Life in a Zero-Sum World: Capitalism, Socio-Ecological Crisis and Alternatives

30 Sunday Sep 2012

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

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17th World Congress of the IUAES, Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Gross Inequality, Peak Oil, Poverty, Social Unrest, The Socio-Ecological Crisis

For my own records and for your curious minds, I’m posting some abstracts on papers that were written for an upcoming symposium called the 17th World Congress of the IUAES (Manchester, UK; 5th-10th August 2013). Many of these papers sound very interesting:

Papers

That Big Slow Curve: Fossil Fuel Based Growth meets A Prosperous Way Down

Author: Thomas Abel (Tzu Chi University) email

LONG ABSTRACT

This century and the last may someday be called the Oil Years. Many who view our human economies in biophysical terms have come to conceive the peak of oil production as a turning point for peoples of the world. For the Odum’s, A Prosperous Way Down (2001) is in no part inevitable as oil production peaks and declines. Their book offers guidelines for a preferable future, a hopeful scenario, but with clear recognition that there are many less desirable and more likely directions that the world may take. In this paper I will reprise the Odum’s preferred scenario as it relates to undesirable alternatives. I will place these scenarios along the path of a big slow curve—the 80-year curve of world oil consumption. At human time scales, we might think that the big slow curve is difficult to detect or attend to. However, I will argue that the effects of asset growth and decline are indeed attended to, and have dramatically affected cultural trends in these oil years. This is because the detection of the growth (or its absence) of cultural assets is of central concern to all ‘consumers’ within ecosystems, but especially to human consumers who produce and manage their own food in various ways. These issues will be explored with mini-model simulations.

Accumulation by Displaced Emission: On Climate, Consumers, and the Rhetoric of Confidence

Author: Cindy Isenhour (Centre College ) email

Long Abstract

Whether referred to as ecological modernization, bright green environmentalism, or the rationalization of lifestyles, technological improvement has long been presented as a “win-win” strategy resulting in both economic growth and improved environmental health. Yet significant and mounting research suggests that these strategies have not delivered on their promises. Efficiency gains are being rapidly outstripped by sustained net growth in consumption. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research, this paper explores a series of reports published by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and their subsequent impact on other nations. The report authors advocate a zero-sum approach to understanding green house gas emissions – recognizing that while Sweden has reduced domestic emissions since 1990 — simultaneous growth in the consumption of imported goods and services has resulted in net increases elsewhere. The Swedish “consumption approach” to global GHG emissions accounting helps to elucidate the zero-sum reality of outsourcing emissions to nations where the need for economic development results in environmental injustice. While it is certainly more just to attribute all environmental costs to the consumers who benefit from the products associated with emissions, this perspective was contentious in Sweden where many saw it as anti-market. Its logical conclusion implied moving past economic and environmental de-coupling, toward de-growth. While these reports have had a substantial impact on several other nations, I argue that the approach they advocate is unlikely to gain much traction within UN climate talks until the pro-growth rhetoric surrounding consumer choice, responsibility, and freedom are challenged.

Cornucopianism and the image of limited good

Author: Richard Wilk (Indiana University) email

Long Abstract

In this paper I argue that the metaphors that we use to think about global economic processes suffer from inherent limitations. The metaphors come from early moral and vitalistic thinking about the economy, and from modernist mechanical models which have now been enhanced with systems thinking, nationalism, and what I call “ecologism” which fetishizes nature. I propose that both cornucopian and zero-sum limited-good ideas about the future are fundamentally flawed, and are incapable of projecting a credible imagination of sustainability. I focus particularly on the language and metaphors of temporality and boundaries, both of which incorporate assumptions which we know to be false. I also discuss the prevailing dualism in discourse about the economy, and the way it limits our thinking and blinds us to what Latour calls “the proliferation of hybrids.” The economy is a cyborg, partially human and partially machine, and the sooner we recognize this, and stop fighting the pre-determined wars of modernism, the better we will be capable of thinking about a planet with 10 or 11 billion human beings on it.

Rethinking Economy

Author: Stephen Gudeman (University of Minnesota/ Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) email

Long Abstract

Most economists see material life as consisting of markets surrounded by market-like behavior: everything else is a positive or negative externality on market exchange. The anthropological perspective is different. I see economies as fields of value defined by crosscutting coordinates. One axis locates economies on a scale from High Relationship to Low Relationship transactions; the other positions economies on a measure from High Markets to Low Markets. Set diagonally to this “graph view” are five, increasingly abstract and encompassing institutional spheres that shift from the House, to Community, to Commerce, to Finance, to Meta finance. This view offers a comparative way to understand economies, change, and the contemporary crises. It suggests that economy is built on a material base whose uses change and are differentially valued. The more abstract spheres, through cronyism, oligopolies, information control and other devices, extract “value” that is first achieved through production and innovation. Unless mollified by communal action, this power of abstraction heightens unequal distribution and leads to environmental degradation seen in terms of entropy and pollution. I contest the belief in growth that is generated by market competition and consumption desires, as well as the ideology that growth, with its increasing toll on the environment, is the remedy to unequal distribution. Placing limits on the growth of inequalities in wealth counters the entropic toll we are incurring, and the reverse.

Revisiting the Image of Limited Good: On Sustainability, Thermodynamics, and the Illusion of Creating Wealth

Author: Paul Trawick (Idaho State University) email

Long Abstract

This paper focuses on worldview, examining two cultural models that are now contending for dominance on the world stage: the open-system model long promoted by economists, referred to as the ‘image of unlimited good’, and a closed-system model, the ‘image of limited good’ made famous by George Foster, who attributed it to members of peasant societies throughout the world. The former worldview is based on the idea that people ‘create’ wealth, an illusion arising from a fundamental confusion about the respective properties of real wealth and virtual wealth, or productive capital and finance capital. This perspective ignores the near-total reliance of the global economy on fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources, finite forms of real wealth whose exploitation is governed by the laws of thermodynamics. The alternative “zero-sum” worldview rests on the axiom that most of the ‘goods’ that people value in life are inherently scarce, being derived from those limited resources and raw materials, a scarcity that must somehow be shared. Based on an ethnographic and ethnological argument, a radical shift toward the closed-system view is said to be necessary if people are to act collectively to impose sustainable limits on their expanding consumption, a cultural change that may already be underway.

