 5 million gallons of water can be injected into a single fracking well, of which 200,000 is laden with carcinogenic toxins such as benzene, so the water can’t be re-used.)
Pair this with the earlier use of corn (a food crop) for ethanol, and you have the makings of an energy desperation syndrome of epic proportions. But hardly anyone hears of the extent of it or the harm done…
This is what I and others call the Third-Worldization of America as we descend the net energy cliff of peak oil. We start using the harder to extract, dirtier stuff like tar sands, deep water oil, and gas fracking:
The formula for making Canada and the U.S. the “Saudi Arabia” of the twenty-first century is grim but relatively simple: environmental protections will have to be eviscerated and those who stand in the way of intensified drilling, from landowners to local environmental protection groups, bulldozed out of the way. Put another way, North America will have to be Third-Worldified…
Has any American bothered to look at how our energy hungry lifestyles have left the environment in the Third World? That’s what happens when mass consumerism is coupled with unfettered free-market capitalism devoid of regulation. If you missed it, Obama recently opened the gates for the oil companies to drill in the Antarctic:
Someone at the Oildrum once said that our planet will look like it’s been denuded and scavenged by a swarm of hungry locusts when humans are done with it. That seems to be an apt description at the rate we are going trying to prolong the impossible. To put another more devious twist on this situation, we now have privately owned water companies partnering up with the fracking industry in order to profit off the exorbitant amount of water those drillers need to perform their nasty business:
…The water companies — American Water and Aqua America — are leading drinking water suppliers in Pennsylvania, where drilling is booming. They also sell water to gas companies — which use a drilling technique that requires massive amounts of water — and have expressed interest in treating drilling wastewater, a potentially lucrative opportunity.
These investor-owned, publicly traded water utility companies are also dues-paying “associate members” of the gas industry’s powerful Marcellus Shale Coalition, a fact confirmed by coalition spokesman Travis Windle, who says associate members pay $15,000 annually in dues. “Our associate members are really the backbone of the industry,” adds Windle…
…Aqua America is aggressively positioning itself to take advantage of what CEO Nick DeBenedictis has described to investors as a “water-energy nexus that could have a positive impact on the future of our company.” In recent years, the company has made sizeable acquisitions in Texas and Ohio – states that, like Pennsylvania, are home to large shale gas plays – and is also building a pipeline in Pennsylvania to supply water to drillers.
It’s not a good sign when a life-giving resource the public wants protected is owned by a company profiting from it. We then get perverse alliances like that described above in which the water company sees dollar signs when it looks at the profligate use of H2O by the fracking industry. You see, our capitalist system is not engineered to protect resources, but to maximize their consumption for the most profit possible, whether that be through people drinking it or the fracking industry pumping millions of gallons of water into the earth mixed with a witch’s brew of toxic chemicals. The for-profit water companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves in regards to what is in the public’s best interests.
I’m glad that at least one state is smart enough to see the self-destruction of fracking and is strong enough to do something about it:
…many of our official pronouncements – echoing those of most elite institutions and organizations – proudly and confidently insist that our future lies in “globalization.” Globalization – for lack of a better term – is, in actuality, the building out of a monoculture, a singular culture based upon basic presuppositions of modern political, economic and social theory.
Nature abhors monocultures. Nature abhors them so much that they do not exist in accordance with nature. They would be unknown but for modern man.
A monoculture is a single form of life – or, by extension, a single culture – that exists over a large expanse of space, even globally. Nature abhors monocultures because they are so susceptible to annihilation by one agent of destruction. In plant or animal life, for example, a single virus or bacteria, a single destructive fungus or disease, a single hostile predator or pest would wipe out an entire monoculture without the barest resistance. It is the very nature of nature to avoid monocultures – indeed, it cannot be otherwise since any form of monoculture cannot long exist in nature. Life in the natural realm is manifold and varied, precisely so that some life will weather the inevitable deadly challenges that arise. – Patrick J. Deneen
The following is an excellent essayby Chris Williams, a professor in the Dept of Chemistry & Physical Science, Pace Universityand author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis (Haymarket Books, 2010). It goes well with my previous post on the corporatized Rio Earth Summit. In the last two decades only four out of ninety United Nation environmental sustainability pledges have been fulfilled, a pretty dismal failure by anyone’s standards. The four were: reducing ozone depletion, removing lead from gasoline, improving access to water supplies and boosting research for marine pollution. The reason for its epic failure is that the whole process of sustainability and scaling back ecologically destructive megatrends have been co-opted by our economic system, i.e. capitalism. The need for continuous growth and expansion into new markets is inherent in capitalism. It has come to define our culture and relationship with nature and our fellow man. As history has clearly shown, capitalism will be the death of us all if we allow this ethic-less system to define ourselves and to continue its rampant, unbridled destruction in the name of ‘development’ and profit.
Sometimes, the calendar of international conferences attended by global elites serves up potent lessons for the rest of us, when they shine a spotlight on the deliberately murky affairs of the people who run the system. As the 20 most powerful world leaders deliberate on economic issues in Los Cabos, Mexico for the G20 summit, representatives of the rest will be simultaneously converging on Rio de Janeiro to consider how to follow up on the original Earth Summit, 20 years ago this year.
At these seemingly separate gatherings, we in truth observe the two sides of the capitalist coin. Namely, how can the capitalist elite continue the necessary work of exploiting both humans and the natural world in the service of profit, while cloaking their intentions in the benign language of growth, development and sustainability? Fine words to cover nefarious ends. No doubt, as people’s livelihoods and world decay around them as a direct consequence of the system the elite oversee, and in response the flame of revolt is rekindled from Cairo to Athens, political elites in the two locations will reflect on the fact that it’s not getting any easier. From the other side, critics and commentators of the two conferences are missing an important and significant lesson when they consider them in isolation.
At the original Earth Summit in Rio, it was generally accepted that environmental questions could not be separated from economic ones. This year, the two conferences, occurring concurrently at different ends of the South American continent, bring to light how this thinking has been undermined. Furthermore, they indicate with geographical and political precision where the priorities of the global elite lie. While the most important world leaders hot-foot it to Mexico to discuss global economic development, they send low-level delegates to Brazil to discuss issues they deem less vital; to be exact, planetary ecological crisis.
Indeed, so desperate were the Brazilian organizers of Rio+20 to cajole the British premier to attend, they changed the date of the conference so as to avoid conflicting with the much more important and worthy 60th anniversary celebrations of the Queen of England’s ascension to the throne. An attempt that proved ultimately and embarrassingly futile, as British Prime Minister, David Cameron, chose to cling to the coattails of President Obama and other G20 leaders in Los Cabos, as they calculate, connive and concoct the further dismemberment and disenfranchisement of communities of workers and peasants around the world.
In a further sad irony, to enhance attendance at Rio, Brazil is providing flights courtesy of the Brazilian air-force to those countries too poor to send delegates. It’s hard to imagine that the countries who can’t afford to send delegates to an environmental conference will have the financial capacity to take action to preserve biodiversity and a stable climate without international funding and technology transfer. But the concept or even use of the word “transfer” is exactly what the United States delegation is trying to excise from any document emerging from Rio+20.
In Los Cabos, 20 people wielding enormous economic power gather to ensure that nothing stands in the way of the international accumulation of money by their respective corporations; that capitalist growth continues, uninterrupted by paltry considerations such as democracy. Scheming and plotting in Los Cabos, the 20 leaders will huddle, concerned that their plans have been exposed by the people of Greece. As they jet to Mexico, one of the first countries to be devastated by the neoliberal prescription of privatization, deregulation and cuts to social spending, the election results in Greece ring in their ears as a collective rebuke to austerity and unemployment. In unprecedented numbers, Greeks exercised their democratic rights by voting for a previously obscure and marginal left coalition, SYRIZA and against handing the welfare of their country over to unelected technocrats governing from afar. A vote, it should be emphasized, carried out in the teeth of apocalyptic warnings of doom from central bank acolytes of the 1%, desperate to stop the people voting ‘the wrong way’.
As for the Global South, capitalist economic development, particularly since its neoliberal mutation, has been a disaster of gigantic proportions as money and natural wealth are siphoned into Western financial institutions. According to Oxfam, gross capital flows to developing countries fell from $309 billion in 2010 to $170 billion in 2011. Last year, aid donations from major donors experienced the first decrease in 14 years, dropping by $3.4 billion; overall aid was $16 billion below what the G8 committed to delivering in 2009. The drop in aid, along with legal and illicit financial transfers out of the developing world, mean that for every dollar received in aid (much of it tied to the purchase of materials from the West), 7-10 dollars go out. In 2009 alone, the developing world saw $903 billion disappear overseas thanks to a rigged system from which the majority cannot benefit. While 16 of the 20 members of the G20 have seen inequality increase over the last 20 years, as complement to that process, is it any wonder that developing countries seem to be permanently ‘developing’ even as social and ecological conditions there also worsen?
