Spectating at the End of the World

02 Friday Jan 2015

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

≈ 205 Comments

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6th Mass Extinction, Abrupt Climate Change, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Davi Kopenawa, Eco-Apocalypse, Extinction of Man, Green Washing, Guy McPherson, Inverted Totalitarianism, Military Industrial Complex, Mr. Natural, Neoliberal Capitalism, Robert Crumb, Security and Surveillance State, Social Psychology and Theories of Consumer Culture: A Political Economy

Front Row Seat to the Eco-Apocalypse

“I fear their euphoria of merchandise will have no end and they will entangle themselves to the point of chaos. They do not seem concerned that they are making us all perish with the epidemic of fumes that escape from all these things…” ~ Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami leader and shaman

Another year has turned over on Earth, home to an exothermic, bipedal omnivore known as capitalist carbon man whose expanding numbers and army of fossil-fueled machinery spans the globe. There’s nothing subtle or restrained about his reign of terror. He pokes and prods the climate change beast while taking for granted the stability of the Holocene, a peculiar aberration in the paleoclimate record. Plotted on a graph, the history of Earth’s climate resembles the jagged teeth of a demonic monster, a volatile creature whose abrupt and catastrophic shifts have wiped landscapes clean of most life. The consequences of burning the equivalent of an olympic sized swimming pool of oil (300,000 liters) per second, year after year, into the atmosphere will ultimately prove lethal to the planet’s habitability. Recently, scientists were surprised to discover a “Delaware-sized methane cloud” hovering over the U.S. southwest, the remnant of “years of intentionally released and errantly leaked natural gas during fossil fuel drilling operations.” No less problematic to the Earth’s homeostasis are the many other destructive habits of capitalist carbon man such as moving ten times more dirt than all natural processes, fixing more nitrogen than all terrestrial bacteria, and producing more sulfate than all ocean phytoplankton.

The exponential melting of Earth’s cryospheric regions is a foreboding harbinger of devastating sea level rise, altering oceanic and jet stream circulation, changing hydrologic cycles, and wholesale disruption of the entire planet’s biospheric system. A brief retrospective of our unfolding environmental meltdown by a major news source concludes that “2014 will likely go down as the year that melting polar ice caps graduated from being a geographic abstraction to a symbol of the irreversible ways we’ve warped the planet.” News reports continue to grow more ominous with recent warnings that the oceans are on the verge of belching their decades of stored heat from human industrial activity. CIVILIZATION is in the process of going ‘poof’ as its leaders play monkey politics and the masses are drowned in a sea of consumerist images. As Dr. McPherson recently pointed out, gallows humor is the 6th stage of grief for coping with a civilization that is blind to its own demise.

“Going Green” is a Marketing Slogan and Inverted Totalitarianism is the Most Successful Form of Tyranny

The unsettling truth is that the slogan “going green” has become a marketing ploy to greenwash capitalism and keep business-as-usual going. The speeches of corporate and political leaders are sprinkled with conscious-soothing key words such as “sustainable”, “eco-friendly”, and “2°C climate goal”, but there’s nothing sustainable about globalized techno-capitalism and the target of limiting warming to 2°C is a cruel illusion. So-called “green energy” is severely limited by suitable geography and intermittency of power production. The behemoth Google learned from its own extensive research that “today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us.” The top business firms appear to be having a problem squaring their green rhetoric with reality, and there seems to be no way to make automobiles truly sustainable. Germany, the poster child for a green economy, is now “burning more coal than at any point since 1990.“:

“We already are on the edge of what is possible,” Mr. Löllgen said in an interview at his Düsseldorf office. “Is it worth it if we as a country succeed in reaching our targets in reducing carbon emissions, but sacrifice good jobs and our industrial base?”

Another misleading headline I get tired of reading states that humans may be headed for a 6th mass extinction. Let’s clarify this statement once and for all by admitting emphatically that we are well in the throes of a mass extinction which will likely include ourselves within this century. By all rational evidence, industrial civilization with its billions of inhabitants cannot survive without fossil fuels. The only way capitalist carbon man will ever be sustainable is as fertilizer beneath the crumbled concrete and asphalt ruins of industrial civilization. Don’t expect any mea culpa from a culture which has been programmed to believe converting all of nature into inanimate symbols of wealth is “progress” and “development”. Not even the dire warnings of esteemed scientists and religious leaders can break the spell cast by capitalism and its definition of progress. Our institutions have become intransigent, petrified monoliths to which all will be sacrificed.

“I think the notions of free will and self-determination have the appearance of reality during a civilization’s gestation and expansion phases, when there is more opportunity and social mobility. As things calcify, instruments becoming institutions that serve their own ends, the facade is harder to maintain. Human existence has always been contingent and constrained by circumstances. These ‘free’ notions are illusions, narrow windows of perception with a limited range of influence during times of transient prosperity.” ~ BP

The term inverted totalitarianism, coined a decade ago by philosopher Sheldon Wolin, describes America’s brand of despotism in which “every natural resource and every living being is commodified and exploited to collapse as the citizenry is lulled and manipulated into surrendering their liberties and their participation in government through excess consumerism and sensationalism.” Opposition to this dominant consumer culture is systematically co-opted and suppressed by the marginalization and alienation of alternative thought. Neoliberal capitalism governs not only states and economies, but extends right down to an individual’s behavior and way of living:

One of the goals of neoliberalism is to foster a population of individuals who will play an active role in their own self-governance by interacting with the market and consumption through calculated acts and investments… sets of rules and conditions are established between institutions, economic and social practices, and patterns of behavior. They generally function outside of conscious awareness and they habitually influence social behavior. Examples of dominant consumer culture discourse include the political linking of consumer sovereignty and choice with freedom, the linking of citizenship and national pride with consumption, the work and spend treadmill that many people choose to pursue, the commercialization of childhood and adolescence, and the celebration of consumer values through the mass media and advertising.
– Social Psychology and Theories of Consumer Culture: A Political Economy

Who better to label people as “unpatriotic” if they acknowledge the reality of climate change than the host of TV’s quintessential symbol of capitalism, The Wheel of Fortune? Beneath this digital web of commercials and TV infotainment is the iron fist of militarized local police and the panopticon surveillance state which can quickly stomp out those troublesome malcontents who break free of the American hologram. What better way is there for controlling entire populations than to condition them to enjoy their chains of slavery? America’s form of tyranny, a blend of covert and overt oppression, is the most successful in the history of mankind.

None of This Can Really Be Happening, Can It?

With all the disjointed and delusional thinking out there, I feel compelled to write a blog post periodically to get the facts straight and assure myself that what I see and hear every day is really happening. Yes, we really are terraforming the Earth into a barren wasteland while convincing ourselves that it’s worth it for the sake of a cubicle job and life in cookie-cutter suburbia. Yes, we really are ruled by the Washington-Wall Street-Pentagon complex. No, you will never get the raw truth from mainstream news outlets. Yes, I’m getting older and need to exercise more because a sedentary lifestyle is as bad as smoking. Yes, industrial civilization is still on track to collapse within my lifetime. As Robert Crumb’s mystic guru Mr. Natural exclaimed, “The whole universe is completely insane!”

Locked-Up Inside the Complexity Trap

18 Thursday Dec 2014

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

≈ 71 Comments

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"Renewable" Energies, 6th Mass Extinction, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, ALTERNATIVE, Antarctic Ice Melt, Arctic Ice Albedo, Capitalism, Carbon Dioxide Equivalent (CO2e), Climate Change Impacts on Freshwater Ecosystems, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Complexity Trap, Corporate State, Creeping Normalcy, Daniel Quinn, David Spratt of Climate Code Red, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Geoengineering, Geological Deep Time, Global Coal Consumption, Global Dimming, Global Warming Potential (GWP), Greenhouse Gases, Homeostasis of Earth, Ishmael, Jared Diamond, Joseph Tainter, Landscape Amnesia, Nate Hagens, Planetary Tipping Points, Runaway Climate Change, Suicide by CO2, The Anthropocene Age

From the acidified and plasticized oceans to the greenhouse gas-polluted atmosphere to the radioactive and heavy metal-contaminated soils, the Anthropocene Epoch will leave behind a planet radically altered in its atmospheric and biospheric chemistry. This disruption, unprecedented in geologic time for its rapidity and wide-scale destruction, is already too severe for the complex web of life that had evolved under earth’s previous life-sustaining homeostatic system. As Brian Moss (et al.) wrote in Climate Change Impacts on Freshwater Ecosystems, “The chemistry of the biosphere is the ultimate sine qua non of our existence.”:

It is expected that we will have lost over half the world’s land ecosystems to agriculture or development by 2050. The urbanites may not be noticing this but the consequences will nonetheless be huge, for it is these natural ecosystems that regulate the nature of the biosphere. We have absolutely no idea how much of them can be damaged without serious consequences for human survival. All we know is that such systems, honed by the utterly ruthless mechanisms of natural selection to be as near fit for purpose as possible, are just as crucial to us, indeed much more fundamentally so, than the local grocer, filling station or hospital. The chemistry of the biosphere is the ultimate sine qua non of our existence. …in contemplating the hitherto effects of climate change, we fail to realize that the loss of ecosystems and the changing climate are linked. Indeed we blithely cost the damage of climate change (Stern 2006) as we cost the goods and services we are losing through the application of the same approach of classical economics. We have failed to see the interaction of climate, ecology, and equability. Our attempts to mitigate climate change, in a desperate bid to avoid disruption of our societies, may inevitably be doomed to failure unless we begin to see the whole picture and not just the components we find most convenient to our cash economy. – Link

Man-made climate change is the number one driver of the 6th mass extinction currently unfolding. Without bees, the grocery shelves look rather bare. Without coral reefs, the oceans are devoid of most life. Perhaps the greatest blind spot of humans is their inability to imagine that earth does not need them. The myopic, anthropocentric worldview that humans “own the earth” is emblematic of our economic system and its principles, and this belief that everything can be valued in dollars and cents will prove to be our undoing.