The moral economy and moral ecology of organic food in Western Sicily: from growth to degrowth?

Author: Giovanni Orlando (Independent Scholar) email

Long Abstract

For almost a century now the dominant socio-ecological regime of the world agri-food system has rested on the two pillars of productivism and mass consumption. An idea of limitless growth is thus intrinsic to it. Such growth has resulted in the degradation of ecosystems and the exploitation of farmers and consumers. The organic food movement has sought to counter this situation by developing agri-food systems that renew, rather than deplete, natural resources, and that do justice to farmers and consumers. Potentially, then, organic food can be grounded in non-accumulative paradigms such as agroecology and degrowth. From a cultural point of view, what values and symbols would underpin these ‘sustainable’ paradigms? This paper tries to answer this question in Western Sicily, Italy. By looking at the practices and discourses of people who grow, sell and eat organic foods, it explores the degree to which subjects hold values about nature and people that speak to notions of degrowth and agroecology. The paper uncovers a common thread in people’s emphasis on what might be termed ‘excess’. From the fear of the dietary abominations created by an excessive use of technology in food manufacturing and processing, to the outrage for the abuses caused by a desire for excessive profits in food retailing, the paper shows how the ideal of sufficiency, documented by anthropologists in a variety of non-Western societies, creates a moral economy-ecology of organic food.

The Revival of Survival: Pioneering a Post-Financial America

Author: Eliza Jane Darling email

Long Abstract

The financial crash of 2008 precipitated the renaissance of a primordial American tradition: survivalism. Often stigmatized as an eccentricity, the survivalist ethos is in fact deeply ingrained in American cultural production, from post-apocalyptic film to millenarian religious movements, as well as in American capitalism, generating millions of dollars in annual profits through the production of demand for palliative commodities. In recent years survivalism has indeed infiltrated mainstream American politics at multiple scales, from New York City’s “go-bag” scheme to Wyoming state’s “doomsday bill” to the CDC’s “zombie-preparedness” initiative. Like its historical predecessors, Great Recession survivalism is predicated upon a zero-sum logic simultaneously economic and environmental, entailing fears of an imminent collapse of finite financial and ecological resources as well as alternative visions for post-crisis continuity. This paper examines the history of survivalist ideology as a heterodox response to capitalistic crisis that is cyclically subsumed by its alleged antithesis: a cultural manifestation of deep-seated doubts about the propensity for endless growth which has itself been absorbed into the warp and weft of capitalist expansion through commoditisation.

Why Solar Panels Don’t Grow on Trees: Technological Utopianism and the Uneasy Relation between Ecomarxism and Ecological Economics

Author: Alf Hornborg (Lund University) email

Long Abstract

Ever since the Industrial Revolution saved Britain from ecological crisis in the early nineteenth century, visions of miraculous new technologies have alleviated Euro-American anxieties about the impending doom of the fossil-fuelled capitalism that it inaugurated. Although Malthus’s worries about land shortages were transcended by world-historical events as well as by Ricardo’s and Marx’s different versions of technological optimism, they were soon reincarnated in Jevons’s warnings about the depletion of coal. Today economists generally dismiss the pessimism not only of Malthus and Jevons, but also of current concerns over peak oil, by expressing faith in human ingenuity. To retrospectively ridicule pessimists by referring to technological progress that they did not anticipate has become an established pattern of mainstream thought. Almost regardless of ideological persuasion, the seemingly self-evident concept of “technological progress” inherited from early industrialism has been resorted to as an article of faith serving to dispel the specter of truncated growth. The increasingly acknowledged threats of peak oil and global warming are thus generally countered with visions of a future civilization based on solar power. In this paper I discuss this technological scenario as a utopia that raises serious doubts about mainstream understandings of what “technology” really is, and what it means to say that something is “technologically” feasible. The technological utopianism professed, for instance, by ecomarxists raises difficult but fundamental analytical questions about the relation between thermodynamics and theories of economic value.

Decoupling waste from growth

Author: Catherine Alexander (Durham University) email

Long Abstract

The correlation between increased waste production and increased wealth
headlines the EU’s environmental strategy. On the basis of trends so far,
the OECD projects a 45% increase in waste from 1995. The need for
continual economic expansion is taken as an unproblematic given. The
question that therefore seems to present itself is how to continue to
increase wealth without environmental despoilation. The EU’s Sixth
Environment Action Programme identifies waste prevention and management
as one of its top priorities. Its primary objective is to decouple waste
generation from economic activity, so that EU growth will no longer lead
to more and more rubbish. In the paper I make three points in response.
The first is that the desirability of growth remains unquestioned,
alternatives unexplored. The second is that environmental justice or
equity seems now to be foregrounded, often at the expense of other
inequalities produced by capitalist relations. The answer to waste
production, however, appears to be shifted away from economic rationales
of constant expansion to technocratic solutions or campaigns to change
consumers’ ‘attitudes and behaviour’ or the sleight of hand involved in
reclassifying wastes as energy (with the potentially bizarre prospect of
an economy that demands more waste in order to feed energy demands). I
suggest that the production of wastes is intimately tied to every aspect
of mass economic activity from extraction, through production,
distribution and consumption to disposal, and crucially, capitalist growth
depends on things breaking down, the inability to repair things, fashion.
One of the first steps forward might be to recognize that this kind of
growth is inseparable from social and environmental degradation.