The violent dispossession that characterized the bloody dawn of capitalism captured by Marx in his writings on the enforced removal of peasants in the 1500’s amid the first acts of privatization – the land enclosures, is repeated in contemporary form through land grabs; his writing has a remarkably contemporary ring to it: “Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system.”
In the 20 years since the optimism of the first Earth Summit in Rio, carbon emissions have increased by 50% and, since 1950, while the rest of the world has seen an average increase in temperature of 0.70C, the arctic, due to various positive feedback loops, has experienced double that. Absent serious action, whereas the world is now on track for 20C of warming, the arctic is on course for a truly calamitous 3-60C. The June 16th 2012 special edition of The Economist pondered an ice-free arctic with a mixture of trepidation, casual racist indifference and a general leaning toward monetary excitement: “In the long run the unfrozen north could cause devastation. But, paradoxically, in the meantime, no arctic species will profit from it as much as the one causing it: humans. Disappearing sea ice may spell the end of the last Eskimo cultures, but hardly anyone lives in an igloo these days anyway. And the great melt is going to make a lot of people rich.” Yes, to The Economist, while the change may be “devastating” to ancient and indigenous cultures, along with cold-adapted species, a certain small subset of humans will become rich while ‘making a killing’ – in all senses of the phrase.
We and the land have certainly changed and the continuation planned by the capitalists and their political representatives has unquestionably become impossible, as further capitalist development begins to contradict not just human rights or a sense of social progress, but the thermodynamic laws of the universe, which underpin a stable biosphere, upon which all life ultimately depends.
To quote British journalist George Monbiot on the reasons for the failure of so many environmental conferences, “These summits have failed for the same reason that the banks have failed. Political systems that were supposed to represent everyone now return governments of millionaires, financed by and acting on behalf of billionaires. The past 20 years have been a billionaires’ banquet. At the behest of corporations and the ultra-rich, governments have removed the constraining decencies – the laws and regulations – which prevent one person from destroying another. To expect governments funded and appointed by this class to protect the biosphere and defend the poor is like expecting a lion to live on gazpacho.”
From the other side of the political spectrum, representatives of the US environmental organization, Environmental Defense Fund, writing in a New York Times op-ed concede that “As the Arctic becomes ice-free, we can expect that it will be drilled for oil”. But, nevertheless, despite two decades of failure, hold out hope that with just a little more effort and market reforms such as cap and trade, 10 years from now we’ll be okay “with determination and the right policies, by the time Rio+30 rolls around, optimism might be the order of the day.”
Now, socialists are often decried as Utopians. We are told, our ideas may sound good in theory, but humans living equitably with one another in a democratic system based on cooperation, in a society that lives in harmony with the natural world, will simply never work in practice. Is it more realistic to believe that the same system that got us to this point will extricate us? The message from the ‘realists’ seems to be that while we may well have covered the arctic in drilling rigs by then, just give it another 10 years and things will be fine. Going beyond the wrong-headed pronouncements of the EDF, UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon managed a level of fervor that would have put Dr. Pangloss himself to shame, “Increasingly, we understand that, with smart public policies, governments can grow their economies, alleviate poverty, create decent jobs and accelerate social progress in a way that respects the earth’s finite natural resources.”
One has to ask, who are the real Utopians? To many people around the world, leftwing and explicitly socialist ideas, along with class-based revolt, are re-emerging as real alternatives precisely because our rulers quite clearly have no answer other than an extension of the market into whole new areas. Meena Raman of the Malaysia-based Third World Network, was unequivocal in her denunciation of the US’s role in derailing climate negotiations in Durban in 2002 and in Rio+20: “Given the US stance, we do not want President Obama or any US leader to come to Rio to bury what was agreed in 1992 in Rio. We cannot expect the US to show any leadership in truly wanting to save the planet and the poor. So it is better for President Obama to stay at home.”
Meanwhile, 105 scientific institutions are urging action at Rio on population and consumption “For too long population and consumption have been left off the table due to political and ethical sensitivities. These are issues that affect developed and developing nations alike, and we must take responsibility for them together,” said Charles Godfray, a fellow of the Royal Society. Except that population growth is a function of poverty and it is in fact the countries with the largest levels of consumption, such as the United States and Europe, that not only are the historical cause of the ecological crisis, but are helping to drive it to its logical conclusion – a cascading collapse of ecosystems – by advocating continual economic expansion and the generation of poverty through the promotion of financial and trade agreements that accentuate inequality. Capitalism is like a shark; just as these animals can never stop moving forward for fear of drowning, so capitalism must grow or die.
It’s important to understand why negotiators see the primary way to save the environment is through putting a price on it. This is the main thrust of the talks and accepted by all negotiating parties inside the conference, representing a major schism with the tens of thousands of protesters attending the Rio+20 People’s Summit who are being forcibly kept out of the deliberations by armed riot police.
The argument goes that only by giving natural resources “value” in monetary terms can the environment be protected. On the one hand, it’s easy to see the further privatization of every molecule of water, every tree and every piece of land as dovetailing beautifully with the desires of the corporations. Extending the “free” market to new areas for exploitation is a tried and true method to enhance profits. Those who run the corporations are not slow to catch on and self-advocate: “For companies this is enlightened self interest…Those who can afford water should pay. Water is essentially over exploited because we are not valuing it as an economic good. Introducing methodologies such as escalating tariffs, which some countries have already done, will help in terms of using water intelligently, often for the first time.” So said, Gavin Power, deputy director of the UN Global Compact, which is acting as an umbrella group for 45 of the most powerful CEO’s, from such well-known environmentally conscious concerns as Coca Cola, Glaxo-SmithKline, Nestle, Merck and Bayer, to ensure their voice is heard at Rio+20.
But advocacy for the “valuation” of natural resources occurs not just or even primarily because it coincides with what corporations want. Many of the people arguing for such quantization of nature genuinely believe it will help preserve biodiversity, slow climate change and reduce the pressure on natural resources.
More fundamentally, the need to place “fair value” on everything is part of the ideological foundation of capitalism. Within the philosophy of capitalism, if something does not have a price, it cannot have value. Hence, putting the correct price, otherwise known as internalizing the cost, of a natural good, is to make possible its rational exploitation and simultaneous conservation. To those mired deep within the labyrinth of a capitalistic value system, there is no contradiction between these two aims: the commodification of nature can be seen both as a way of making money from it, and as a way of saving it, as perfectly expressed by Ban Ki-moon.
The quantification of nature is the rational end-point of capitalism’s philosophical approach to nature and hence a practical approach to ‘saving nature’. The non-quantifiable, qualitative side of nature, the purely spiritual and awe-inducing beauty of watching a sunrise for example, is not only entirely absent, or under-appreciated, it is essentially unknowable. Hence, assuming you’re not prepared to advocate regulatory reforms to place limits on the operation of corporations and boundaries beyond which they cannot cross, or you’re not advocating revolution, then extending the market becomes the only option left, consequently the focus at Rio+20 on doing exactly that.
However, for those of us who truly want to see a better world, the extension of its commodification to every single particle of nature cannot be an answer. Taking our inspiration from the rising struggles of 2011 around the globe, it is imperative that we link up the movements of social resistance, and forge new alliances with organized labor and the disenfranchised of the planet to force regulatory changes onto those who would foist false solutions on us. Only by linking social and ecological change and fighting on both fronts, autonomous of mainstream political parties, while creating our own independent battle organizations, can we hope to make progress.
Ultimately, however, it is just as vital that fighters for social emancipation, human freedom and ecological sanity, recognize that capitalism represents the annihilation of nature and, thus, humanity. A system based on cooperation, real democracy, long-term planning, and production for need not profit, i.e., socialism, represents the reconciliation of humanity with nature. And its achievement will, as Marx pointed out, of necessity be much less violent than the process by which capitalism was born in the first place:
“The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labor, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialized production, into socialized [common] property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.”
We currently live in an age that has been characterized as the Anthropocene, the Age of Man, by some scientists to take into account how drastically human civilization has altered the biosphere on a geological time scale. Only by overthrowing capitalism and moving toward a cooperative, planned economy based on democracy and sustainability can we move toward an age characterized, after Epicurus, as the Oikeiotocene – The Age of Conformity to Nature.