Modern man evolved in an environment composed of carbon dioxide(CO2) levels averaging 240ppm and methane(CH4) levels averaging 700ppb. Today’s atmosphere is now filled with nearly double the amount of CO2 and triple the CH4. A third greenhouse gas worth noting is nitrous oxide(N2O) which has 296 times the ‘Global Warming Potential’ (GWP) of CO2 and a lifespan of 150 years. N2O’s pre-industrial levels were around 270ppb, but are now at around 330ppb and climbing 0.3% per year. When all greenhouse gases are combined, the world is at a carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) of 479 ppm. And we’re locked into much more warming due to the carbon-based civilization we have built. Global dimming and the lag time of climate change have hidden the full effects yet to come, but the changes we are already seeing at only 0.85°C are catastrophic. If you are unaware of the runaway feedback loops causing the Arctic to warm twice as fast as the rest of the planet and the exponential ice melt happening in both of the Earth’s poles, then you haven’t been paying close enough attention. David Spratt elucidates some of the tipping points we have already breached:

…tipping points that have been passed thus far, at less than 1°C of warming:

The loss of the Amundsen Sea West Antarctic glaciers, and 1–4 metres of sea level rise (Rignot, Mouginot et al., 2014; Joughin, Smith et al., 2014). Dr Malte Meinshausen, advisor to the German government and one of the architects of the IPCC’s Representative Concentration Pathways, calls the evidence published this year of “unstoppable” (Rignot, 2014) deglaciation in West Antarctica “a game changer”, and a “tipping point that none of us thought would pass so quickly”, noting now we are “committed already to a change in coastlines that is unprecedented for us humans” (Breakthrough, 2014).
The loss of Arctic sea-ice in summer (Duarte, Lenton et al., 2012; Maslowski, Kinney et al., 2012), which will hasten regional warming, the mobilization of frozen carbon stores, and the deglaciation of Greenland.
Numerous ecosystems, which are already severely degraded or in the process of being lost, including the Arctic (Wolf, 2010). In the Arctic, the rate of climate change is now faster than ecosystems can adapt to naturally, and the fate of many Arctic marine ecosystems is clearly connected to that of the sea ice (Duarte, Lenton et al., 2012). In May 2008, Dr Neil Hamilton, who was then director of Arctic programmes for WWF, told a stunned audience (of which I was a member) at the Academy of Science in Canberra that WWF was not trying to preserve the Arctic ecosystem because “it was no longer possible to do so.”

Such environmental changes are imperceptible to the real-time cognitive processing of humans, but in geological ‘deep time’ these events are cataclysmic and portend a dire future for humans. As Jared Diamond described in his writings, climate change is the ultimate under-the-radar threat able to undermine human reasoning and response:

Psychological concepts of how we view the world around us, including ‘creeping normalcy’ or ‘landscape amnesia’, block day-to-day comprehension of what accelerating human activities represent—whether it is human population, the number of dammed rivers, forest destruction, or the impact of motor car emissions in a timespan that is geologically brief. Creeping normalcy refers to slow trends concealed in noisy fluctuations that people get used to without comment, while landscape amnesia describes forgetting how different the landscape looked 20–50 years ago (Diamond 2005: 425).

In his study of how societies fail, biogeographer Jared Diamond calls global warming a pre-eminent example of a ‘slow trend concealed by wide up and down fluctuations’ (2005: 425). He likens the denial of climate change impacts by leading politicians, including former US president George W. Bush (and his contemporary John Howard in Australia), in the late 1990s and early 2000s to the elite of ‘the medieval Greenlanders [who] had similar difficulties recognizing that their climate was gradually becoming colder, and the Maya and Anasazi (in Central and North America) [who] had trouble discerning that theirs was becoming drier’ (2005: 425). – Link

Nate Hagens recently made a comment online which is key to understanding much of the frustration, obstinacy, and mass delusion that modern society exhibits when trying to understand one piece of the global crisis rather than taking a holistic approach:

“I think 95%+ of environmentalists don’t integrate systems, energy or human behavior into their analysis of our climate predicament and think we can just plug and play BTUs (British Thermal Units) and have low carbon economic growth – PCI (Post Carbon Institute) has spent most of the last 5 years trying to educate [the public] on this front, to little avail.”

Most energy experts know that “renewable energy” will never be able to replace energy-dense fossil fuels at the global scale (Just for oil, it’s 90 million barrels consumed every day and forecast to hit 96 million BPD by 2019), but they don’t take into full consideration the collapse of earth’s stable Holocene climate which has allowed industrial civilization to flourish. On the other side of the coin, most climate scientists and activists I have encountered do not understand the sever limitations of “renewable energy”, yet many are well aware of the looming disaster posed by anthropogenic climate disruption. Trying to fully comprehend the multiple interconnected global crisis bearing down on industrial civilization is like the allegory of the six blind men and an elephant. Unable to see the bigger picture, each man argues and maintains that their limited view of reality is the only correct one.

As global coal consumption continues its upwards march, the real outcome of the Lima climate conference is that humans are more than willing to hide behind contractual jargon and kick the can down the road rather than come to terms with the unsustainable nature of industrial civilization:

The shift of a single word—from a “shall” to a “may”—means the world will very likely continue to burn lots of coal. Instead of being required to provide “quantifiable information” about their greenhouse-gas emissions, countries may choose whether or not to include those statistics in their pledges instead, known in the jargon as “intended nationally determined contributions. – Link

After more than two decades of climate talks, are we to believe that industrial civilization will ever reform itself for the sake of a living planet? As pervasive as self-deception is in modern society, the reinsurance industry is one sector of industrial civilization unable to turn a blind eye to the rising costs of increasingly extreme and chaotic weather events. The U.S. military is another entity impelled to acknowledge anthropogenic climate disruption, whether it be responding to the wreckage from monster typhoons in the Philippines or the destabilizing effects of droughts in the Middle East. After a few centuries of burning fossil fuels and the accumulation of vast amounts of climate science data, techno-capitalist carbon man is also being forced to react to the fact that the earth’s atmosphere is not an infinite pollution sink for his endless consumption of energy. The problem is that several planetary tipping points have already been irreversibly transgressed, threatening the very habitability of earth. Our predictable collective response is to try to techno-fix the problem rather than entertain any fundamental rethink of the pillars of the capitalist economic system and the scientific reductionism that have led us to this impasse. As evidenced by the number of articles published in mainstream periodicals these days about geoengineering the atmosphere, awareness appears to be growing amongst the business elite that things are starting to spiral out of control:

Geoengineering is another problem-solving strategy that our complex society will employ in order to try to solve the ever-complicated problems arising from ecological overshoot. In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter described this process of developing progressively more sophisticated technologies to solve problems. Geoengineering is wrought with dangers and even frightens many of those scientists who are working on such schemes, but it may be our last hope of saving ourselves from abrupt climate change and a hothouse Earth similar to past rapid warmings. Recent research has shown that the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a time in earth’s history when global temperatures rose upwards of 5°C in the space of about 13 years, serves as a better case study for modern climate change than previously thought:

About 55.5 million years ago, a burst of carbon dioxide raised Earth’s temperature 5°C to 8°C, which had major impacts on numerous species of plants and wildlife. Scientists analyzing ancient soil samples now say a previous burst of the greenhouse gas preceded this event, known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), and probably triggered it. Moreover, they believe humans are pumping similar levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere right now, raising concerns that our own emissions may also destabilize Earth’s climate, triggering the planet to emit devastating bursts of carbon in the future.

The paper implies that even if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide right now, our descendants might still face huge temperature rises, says paleoclimatologist Gabriel Bowen of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, the lead author of the new research. “It is a possibility,” he says, “and it’s a scary one.”…

…The researchers used climate models to investigate how the initial, smaller heating could have triggered the later surge in temperature. They estimate that the first thermal pulse is likely to have warmed Earth’s atmosphere by 2°C to 3°C, but that the atmospheric temperature would have gradually returned to normal as the heat was absorbed into the deep ocean. However, when that heat finally reached the ocean floor, it might have melted methane ices called clathrates, releasing the methane into the ocean and allowing it to make its way into the atmosphere. As a greenhouse gas, methane is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide [up to several hundred times the Global Warming Potential of CO2 for the first two decades before decaying into CO2], so a sudden spike in methane emissions could lead to huge climate change. – Link

If we are only going to use geoengineering techniques to try to keep business-as-usual afloat, then such efforts will be nothing more than the last gasps of a dying civilization, but if these technologies are coupled with an expedited wartime transformation of our society, culture, economy, and political institutions into a very low or zero carbon society, then perhaps such efforts would be worthwhile and could save our species from extinction. However, I see no signs of any such transition towards a decentralized, simplified society, and more noteworthy, neither does Tainter. We are firmly locked within the complexity trap:

…‘the study of social complexity does not yield optimistic results’ (Tainter, 2006: 99). In fact, there is something deeply tragic in Tainter’s view, because it suggests that civilisation, by its very nature, gets locked into a process of mandatory growth in complexity that eventually becomes unsupportable. Furthermore, history provides a disturbingly consistent empirical basis for this tragic view (Tainter, 1988), leading Tainter (2006: 100) to conclude that ‘all solutions to the problem of complexity are temporary.’ This seemingly innocuous statement is actually extremely dark, for it implies that ultimately and inevitably social complexity will outgrow its available energy supply. – Link

As things stand right now, not only must we stop the rise of CO2, but we must also halt the loss of Arctic ice albedo and implement methods for pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere because a 2 °C warming limit is a thing of the past. Sound advice would be to stop digging when in catastrophic overshoot, but it does not appear we can stop because the system is in control, not us.