Keeping the Machine Well Fed

29 Saturday Sep 2012

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

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6th Mass Extinction, Biophysical Economics, Chris Hedges, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Financial Elite, Greenwashing, Mass Die Off, Shell oil drilling in the Arctic

One of the recent headlines that caught my eye:

And of course the cartoonist Polyp had the perfect response…

While reading this morning, I stumbled across the following blog and found it informative…

Occam’s razor does not favor a climate change “hoax” {Infographic}

Occam’s razor suggests that the more likely explanation for some phenomenon is the explanation which requires the fewest number of assumptions or required assertions. Even though in science the correct answer is sometimes the more complex one, rationally speaking, the fewer amount of assumptions that we have to make in order to get a theory to work, the better.

For example, think of how many assumptions you have to make to consider the September 11th attacks a government conspiracy. So many claims about time, space, engineering, politics, prior knowledge, flight patterns, etc., must be made to even start bridging the gap. On the other hand, the simpler explanation that requires less assumptions (and indeed has more evidence) is that a group of terrorists hijacked some planes and flew them into the buildings.

By association, Occam’s razor regularly dismantles most conspiracy theories without much effort. Of course, any of the conspiracies could be true, but without evidence the numerous assumptions that need to be made push these theories into irrational confines.

The infographic below takes a similar approach. On the side that accepts anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, it takes many more assumptions to make the idea that the majority of the world’s climate scientists are in collusion to make a worldwide hoax from which they see no benefit work than it does to think that oil companies are protecting their bottom line. We know that there are huge oil lobbies, oil companies that have scientists in their pockets, and that large corporations are trying to purposefully undermine the science of climate.

Therefore, which makes more sense?

At the root of the Anthropocene Crisis of the 21st century is the unabated expansion of humankind fueled by fossil fuels. We are pushing all other living things off the cliff of extinction, with ourselves soon to follow.

Global efforts to slow extinctions lag pledges, UN says:

…32 per cent of livestock breeds are under threat of extinction within the next 20 years, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says. And 75 per cent of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops has been lost since 1900.

“Because we don’t really know the full impacts of climate change down the line, we don’t really know what’s going to happen in terms of growing conditions around the world. It’s just safer for us to have a lot of these other varieties in our pocket,” said David Ainsworth, spokesman of the CBD Secretariat.

Cooper said the pace of extinctions among the planet’s estimated 9 million species – plants, animals from insects to whales but excluding legions of tiny bacteria – was perhaps 100 times the background rate estimated in fossil records.

“If you project the rates into the future, the rest of the century, they are likely to be 100 times larger still,” he said. The rising human population threatens ever more habitats with expanding cities, farms and roads…

The machine of industrial civilization has become the master of our fate. It rolls onward under its own colossal impetus, crushing all in its path. The billions of people in the globalized economy are now mere cogs in its wheel. ‘Economic development and growth’ is the mantra chanted by all. ‘Green’ and ‘sustainable’ are the adjectives used by corporations to whitewash the continued plunder of the environment. Capitalism, an economic system that requires continued expansion and control, is inherently unstable and incompatible with the long-term habitability of the planet. Will the principles of biophysical economics become accepted as truth before we destroy ourselves?

The answer lies in this excerpt from Chris Hedges’ latest essay:

…perhaps the most egregious assault will be carried out by the fossil fuel industry. Obama, who presided over the repudiation of the Kyoto Accords and has done nothing to halt the emission of greenhouse gases, reversed 20 years of federal policy when he permitted the expansion of fracking and offshore drilling. And this acquiescence to big oil and big coal, no doubt useful in bringing in campaign funds, spells disaster for the planet. He has authorized drilling in federally protected lands, along the East Coast, Alaska and four miles off Florida’s Atlantic beaches. Candidate Obama in 2008 stood on the Florida coastline and vowed never to permit drilling there.

You get the point. Obama is not in charge. Romney would not be in charge. Politicians are the public face of corporate power. They are corporate employees. Their personal narratives, their promises, their rhetoric and their idiosyncrasies are meaningless. And that, perhaps, is why the cost of the two presidential campaigns is estimated to reach an obscene $2.5 billion. The corporate state does not produce a product that is different. It produces brands that are different. And brands cost a lot of money to sell…

Overly Conservative Scientific Estimates Hide the Coming Human Tragedy

22 Saturday Sep 2012

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

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Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, John Reilly Senior Climate Change Researcher at MIT, Overly Conservative IPCC Estimates, Paul A. O’Gorman Professor of Atmospheric science at MIT, Take Shelter

The excerpt ‘On the Threat of Environmental Catastrophe’ at the bottom of this post is from an essay just published a few hours ago entitled ‘A Tale of Two Crashes Part 2‘ from Empirical Magazine. It elaborates a bit more on the coming climate chaos and the destruction of industrial civilization. As has been noted by others, the estimates of the IPCC have been overly conservative:

Read what John Reilly, a senior climate change researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has to say about future scenarios in ‘On the Threat of Environmental Catastrophe’. Also, take notice of this recent news article:

Climate scientists have long projected that increases in global temperatures will result in higher rainfall and flooding in tropical regions. But now a MIT study has put some numbers to the prediction. Writing in Nature Geoscience in a September 16th letter titled “Sensitivity of tropical precipitation extremes to climate change,” Paul A. O’Gorman, professor of atmospheric science at MIT, said that for every one-degree Celsius increase in global surface temperature, there will be 10 percent heavier rainfall extremes in the tropics.

O’Gorman tells MIT News that “The study includes some populous countries that are vulnerable to climate change, and impacts of changes in rainfall could be important there.” Extreme rainfall in the tropics responds to climate change in distinct ways from that of other regions. He added, “It seems rainfall extremes in tropical regions are more sensitive to global warming. We have yet to understand the mechanism for this higher sensitivity.”

For more details, read his letter here.