The following article is perhaps the most important one I have posted thus far on ‘Collapse of Industrial Civilization’ because it gets at the root cause from which all the global crises have emerged, threatening not only the mass extinction of all flora and fauna, but also mankind’s own annihilation. This is the final act in the tragedy of the commons and it’s capitalism’s last gasp to commodify the rest of the planet for GDP growth, profits and the externalization of costs onto communities and the environment. There can be no price tag put on ecosystems because they are a finite entity priceless to the existence of life as we know it. But this is what is being created by the profit-at-any-cost transnational corporations in a so-called ‘green economy’ and its ‘sustainable development’. We can see this in the global land grab that was discussed in my post Hydro-Colonialism.
The Church of the Almighty Free Market is sending out its missionaries to ensure that neoliberal capitalism extracts the last bit of life from a ravaged planet teetering on the verge of ecological bankruptcy. If you want the unvarnished, non-commercialized report of the Rio Earth Summit, go here.
The upcoming Rio Earth Summit gives us a window into a fierce battle for the future of global environmental action. Danny Chiversexplains what it’s all about.
Many people don’t even know it’s happening. But from 20-22 June more than a hundred heads of state, along with an estimated 50,000 representatives from businesses, NGOs, trades unions, local government and others will gather in Rio de Janeiro for the 2012 UN Earth Summit.
The conference’s official website makes it look like a friendly gathering of world leaders and other ‘stakeholders’ from business and civil society. However, underneath the surface layer of polite discussion documents and optimistic press releases, a battle is raging.
Harmless-sounding phrases like ‘green economy’ and ‘sustainable development’ have become grounds for bitter dispute, as different governments and business interests attempt to redefine these terms to meet their own agenda.
Like a door that swings unexpectedly open to reveal a family squabble, the 2012 Rio Summit gives us a glimpse of an argument that’s been rumbling away largely out of the public eye – an argument about the future direction of intergovernmental environmental action.
This year’s event is commonly referred to as Rio+20 as it falls exactly two decades after the famous 1992 Earth Summit in the same city. That earlier UN conference is often cited as a key moment in the history of environmental politics: it established the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21.
The price of everything
While these measures contained many fine words and good ideas, they didn’t have much regulatory force behind them and relied on voluntary actions by governments, business and civil society.
This row of well-meaning policy sandcastles have spent the past 20 years being eaten away by a rising tide of fundamentalist free-market economics, unfettered financial speculation, and consolidated corporate power.
As a result, any environmental and social gains from the first Rio summit look small next to the destruction wrought by a voracious corporate sector and by governments obsessed with growth in GDP before all else.
Global inequality has increased, natural habitats have been degraded and climate talks have been stalled by a mix of corporate lobbying and self-interested political horse-trading.
Much of this has been done by companies and politicians under the banner of ‘sustainable development’ – sustainable in this case meaning ‘able to keep making money into the future’.
A shift to a genuinely sustainable society will require us to challenge these negative forces, rein in the excesses of corporations and markets, and build an entirely different economy based on wellbeing for the many rather than profits for the few.
But Rio+20 shows little sign of achieving this. It could make things worse. The preparatory Green Economy Report launched by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2011 provoked outrage among NGOs by focusing on market-based and technological responses to the environmental crisis, rather than the underlying economic and political causes.
Silvia Ribeiro from the campaign group ETC Mexico points out: ‘Collapsing financial markets in Northern countries mean that banks and other investors are now looking desperately for new areas of expansion and speculation. We can see these desires leaving their mark on the Rio+20 process. The “Green Economy” now under discussion would unleash a wave of risky but lucrative new technologies such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology and climate technofixes. This isn’t about finding the best environmental solutions: it’s about creating profitable new investments.’
Another key theme of the 2011 UNEP report – which had investment banker Pavan Sukdhev as a lead author – was that placing a financial value on natural systems, cycles and habitats would allow markets to price them properly, and thus prevent them from being degraded.
Large polluting industries… like mafia bosses invited to a meeting on reducing gang violence
This approach has broad support from many Northern governments and institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, but has set off alarm bells elsewhere.
Thomas Barlow from the World Development Movement says: ‘The global market is a fundamental part of the problem. Through its quest for never-ending growth, it helps to drive our insatiable appetite for the things – like clean air, water, biodiversity – that nature provides.
‘Protection of these cannot be left in the hands of this market – we cannot afford to live in a world where ecosystems are protected if, and only if, there is more profit to be made by protecting them than by trashing them.
‘Protection of natural systems will only happen through bringing the market under control, not by giving it yet more power over nature.’
Unacknowledged power
What price a gliding treefrog in the costing of ‘eco-system services’ that the Rio+20 process seems to be heading towards?
How has this controversial vision of the green economy crept into the Rio+20 process? Part of the problem is that the UN is attempting to figure out a global governance system that would prevent environmental destruction, but is allowing those most responsible for that destruction to claim a disproportionate voice within the process. Large polluting industries, business lobby groups and financial institutions are welcomed in as well-meaning ‘stakeholders’ – like mafia bosses invited to a meeting on reducing gang violence.
While the UN’s stated commitment to dialogue and consensus is laudable, the process fails to acknowledge the imbalances of power that allow the wealthiest governments to wield greater influence within the negotiations, while small farmers, indigenous groups, and other representatives of affected communities are given token representation but largely ignored.
The businesses with the most wealth and power are those that have flourished in an economy based on the unrestricted use of natural resources and the exploitation of many of the world’s people. Those with the most to lose from a shift to true sustainability are therefore those with the most power to block that change. Some, like South African petrochemical giant Sasol, influence the UN process through cosy relationships with national governments. Some, like Brazilian miner Vale, muscle in on civil society networks and influence their input in the Rio process. Still others work via lobbying organizations such as the International Emissions Trading Association. Meanwhile, industry groups, like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, have had an organizing role within the various Rio+20 pre-meetings.
this kind of research accepts and reinforces the terms laid down for us by the existing system – the idea that nothing can be valued unless it has a price tag
The scientific community has also been getting increasingly vocal. A major conference called Planet Under Pressure brought together almost 3,000 scientists in London in March, with the aim of giving some stark warnings and policy advice to politicians in the run-up to Rio. The ‘State of the Planet’ declaration issued from the conference didn’t mince its words: ‘Research now demonstrates that the continued functioning of the Earth system as it has supported the wellbeing of human civilization in recent centuries is at risk… creating the potential for a humanitarian emergency on a global scale.’
The accompanying policy papers recognized the need for social change and better environmental governance, not just more technology. Useful concepts like planetary boundaries and the ‘Inclusive Wealth Index’ (an alternative to GDP) were presented, and speakers from the stage spoke repeatedly for the need for a ‘paradigm shift’ in society.
However, there was little acknowledgement of what this would mean in practice, that there are powerful interests working against such a shift and that they will need to be challenged. Instead, the general plan seemed to be just to keep on telling people about the problem and hoping that good folks from across society will agree to work together to fix it – including the big corporations.
The waters were particularly muddy in the discussions around ‘valuing ecosystem services’. Researchers have been assessing the monetary value of crucial environmental services such as the water-filtering properties of wetlands, in order to explain to policymakers just how much would be lost by damaging or destroying them. For example, the Stockholm Environment Institute calculated that the economic value of the oceans could be reduced by up to $2 trillion per year if climate change is left unchecked.
These studies are doubtless carried out with the best of intentions and may help to protect some ecosystems in the short term. However, they could also represent a dangerous first step towards the ‘costing’ of ecosystem services for trade on the open market. Rather than seeking that much-vaunted paradigm shift, this kind of research accepts and reinforces the terms laid down for us by the existing system – the idea that nothing can be valued unless it has a price tag.
Timid monstrosity
Of course, scientists aren’t a lab-coated homogeneous mass. Nor are activists all of one mind. Some NGOs and civil society groups have fully engaged with the Rio+20 process, sending submissions into the draft document and delegates to the meetings; others have preferred to spend their time mobilizing people elsewhere, including at a parallel People’s Summit which will take place in Rio during the UN talks. Many are pursuing a dual strategy, both inside and outside the talks.
However, most are united in their criticism of the draft declaration that’s been put together so far – the ‘outcome document’ that governments will sign up to at the end of Rio+20. An initial 19-page ‘zero draft’ document was launched in January as a starting point for discussion. It contained no binding resolutions of any kind, just a wish-list of voluntary actions that business and government would be ‘encouraged’ to take, and lots of mentions of a poorly defined ‘green economy’.