“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That’s what’s at stake, isn’t it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

Death by Dollar$ and Suicide by CO2

08 Saturday Nov 2014

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

≈ 179 Comments

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6th Mass Extinction, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Bliss Point of Sugar, Capitalism, Carrying Capacity, Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate $tate, Corporatocracy, Dalai Lama, Death by Dollars, Dr. Suzanne de la Monte, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Geoengineering, Hydropower, Inverted Totalitarianism, IPCC, Kurt Vonnegut, Mass Die Off, Nate Hagens, Overpopulation, Paul Chefurka, Processed Food, Senator James Inhofe, Senator Mitch McConnell, Suicide by CO2, The Unsustainability of Mega-Cities, Tragedy of Privatizing the Commons, WWF's Living Planet Report

Unresponsive and Corrupt Governments

Another election cycle passes and the American people responded with the lowest voter turnout since WWII. The staged events of today’s political rallies will soon be composed solely of people paid off with corporate bribes to wave flags and chant slogans. As ever more corporate money floods into the faux democratic process, participation by the average citizenry has plummeted. Americans are now more disillusioned with the charade of “American democracy” than at any time in history:

Confidence in Congress as an institution is at 7%, the lowest measurement in history and lower than any other institution tested, including organized labor, banks and big business. Views of the honesty and ethics of members of Congress are at 8% on average, one percentage point above lobbyists, but one point below car salesmen… – link

We are also undoubtedly becoming more callous and insensitive to our fellow-man when a 90-year-old gentleman is arrested for feeding the homeless from a church kitchen. In fact, we’ve lost all our humanity and exchanged it for the almighty dollar. Neoliberal capitalism has permeated very aspect of social and civic life, creating a new epitaph for the demise of such a mean-spirited culture —‘death by dollars’.

You Are What You Eat

I just became aware of Dr. Suzanne de la Monte’s studies on the food industry’s use of sugar in all its products in order to fabricate a consumer “bliss point” for maximizing sales. Capitalist industrial civilization has bred a morbidly obese creature conditioned to overeat processed food spiked with sugar, fat, and salt. A high-fructose diet has undoubtedly turned the cognitive skills of many into mush. John Oliver recently used a clip from her work in his takedown of the sugar industry:

“De la Monte has done her research by feeding healthy rats the equivalent of a North American diet, complete with all the sugars and fat. All her rats ended up demented.” – from the documentary The Secrets of Sugar

The Dopamine Rush of Fossil Fuels

With the recent elections the lunatics have taken control of the asylum. Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, recipient of 2012 Rubber Dodo Award, is in line to chair the Senate’s top environmental job, and incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says his first priority will be to “do whatever I can to get the EPA reined in.” At least a dozen newly-elected climate science deniers will be there to help Mitch compete with China and India in a race to global mass extinction.

The IPCC stated back in 2007 that emissions would have to peak in 2015 to avoid a rise of 2°C, but since that is not going to happen, they are putting their hopes in technology that could pull CO2 out of the atmosphere while conceding that such techniques are “uncertain” and “limited”. Mankind’s grave is already deep enough, yet we keep digging. Just as China’s coal consumption has registered a drop for the first time this century, India has announced it will pick up the slack by planning to double its coal production to meet the country’s soaring energy demand. Poland has rejected the IPCC target of zero emissions by 2100. In the U.S., new data has revealed that climate change has become the most politically divisive issue in the U.S.

According to energy expert Nate Hagens, modern-day carbon man’s metabolic energy consumption makes each of us a 30-ton primate. It appears the Pavlovian conditioning of modern man to energy dense fossil fuels and capitalist wealth have irrevocably hacked and rewired his brain’s reward system. The autopsy results for the age of the Anthropocene will read: “fossil fuel overdose” and “suicide by CO2”.

Hydropower is Not Green

Even overlooking the GHG emissions from a dam’s construction and maintenance, hydropower is seen by some as a “renewable energy source”, yet it is apparently a much larger source of methane emissions than once thought, perhaps releasing nearly as much as the methane emissions that accompany the burning of fossil fuels:

…In 2012 study, researchers in Singapore found that greenhouse gas emissions from hydropower reservoirs globally are likely greater than previously estimated, warning that “rapid hydropower development and increasing carbon emissions from hydroelectric reservoirs to the atmosphere should not be downplayed.”

Those researchers suggest all large reservoirs globally could emit up to 104 teragrams of methane annually. By comparison, NASA estimates that global methane emissions associated with burning fossil fuels totals between 80 and 120 teragrams annually…

Nonetheless, industrial civilization is currently damming up every large river on the planet:

The Unraveling Web of Life

The WWF(World Wildlife Fund) released its biennial ‘Living Planet Report’ which some on Twitter are calling the ‘Dead Planet Report’. The silence of mass extinction draws ever nearer…

The report writers, based on data kept by the Zoological Society of London, studied 10,380 populations of 3,038 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles from 1970 to 2010. Over these four decades, the average decline of these vertebrate species was 52 per cent – all in less than two human generations.

Amongst freshwater species the population decline was a staggering 76 per cent, owing to habitat loss, land fragmentation, pollution and invasive species.

In the same period terrestrial species declined by 39 per cent through unsustainable land use and increased poaching, often spurred on by wildlife crime syndicates.

Marine species declined also by 39 per cent, to include large migratory seabirds, many shark species and also sea turtles.

A major contributory factor to marine loss of life was through by catching (accidentally catching, in certain fish net sizes, species which were of no market value and then casting these dead fish overboard), illegal fishing and overfishing of the same fishing grounds.

Currently we need a 50 per cent bigger Earth to allow the regeneration of the natural resources we consume…

…By 2050, we will have an extra 2.4 billion people in our world, with urban populations increasing from 3.6 billion in 2011 to 6.3 billion. In 1970, there were only two megacities (over 10 million people) – New York and Tokyo; in 2014 there are 28 such cities – 16 in Asia, three each in Europe and Africa, four in Latin America and two in North America, all totalling 12 per cent of the world’s urban population.

The United Nations (UN) predicts that in 2025, there will be 37 megacities with eight new ones in Asia. Also in the pipeline are meta-cities – conurbations of over 20 million people – through the amalgamation of megacities…

…The report interestingly mentions that the diversity of human languages in our world is strongly correlated to areas of high plant diversity. Some linguists have predicted that 90 per cent of the world’s languages will expire by the end of this century…

Here is an interesting graph created by Paul Chefurka which shows that the combined biomass of humans with their farm animals exceeds the natural carrying capacity of the earth sevenfold:

In the graphic, the “wild animal” biomass doesn’t include insects, bacteria, or marine organisms.

I used three data sources to develop the chart: a paper by world-respected ecological scientist Vaclav Smil, called “Harvesting the Biosphere”, linked below; world population estimates from the Wikipedia article of the same name; and the UN’s Medium Fertility variant for the human population in 2050 (9.6 billion).

The definition I used for Global Carrying Capacity is, “The biomass the planet can support without the assistance of human technology or fossil fuels.” The impact of human activity has gradually eroded the Earth’s carrying capacity over time, which is why I show the red dotted line sloping down to the right. The degree of erosion is very hard to estimate. My guess is that we may have lost around 25% by this point, some of which would of course be naturally regenerated over time in the absence of human activity. Any biomass above that dotted line has to be supported by human technology and energy supplies (which at this point are mostly from fossil fuels).

The conclusion is that we have been living in the midst of an accelerating Global Mass Extinction Event for over 100 years already. Unfortunately we’ve been too fixated on human issues like economics and politics to even notice, let alone realize what it means. Those who did realize the significance, both to wildlife and the human species, have been powerless to act in the face of economics and politics.

Paul gives the following further explanation for the graph:

The definition one uses for “carrying capacity” is so loose as to make it quite arbitrary. Here’s the definition I used: “The global carrying capacity is the total biomass of the organisms under consideration that the planet can support without the assistance of technology or fossil fuels.”

Accordingly, I estimated the carrying capacity in this case as being about the same as the world’s wild animal biomass in 10,000 BCE, with the assumption that the unassisted carrying capacity of the world would have been fully utilized at that point. I estimated the wild animal biomass in 10,000 BCE as being somewhat less than the combined wild and domestic animal biomass in 1900, per Smil. I made it lower in order to account for the technological intensification of farming already well under way by that time.

The slope of the carrying capacity line is arbitrary, because it’s impossible to determine how much we have actually eroded the world’s unassisted carrying capacity. We just know that we have. I chose the slope to correspond to my belief that we’ve eroded it by about 25% at this point. The actual slope is therefore somewhat editorial.

The Dalai Lama says, “Affection, a sense of community and a sense of concern for others are not some kind of luxury. They’re about the survival of humanity,” but the socio-economic system that rules the world is characterized by hyper-individualism and self-interest devoid of moral constraints. A system that enshrines greed and mocks equity and the public good will never be able to find a solution to the tragedy of privatizing the commons.

All lights are about to go out. No more electricity. All forms of transportation are about to stop, and the planet Earth will soon have a crust of skulls and bones and dead machinery. And nobody can do a thing about it. It’s too late in the game. Don’t spoil the party, but here’s the truth: We have squandered our planet’s resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn’t going to be one.
~ Kurt Vonnegut

In the Ashes of Civilization

16 Tuesday Sep 2014

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

≈ 112 Comments

Tags

Alan Weisman's 'The World Without Us', Anthropocentrism, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Edward O. Wilson's Consilience, Extinction of Man, Greenwashing, Pandemic, Resource Wars, Runaway Climate Change, Sara Teasdale, Sea Level Rise, Techno-Optimists

False Gods

To the extent that we depend on prosthetic devices to keep ourselves and the biosphere alive, we will render everything fragile. To the extent that we banish the rest of life, we will impoverish our own species for all time. And if we should surrender our genetic nature to machine-aided ratiocination, and our ethics and art and our very meaning to a habit of careless discursion in the name of progress, imagining ourselves godlike and absolved from our ancient heritage, we will become nothing.
~ Edward O. Wilson, Consilience; Chapter 12: ‘What Does It All Mean?’