On the Threat of Environmental Catastrophe

“The influence of private power over human fate is as strong as it has ever been and looks set to have an impact generally on much of life on earth if the reckless and single-minded pursuit of profit so often associated with modern capitalism is not reigned in. The gravity of the problem is almost certainly unrivaled by any threat to the species in recent history since the Second World War or the Cuban missile crisis.

Yet the danger is not posed by the familiar boogeyman of corporate greed per se. The threat is represented by the effects of significant global climate change, presently on course to occur barring some miracle.

An authoritative government report released last year indicated that in only the next decade New York would be under threat from temporary or partial submergence by rising sea levels and increased storm activity similar to Hurricane Irene, causing enormous damage with a massive economic price tag attached to the mess. Yet this scenario, entirely plausible and very worrying, is only a taste of what looks set to be a part of our future.

In November last year the International Energy Agency released a report described as the “most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure,” which indicated that if global fossil-fuel-producing infrastructure (i.e. coal and power stations) is not widely replaced or significantly altered in the next five years, then it would “become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating runaway climate change will be lost for ever.”

Additionally, around the same time as the IEA report was published last year, the US Department of Energy reported that the “biggest jump” in carbon dioxide (a major cause of climate change) outputs ever measured occurred in 2010, indicating that the trajectory of risk from the effects of global environmental cataclysm is rising steeply.

World-leading academics like John Reilly, a senior climate change researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have warned that some of the most widely-accepted estimates of the effects of global warming have been far too conservative. Reilly’s team at MIT forecast carbon emissions scenarios, their likelihood, and what the most likely outcomes are in the event they occur. What they discovered recently does not bode well. According to an Associated Press report, a “[UN-organised International Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, report’s] worst-case scenario was only about in the middle of what MIT calculated are likely scenarios.” It is interesting to note that, to many climate skeptics, the IPCC report was widely derided as being “too alarmist.”

The IPCC estimates foresaw a rise in global temperature of somewhere between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit (2.4-6.4 Celsius), with the most likely outcome being a rise of 7.5 Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius). To put this in perspective, the generally-agreed baseline for “safety” in terms of climate change would see an increase in global temperatures by only 2 degrees, in itself a global climate shift that would still have profound consequences.

However, topping the safety line things begin to look really scary. At 3 degrees alone the consequences for humanity are close to nightmarish.

According to British newspaper The Guardian’s science correspondent Alok Jha, who compiled the predictions of researcher Mark Lynas, the World Bank’s “Stern report,” and Britain’s Met Office, at 3 degrees: “Billions of people are forced to move from their traditional agricultural lands, in search of scarcer food and water. Around 30-50% less water is available in Africa and around the Mediterranean.” At 4 degrees “Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey become deserts and mid-Europe reaches desert temperatures of almost 50 degrees Celsius in summer. Southern England’s summer climate could resemble that of modern southern Morocco.”

At 5 degrees and above, the picture becomes apocalyptic. The results would see “global average temperatures … hotter than for fifty [million] years.” Additionally, Jha said that “most of the tropics, sub-tropics and even lower mid-latitudes are too hot to be inhabitable. The sea level rise is now sufficiently rapid that coastal cities across the world are largely abandoned,” with a risk that at 6 degrees and over, “there would be a danger of “runaway warming,” perhaps spurred by release of oceanic methane hydrates,” risking that the “human population would be drastically reduced.”

That’s quite some bad news. However, at present a 5-6 degree rise is not guaranteed, nor yet confidently forecast. There’s a lot of work to be done however to prevent or mitigate the worst effects of probable temperature rises above 2, 3 or even 4 degrees Celsius. God forbid anything higher.

Yet despite the urgent need for action on this issue, there are those who would try to convince the average citizen that climate change, a problem of planetary significance that Western industry has had an unrivalled role in creating, is merely the product of “liberal propaganda”–a kind of modern-day myth.

Oil companies like Exxon-Mobil are still largely the biggest in the world, and these groups have been proven to have funded climate change skeptics.

As the “carbon bubble” is being readied for bursting by rising emissions, a drop in media coverage of the effects of climate change has been measured by groups monitoring the news, helping to efface the issue from the public mind in an election year, where the aftermath of the economy still rides high among concerns for most people.

Yet regardless of the economic woes that still persist for many people, through little fault of their own, something has to shift in the world if it is to be rescued from the threat of climate change.

A Stark Choice

If this is to be done, a stark choice between submitting to the imperatives of the economy’s endless need for profit or protecting the future of the planet may be required of us. As environmentalist Bill McKibben articulated recently: “If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons–five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground. Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent towrite off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil … If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be, and that’s far scarier than drought and flood. It’s why you’ll do anything–including fund an endless campaigns of lies–to avoid coming to terms with its reality.”

“Growth for its own sake,” so the saying goes, “is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Regardless of the cliché of this thoroughly-abused slogan, its message is apt to our present crisis: the interminable desire for gain required by our present way of life may yet so damage the organism from which it derives sustenance (our planet) that it sabotages its own existence. This negative-sum game is given license to continue apace because it is inexpedient for those with real power to challenge it.

Endless clamoring for growth has meant that along with development, massive pollution has shadowed the steps of Western prosperity–yet the effects of this on the climate, now widely accepted as fact, are an “externality” not incorporated into market calculations. Climate change thus remains a total irrelevance to the closed system of global capitalism, regardless of its long-term impacts on the future of the sine qua nonbase that supports the market itself: human beings and their labor, the environment and its resources.

For big business, even when there are devastating economic crashes, somebody always benefits. Goldman Sachs famously reaped massive rewards by betting on the housing crash that they themselves contributed to, helping to consolidate their leading position in the banking world. However shocking this may seem, however such acts stink of grotesque immorality–they are merely consistent with the demands of the system in which they operate, and the rigid logic of the market.

It remains for politicians to act on this issue. But they are not doing enough.