In response, civil society and industry groups put forward their own suggested amendments. Environmental campaigners, indigenous peoples and Southern farmers’ groups called for major changes; meanwhile, the business lobby were generally happy with the document, asking for adjustments like the removal of references to technology transfer and the role of small farmers.
Governments – often grouped into ‘blocs’ – then submitted formal amendments to the draft, with suggested additions and removals. These suggestions swelled the document from 19 to over 150 pages, reflecting the level of disagreement involved. Derek Osborn of the Stakeholder Forum has described the new draft as a ‘monstrosity’ full of ‘timidity, caution, suspicion, protection of vested interests, and even attempts to undermine and go backward on rights, actions and issues already agreed.’
Groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and La Via Campesina are calling for a very different Rio+20 agreement based on respect for people’s rights to land, food and clean water. Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of IEN, said: ‘Systems such as “payment for ecological services” and using forests in carbon offset markets do nothing but make Mother Earth into the World Trade Organization of nature.’ He stated that Indigenous Peoples from around the world would be coming together at Rio to ‘oppose an agenda based on the privatization and commodification of nature’. Campaigners like theETC Group are calling for proper technology assessment measures to be built in to any agreement, before untested geo-engineering and synthetic biology techniques are unleashed in the name of the green economy.
Quite how all of this will be boiled down into any kind of coherent final statement remains to be seen. However it emerges, the new Rio declaration will give us a snapshot of where we’re at with these crucial debates, and how far we still need to go.
Moving forwards
On a more positive note, Rio+20 has been a good opportunity to raise the profile of some interesting and potentially useful sustainability ideas. It’s also helped to bring together disparate groups and build important new alliances. For example, an international pre-Rio+20 conference organized by the Central Workers of Argentina reinforced alliances between trades unions and environmental movements. According to Lucia Ortiz of Friends of the Earth Brazil: ‘Trades Unions are getting very concerned about the “green economy” agenda, because it represents a deepening of neoliberal policies, and threatens to undermine the social rights already secured by past struggles. They are working in solidarity with environmentalists, indigenous peoples, farmers and women’s rights activists, calling instead for a transition to a sustainable and just society free from the exploitation of workers and of nature.’
The best thing to come out of Rio+20 could be the strengthening of social movements in opposition to one of its core ideas. The false green economy’s grand Brazilian showcase might just be the event that helps to trigger its downfall.
Note: The People Summit held dialogues outside of the UN participation structure and published ‘Another Future is Possible’ in direct opposition to the orientations the UN negociators have been taking in the past few months. Their position: the green economy as defined in the negociations deepens “the commodification, privatization, and financialization of nature and its functions. It is a reaffirmation of full control of the entire biosphere by the economy” and is to be rejected.
Most who are up on current news are aware of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and our throw-away culture. By the way, there are five of these ocean gyres filled with plastics across the world’s waters. Last month a report was released from the Scripps Institute which puts into perspective what has been the environmental price of our convenience-obsessed culture:
Scripps Institute graduate Miriam Goldstein was chief scientist on a similar expedition to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 2009. According to her research, there has been a 100-fold increase in plastic garbage in the last 40 years, most of it broken down into tiny crumbs to form a concentrated soup.
The particles are so small and profuse that they can’t be dredged out. “You need a net with very fine mesh and then you’re catching baby fish, baby squid — everything,” Goldstein says. “For every gram of plastic you’re taking out, you probably take out more or less the equivalent of sea life.”
Scientists are worried that the marine organisms that adapt to the plastic could displace existing species. Goldstein said this was a major concern, as organisms that grow on hard surfaces tend to monopolize already scarce food, to the detriment of other species.
“Things that can grow on the plastic are kind of weedy and low diversity — a parallel of the things that grow on the sides of docks,” she says. “We don’t necessarily want an ocean stuffed with barnacles.”
Eriksen says the mood on the Sea Dragon has been upbeat, with crew members playing a ukulele and doing yoga, “but the sobering reality is that we’re trawling through a synthetic soup.“
LOL. The researchers mood has been “upbeat” despite the “sobering reality” of their work. Forensic detectives usually develop a morbid sense of humor to deal with the gruesomeness of their work. This might be a tactic that the environmental scientist will want to adopt as we continue working on our own self-eradication from a ravaged planet.
The plastic stuff is broken down into parts so small as to make it impossible to clean them out of the ocean, not to mention the astronomically prohibitive cost of doing so. In other words, we are unable to clean it up:
Stiv Wilson of the ocean conservation group 5 Gyres has made a first attempt to tally how much plastic is in the global ocean.
In a new post on 5gyres.org, Wilson takes what appears to be the first-ever stab at trying to figure it out.
The number he comes up with is staggering: he conservatively estimates there are 315 billion pounds of plastic in the oceans right now.
Now, Wilson will be the first to admit a lot of assumptions were made in order to arrive at that number, but most of them err on the side of caution. It’s worth going through his thought process and calculations here.
To help visualize that massive heap of trash, Wilson divides by a “supertanker” — that is, a giant ship that could theoretically sail through the seas, skimming out the plastic junk as it goes (much of which hovers down to 90 feet below the surface).
No such ship has been outfitted to skim plastic. But let’s say it did, and it could hold 500 million pounds of plastic. You’d need 630 of them to do the job, or about 17 percent of the planet’s current fleet of oil tankers.
Yipes.
To make it a little more personal, every American produces about 600 pounds of garbage each year. The proportion of plastic varies from household to household, but overall about half of all waste is synthetic. Some of that probably ends up in landfill, or recycled (Wilson says only about 3 percent of virgin plastic gets recycled).
Either way, the pile of plastic you inadvertently dump into the ocean each year is probably more than you can lift.
The point of the calculations is this: cleaning up the plastics in the ocean ain’t gonna happen. Well-intentioned programs designed to take the fight to the high seas, like Project Kaisei and the Environmental Cleanup Coalition, for example, are exercises in futility.
“I’m not trying to call them out,” Wilson told Discovery News. “What I really fear is a barge full of plastic coming in under the Golden Gate bridge, the media taking pictures and people thinking ‘oh good, we’ve solved that problem.'”
A real cleanup would be astronomically expensive, both in terms of dollars and equipment
According to scientists from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, the patch is just too large and too “broken down” to be cleanable. As plastic is exposed to the sun, it photodegrades (breaks down) into fine plastic chips. In some areas, the plastic is as fine as dust. Once the plastic turns into dust, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean, making it even more difficult to clean.
…removing plastics from the ocean would expend energy about 250 times plastic’s mass .
The following video is a short documentary made back in 2008 by Vice, but it’s worth the watch to give you an idea of the problem which has gotten worse since then:
In his book GARBOLOGY, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes says that the plastic we expel out into the ocean every year is the weight equivalent of 40 aircraft carriers. Since plastic is not biodegradable, it only gets broken down into smaller pieces which persist in the environment, acting as accumulators of hydrophobic pollutants “like DDT, an extremely toxic pesticide, and PCB’s – dangerous persistent organic pollutants. These can be up to one million times more concentrated on the surface of these bits of plastic than they are in the ambient sea water.” Being mistaken for plankton or other food, they get eaten by fish and birds and have now entered the food chain for long into the future. This plastic, as it degrades, also releases chemicals that are endocrine disruptors:
The team analyzed sand and seawater from more than 200 sites in 20 countries, mainly in Southeast Asia and North America. All contained what Saido described as a “significant” amount of BPA, ranging from 0.01 parts per million (ppm) to 50 ppm. They concluded that polycarbonates and epoxy resin coatings and paints were the main source.
Plastics may be the most persistent memory of mankind that we leave behind:
A recurrent theme in the reality based community is the continued assertion that infinite growth cannot happen on a finite planet. This simple statement seems to be quite self-evident to those announcing it, yet the powers that be cannot seem to be able to wrap their head around it. We live in a society awash with advertisements that seek to sell you something at some price. Capitalism commodifies everything and its ethos of mandatorily attaching some arbitrary, imagined worth to all things has permeated every aspect of our lives, our ethics, and our value system. We are a society that projects a cost/price analysis on everything, including relationships with fellow humans. According to ‘Save the Children’ charity chief executive, Justin Forsyth, half a billion children over the next 15 years will suffer long-term mental and physical harm due to stunted growth by malnutrition. Surely if we valued the future life of our grandchildren more than profit, then we would not allow such a thing to happen. If our own children’s future is not valued enough to save them from our greed and shortsightedness, then why would the environment be treated any differently, despite its importance to the survival of every living thing on the planet. The scientist James Lovelock once said that Green is the color of mold and corruption. If we cannot separate the needs of capitalism from the needs of our planet, then every last bit of resources and life-sustaining gift from the earth will be chopped up into tradable, sellable units and thrown into the gaping jaws of the free market. Philosopher Leonardo Boff notes:
The fundamental defect in the UN’s document for Rio+20 is the total absence of a new vision or new cosmology that would create the hope of the «future that we want», the motto of the great gathering. As such, it belies a promising future.