From its inception, capitalism paved a one-way path to annihilation, predicated as it was on unmitigated growth, the extraction of finite resources, the exaltation of individualism over communal ties, and the maximization of profit at the expense of the environment and society. The capitalist world was, as one author described so bleakly, ”dominated by the concerns of trade and Realpolitik rather than by human rights and spreading democracy”; it was a ”civilization influenced by the impersonal, bottom-line values of the corporations.” Capitalist industrial civilization was built on burning the organic remains of ancient organisms, but at the cost of destroying the stable climatic conditions which supported its very construction. The thirst for fossil fuels by our globalized, high-energy economy spurred increased technological development to extract the more difficult-to-reach reserves, but this frantic grasp for what was left only served to hasten the malignant transformation of Earth into an alien world.

The Fossil Fuel Age did not end for lack of fossil fuels, but because there was no place left to store its CO2 waste. Earth’s overwhelmed carbon sinks became carbon sources. Humans with their hubristic technological overreach had been living on borrowed time for a long time; techno-fixes were not able to artificially expand the carrying capacity of the planet any longer. The climax of the ecological crisis had arrived.

The ruling class tried to hold things together for as long as they could by printing money, propping up markets, militarizing domestic law enforcement, and orchestrating thinly veiled resource wars in the name of fighting terrorism, but the crisis of capitalism was intertwined with the ecological crisis and could never be solved by those whose jobs and social standing depended on protecting the status quo. All the corporate PR, greenwashing, political promises, cultural myths, and anthropocentrism could not hide the harsh Malthusian reality of ecological overshoot. As crime sky-rocketed and social unrest boiled over into rioting and looting, the elite retreated behind walled fortresses secured by armed guards, but the great unwinding of industrial civilization was already well underway. This evil genie was never going back in the bottle.

The melting of the glacial poles meant that global weather patterns and jet streams were irrevocably altered. Consequently, extreme floods and drought wreaked havoc on agriculture. Sea levels also rose much faster than predicted, inundating coastal cities and salinating farmland. Currency markets collapsed, cell phones went silent, transportation systems ground to a halt, and grocery shelves went bare. The disintegration of globalized trade, the dissolution of nation states, and the exhaustion of the biosphere brought forth a new dark age. Deadly microbes and pathogens that had lain dormant or been restricted to certain outlying areas of the planet were now free to migrate and proliferate in new regions. This opened the door for a string of global pandemics that the world had never seen before. Pestilence and famine whittled the population down to under a billion within a few decades.

Entropic Wastelands

The electric glow of the world’s cities was blotted out; the stars and moon were the only sources of illumination in the pitch black of night. A ghostly silence replaced the hustle and bustle of people and machinery that once animated the city. Time was no longer measured with the hands of a clock, but by the rise and fall of the sun and the changing of the seasons. A carpet of overgrown grass, weeds, bramble, and trees silently overtook the crumbling city, uprooting and splitting concrete and asphalt. Skyscrapers, once the temples of corporate power and wealth, were now nothing more than monstrous sundials casting their long shadows across the decaying wastelands. Never again would there be such a complex, globe-spanning civilization on Earth.

Haunted for millenia by the legacy of mankind’s fossil fuel binge, roving bands of human survivors were condemned to wander this angry Earth. Only the most physically and mentally fit were able to eke out an existence in an increasingly inhospitable world to pass through the evolutionary bottleneck. They huddled together at night around bonfires and fed the flames with old office furniture and business papers from abandoned buildings. Without electricity, modern medicine, and sanitation systems, life became a short and brutal affair. Nature’s primal forces could no longer be disregarded; their harsh reality sharpened all the senses. Nearly all the technology that had enslaved and anesthetized modern man for so long was now of no use in this neo-medieval world. Megacities were reduced to entropic wastelands, their detritus scavenged by these post-apocalyptic tribes.

Like a rocket disintegrating in mid-flight, capitalist industrial civilization rushed headlong into oblivion, always believing human ingenuity and free markets would solve the mounting number of crises. It turned out humans were extraordinarily clever at deceiving others and, in turn, equally clever at deceiving themselves. They burned the devil’s excrement, split atoms to play with lethal radiation, and tinkered with the building blocks of life, but they never heeded numerous warnings against such folly. Like Icarus who, flying too close to the sun, forgot that his wings were made of wax, humans ignored their earthly origins, believing too much in their own technological infallibility.

A passage from The World Without Us:

There Will Come Soft Rains 

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone. 

~ Sara Teasdale

Capitalist Industrial Civilization = M.A.D.

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 82 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, David Suzuki, Depleted Uranium, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Gross Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Mountaintop Removal, NSA chief Keith Alexander, Nuclear Waste, Ocean Acidification, Plasticizing the Planet, Poverty, Privatization, Regulatory Capture, Strip, The Revolving Door Between Government and Corporations, War for Profit

“This, then, is the legacy we leave to future generations so that we can turn on our lights and computers or make nuclear weapons… Have we, the human species, the ability to mature psychologically in time to avert these catastrophes, or, is it in fact, too late?” ~ Dr. Helen Caldicott

Radical, wide-scale planning should have been executed decades ago in response to the Limits to Growth study. Instead, we carried on with business-as-usual as the natural world underwent cataclysmic, mass extinction level changes. Every day, the insanity of capitalist industrial civilization(CIC) is on full display as we entertain ourselves with the illusion of token political gestures towards “sustainability”. None of it changes our death march over the cliff of extinction. Nature died long ago with man’s discovery of fossil fuels which fed his terminal overshoot. Any isolated pockets of remaining wilderness are trampled underfoot, amounting to no more than a mere novelty destination commercialized by the tourist industry.

Enslaved to his own self-destructive technology, CIC continues to toxify and irradiate the planet, plasticize the oceans, and disrupt the chemical conditions that allow for life. A society that dehumanizes everything with the fetishization of technology and money will always see disaster as a money-making opportunity. Anthropogenic climate disruption is no exception. Competition amongst nations and corporations for economic/military supremacy, wealth, and power demands that the energy resources to be exploited first are those with the highest available ERoEI, i.e. fossil fuels. The charts bear out this cutthroat strategy and so do the actions of nation states who have made it a legal duty to maximize greenhouse gases. Giving up the competitive advantage of coal, oil, and gas ensures you will be eaten alive in the global economy. Thus nation states are locked into a capitalist race to the grave. The nasty greenhouse gas-emitting side effects of these fuels are simply another negative externality quietly pushed onto future generations. However, physical reality will eventually overtake a fake mass-media culture consumed by the idolatry of materialism and greed. The Earth doesn’t bail out a species that continuously spends more than it saves. Instead, the biospheric slate is wiped clean to make way for the next bout of evolutionary events.

Like radiation, GHG’s are seemingly invisible yet their effects are all too real. Because of the lag period involved in anthropogenic climate disruption, their devastating environmental costs will never be fully appreciated in time to avert disaster. Adding up the land, air, ice, and ocean warming data, a study from last year found that in recent decades the earth has been heating up at a rate of 250 trillion Joules per second. This is equivalent to:

Detonating four Hiroshima atomic bombs per second
Experiencing two Hurricane Sandys per second
Enduring four 6.0 Richter scale earthquakes per second
Being struck by 500,000 lightning bolts per second
Exploding more than eight Big Ben towers, with every inch packed full of dynamite, per second

For the Fox-news-befuddled masses, such analogies are meaningless because the threat is not in their face. In their conspiracy-addled minds, climate change is a socialist plot to ruin the American economy and undermine capitalism itself. To the genuflecting masses of capitalism, the mythical free market is seen as an all-powerful, self-regulating mechanism of the Earth, the Sun, and the Universe. Man-made constructs are inanimate and artificial, yet we cling to them as if they were immutable laws of nature.

Keeping industrial civilization chugging along in the face of planetary ecological collapse is eerily similar to the military doctrine of nuclear deterrence called M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction), as commenter James explained:

Our competitive growth is MAD and considered on a geological time scale is only slightly slower than a sudden launch of nuclear missiles which may also eventually occur. We kid ourselves when we think that we’ll be fine as long as we never have a nuclear exchange, that sustainability is a possibility if we prevent nuclear war…

…This planet has the Big C, civilization, and it will torture its denizens as they struggle to maintain normalcy while the onslaught of malnutrition, decay and chaos drive them mad.

Do you think Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney are going to ameliorate the conditions of your decline? Ever wonder what it’s like to be a human sacrifice?

Capitalist carbon man’s unwavering faith in the powers of technology ensures that Big C’s omnicidal, energy-slurping $46 trillion-dollar infrastructure(U.S.A. only) and its array of mechanized contraptions cranks onward, squeezing out the last drop of resources from a spent Earth. Human cannon fodder will continue to be shoveled into Iraq and the Middle East to keep the fossil fuel furnaces burning. America’s corporate-industrial-military-political-financial complex will protect its financial coffers at the expense of the destitute masses and a habitable planet. When it comes to money, there is no loyalty to anyone or anything in the land of the FEE and home of the bamboozled. Just like countless Wall Street predators who have passed through the revolving corporate/government door, former NSA chief Keith Alexander is now getting in on the action to exploit his national security credentials.

A simple lesson not learned from the two recent epic industrial disasters:

Collusion between big business, government and industry is hardly restricted to Japan. In every country, the health and safety of working people in their workplaces and their communities are routinely subordinated to the dictates of profit. Moreover, the past three decades of market restructuring have led to the systematic erosion of the limited regulations that previously existed. In many instances, regulatory bodies have been cut back or replaced by corporate “self-regulation”.