As a result of runaway climate change, losses in the future may be so broadly and profoundly felt, however, that future generations can hardly be expected to accept with equanimity what history may teach them about how the miserable state of the world they have inherited came to be. Explaining to our grandchildren that the Earth was left to go to hell because it was deemed too much for our politicians to reign in corporate and industrial irresponsibility will not be easy, but it won’t stop it from being true–if we do nothing.

It is time to forget what is convenient or ideologically appealing, and address what is real–for our children’s sake…”

There is a Storm Comin’…

Global Ecological Collapse Unfolding in Plain Sight, Yet the Establishment Can’t be Bothered

21 Friday Sep 2012

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

≈ 5 Comments

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Inverted Totalitarianism, New Zealand's Kennedy Graham MP, The Elite 1%

Epic ice melt in the Arctic puts on a spectacular demonstration illustrating the consequences of our orgy on fossil fuel consumption, yet the global bureaucrats’ and corporatists’ only reaction is to race northward for further resource plundering.

Russia suffers its most severe wildfire season in recent history and discovers over 200 massive methane fields bubbling up from their seas, yet the Russian bureaucrats and corporatists plan to increase their coal exports to China by 50%.

Compared to forty years ago, American forests now succumb to twice as many conflagrations in burn seasons lasting over two months longer, yet the bureaucrats and corporatists proclaim that the development of the Keystone oil sands pipeline is inevitable.

The U.S. bread basket gets decimated by unrelenting drought, yet bureaucrats and corporatists institutionalize taxpayer-funded subsidies and insurance bailouts for Big Ag which is resposible for up to 30% of CO2 emissions.

“Much of the world’s photosynthesis, the basis of all of our food, comes from the ocean’s plankton. The oxygen in every other breath we take is a product of phytoplankton photosynthesis.” Yet we continue to burn ever more coal and other fossil fuels and carry out bottom trawling of the oceans, the end result being the death of the cradle of life on Earth.

You have cancer; please stop smoking.

New Zealand’s Kennedy Graham MP, who has tried to raise such points with his country’s bureaucrats and corporatists, has an interesting article out which questions whether these business suits he deals with are living on the same planet he is:

Climate change and human psychoses…

…A quarter century, actually, since the US Senate and the Brundtland Report put the issue on the international agenda. We’ve had, since then, Rio and Cairo, Kyoto and Marrakesh, Copenhagen and Cancun and Durban, and Rio again.

But the past week has been especially intensive, and this for two reasons. The NZ Parliament is conducting hearings on the Government’s bill to amend the ETS[emissions trading scheme], in response to the Advisory Panel’s report of 2011. And, concurrently and with no strong causal link, the latest scientific findings of climate change are reported in.

So, in the past week, I have asked two questions of the Government on climate change. Taken together, they traverse the range of the issue – the NZ Government’s domestic instrument for combating climate change, and its appreciation of the global reality out there.

The first questioned the Government on what the Green Party critiques as a weak emissions trading scheme, ‘subsidising polluters’ and incurring considerable net fiscal cost to the taxpayer.  The second queried whether, in drafting the latest amendments to the ETS, the Government had sufficiently taken into account the latest scientific findings.

In short, the Government’s response was as follows:

– The amendments defer any strengthening of the ETS because we live in fragile economic circumstances and it is ‘not a stellar time’ to increase charges and taxes. The changes did not amount to ‘subsidies’, and indeed New Zealand was on track to more than meet its five-year Kyoto obligations.

– The Government had, indeed, adequately accounted for the latest scientific findings, but it has to take into account a whole range of factors such as the global developments and employment levels in New Zealand.

This is as close as it gets to a meaningful exchange in the NZ Parliament on the future of the planet. I acknowledge that Ministers Groser and Bridges are well-meaning and competent. I count them as friends. Tim Groser, in particular, has huge international experience and reputation.

That does not make them necessarily right in what they are doing. It is possible for such people to be egregiously wrong, fatefully, fatally.

Effectively, the ministers are acknowledging that the amendments weaken the ETS in the sense of deferring sectoral obligations, and seek to explain why – protection of jobs, firms and investment at home against risk competitiveness during tough global economic times.

That is circular logic, and it rests on an erroneous premise. We are entering the Global Ecological Crisis. An ecological crisis means an economic crisis. They are one and the same thing. You do not defer measures to combat an ecological crisis because you are in an economic crisis. You deal with them as one crisis, and seek to resolve ‘it’ immediately.

The latest scientific findings are alarming. They possibly portend a new era for humanity – one where dangerous anthropogenic climate change may arrive within half a decade out, not half a century.

–          Arctic ice extent, as measured this month by the US Snow & Ice Data Center, is 49% below the past 30-year average. Between 2007 and ’11 it has dropped from 4.17 m. sq. km to 3.41 m. sq. km., an 18% drop in four years. The different trends in Antarctica, where there is some cooling and ice-accretion, is understood by scientists to be consistent with an increase in average global temperature.

–          Russian scientists on the Viktor Buinitsky research vessel have found methane fields in the Laptev Sea of 1 km. in diameter. Methane deposits in the seabed near Spitzbergen are effervescing to the surface.

–          This has been described by Cambridge University scientist, Prof. Wadhams, as ‘terrifying news’. It facilitates the release of potent methane gas from land-based tundra and seabed floor, reducing Earth’s albedo effect, risking a positive feedback loop on temperature increase that can breach unpredictable tipping-points. While we must await the IPCC’s 5^th assessment report in 2013, the latest specific findings are of far-reaching concern.

I confess I experience my share of surreal moments in the NZ House of Representatives when I ask these questions and receive the answers I do. It is as if we truly are, my National MP colleagues and I, on different planets.

For I am asking questions, in as measured tones as I can, of what appears to me to be about the future of the planet and humanity, and they are answering as if (a) it is just another problem and (b) I am something of an irritant.

No-one will be more relieved than I shall, if the science proves to be wrong or excessively ominous. I shall simply look stupid. That will be my preference, since my grand-children will have a decent future.