To those who drafted it, the future depends on the economy. There is little value in the adjectives they attach to it: sustainable or green. The green economy in particular constitutes a great assault on the last bastion of nature: transforming into merchandise and putting a price on everything that is common, natural, vital and indispensable to life, such water, the soil, fertility, jungles, genes, etcetera. That which pertains to life is sacred and must not be passed to the sphere of business. Instead, it becomes part of the market place, under the categorical imperative: take all you want, make business with everything, especially with nature and with her goods and services.
This is the supreme egocentrism and arrogance of the human being, or, as it is also called, anthropocentrism. Human beings see the Earth as a warehouse of resources only for them, without realizing that we are not the only ones who inhabit the Earth, nor do we own her; we do not feel that we are part of nature, but outside and above her, as her «lords and masters». We forget, however, that there exists a whole visible community of life (5% of the biosphere) and quadrillions of quadrillions of invisible microorganisms (95%) that guarantee the vitality and fecundity of the Earth. They all belong to the Earth/condominium and have the right to live and coexist with us. Without interdependent relationships with them, we could not even exist. The Rio+20 document does not take any of this into account. We can then safely say that with that document there is no salvation. It opens a path towards the abyss…
This straitjacket of capitalism will not release its grip on civilization until the needs of this ever-consuming, ever-growing, ever-alienating economic system kills its host. Gil Smart gives insight into this dead-end thinking taking us all over the cliff in his short writing called Faith of our fantasies:
…we face a coming era of constrained resources. Fiscal resources; energy; environmental resources. Continual growth, the type we have conditioned to believe as natural and inevitable, is neither.
I read Megan McArdle’s stuff in the Atlantic, where recently she opined about Europe’s changing demographics (i.e. fewer births, more oldsters) and how this makes robust growth more difficult. She got a letter in return from someone questioning the premise – saying that perpetual growth isn’t possible. This was her response:
Whether or not continuous economic growth is possible, or desirable, the fact remains that modern economies are predicated on the assumption that it will happen. Both individuals and governments have planned for a future in which incomes steadily rise, allowing people to enjoy lengthy retirements, advanced health care, independent living, and of course, repayment of the massive debts that almost everyone has accumulated over the past few decades.
If that growth doesn’t materialize, the shock will be enormous. Generational battles over things like pensions have occurred in the context of rising incomes; they will become bitter indeed if young and old are fighting over a shrinking economic pie. The most brutal shock will of course be over debt. If incomes fall, debt will become an ever larger burden. But if countries default, they will merely shift the shock to someone else — too often, to pensioners at home or abroad.
However laudable Europe’s demographic decline may be from an environmental point of view, it will be an economic disaster for many who expected a stable, prosperous future.
Get it? This is the idea on which we’ve staked our future. And if the idea’s wrong?
Well. I guess that means you’re up shite creek, then.
If we plow blindly down this path, infused with the faith that what we want is what will actually happen – we’re doomed. But not charging down this path requires a fundamental restructuring of the way we think – not bloody likely in this society. Or maybe any society.
Well, Mr. Smart, along with a restructuring of our way of thinking will also be required a restructuring of society. And the elite who sit atop our current social hierarchy of capitalism, benefiting the most from its exploitation and theft, will not let go of the power they hold until it’s ripped from their cold, dead hands, whether by an angry mob or the wrath of an abused and ravaged Mother Earth.
The above montage of clips from the satirical movie ‘The Distinguished Gentleman‘, in which Freshman Congressman (and con man) Thomas Jefferson Johnson (Eddie Murphy) is schooled in the ways of Washington by legendary lobbyist Terry Corrigan (Kevin McCarthy), is as true today as it was back when that movie was made more than twenty years ago, so says Marty Kaplan. The following excerpts from the transcript of Bill Moyer’s latest report – Big Money, Big Media, Big Trouble – tells the sorry and sordid tale of our political economy/society. This Moyer’s interview with Kaplan, a true insider to our political and media complex, is quite extraordinary. He affirms what the general populace is unable to comprehend… that we live in a society in which the news media and government institutions are entirely owned by the corporate oligarchs. The government regulators are owned by the very companies they are charged with over-seeing by way of Wall Street’s army of lobbyists and the revolving door that exists between government and private sector positions. Actual news to inform the public on the state of affairs and issues affecting them is virtually nonexistent on the media airwaves.
…what’s really driving it, if you think of this as a symptom and not a cause, I think what’s really driving it is the absolute demonization of any kind of idea of public interest as embodied by government. And at the same time, a kind of corporate triumphalism, in which the corporations, the oligarchs, the plutocrats, running this country want to hold onto absolute power absolutely. And it’s an irritant to them to have the accountability that news once used to play.
…the notion of spectator democracy has, I think, extended to include the need to divert the country from the master narrative, which is the influence and importance and imperviousness to accountability of large corporations and the increasing impotence of the public through its agency, the government, to do anything about it. So the more diversion and the more entertainment, the less news, the less you focus on that story, the better off it is.
And the self-serving triviality of corporate-run ‘news’ media has become a self-reinforcing mechanism whereby stats are being kept of what is the most popular story which then gets kicked up to the top and influences what that corporate news channel reports on in the future. It’s all driven by ratings and profit rather than educating and informing people on facts and real issues. So Neil Postman was right… We are being entertained to death, literally. This nihilism plays right into the hands of those controlling the levers of power who would not benefit from a well-informed, well-eduated public. The vast majority of public discourse has been reduced to an echo chamber of the crap (divisive ‘wedge issues’, celebrity gossip, sensationalist stories, corporate propaganda, consumerist materialism, valorization of the predatory skills of the modern competitive capitalist, etc.) that fills the corporate-controlled airwaves.
…
BILL MOYERS: You wrote The Distinguished Gentleman 20 years ago. Could you write it today?
MARTY KAPLAN: Oh God, it still is the same. All you have to do is add a couple of zeros to the amount of money. And the same laws still apply. It is fabulous and miserable at the same time.
BILL MOYERS: Was Washington then, and is it now, the biggest con game going?
MARTY KAPLAN: It is the biggest con game going. And the stakes are enormous. And the effort to regulate them is hopeless, because the very people who are in charge of regulating them are the same people who are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the lobbies that run them.
BILL MOYERS: I have it on very good authority that a prominent Washington senator recently told a group of lobbyists in Washington, a room full of lobbyists, that they are the lifeblood of the city. And I thought, “Kaplan has to do a vampire movie now.” Right?
MARTY KAPLAN: Exactly. The connection between the legislators and the lobbyists is so intimate that it’s not even embarrassing for a senator to say that in front of a room. The culture is so hermetically sealed from the rest of the country that it doesn’t occur to them that there is something deeply outrageous and offensive and corrosive of democracy to admit that the money side of politics and the elected side of politics belong to each other.
BILL MOYERS: You wrestle with this, you and your colleagues at the Norman Lear Center, and all the time, on how, on what the system is doing to us. So let me ask you, “How did this happen in America? How did our political system become the problem instead of the answer?”
MARTY KAPLAN: Part of it is the nexus of media, money, and special interest politics. The citizens have given the airwaves to the station. We own the electromagnetic spectrum and for free we give out licenses to television stations. Those stations, in turn, use that spectrum to get enormous amounts of money from special interests and from members of Congress in order to send these ads back to us to influence us. So we lose it in both ways. The other day, the president of CBS, Les Moonves, was reported by “Bloomberg” to have said “Super PACs may be bad for America, but they’re … good for CBS.” I mean, there it is. This is a windfall every election season, which seems not to even stop ever, for the broadcast industry. So not only are they raking it in, they’re also creating a toxic environment for civic discourse. People don’t hear about issues. They hear these negative charges, which only turn them off more. The more negative stuff you hear, the less interested you are in going out to vote. And so they’re being turned off, the stations are raking it in, and the people who are chortling all the way to Washington and the bank are the ones who get to keep their hands on the levers of power. So one of the big reasons that things are at the pass they are is that the founders never could have anticipated that a small group of people, a financial enterprise and the technology could create this environment in which facts, truth, accountability, that stuff just isn’t entertaining. So because it’s not entertaining, because the stations think it’s ratings poison, they don’t cover it on the news.