Fukushima is just one of the major disasters that have exposed the criminal character of capitalism. One year earlier, an explosion at the BP-run Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and created the worst environmental catastrophe in US history. The Bush and Obama administrations fast-tracked the project, which proceeded without an environmental impact study, despite public concern and opposition. In the wake of the oil spill, the Obama administration acted as a virtual attorney for BP, assisting the energy giant to minimise the economic and political fallout. From the outset, the White House made clear that the disaster would not impede further offshore oil projects—including by BP.

The Japanese government, first under Prime Minister Naoto Kan, and now Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, has performed a similar service for TEPCO—providing a huge bailout for the company and limiting the payouts to small businesses and individuals whose lives have been devastated…

…The real lesson that should be drawn from the report’s revelations is the incompatibility between capitalism and even the most elementary needs of humanity for a healthy and secure environment….

Structuring a society to reward the most sociopathic and ruthless amongst us, create grotesque levels of inequality and political disenfranchisement, deify material wealth as the primary metric of success, privatize and profitize war, and use the planet as a garbage dump for toxic waste is a recipe for disaster.

Humans have thrown into the geological evolutionary processes of Earth several long-lived and very disruptive monkey wrenches. There are three which are noteworthy and will outlive us all in the deep time of planetary history:

Anthopogenic climate disruption will essentially last forever, according to Professor David Archer of Chicago University and his associates. He says “the climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge, longer than time capsules, far longer than the age of human civilization so far. Ultimate recovery takes place on timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, a geologic longevity typically associated in public perceptions with nuclear waste.”

Ocean Acidification, the so-called ‘evil twin’ of climate change, will mirror the longevity of anthropogenic CO2…

Nuclear Waste from the production of nuclear power and nuclear bombs lasts essentially until the end of time. Coal-fired electric plants produce their own witch’s brew of radioactive waste as well. In the U.S. alone, roughly 2,000 metric tons of nuclear waste are produced every year with 70,000 tons now sitting at some 100 temporary sites across the country. A permanent disposal site has yet to be established to store the fatal stuff. The recent egregious, Homer Simpson-esque mishaps and incompetence at America’s only radioactive waste repository located in New Mexico don’t inspire any confidence that we can store this stuff safely even for a brief period, let alone for the thousands of years required. We’re too busy fracking around that fragile site to worry about any long-term consequences. Humans have sufficiently booby-trapped the planet that in the dying days of the Anthropocene, your chance of survival is the same as winning the Lotto.

A few of the deadly radioisotopes that can be found in nuclear waste are the following:

– uranium 238 (half-life 4.468 billion years)
– uranium 235 (half-life 700 million years)
– plutonium 244 (half-life 80 million years)
– iodine-129 (half-life 15.7 million years)
– neptunium-237 (half-life two million years)
– plutonium 242 (half-life 373,300 years)
– technetium-99 (half-life 220,000 years)
– plutonium-239 (half-life 24,000 years)

Depleted uranium is a byproduct of processing mined uranium for fuel in nuclear energy plants and as a component for nuclear bombs. Depleted uranium contains U-234, U-235, U-236, and U-238. Only two countries have acknowledged using depleted uranium in their weaponry, the US and UK, for its armor-piercing advantages. Only one country, Belgium, has banned its use. A couple of years ago, New Zealand put forth a bill to ban DU munitions, but it failed by one vote. The Dutch peace group PAX recently confirmed that the U.S. fired DU munitions into Iraqi civilian populations.

Once a DU shell impacts a target, it aerosolizes into a fine gas or mist which can then travel in the air for miles. These radioactive particles can get kicked up again and again by the wind or other disturbances after they have settled on the ground or in the sand. Once inhaled by humans, DNA is damaged and the ensuing cell mutations lead to cancer. For an example of the havoc depleted uranium has wreaked on the health of returning soldiers, watch this video. Investigative reporter Dr Nafeez Ahmed recently reported how the World Health Organization tried to cover up the horrific, lingering effects of depleted uranium contamination in Iraq. For those Middle East countries, the use of these radioactive DU munitions by Western forces constitutes an under-the-radar nuclear scourge with cancers, birth defects, and chronic ill-health affecting generations upon generations into the distant future.

I suppose one could add plastics to the list of unimaginably long-lasting pollutants to the list. Microscopic particles of the stuff can be found at any beach and even in mountaintop lakes. And of course the scars from massive strip mining operations will remain as an indelible reminder of industrial civilization’s insatiable appetite for energy. Scientists didn’t declare this the Anthropocene Epoch for nothing; we have certainly left our mark like no other species before or since, literally terraforming the Earth into a planet inhospitable to ourselves. Perhaps aliens will pay a visit after the dust has all settled. They’ll surely shake their heads in disgust at the poisonous wreckage left behind by our fossil-fueled madness before zooming off into the night skies in search of a planet that has intelligent life.

The Exact Timing of Near-Term Human Extinction Is Academic

29 Thursday May 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 56 Comments

Tags

Abrupt Climate Change, Antarctic Ice Melt, Climate Change Feedback Loops, Climate Lag Time, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Dahr Jamail, Eco-Apocalypse, Environmental Collapse, Faustian Bargain of Climate Change, Global Dimming, Methane Clathrate Gun, Near-Term Extinction, Peter Wadhams, Runaway Climate Change, Systemic Disorder

This post is in response to Systemic Disorder commenter Palloy who thinks that peak oil will save mankind and that global warming “will not be as bad as +1.5°C.” I want to answer the question of what degree of warming we are already committed to if industrial civilization were to disappear off the face of the Earth right now.

Palloy is overlooking the part that aerosols from industrial activity play in temporarily cooling the planet. James Hansen called this the Faustian Bargain:

…Human activity modifies the impact of the greenhouse effect by the release of airborne particulate pollutants known as aerosols. These include black-carbon soot, organic carbon, sulphates, nitrates, as well as dust from smoke, manufacturing, wind storms, and other sources. Aerosols have a net cooling effect because they reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the ground and they increase cloud cover. This is popularly known as “global dimming”, because the overall aerosol impact is to mask some of the warming effect of greenhouse gases.

Hansen’s new study estimates this aerosol “dimming” at 1.2 degrees (plus or minus 0.2°), much higher than previously figured. Aerosols are washed out of the atmosphere by rain on average every 10 days, so their cooling effect is only maintained because of continuing human pollution, the principal source of which is the burning of fossil fuels, which also cause a rise in carbon dioxide levels and global warming that lasts for many centuries…

The average global temperature rise thus far is about 0.85°C since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Once industrial activity ceases and its accompanying aerosols fall out of the atmosphere, the average global temperature will jump to about 2°C, but it won’t simply stop there because Palloy forgets that there is a lag time involved with CO2 emissions. The effects we are feeling now were from our emissions 40 years ago:

…The estimate of 40 years for climate lag, the time between the cause (increased greenhouse gas emissions) and the effect (increased temperatures), has profound negative consequences for humanity. However, if governments can find the will to act, there are positive consequences as well.

With 40 years between cause and effect, it means that average temperatures of the last decade are a result of what we were thoughtlessly putting into the air in the 1960’s. It also means that the true impact of our emissions over the last decade will not be felt until the 2040’s. This thought should send a chill down your spine!…

This “committed warming” of past CO2 emissions whose effect will be manifested in the coming decades is about 0.6 degrees Celsius. Adding up the current warming of 0.85°C from the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the loss of aerosols with global dimming at 1.2°C, and the “committed” temperature rise from the 40-year lag time of CO2 emissions equal to 0.6°C, we get a total of 2.65°C. If all industrial activity stopped right now, we would already be committed to 2.65°C, a global average temperature rise of three times what we are currently experiencing. With all the drought, flooding, hurricanes, landslides, fires, and other manifestations of climate change that we are undergoing now, I shudder to think what the world will be like in 2050 and yet humans continue to burn coal and other fossil fuels at breakneck speed. According to the Climate Accountability Institute, half of all emissions have been produced in the past 25 years.

Now we get to the even more insidious aspects of anthropogenic climate change that very few comprehend. Dozens of self-reinforcing feedback loops have already been triggered, but we’ll discuss only one, the albedo effect, in the loss of our planet’s air conditioners, the Arctic and Antarctic:

(1)   An increase in temperature decreases the area covered by sea ice as it melts leaving a larger area of exposed ocean.
(2)   This decreases the reflection of sunlight as ice is far more reflective than the newly exposed ocean.
(3)   Reduced reflection increases the area’s absorption of heat from the sun.
(4)   This increases the temperature of the area, amplifying the original increase in temperature mentioned in (1).

A recent study calculated that the loss of Arctic ice reflectivity from 1979 to 2011 added an amplifying feedback to human warming equivalent to 25% of the heat captured by CO2 emissions during that same time.

We know that we don’t live in a linear world and that climate change is a non-linear phenomenon. Recent studies on abrupt climate change in Earth’s history reveal that temperatures have changed rapidly by 5°C in just 13 years. With the grand experiment mankind has irrevocably and haphazardly embarked on, the de-thawing of vast stores of permafrost and clathrates measured in the gigatons has commenced, creating the possibility for a sudden catastrophic release of such gases at any time. Methane, for about the first 10 to 20 years of its initial release before it breaks down into CO2, is many fold more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Humans are too busy calculating everything in terms of economic profit with regards to newly exposed resources and shorter shipping routes in the Arctic to take the time to fathom what damage they have done. Industrial civilization has permanently disrupted the stable period known as the Holocene within which mankind and civilization have been allowed to prosper.

Thus, we can see that the world is changing quickly into an environment that may well be outside the habitability for humans. The timing of human near-term extinction is likely academic.

Apneaman left this message here just a short time ago:

Journalist Dahr Jamail & Professor Peter Wadhams say the resulting release of methane will lead to massive climate disruption, and that we have reached a point of no return.