But I do not see how that can be the case.

Browbeaten Scientists Not Telling the Public the Full Truth

19 Wednesday Sep 2012

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

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Feedback Loops, Climate Scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, David Roberts, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Free Market Ideologues, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, The Elite 1%

Is it still possible to limit climate change to a 2 degree increase? If we don’t take into account the loss of sulfate parasols as a result of our emissions controls and if we close our eyes to the multiple feedback loops that have already been unleashed and which, in and of themselves, could dwarf anthropogenic emissions, then it might be possible in such a theoretical and hypothetical world.

(click to enlarge)

But a theoretical and hypothetical world and a world of brutal reality are two very different things. Humans must ultimately answer to brutal reality which discards all of the fabricated economic theorems and pie-in-the-sky myths about the techno-supremacy of modern man that we delude ourselves with. So the cold and hard reality is “No, we are well and truly fucked!” Despite decades of warnings by scientists, we have kept on burning fossil fuels and continue to do so as I write this post. As a matter of fact, growth in fossil fuel consumption is baked into our economic system as far into the future as we care to fantasize. We have backed ourselves into a corner where the only salvation left is some sort of globally coordinated Manhattan project of geo-engineering. And how likely is that to occur, let alone succeed? As David Roberts reports in his latest essay ‘Freaked-out climate scientists urge other freaked-out climate scientists to speak up, fight Man‘, our current enslavement to an infinite growth economic paradigm precludes such a possibility:

…Can we make the radical changes necessary to meet that challenge? No, say climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows in a recent commentary in Nature Climate Change, not “within orthodox political and economic constraints.”

There is no political or economic constraint more orthodox than the primacy of economic growth. No solution to climate change that threatens economic growth can get any traction at all — even the most “alarmist” climate hawks fear to tread there. Which is too bad, Anderson and Bows say, because “climate change commitments are incompatible with short- to medium-term economic growth (in other words, for 10 to 20 years).” What’s worse, “work on adapting to climate change suggests that economic growth cannot be reconciled with the breadth and rate of impacts as the temperature rises towards 4 °C and beyond.” In other words: We either give up economic growth voluntarily for a little while or suffer a climate that will reverse economic growth long-term…

…Anderson and Bows stress that, “within orthodox political and economic constraints,” hitting such a target is wildly unlikely. Absent some pretty revolutionary political and economic changes, it won’t happen. For obvious reasons, scientists shy away from saying this kind of thing in public. They don’t want to depress people or come off as “political.” However, say Anderson and Bows, “away from the microphone and despite claims of ‘green growth’, few if any scientists working on climate change would disagree with the broad thrust of this candid conclusion.”…

The article goes on to explain how our scientific community is hamstrung and browbeaten into reciting and presenting only evidence without expounding upon and revealing what the consequences of those findings will be for humanity:

…scientists remain reticent, often assuming that “the most effective way of engaging is by presenting evidence, without daring to venture, at least explicitly, broader academic judgment.” This kind of just-the-facts reticence, Anderson and Bows say, is neither warranted nor wise given the urgency of current climate circumstances:

[W]e need to be less afraid of making academic judgments. Not unsubstantiated opinions and prejudice, but applying a mix of academic rigour, courage and humility to bring new and interdisciplinary insights into the emerging era. This would be controversial enough in itself. Various social and professional incentives work against academic researchers speaking out beyond their narrow specialties. And there is an entire cottage industry devoted to scolding climate scientists for going “beyond the science” to political analysis or policy advocacy. These latter sins, they are warned, threaten their status as “trusted brokers.” (Because the trusted-broker thing is working so well so far, climate-wise.)

What else can you do, though, when danger of such unthinkable scope and permanence is looming and humanity’s actions in the coming decade will determine the fate of future generations? I mean, it sounds like a sci-fi movie, but it’s real. What can you do if you’re one of the scientists who understands how dire the situation is? These are not ordinary times.

And in conclusion, the article talks of something I have posted about here – the failure and inability of the free market to solve this civilization-ending problem of climate change:

Anyway, as controversial as it is to ask climate researchers to venture broad social and economic judgments, the specific critique that Anderson and Bows offer is even more likely to make some of their straight-laced colleagues wince. It has to do with the “catastrophic and ongoing failure of market economics and the laissez-faire rhetoric accompanying it.” Specifically, market economists (and the politicians and scientists in thrall to them) suffer the “misguided belief that commitments to avoid warming of 2°C can still be realized with incremental adjustments to economic incentives.” They urge their colleagues:

Leave the market economists to fight among themselves over the right price of carbon — let them relive their groundhog day if they wish. The world is moving on and we need to have the audacity to think differently and conceive of alternative futures.

One of the objectives of this blog was to speak truth to power and reveal where the human race is headed. Now that we know our final outcome, our predicament is analogous to being diagnosed with terminal cancer. You people reading this post are an infinitesimal percentage of the global population who are privileged, or perhaps cursed, to be in possession of such depressing knowledge. Where do we go from here? What do we do? How do we live our lives knowing what we know of the dismal future of the world’s youth? The entire edifice of human civilization will become a worldwide ghost city before this century ends. Perhaps the only thing left to do is live each day as if it were our last because there really is no future without some miraculous, radical, and global social change accompanied by unprecedented global cooperation. Those in charge of such matters have chosen temporary preservation of the current system over the long-term survival of our species. Evil and suicidal or foolish and ill-informed… Which is it that best describes the self-destructive choices that have been made?