BILL MOYERS: They don’t cover the news.
MARTY KAPLAN: They don’t cover politics and government in the sense of issues. They’re happy, occasionally to cover horse race and scandal and personality and crime and that aspect of politics. But if you look at a typical half hour of news, local news, because local news is one of the most important sources of news for Americans about campaigns. A lot—
BILL MOYERS: You and your colleagues have done a lot of research on local news.
MARTY KAPLAN: Yes, we’ve been studying it now since 1998. And each year it gets more depressing and it’s hard to believe. We, not long ago, did a study of the Los Angeles media market. We looked at every station airing news and every news broadcast they aired round the clock. And we put together a composite half hour of news. And if you ask, “How much in that half hour was about transportation, education law enforcement, ordinances, tax policy?” everything involving locals, from city to county. The answer is, in a half hour, 22 seconds.
BILL MOYERS: Twenty-two seconds devoted to what one would think are the serious issues of democracy, right?
MARTY KAPLAN: Yes. Whereas, in fact, there are three minutes about crime, and two and a half minutes about the ugliest dog contest, and two minutes about entertainment. There’s plenty of room for stuff that the stations believe will keep people from changing the dial.
BILL MOYERS: What is the irony to me is that these very same stations that are giving 22 seconds out of a half hour to serious news, are raking— and not covering politics, are raking in money from the ads that the politicians and their contributors are spending on those same papers.
MARTY KAPLAN: Yes, they’re earning hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars from the ads that they are being paid to run. And not even risking running a minute of news, which might actually check on the accuracy of an ad. Truth watches, they’re almost invisible now.
BILL MOYERS: So they will tell you, however, that they’re in the entertainment business. That they’re in the business to amuse the public, to entertain the public. And if they do these serious stories about the schools or about the highways or about this or that, the public tunes out. That the clicks begin to register as—
MARTY KAPLAN: It’s one of the great lies about broadcasting now. There are consultants who go all around the country and they tell the general managers and the news directors, “It is only at your peril that you cover this stuff.” But one of the things that we do is, the Lear Center gives out the Walter Cronkite award for excellence in television political journalism every two years. And we get amazing entries from all over the country of stations large and small of reporters under these horrendous odds doing brilliant pieces and series of pieces, which prove that you can not only do these pieces on a limited budget, but you can still be the market leader.
…
MARTY KAPLAN: Well, what’s really driving it, if you think of this as a symptom and not a cause, I think what’s really driving it is the absolute demonization of any kind of idea of public interest as embodied by government. And at the same time, a kind of corporate triumphalism, in which the corporations, the oligarchs, the plutocrats, running this country want to hold onto absolute power absolutely. And it’s an irritant to them to have the accountability that news once used to play.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean by that? News challenges their assumptions, challenges their power?
MARTY KAPLAN: It used to be that the news programs that aired, believe it or not, had news on them. They had investigative stories.
But then somewhere in the 1980s, when 60 Minutes started making a profit, CBS put the news division inside the entertainment division. And then everyone followed suit. So ever since then, news has been a branch of entertainment and, infotainment, at best.
But there was a time in which the press, the print press, news on television and radio were speaking truth to power, people paid attention, and it made a difference. The— I don’t think the Watergate trials would have happened, the Senate hearings, had there not been the kind of commitment from the news to cover the news rather than cutting away to Aruba and a kidnapping.
BILL MOYERS: What is the basic consequence of taking the news out of the journalism box and putting it over into the entertainment box?
MARTY KAPLAN: People are left on their own to fend for themselves. And the problem is that there’s not that much information out there, if you’re an ordinary citizen, that comes to you. You can ferret it out. But it oughtn’t be like that in a democracy. Education and journalism were supposed to, according to our founders, inform our public and to make democracy work.
You can’t do it unless we’re smart. And so the consequence is that we’re not smart. And you can see it in one study after another. Some Americans think that climate change is a hoax cooked up by scientists, that there’s no consensus about it. This kind of view could not survive in a news environment, which said, “This is true and that’s false.” Instead we have an environment in which you have special interest groups manipulating their way onto shows and playing the system, gaming the notion that he said she said is basically the way in which politics is now covered.
It’s all about combat. If every political issue is the combat between two polarized sides, then you get great television because people are throwing food at each other. And you have an audience that hasn’t a clue, at the end of the story, which is why you’ll hear, “Well, we’ll have to leave it there.” Well, thank you very much. Leave it there.
BILL MOYERS: You have talked and written about “the straightjacket of objectivity.” Right? What is that?
MARTY KAPLAN: Well, the problem with telling the truth is that in this postmodern world, there’s not supposed to be something as truth anymore. So all you can do if you are a journalist is to say, “Some people say.” Maybe you can report a poll. Maybe you can quote somebody. But objectivity is only this phony notion of balance, rather than fact-checking.
There are some gallant and valiant efforts, like PolitiFact and Flackcheck.org that are trying to hold ads and news reports accountable. But by and large, that’s not what you’re getting. Instead the real straightjacket is entertainment. That’s what all these sources are being forced to be. Walter Lippmann in the 1920s had a concept called “spectator democracy” in which he said that the public was a herd that needed steering by the elites. Now he thought that people just didn’t have the capacity to understand all these complicated issues and had to delegate it to experts of various kinds.
But since then, the notion of spectator democracy has, I think, extended to include the need to divert the country from the master narrative, which is the influence and importance and imperviousness to accountability of large corporations and the increasing impotence of the public through its agency, the government, to do anything about it. So the more diversion and the more entertainment, the less news, the less you focus on that story, the better off it is.
BILL MOYERS: Are you saying that the people who run this political media business, the people who fund it, want to divert the public’s attention from their economic power? Is that what you’re saying?
MARTY KAPLAN: Yes.
Let us fight about you know, whether this circus or that circus is better than each other, but please don’t focus on the big change which has happened in this country, which is the absolute triumph of these large, unaccountable corporations.
This is about as dismal and effective a conspiracy, out in plain sight, as there possibly could be. So I don’t say that this is going to be solved or taken care of. What I do say is the first step toward it is at least acknowledging how toxic the situation has become.
…
BILL MOYERS: What you’re saying is that the political square is now a commercial enterprise, owned and operated for the benefit of the brand, CNN, Fox, all of those, right?
MARTY KAPLAN: That’s correct.
BILL MOYERS: How did it happen? How did we sell what belonged to everyone?
MARTY KAPLAN: By believing that what is, is what always has been and what should be. The notion that what goes on is actually made by people, changes through time, represents the deployment of political power. That notion has gone away. We think it’s always been this way. People now watching these CNN and Fox. They think this is how it works. They don’t have a sense of history. The amnesia, which has been cultivated by journalism, by entertainment in this country, helps prevent people from saying, “Wait a minute, that’s the wrong path to be on.”
BILL MOYERS: Amnesia, forgetfulness? You say that they’re cultivating forgetfulness?
MARTY KAPLAN: Absolutely.
…
BILL MOYERS: You made a very important speech not long ago at a media conference in Barcelona. And you tried and did draw the distinction between— you said the battle of the future is between big data and big democracy. In layman’s language, what is that?
MARTY KAPLAN: Big data, the age of big data that we’re supposed to be in, refers to the way in which, as we go on the internet, as we do all these media activities, watching television, which are at the center of our lives, we’re leaving a trail behind. We’re giving bits of ourselves up. And that set of bits is being collected and mined relentlessly.
So every time we buy a product or send an e-mail or vote how many stars to a restaurant, all this stuff creates a profile that companies buy and sell to each other. And that stuff is being used currently not only to market to us, to target ads toward us, but it’s also being used to profile us. There’s something called “web lining.” Which is similar to what used to be called “red lining.” The— that phenomenon, which is now illegal, in which people who were discriminated against because of the neighborhoods they live in. Right now—
BILL MOYERS: Banks drew a red line around impoverished neighborhoods that they would not then serve.
MARTY KAPLAN: Exactly. And so today imagine if you were to permit a private detective to follow you as you went to your drug store and bought a medication to help you with depression or as you made a phone call to a bankruptcy lawyer, because you needed one. Imagine if that kind of information could be put together and used against you to decide that you’re a bad credit risk or that maybe your insurance company should turn you down, because you suffer from this problem.