Update (12-3-2014):

CO2 Takes Just 10 Years to Reach Planet’s Peak Heat (Not 40 Years)

In a study that could have important ramifications on estimating the impacts, costs and benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, new research shows that CO2 brings peak heat within a decade of being emitted, with the effects then lingering 100 years or more into the future…

…The research, published Wednesday in Environmental Research Letters, provides policymakers and economists with a new perspective on how fast human carbon emissions heat the planet. Back-of-the-envelope estimates for how long it takes for a given puff of CO2 to crank up the heat have generally been from 40-50 years. But the new study shows that the timeframe for CO2 emissions to reach their maximum warming potential is likely closer to 10 years….
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/co2-emissions-peak-heat-18394

Business-As-Usual on a Dying Planet

19 Monday May 2014

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

≈ 120 Comments

Tags

BP, British Petroleum, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corexit, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Corporate State, Dr. Wilma Subra, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Sacrifice Zones, Environmental Collapse, Gross Inequality, Gulf Oil Spill, Industrial Disease, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Noam Chomsky, Peak Oil, Renfrey Clarke, Tragedy of the Commons, Vice Media: Crude Awakening

A recent investigative piece by Vice on the aftermath of the BP oil spill, America’s most devastating environmental accident to date and the “largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry”, shows that people are still getting sick and dying in the Gulf region.

Award winning chemist, Dr. Wilma Subra, conducted blood tests on Gulf Coast residents who were symptomatic with new illnesses and found that some of the cancer-causing agents were 65 times the expected level in the victims blood tests. Subra noted that Corexit is in the air, the water and the Gulf resident’s blood.

“There’s a whole population that’s very sick and doesn’t have access to medical care, and that’s what we’ve been trying to work on now, from the very beginning, is getting them medical care so they will get better,” says Subra. “How many people do you think we’re talking about, do we have any guess?” “Hundreds of thousands along the whole coastal area,” Subra says. “Hundreds of thousands of people?” “That are sick, yes.”

It also is likely that the BP cleanup workers are going to suffer the same fate. Listen to what Dr. Wilma Subra had to say about the health of this group.

These findings can leave little doubt that BP’s use of Corexit has seriously compromised the collective life span of Gulf Coast residents. This is a staggering implication for the collective longevity in the Gulf. – link

Nearly 2 millions gallons of Corexit were used to prevent the millions of barrels of leaked oil from hitting shorelines. Where did all that oil go? Once Corexit is dispersed over an oil slick, it causes the spilled oil to break apart and sink to the bottom of the ocean. In the case of the BP oil spill, this toxic material created massive kill zones on the Gulf floor. When oil and Corexit are mixed together, the resultant substance becomes 52 times more toxic and penetrates human skin much easier. The locals don’t eat what they catch, but remember that Obama said it was safe.

Corexit has been banned in 18 countries, including the UK, because “it is a cancerous causing neurotoxin pesticide that is acutely toxic to both human and marine life.” Every time there is a strong storm, the Corexit chemical and oil mixture gets swept up onto shore and enters the water cycle:

As of early October 2013, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) website specifically stated that the spill should have no effect on drinking water, and that any questions residents might have about their water should be directed to their drinking water provider. The website fails to mention that water from the Gulf, mixed with oil and Corexit could make its way into the ecosystem eventually, washing up onto the Gulf’s shores and seeping insidiously into the ground water. Florida’s ground water aqueduct system provides drinking water to 18 million residents. – link

The happy motoring culture of suburban sprawl, bread & circus infotainment, and celebrity/wealth worship has long since forgotten what has been called “the biggest public health crisis from a chemical poisoning in the history of this country“. Entrapped by poverty and lacking the means to escape the Gulf region, its residence have become part of the sacrifice zone offered up in the name of profit to the carbon-hungry God of industrial civilization.

None of the locals who took part in the clean-up effort were told of the dangers to their health, nor were they allowed to wear protective gear such as respiratory masks, suits, and gloves because it would have more accurately conveyed to the world the true nature of the disaster. More recently, BP has been accused of hiring internet trolls to threaten critics of its handling of the 2010 disaster. Surely the authorities were aware of the aftermath from the Exxon Valdez accident wherein the same dispersant was used by those clean-up workers who are now nearly all dead at the average age of 51. For BP and the U.S. government, image and corporate interests override the horrific realities of ecocide and corporate manslaughter. Better to sink the oil out of sight and mind in order to maintain the illusion that all is well rather than have a company pay the full cost for its recklessness. All that oil mixed with Corexit is now a 3 to 4 inch toxic layer blanketing the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, inhibiting its biodegradation by natural oil-consuming bacteria and prolonging the disaster for decades. And BP is once again allowed to bid for U.S. government contracts after having sued the EPA in 2013 to lift the suspension. Of course lots of conspiracy theories surrounded the BP oil spill, but the only real conspiracy here was the government/corporate collusion to hide and minimize the damage, control the public’s perception of the disaster, and protect corporate profits over people and environment — nothing out of the ordinary for the corporatocracy we live under, here or abroad.

It’s not just in the oceans that we have to worry about oil spills. If we look at just one set of data from one inland state, you can get an idea of the staggering scale of the fallout from the oil drenched machine of industrial civilization:

When you take into account all the global destruction that capitalist industrial civilization has wrought over the last few centuries, you realize no solution will ever be forthcoming from our corporate overlords. The idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is simply a PR and marketing ploy. CSR employs ineffective market-based solutions, making it appear that a corporation is addressing a social or environmental problem when in fact it only serves to protect corporate financial interests and shift the blame to the individual and elsewhere. Over decades, corporations have molded society into atomized, uninformed, and passive consumers who parrot the same talking points fed to them from the mainstream media. Those wielding the power in society and leading mankind over a cliff are the same ones that hide behind the moniker of CSR, a smokescreen for continuing the looting and polluting of the planet to the point of ecological collapse.

As the catastrophes of the BP oil spill and Fukushima illustrate, a bankrupt planet is preferable to them over a bankrupt corporation. The Tragedy of the commons, as Noam Chomsky points out, has been perverted and twisted by the widespread adoption of the capitalist ethos. It actually means the opposite of what most have been taught to believe:

…there is another part of Magna Carta which has been forgotten. It had two components. The one is the Charter of Liberties which is being dismantled. The other was called the Charter of the Forests. That called for protection of the commons from the depredations of authority. This is England of course. The commons were the traditional source of sustenance, of food and fuel and welfare as well. They were nurtured and sustained for centuries by traditional societies collectively. They have been steadily dismantled under the capitalist principle that everything has to be privately owned, which brought with it the perverse doctrine of – what is called the tragedy of the commons – a doctrine which holds that collective possessions will be despoiled so therefore everything has to be privately owned. The merest glance at the world shows that the opposite is true. It’s privatization that is destroying the commons. That’s why the indigenous populations of the world are in the lead in trying to save Magna Carta from final destruction by its inheritors…

I’m afraid we are light years away from the Charter of the Forests and any sort of bucolic utopias. As for the future, think moonscapes, tumbleweeds, and the creaking sheet metal of rusted-out cars. The hyper-reality of megacities, with their pulsating neon lights and traffic-filled streets, will fall into silence and decay. Coastal cities will be swallowed up in watery graves. The impotence of man’s technology will become painfully evident as the global-scale geochemical disruptions caused by man quickly unfold, ripping asunder any hold we once had on Earth.

…If modern industrial capitalism were a person, he or she would be on suicide watch. The system that has brought us quantum physics and reality television, modern medicine and the columns of Andrew Bolt is set on a course which, by all the best reckoning, points directly to its doing itself in. If capitalism goes on — everything goes. Climate, coastlines, most living species, food supplies, the great bulk of humanity. And certainly, the preconditions for advanced civilisation, perhaps forever…
~ Renfrey Clarke

A Time of Seamless Black

16 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Peak Oil

≈ 111 Comments

Tags

Age of Climate Chaos, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate $tate, Depression, Eco-Apocalypse, Michael Ruppert, Peak Oil, Resource Wars, Security and Surveillance State, Suicide, The Elite 1%, Vandana Shiva

Humans live on hope and without it they fall into depression, oftentimes taking their own lives. In ‘The Evolution and Psychology of Self-Deception‘, optimism bias is said to be a defense or coping mechanism for survival. Most turn to religion for the ultimate hope of an afterlife nirvana. Voluntarily and unflinchingly holding one’s eyes open to the searing light of reality is an unnatural act for humans. For many, simply dealing with everyday life and the stress of surviving the concrete jungle is enough to drive them to despair, madness, and suicide. Whether they realize it or not, any normal person taking in the full scope of the multiple crises we face is surely prone to depression to some degree or another. I am now finding that I have to periodically distance myself from blogging on these subjects because it’s affecting my personal relationships as well as my mental/physical health. Suicide is on the rise in the modern world:

Death on the Farm:
…Since that crisis, the suicide rate for male farmers has remained high: just under two times that of the general population. And this isn’t just a problem in the U.S.; it’s an international crisis. India has had more than 270,000 farmer suicides since 1995. In France, a farmer dies by suicide every two days. In China, farmers are killing themselves to protest the government’s seizing of their land for urbanization. In Ireland, the number of suicides jumped following an unusually wet winter in 2012 that resulted in trouble growing hay for animal feed. In the U.K., the farmer suicide rate went up by 10 times during the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, when the government required farmers to slaughter their animals. And in Australia, the rate is at an all-time high following two years of drought.

Suicide Rate Rises Sharply in U.S.:
From 1999 to 2010, the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 13.7. Although suicide rates are growing among both middle-aged men and women, far more men take their own lives.