A truly frightening time-lapse visualization by the NOAA of the Arctic Ice Melt:

In the End, It Will Be Worse Than a Zero-Sum Game

18 Tuesday Sep 2012

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

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Arab Spring, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Daniel Quinn, Destruction to Food Supply, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Frederick Engels, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Methane Fields, Neoliberal Capitalism, Occupy Wall Street, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%

I think we can safely shorten that time span to no more than 50 years. Right now I’m with my family, so postings will be light to nonexistent until the beginning of October when I will essentially be in seclusion once again to read more often and study the state of the world. As I write this post, one particular story that stands out is the discovery by Russian scientists of ‘methane fields’ exceeding 1 kilometre escaping from the Laptev Sea, as elaborated upon by Arctic News. In the views of these scientists, methane plumes like the ones they are observing could be catastrophic to this planet’s climate. Other than some obscure website, is anyone talking about the destruction to our food supply that climate change will surely bring about? Make no mistake, this is real news as opposed to the MSM’s three-ring political circus or the perverse reporting of decadent Hollywood parties to toast the christening of a new luxury jaguar car.

Many scientists are saying that the only thing that will save us is global coordinated action and a Manhatten project of geoengineering to halt any further damage from our CO2 emissions and its catastrophic impact on the environment. Others have lamented the total failure of governments to look after the well-being of their people:

Fossil fuel companies are still making profits despite the fact that climate change is so clearly upon us. Our politicians are putting corporate interests above scientific warnings and failing in their duties to the public.”
– link

The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street were initially grassroots movements which evolved as a response to the gross social inequalities of neoliberal capitalism. Washington inadvertently created both movements through their push of the aforementioned economic policies which have made a few extremely wealthy at the expense of those country’s populations. In the near future, the issue of corporate profits over the environment will become a driving force for future social unrest and revolt.
In the end, our ill-conceived exchange of fossil fuels for a stable biosphere will be worse than a zero-sum game when you take into account the hell that climate change will wreak. On our present course, we will be left with an uninhabitable planet. We have only seen the beginning inklings of what human-induced disasters such as drought, ocean acidification, deforestation, and mass species extinction will mean to industrial civilization which has become completely delusional about its “victory” over nature:

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.” ~ Frederick Engels

The Earth giveth and she taketh away. Short-sightedness, greed, and conceit are traits undeserving of long-term survival on this once generous but now scorned planet.

Get Me Off This Crazy Ride!

15 Saturday Sep 2012

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

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Arctic Ice Melt, Capitalism, China's Massive Coal Consumption, Climate Change, CO2 Emissions and GDP, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Global Warming, Greenhouse Gases, Industrial Agriculture, Intensified Global Water Cycles, Methane Release from Thawing Permafrost, Peak Oil, Projected World Energy Consumption, Sir Robert Watson

Speaking on climate change in the video above is Sir Robert Watson, retiring chief scientist at Britian’s Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs. He is warning that governments cannot afford to do nothing about greenhouse gas emissions, irrespective of the current state of the economy. He says the hope of restricting the average global temperature rise to 2C is “out the window”.

If we continue the way we are, we’ve got a 50-50 shot of a 3 degree [Celcius] world – and I would not rule out a 5 degree [Celcius] world.
~ Dr Bob Watson

Hell on Earth is coming to a reality near you:

Here’s the edition of the Royal Society journal that came out of the conference on 4 degrees C of warming. Read through it and see if you think “hell on earth” is an exaggeration. Desertification, water shortages, agricultural disruptions, rising sea levels, vanishing coral, tropical forest die-offs, mass species extinctions, oh my. Kevin Anderson, one of the lead scientists involved, was moved to say that “a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.” ~ Grist

A new article in the Journal “Nature” reports an ominous finding that far more carbon dioxide and methane are being released from parts of Arctic Siberia than previously thought.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that lack of sea ice could drive heat up to 900 miles further inland and cause the melting of permafrost. Most scientists agree that is a recipe for runaway global warming. From the findings of the NCAR/NSIDC Study:

The findings point to a link between rapid sea ice loss and enhanced rate of climate warming, which could penetrate as far as 900 miles inland. In areas where permafrost is already at risk, such as central Alaska, the study suggests that periods of abrupt sea ice loss can lead to rapid soil thaw.

Thawing permafrost may have a range of impacts, including buckled highways and destabilized houses, as well as changes to the delicate balance of life in the Arctic. In addition, scientists estimate that Arctic soils hold at least 30 percent of all the carbon stored in soils worldwide. While scientists are uncertain what will happen if this permafrost thaws, it has the potential to contribute substantial amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Arid regions will become much more dry, and wet regions will experience much more rain due to the warming planet, according to scientists:

A paper in Science today finds rapidly changing ocean salinities as a result of a warming atmosphere have intensified the global water cycle (evaporation and precipitation) by an incredible 4 percent between 1950 and 2000. That’s twice the rate predicted by models.

These same models have long forecast that dry areas of Earth will become drier and wet areas wetter in a warming climate—an intensification of the water cycle driven mostly by the capacity of warmer air to hold and redistribute more moisture in the form of water vapor…

…But the rate of intensification of the global water cycle is happening far faster than imagined: at about 8 percent per degree Celsius of ocean warming since 1950.

At this rate, the authors calculate:

The global water cycle will intensify by a whopping 16 percent in a 2°C warmer world

The global water cycle will intensify by a frightening 24 percent in a 3°C warmer world

…The changes will not be uniform across the globe, but trend toward increased drying of arid areas and increased flooding of wet areas.

And the resulting changes in freshwater availability are likely to be far more destabilizing to human societies and ecosystems than warming alone.

“Changes to the global water cycle and the corresponding redistribution of rainfall will affect food availability, stability, access, and utilization,” says lead author Paul Durack at the University of Tasmania and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

When dealing with a crisis that threatens the very existence of the human species, a rational society would not put the issues of cost-effectiveness and inconveniences to the economy above all else as the deciding factors for taking action. But that is what we are doing, allowing the “ALMIGHTY MARKET” to decide our fate. As explained in another post, this deference to “THE MARKET” to solve such a seemingly abstract problem like climate change is essentially condemning our children to a horrible fate. Climate change is not going to respect or accommodate ‘THE MARKET’, our lifestyle, and mankind’s hubris; it will just wipe us right off the face of the Earth like the pesky and bothersome vermin we have become.