That kind of information, that kind of digital profiling is something which is emerging as a huge industry. And unless there are controls on it and constraints, as they have to some degree in Europe but not nearly enough even there, we are about to kiss goodbye our ownership of our privacy and also even the ownership financially of our information. We are the people who make Facebook and Twitter worth the billions of dollars that they’re worth, because we are giving up our information to them, which they are then selling and raising capital around.
BILL MOYERS: But in a libertarian era, what are the restraints and constraints against that? Where are they going to come from?
MARTY KAPLAN: Well, right now, the constraints in this country are voluntary. The Obama White House not long ago issued a digital code of conduct, which included privacy. In which they asked companies and companies did step up to it to say, “We’re not going to track people if they don’t want to be tracked.” And other such efforts to get people in control.
But what we do know, the record of just the past couple of months, is that company after company was doing stuff to us that’s astonishing, that we didn’t know about. The ways in which the apps that you use on your smartphones were vacuuming up information about you, your address book and all your pictures.
Stuff that you had no idea you had consented to, which in fact usually you had not, suddenly was all owned by other people, as well. You have not given permission, but that essential part of you is now not yours. That’s the name of the game now. This is baked into the business model of data mining, which is at the heart of so much of the digital economy.
BILL MOYERS: But that’s big data. You talked about big democracy.
MARTY KAPLAN: So at the same time as our data is being mined, there is this movement to protect people using technology to give them the power to say, “I’m not going to opt into this stuff.” We’re still at the beginning of this industry. And there has to be rules of the road. And part of those rules include my attention rights. My rights to control my identity, my privacy, and my ownership of information.”
BILL MOYERS: In your speech in Barcelona, you pointed to two simultaneous covers of TIME Magazine appearing the same week. One for the editions in Europe, Asia, and South Pacific, and it was about the crisis in Europe. The other, which appeared in the American edition, featured a cover about animal friendships. You use these two covers to illustrate the difference between what you call “push journalism” and “pull journalism.” What’s the difference?
MARTY KAPLAN: Push journalism is the old days, which seem no longer to apply in the era of the internet, in which an editor, a gatekeeper, says, “Here’s the package which you need to know.” All of that is ancient history now.
Instead, now, it’s all driven by what the consumer is pulling. And if the consumer says, “I want ice cream all the time.” And whether that ice cream is Lindsay Lohan, or the latest crime story, that’s what’s delivered. And as long as it’s being pulled, that’s what is being provided. So it’s quite possible that in the U.S., the calculation was made that the crisis in Europe and the head of Italy would not be a cover that one could use. But that pet friendships would be the sort of thing that would fly off the newsstand.
BILL MOYERS: So the reader is determining what we get from the publication?
MARTY KAPLAN: On a minute by minute basis, stories that the reader’s interested in immediately go to the top of the home page. There are actually pieces of software that give editorial prominence to stuff that people by voting with their clickers have said is of interest to them. No one is there to intervene and say, “Wait a minute, that story is just too trivial to occupy more than this small spot below the fold.” Instead, the audience’s demand is what drives the placement and the importance of journalistic content.
BILL MOYERS: So George Orwell anticipated a state as big brother, hovering over us, watching us, keeping us under surveillance, taking care of our needs as long as we repaid them with utter loyalty. Aldous Huxley anticipated a Brave New World in which we were amusing ourselves to death. Who’s proving the most successful prophet? Huxley or Orwell?
MARTY KAPLAN: Well, I think Huxley is probably right, as Neil Postman said in—
BILL MOYERS: The sociologist, yes.
MARTY KAPLAN: —in Amusing Ourselves to Death. That there’s no business but show business. And we are all equally guilty, because it’s such fun to be entertained. So you don’t need big brother, because we already have big entertainment.
BILL MOYERS: And the consequences of that?
MARTY KAPLAN: That we are as in Brave New World, always in some kind of stupor. We have continual partial attention to everything and tight critical attention on nothing.
…
According to stats from 2010 for TV viewing by adult Americans, we’re glued to the boob tube in our waking hours. This explains why having an intelligent conversation with most Americans is an impossible task. All they can do is regurgitate what has been constantly programmed into their heads.
• The average American watches 35:34 (hours/minutes) of TV per week
• Kids aged 2-11 watch 25:48 (hours/minutes) of TV per week (Q1 2010)
• Adults over 65 watch 48:54 (hours/minutes) of TV per week (Q1 2010)
And according to the latest Nielsen study, TV viewing is on the increase, notwithstanding a tiny drop in the number of households who own a TV:
…despite all the competition from cable TV, videogames, and the Internet, the average household watched 59 hours, 28 minutes of broadcast TV per week during the 2010-2011 season, setting a new record. Lanzano drew particular attention to the competition — or lack of it — from Facebook, noting that while the average person spends about 13 minutes a day on Facebook, they spend 297 minutes watching TV. “No wonder our friends at [General Motors] are making some changes,” he said. [Last month GM announced that it will stop placing ads on Facebook, after determining that they had little impact.]
It’s important to keep in mind that at the root of industrial civilization’s problems is an economic system called capitalism which requires infinite growth at the expense of our global life support system, the earth. The end game is a spent and destroyed environment in which a small global elite control the overwhelming percentage of the planet’s extracted wealth while the vast majority of the world’s population exist in squalor and debt peonage. The social hierarchy of our system can be visualized as a large pyramid with the wealthiest of society represented as the eye of a thin needle sitting atop the massive base that represents the rest of humanity. It seems the only impediment to capitalism is its own unstoppable path to self-destruction. For the power that accumulated capital wields has taken over all aspects of societal behavior – cultural, spiritual, political, legal, and analytical – to the detriment of us all.
“…About two years ago, WWF, the international organization involved in the area of ecology, said in its Living Planet report: A second planet will be required by 2030 to meet our needs as over-use of Earth’s natural resources and carbon pollution have become critical. If all human being in this world used resources at the same per capita rate as the US or the UAE, four and a half planets would be needed. More than 70 countries were exhausting their freshwater sources at an alarming, unsustainable rate. About two-thirds of these countries experience water scarcity ranging from moderate to severe. In 2007, the world’s 6.8 billion humans were living 50% beyond the planet’s threshold of sustainability. The report highlighted the rich-poor ecological gap. In 1970-2007, an index of biodiversity showed a world decline of almost 30%. In the tropics, it was alarming: 60%.
No brain with logic will claim that the acts are isolated from the world economic system: capitalism. “From the outset,” Joe Bageant, author of the book about working class in America Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War , writes, “capitalism was always about the theft of the people’s sustenance. It was bound to lead to the ultimate theft – the final looting of the source of their sustenance – nature.” (“Our Plunder of Nature will End up Killing Capitalism and Our Obscene Lifestyles”, Countercurrents , July 13, 2010 )
“The main feature of capitalism is the seductive assertion that you can get something for nothing in this world.” (ibid.) Owners of this system, the capitalists, Joe continues, “hate any sort of cost.” They, he describes, “remain unimpressed by global warming, or melting polar ice caps, or Southwestern desert armadillos showing up in Canada , or hurricanes getting bigger and more numerous every year.”
These are the elites in control of the world environment in continents and countries. “Just before the economy blew out,” according to Joe, “these elites held slightly less than $80 trillion. After the blowout/bailout, their combined investment wealth was estimated at a little over $83 trillion. To give some idea, this is four years of the gross output of all the human beings on earth.”
This massive money power takes hold of political power. Owning this unimaginably monstrous money-political power system they put their footprint on ecology that is changing the planet’s environment irreversibly.
This system, the masters of the system in the center, in the periphery, in between the center and the periphery, try their best to maximize profit by minimizing cost, by appropriating labor, robbing nature, grabbing everything within their reach, putting costs on public. Pollution, destruction of ecology and ruination of nature thus creep into public domain – a human concern.
Acts of the masters are turning into crime, crime against the planet, against posterity, against humanity.
The World Future Council leaders said: “These are crimes against the future … These are crimes that will not only injure future generations, but destroy any future at all for millions of people.”
The Council has called for appointing “ombudspersons for future generations”, “guardians appointed at global, national and local levels whose job would be to help safeguard environmental and social conditions by speaking up authoritatively for future generations in all areas of policy-making. This could take the shape of a parliamentary commissioner, a guardian, a trustee or an auditor, depending on how it best fits into a nation’s governance structure.”