Why Suicide Has Become an Epidemic–and What We Can Do to Help:
…We know, thanks to a growing body of research on suicide and the conditions that accompany it, that more and more of us are living through a time of seamless black: a period of mounting clinical depression, blossoming thoughts of oblivion and an abiding wish to get there by the nonscenic route. Every year since 1999, more Americans have killed themselves than the year before, making suicide the nation’s greatest untamed cause of death. In much of the world, it’s among the only major threats to get significantly worse in this century than in the last…

…This year, America is likely to reach a grim milestone: the 40,000th death by suicide, the highest annual total on record, and one reached years ahead of what would be expected by population growth alone. We blew past an even bigger milestone revealed in November, when a study lead by Ian Rockett, an epidemiologist at West Virginia University, showed that suicide had become the leading cause of “injury death” in America. As the CDC noted again this spring, suicide outpaces the rate of death on the road—and for that matter anywhere else people accidentally harm themselves. Somewhere Ralph Nader is smiling, but the takeaway is darkly profound: we’ve become our own greatest danger.

This development evades simple explanation. The shift in suicides began long before the recession, for example, and although the changes accelerated after 2007, when the unemployment rate began to rise, no more than a quarter of those new suicides have been tied to joblessness, according to researchers. Guns aren’t all to blame either, since the suicide rate has grown even as the portion of suicides by firearm has remained stable.

The fact is, self-harm has become a worldwide concern. This emerged in the new Global Burden of Disease report, published in The Lancet this past December. It’s the largest ever effort to document what ails, injures, and exterminates the species. But allow me to save you the reading. Humankind’s biggest health problem is humankind…

That last article I quoted above, from a mainstream periodical, has more truth written between the lines than its author even realizes. Humans are their own worst enemy and perhaps the rise of suicides across the globe is a reflection of our ecocidal culture, one that values money over life and reduces everything to a financial statistic. Capitalism is the most pervasive religion on the planet today. Most living at the end of modern history have adopted the ruling elite’s belief system which says that all problems can and will be solved via the “free market” and human ingenuity, but as one Indian philosopher of the 21st century wisely observed:

“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.” ~ Vandana Shiva

People are a reflection of their environment, and so it is in the waning days of industrial civilization and predatory capitalism that many will no longer have the will to go on. From an interesting obituary written by a friend of Michael C. Ruppert:

…I look at Ruppert’s life, his hard struggle, his victories and his short-comings. I wish we were closer in his final couple of years. I loved him. I say the following with love. I say the following because I don’t want to know any more great truth-loving writers to die this way. If you have a drinking problem, hit a meeting. Reach out. It worked for me, to stop flailing about, running from city to country to city, always moving, thinking a big move is going to change things. Get centered. Pray and meditate. Be still.

Something snapped in Ruppert sometime later in that decade, after the book. He moved to Venezuela, in rushed effort to seek political asylum from the Chavez government. Ruppert probably wasn’t anti-imperialist enough for their tastes, at least not in a leftist way. Oh, and the CIA/DIA family background probably didn’t help.

I wept. I felt rage today. I was mad at you, Mike, going out this way. It was too similar to Gary Webb, to Jim Hatfield the Bush biographer. I don’t want this pattern. Tell me it’s not the fate for writers of deep truth, to die, alone, shooting their brains out, because they went deep and hard after the invisible forces, the slithering stag. The hunter became hunted by the dragon.

No. Mike will be remembered for his discipline, his writing, his development of a critical paradigm. Our society is stronger for the deep analysis. In the same way that Ruppert investigated Gary Webb’s death, it’s up to us now to do the scientific and careful analysis of the crime scene. To pick up where he left off, and wake up to a new view of the matrix…

In their search for the truth, perhaps some travel too far down the rabbit hole of civilizational and environmental collapse to ever escape its malignant shadow; it consumes them like a cancer. A copy of Ruppert’s suicide letter can be read here. His research and thinking lead him to the inner sanctum of dark revelation and the unsettling details of civilization’s trajectory. The vaporware dreams of a technological utopia will most certainly go up in smoke as social unrest and resource wars consume the nations of the world in an age of climate chaos. The evil genius of mankind will be revealed in evermore lethal and destructive ways to kill his fellow man. And waiting in the wings of industrial civilization’s collapse is the toxic and radioactive tsunami from an aging fleet of nuclear reactors dependent on a functioning electric grid. Humans are capable of great acts of compassion and selflessness as well as great acts of cruelty and violence. The system rewards sociopathic behavior at the expense of the health of the whole. Ignoring such stark realities won’t change our odds for survival.

RIP Michael C. Ruppert, Feb. 3, 1951- April 13, 2014

Full Documentary of ‘Apocalypse, Man’:

“We’ve Got It All Under Control.”

20 Thursday Mar 2014

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

≈ 148 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Energy and Societal Complexity, Financial Elite, Human Culling and Depopulation, Inverted Totalitarianism, Law of the Conservation of Energy, Mass Die Off, Overpopulation, Political Thermodynamics, Roman Empire, Security and Surveillance State, Slavery, Sociopaths/Psychopaths, Spartan Empire, The Elite 1%, The Global Elite, unwashed public, Zdzislaw Beksiński

A Word from the ‘The Big Club’

The Power of ~~Energy~~ Money

What’s with these eco-freaks!?! Don’t they see they’re destroying the economy. We need to defang the EPA and go balls out like China’s doing. So what if we create a little waste! There’s money to be made from gas masks, water filtration, hazmat suits and cancer treatment. If the Earth worshippers get really bothersome, we’ll just sic the security and surveillance state on them. Send over a couple unmanned aerial vehicles on their ass. Drones… a multibillion-dollar industry! Beautiful, isn’t it? If we have to lock them up, we’ll profit from that too. There’s no problem that can’t be turned into a business scheme.

The upper class that creates wealth, like myself, is just better at procuring what this world respects –money, power, prestige and all the other measurements of social status. They say “money makes the world go round”, but really it’s just a symbol for energy exchanged for work, as in human labor or the virtual slave labor of our fossil fuel-based civilization. Based on the law of the conservation of energy and political thermodynamics, all organisms seek to conserve energy and overcome the disorder and decay of entropy. Humans are following their biological inclination to search out the richest source of energy and procreate. In fossil fuels we found the mother lode of them all to do both, live like kings and fill the planet with our numbers. We have an innate instinct to burn the stuff and have sex. Just look at how the Dutch and Flemish became the first in pre-industrial times to exploit fossil fuels in the form of peat:

The opening of the peat bogs in the northern provinces from the 1580s onwards meant that the Dutch had a cheap energy source that was widely available, while most other countries in Europe were entirely dependent on wood – which had become ever more expensive as deforestation advanced. The Netherlands’ ample fuel reserves stimulated the development of various fuel-intensive and export-oriented industries…

…The high energy consumption of the Dutch was an anomaly in seventeenth century Europe. The same goes for their prosperity, and for the level of urbanization and industrialisation in the country…

Consequently, their economy became the most powerful in the world. Eventually the peat bogs were mined to exhaustion until new technology arose which allowed even deeper mining below the water. This more intensive process came at the environmental cost of losing agricultural land to the lakes which formed from this new mining technique.

…The authorities, horrified by the loss of agricultural land – and the associated tax income – tried to stop the peat diggers during the sixteenth century by placing export prohibitions and restrictions on peat mining below the water table, but they failed. Digging out peat was more lucrative than cultivating crops. In total, peat digging would turn more than 60,000 hectares (600 km2) of land into water in Holland and Utrecht – almost 10 percent of their total surface area…

This all sounds eerily familiar with America’s current binge on fracking, doesn’t it? These days the entire world is scavenging the hard-to-get energy resources since all the low hanging energy has been consumed.

Blood, Sweat, Oil and Psychopaths

There is some archeological evidence that Romans used coal in England during the second and third centuries (100-200 AD), but they relied primarily on slave labor along with lesser-used sources of fire, animal labor, and wind:

Historians estimate that in the first century of the empire, Rome consumed between one hundred thousand and half-a-million slaves every single year [14][15]. The slaves used for hard agricultural labour and as rowers in Roman ships had a life-expectancy of perhaps only a few years – and those in the mines only a few months. Slaves were, quite simply, an energy resource to be exploited. Nevertheless, despite the high mortality rate, such was the quantity of slave imports that they comprised between 30 and 40 per cent of the population in the empire’s Italian provinces – an enormous proportion [14].

There were, however, cultures much more reliant on slaves than the Roman Empire such as the Spartan Empire with its slave class of helots who, according to Greek historian Herodotus, outnumbered the free by seven to one.

“Parts of iron slave chains that native Britons were forced to wear under Roman rule. This particular item was found at Sheepen, Colchester.”

You so-called wage slaves and working poor of industrial civilization have never had it so good, have you? The average person has dozens and sometimes hundreds of slaves working for them at any given time, courtesy of our gift of fossil fuels. Of course there’s always an oddball Luddite in the crowd, but the average person is not going to walk away from such a life of Riley. And do you really believe that the wealthy elite, whose self-image is infinitely more tied up in their bank account digits than the lowly commoner, is going to give up their amassed fortunes and vaunted position in society for the betterment of mankind? Hell, they think there’s too many of the “unwashed masses” as it is. Why would they want to save the disposable bottom feeders? The global elite clawed their way to the top by stomping on whoever got in their way and dominating the competition. Some degree of lying, cheating, tax-dodging, bribing of officials and “bending” of the law is always buried beneath the squeaky clean propaganda of their PR machines. Show me a truly “sustainable” corporation and I’ll show you a virgin prostitute. Of course they all want to be the benefactor of some humanitarian foundation once they’ve secured their riches, but not a single one of them is a Mother Teresa.

We’ve got the perfect economic system for psychopaths to rule the world in broad daylight under the cloak of democracy and normality:

One in a hundred regular people is a psychopath…That figure rises to 4% of CEO’s and business leaders…The reason why is because capitalism, at its most ruthless, rewards psychopathic behavior –the lack of empathy, the glibness, cunning and manipulative behavior… Capitalism at its most remorseless is a physical manifestation of psychopathy, a form of psychopathy that has come down to affect us all.

About this little problem of climate change that you all are wringing your hands over, I can tell you that the elite think this is really The Market’s way of clearing the dead wood from the economic forest floor. Yes, they really believe they have the inside track on how to beat this thing. Their immense wealth is going to protect them like a cocoon and then they’ll emerge like a butterfly into a new world free of all the huddled, diseased, and starving masses. Who knows, maybe they’ll even feed all those corpses into one of their newly invented biomass energy converters. In their technotopian thinking, they believe the next few decades is sufficient time to develop geoengineering technology that will allow for the rehabilitation of the Earth once the overpopulation problem is taken care of. They know climate change is going to make life nearly impossible for most everything no matter what we do, so they calculated that it serves their interests to simply let business-as-usual run its course and allow the catastrophe to unfold rather than change the rules of the game, in which case all their wealth and privilege would be lost. Yes, they would rather cling to their loot while developing strategies to survive the human culling. Climate change will bring novel viruses that could make short work of it all without any major wars or mass starvation, and no one will ever know what hit them. Its true origin will forever remain a mystery as the powers-that-be sit comfortably behind guarded walls, safely inoculated from the spreading pandemic.

Cold, Dark, and Soulless: Culling the Numbers

Don’t waste your energy hoping that heartless moneyed interests will find the wisdom and virtue to heal a fractured planet or mitigate the untold human suffering that is to come. The global elite has more in common with each other than their own countrymen. Superfluous workers need to be trimmed. Natural resources must be replenished. There will be no more nation states. We’ve been building up our police states for when the time comes. Who will survive the overshoot and collapse has already been decided and it won’t be the billions of dim-witted mouth-breathers. Robots will be ours workers and slaves. They will collect the dead and clean up the aftermath while the Earth is allowed to regenerate in due time. The few selected for their skill, talent, intelligence, and allegiance will preserve and maintain our computers, technology, and culture. We’ll reboot the earth and a new era will dawn for the chosen few. We’re counting on the masses to be malleable and do nothing, to die quietly. As a matter of fact, our planning and research on social and behavioral control gives us a near 100% certainty that this will be the case. We’ve raised them to be obedient consumers and docile sheep.

They will go to the slaughterhouse without a fight, clutching their religious icons and babbling their insane conspiracies.

“You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes.
And the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be.”
~ Charles Bukowski

Nightmares of the Omnicidal Juggernaut

17 Monday Mar 2014

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

≈ 136 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Annalee Newitz, Capitalism, Charles Bukowski, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumer Culture, Corporate State, Dr. Paul Willis, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, General Electric, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Omar N. Bradley, Overpopulation, Privatization of Science, Security and Surveillance State, Singularity Network, Social Unrest, Techno-Optimists, Technocapitalism, Technotopia, The Elite 1%, Transhumanists, unwashed public, Zdzislaw Beksiński, Zygmunt Bauman

What had been designed to be our servants became our masters, then our owners and gods, and finally our destroyer….

Some days I wake up and despise the monotony and pettiness of this culture and its followers: its celebrity worship, its staged news reporting, its chameleon politicians, its conniving marketers of consumerism, its cookie-cutter neighborhoods, its push-button surveillance state, and its clueless masses all working together to create the illusion of normalcy. Everyone goes along with this mindless program like obedient slaves, afraid of the social stigma attached to questioning any radical deviation from what constitutes normal. God forbid anyone openly discusses the cliff we are fast approaching, its sheer drop-off and craggy rocks below coming more clearly into view. One last scramble for the last bit of habitable land at the poles will be the inevitable end game as atmospheric warming catches up to the glacial melt and sea level rise humans have set into motion. In light of all the scientific evidence accumulated over decades, mankind has known for some time that a radical reconfiguration of our socio-economic system was the only way to avoid collapse, as described beautifully back in 2008 by a longtime blogger who has been writing for nearly a decade:

There can be no “soft-landing” for a species adding another million of itself every 4 and a half days to consume and convert into more and more human flesh what little remains of the planet’s tattered web of life. Worshiping paper symbols of wealth as the only measurement of social and environmental worth, our species has monetized and misunderstood nature, ignoring its true incalculable value. Surely something is amiss when the financial interests of the insecticide industry trump the health of humans and the survival of pollinators. Examining the root cause of such corrosive effects in our economic system, i.e. capitalism, is nearly as taboo as mentioning the collapse of modern civilization. The culturally Pavlovian responses to any such criticism directed at capitalism or the unsustainability of industrial civilization is to argue for the rehabilitation of capitalism into something less destructive and tout humanity’s unfailing ability to adapt to any situation. Reinforced by past successes such as the Green Revolution, robotic exploration of distant planets, and Moore’s Law of technological advancement, the marriage of capitalism and technology has created a mindset which takes for granted the belief that the marketplace will create a hi-tech fix to any and all problems. Little green aliens, paranormal experiences, and techno-utopian futures seem to be more socially acceptable subjects for discussion rather than the collapse of a way-of-life that requires several more Earths if everyone were to live like Americans. Perhaps that is why we get technotopian books like this one:

The myth of progress is central to corporate ideologies of materialism, modernism, and technocapitalism. The mythical quality of technological progress was expressed most succinctly in GE’s slogan from the 1950’s: “Progress is our most important product.”

The newly revealed cover-up of GE’s PCB contamination of the Hudson River is just the latest in a not-so-stellar record of “bringing good things to life.”

There are reportedly hundreds of Transhumanist-affiliated groups(life extensionists, techno-optimists, Singularitarians, biohackers, roboticists, AI proponents, and futurists) in the world with the largest, the Singularity Network, claiming 10,000 members. Few in our society can imagine this planet exhausted of its resources, inhospitable to agriculture, and devoid of all its keystone species, but such a world is fast becoming reality as industrial civilization steamrolls the planet under the direction of technocapitalism. Millions of factories continue to spit out products by the ton to be shipped to every corner of the globe. The ravenous hordes struggling for a higher standard of living never think twice about the energy and eco-social damage tied to these consumer products that magically appear on store shelves.

“A transhuman future is a day-dream and we are rapidly running out of the luxury of being able to do nothing about the very real problems that face us now. A transhuman future is a nightmare of the electric sheep.”
~ Dr. Paul Willis

The boundaries of a finite planet have been temporarily extended by technology, giving mankind a false sense of power over his environment, but technological complexity is not immune to the law of diminishing returns; the problems are overwhelming the solutions:

“…Technology cannot bring back a concentrated resource deposit like soil, phosphates and fossil fuels that have been dispersed and converted so completely that no amount of energy can get them back. The links in the technological evolutionary chain have been successful so far, but all it takes is a single broken link that will drop us into the waste heap of failed evolution. The next link of the chain always exists in the imaginations of men, technological wonders to carry us forward, but malignant growth, the kind sponsored by corporate, banking and Wall St. entities, will guarantee the current technological link is our last one…”

For a culture that lives for today and ignores the consequences of tomorrow, the show must go on even as cracks and weaknesses in this false façade become more evident day by day. Omar N. Bradley may have been thinking about weapons of mass destruction when he made an observation about mankind’s tools of self-destruction, but he could not have been more prescient in the broader sense of technology’s reach into our lives when he said, “If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.”

As in previous fallen civilizations, today’s elite are more out of touch with our precarious position than most realize, and they will try to cling to their wealth and social status despite how much blood flows in the streets as the masses bear the brunt of collapse first –poverty, disease, war, starvation, etc., but ultimately no one can run from the death of the Earth’s oceans, the spread of novel diseases, and the die-off of trees. Those now deciding how our technologic scalpels will be wielded are not institutions looking out for the greater good of humanity, but by the ultra wealthy for their own personal financial enrichment and narcissistic interests:

“For better or worse,” said Steven A. Edwards, a policy analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “the practice of science in the 21st century is becoming shaped less by national priorities or by peer-review groups and more by the particular preferences of individuals with huge amounts of money…

…that personal setting of priorities is precisely what troubles some in the science establishment. Many of the patrons, they say, are ignoring basic research — the kind that investigates the riddles of nature and has produced centuries of breakthroughs, even whole industries — for a jumble of popular, feel-good fields like environmental studies and space exploration…

..the rise of science philanthropy may simply help “rich fields, universities and individuals to get richer.” The new patrons are responsible for one of the most striking trends on these campuses: the rise of privately financed institutes, the new temples of science philanthropy.

This privatization of science is just one more aspect of capitalism’s usurpation and corruption of the body politic.

The art in this blog post is from Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksiński whose intricately detailed paintings of apocalyptic landscapes, mutated and deformed humans, and surreal images were said to be inspired from his nightmares. He never gave titles to his paintings and signed them on the back. It is said he would often wake up in the middle of night to paint his dark visions. In 2005 he was found dead lying on the floor of his Warsaw flat in a pool of blood, stabbed 17 times.

Perhaps the greatest nightmare of modern man is the fact that he is at the mercy of an ever-expanding industrial civilization running on autopilot, as Zygmunt Bauman described, with no realistic way to stop its onslaught of toxic waste, greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and numerous other ecocidal features. I can see this horror when I look at much of Beksiński’s work, but I also see nature reclaiming the battlefield after man has defeated himself.

To a great degree, humans are their own worst enemy, prisoners of their flawed cerebral wiring with its neuroses, blind spots, and cognitive biases, but the real enemy is the omnicidal juggernaut our numbers have created; its base urges can’t be contained.

Collapse of Industrial Civilization

~ Finding the Truth behind the American Hologram

Tag Archives: Eco-Apocalypse

Locked-Up Inside the Complexity Trap

Death by Dollar$ and Suicide by CO2

In the Ashes of Civilization

Capitalist Industrial Civilization = M.A.D.

The Exact Timing of Near-Term Human Extinction Is Academic

A Time of Seamless Black

“We’ve Got It All Under Control.”

A Word from the ‘The Big Club’