But questions are there: How far the ombudspersons can act where power structure, economy and political power is of, by and for polluters, grabbers, eco-murderers? If they can act, then, why do environment law/court/ministry/inspectors, depending on arrangement in countries, can’t act? What will happen if polluters grab that proposed holy post as have happened in countries by different lobbies/interests/gangs? What’s the guarantee that the proposed holy persons’ observations/edicts/verdicts will be implemented? Are not there instances of trampling/violation of all basic, fundamental, moral, ethical, human, natural, principled rights/practices/conventions/laws/rules around the world, in countries?
Out of their sense of urgency the WFC leaders’ suggestion sounds nice, but not functional. It’s detached from reality, the socio-economic-environmental -political reality.
What’s the reality?
An answer is provided by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster in their seminal analysis What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism: A Citizen’s Guide to Capitalism and the Environment (2011): Capitalism is a system that must continually expand, a system that, by its very nature, will eventually come up against the reality of finite natural resources, a system geared to expansionist growth in the search for profits that will inevitably transgress planetary boundaries.
By its very nature the system stands against ecology and environment as its only concern is profit, nothing else. Standing for environment will lead to questioning the ever hungry system.
Pushing 1 billion persons down to extreme poverty, and enriching a few, whose consumption is threatening the planet is one of the major “contributions” of the system. Other than the hungry and starved, there are energy poor, electricity poor, water poor, information poor, basic rights poor, safety poor, they are the poor masses deprived of honor and dignity, and there are the food rich, energy rich, electricity rich, water rich, information rich, luxury rich, power and privilege rich, resource rich, consumption rich, the rich few controlling everything.
Imbalance and inequity at this level can’t sustain environment and ecology. The first one, imbalance and inequity, is linear, ever expanding while the later one, environment and ecology, demands diversity, tolerance, consideration, accommodation. Observance related to environment turns hollow and chattering if this aspect of political economy is ignored…
Here is a new and lengthy interview with John Michael Greer on a website called Legalise Freedom:
“The politicians don’t know what’s going on; they have no clue. They don’t get it. There’s a lot of very good reasons why they shouldn’t get it because one of the things that’s going to happen down the road is that they are toast. Their entire world is toast. The only reason that the politicians and the financiers, the modern rich and powerful, have the wealth and the power that they do is that they know how to manipulate. They are in a position to manipulate this very complex, very intricate, very brittle, very fragile system that runs on vast amounts of fossil fuel energy. As that system breaks down, their power goes away. And they’re going to be in roughly the same situation as all those heads of Communist Parties in Eastern Europe when the Communist Parties in Eastern Europe suddenly dissolved out from under them. This is what happens when very complex civilizations start breaking down. The former leadership finds that it has no skills at all that are relevant to the current situation. In the meantime they’re going to increase their grip on the levers of power and flows of money with everything they’ve got.
And you can go out there and protest; you can wave a sign; you can shout obscenities at the status quo or what have you and it will either be ignored or, if it causes sufficient embarrassment, the police are going to come and beat the living crap out of you. Or eventually you may be dragged from you bed at 3 a.m. and shot in the head and tumbled into an unmarked grave. This is the kind of thing that can happen, and it does happen all the time in the Third World. And this is something we can understand in our current situation where the modern industrial nations are becoming Third World countries. The Third World country is a country in the modern world that doesn’t have access to a lot of energy.” – JMG
A bit of background on Mr. Greer:
Background
The world is finally beginning to wake up to its critical dependence on oil and the vitally important issues associated with it such as rapidly rising energy prices and the threat of climate change. Unlike the energy crisis of the 1970s, however, there is a lurking fear that now the times are different and the crisis may not easily be resolved.
The Long Descent examines the basis of such fear through three core themes:
1. Industrial society is following the same well-worn path that has led other civilizations into decline, a path involving a much slower and more complex transformation than the sudden catastrophes imagined by so many social critics today.
2. The roots of the crisis lie in the cultural stories that shape the way we understand the world. Since problems cannot be solved with the same thinking that created them, these ways of thinking need to be replaced with others better suited to the needs of our time.
3. It is too late for massive programmes to implement top-down change; the change must come from individuals.
Hope exists in actions that range from taking up a handicraft or adopting an ‘obsolete’ technology, through planting an organic vegetable garden, taking charge of your own health care or spirituality, and building community.
John Michael Greer is a certified Master Conserver, organic gardener, and scholar of ecological history… Follow him at The Archdruid Report.
“Most people [Americans] have been reduced to a market demographic. They’re consumers, they’re not citizens. No matter how active they are within the system [employment, religion, government, etc.] the system is the problem.” – Joe Bageant
The ideology we have today permeating every aspect of life in America is neoliberal capitalism which takes its ultimate expression in the form of megacorporations or multi-national corporations whose tentacles of power and influence reach deep into government and other nations as well, considering that their wealth and budgets are larger than that of many small countries. Indeed in America the government and the corporate world are one, merely separated by a revolving door.
As long as you conform to what they have programmed you to be, an obedient consumer, then behavior which is in line with that mindset is deemed permissible or legal. Similar behavior which questions the consumer culture and the power structure behind it is deemed illegal and is either squashed or otherwise corralled through State violence and coercion. In an article in the early 1980s in which he referred to the American people as ‘consumer-depositors’ in thrall to the financial elite, Gore Vidal saw into this aspect of the system decades ago.
Consumerism as Hegemony:
By hegemony, Gramsci meant the permeation throughout society of an entire system of values, attitudes, beliefs and morality that has the effect of supporting the status quo in power relations. Hegemony in this sense might be defined as an “organizing principle” that is diffused by the process of socialization into every area of daily life. To the extent that this prevailing consciousness is internalized by the population it becomes part of what is generally called “common sense” so that the philosophy, culture and morality of the ruling elite comes to appear as the natural order of things.
It was Wall Street banks and hedge funds, not home buyers, who created the enormous demand for high-risk mortgages to pool, to securitize, and to turn into Ponzi-like gambling structures with names like CDOs, CDO squared and synthetic CDOs. It was the money-grubbing rating agencies that blessed these pieces of garbage with AAA ratings. As a result, trillions of dollars of worthless toxic assets polluted our financial system. When the bubble they induced burst, our system crashed, causing 8 million working people to lose their jobs in a matter of months due to no fault of their own. Anyone who still blames low-income home buyers, or regulations or Greece — or anyone other than Wall Street — should be checked for dementia.
This deregulation of capitalism into a more predatory and destructive form has occurred at the same time as our government has slowly militarized this nation’s domestic police force and turned our country into a Security and Surveillance State. We are paying for our own enslavement. The rapacious corporate forces that were behind the meltdown of our economy in 2008 are now backed in power by this strengthened Authoritarian State. The inverted totalitarianism that Sheldon Wolin talked about has come to fruition. The great irony is that this totalitarianism is not coming from some socialist revolution as feared by the far right, but from Neoliberal Capitalism, the very system that Fox news and the corporate mainstream media trumpet.
With the dawning of an age of depletion and peak resources, Consumerism and the antisocial behavior of neoliberal capitalism can no longer survive and are simply being propped up and enforced by the iron fist of the Corporate State. Peak oil had a hand in bursting Wall Street’s housing bubble. This scenario of an ever-growing oppresive State in the face of an energy-starved future bodes ill for the rest of us who are not so privileged to be sitting in ivory towers, oblivious to the coming storm. Author Brian Davey describes this disconnection with reality that the elite suffer from, ensconced as they are in their own world of narcissism and luxury:
…There is nothing new in the phenomena of power arrogance and hubris. Since the earliest civilisations, rulers have made decisions and overreached their power in the confident belief that they had God on their side. In more modern times our rulers have believed that nature rewards the fittest, in other words, them.
Irrespective of what point in history they emerge, the starting point of most elites is the comfortable assumption that, as things have typically gone right for them in the past, they will continue to go right in the future. This belief is compounded by the fact that for a long time it has been the “little people” who bear the costs while those higher up the food chain reap the benefits. Power means that they are effectively cocooned from the negative kick-back from their actions. Long before the rulers themselves are successfully challenged and fall — and this typically happens only in the final stages — millions of others have already lost out badly and immense damage has been done.
What we term hubris is the cruel arrogance that arises from a failure of bottom-up feedback in systems where vast social and geographical distances exist between the powerful and the powerless. The punishment of Nemesis, the Greek goddess who was supposed to re-impose limits on those who overstepped their power, typically befalls entire societies before it befalls the rulers. Today the vast distance that separates the global elite from ordinary people is magnified further by the high-power technologies of communications, transport, production and weaponry. Nemesis, when she comes, will be global….
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 