You only have to look at the following graph(click to enlarge) from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2012 to understand how much industrial civilization is locked in to fossil fuels. Do you see that thin dark orange line just below the grey band representing coal? Yeah, that’s renewables.

We are so overly dependent on the high energy density of fossil fuels that the system resists change, with those in charge of it even spending large sums of money to alter public perception on the pernicious effects of burning these CO2-emitting energy sources. The advantages of hydrocarbons, summarized by Tom Murphy, have lured us into drinking an addictive and poisonous elixir:

Fossil fuels are cheap and reliable and are their own storage and allow transportation by car, truck, ship, airplane, and fit seamlessly into our current infrastructure.

Reasons for why carbon emissions will continue their upward trend are described in this article:

Worst ever carbon emissions leave climate on the brink …

• About 80% of the power stations likely to be in use in 2020 are either already built or under construction, the IEA found. Most of these are fossil fuel power stations unlikely to be taken out of service early, so they will continue to pour out carbon – possibly into the mid-century. The emissions from these stations amount to about 11.2Gt, out of a total of 13.7Gt from the electricity sector. These “locked-in” emissions mean savings must be found elsewhere.

“It means the room for manoeuvre is shrinking,” warned Birol.

• Another factor that suggests emissions will continue their climb is the crisis in the nuclear power industry. Following the tsunami damage at Fukushima, Japan and Germany have called a halt to their reactor programmes, and other countries are reconsidering nuclear power.

“People may not like nuclear, but it is one of the major technologies for generating electricity without carbon dioxide,” said Birol. The gap left by scaling back the world’s nuclear ambitions is unlikely to be filled entirely by renewable energy, meaning an increased reliance on fossil fuels.

• Added to that, the United Nations-led negotiations on a new global treaty on climate change have stalled. “The significance of climate change in international policy debates is much less pronounced than it was a few years ago,” said Birol…

…Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, said the global emissions figures showed that the link between rising GDP and rising emissions had not been broken. “The only people who will be surprised by this are people who have not been reading the situation properly,” he said.

Forthcoming research led by Sir David will show the west has only managed to reduce emissions by relying on imports from countries such as China.

Another telling message from the IEA’s estimates is the relatively small effect that the recession – the worst since the 1930s – had on emissions…

And what about that country that, to the shock of many, surpassed the U.S. in carbon emissions 3 years ago?:

In 2009 China consumed 96.9 quads. In 2012 their total is estimated to reach 110.7. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 4.54%. That’s twice as fast as the DOE has predicted going forward.

I’ll remind readers that my estimate for energy consumption in 2035 for China is 247 quads–more than twice what the DOE estimates. Recent growth supports my higher estimates.

Even if China succeeds in building the 150 nuclear plants they aspire to over the next 50 years, they will still be burning more coal in 2035 than the entire world burns now.

The Chinese economy, as I predicted, will start to struggle and even sputter at times between now and then. But if the history of other developing countries is any example, that won’t affect energy consumption nearly as much as one might think. In the United States, that Great Depression? Didn’t affect our energy consumption curve. – link

Lastly, how are we doing on transitioning away from our greenhouse gas emitting, industrial agriculture model of food production? As Stuart Staniford conjectured in his essay ‘Fallacy of Reversibility‘, industrial agriculture has become even more dominant in the age of peak oil, but with adverse effects to the environment:

Harvesting a Climate Disaster – The New York Times

…The farm bill is not only the centerpiece of United States food and agriculture policy, it is also a de facto climate bill. And in this respect, both the Senate and House versions of the legislation are a disaster waiting to happen…

…The proposed farm bill — Senate- or House-style, take your pick — would make American agriculture’s climate problem worse, in two ways. Not only would the bill accelerate global warming by encouraging more greenhouse gas emissions, it would make the nation’s farms more vulnerable to the impacts of those emissions…

…Except in a technical aside, neither the bill passed by the Senate or by the House Committee on Agriculture even mentions climate change.

Coal and cars are blamed, but agriculture is also a major contributor to global warming: by some estimates, it accounts for roughly a third of emissions globally. The industrialized, meat-heavy food system of the United States takes a heavy toll on the atmosphere; it takes an enormous amount of fossil fuel to run farm equipment and harvest the mountains of corn that fatten livestock. And most fertilizers contain nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 298 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a century.

Both of the farm bill proposals would maintain agriculture’s large climate footprint, mainly by continuing to skew subsidies toward a mere handful of commodity crops. The “big five” — wheat, rice, soybeans, cotton and above all corn — have received 84 percent of subsidies since 2004, according to the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group critical of the practice. Subsidies increase with output, encouraging farmers to run highly mechanized operations that plant “fence row to fence row” and apply oceans of fertilizer and pesticide, all of which boost emissions.

But industrial agriculture’s ability to produce gargantuan amounts of food also makes it exceptionally susceptible to climate change. Relying on vast monocultures — the miles and miles of cornfields one passes when driving in Iowa — captures economies of scale. But that lack of diversity invites trouble. A monoculture’s uniformity means that if temperatures spike or a new pest arrives, the damage is likely to spread throughout the entire planted area. By contrast, the diversified landscapes of organic agriculture — corn planted between, say, other vegetables and chicken pens — tend to limit damage.

Farmers can best boost resilience to climate change, scientists say, by improving their soil’s fertility and capacity to retain moisture. That means cutting back on chemical fertilizers, which kill many of the microorganisms that ventilate soil, and shifting to compost and manure fertilizers and crop rotations.

Instead, leading lobbyists for agribusiness want to retain the current production system but shift the mounting climate risks to the taxpayer. Both versions of the farm bill would expand the $11 billion crop insurance program, a move championed by the National Corn Growers Association. The Senate bill, for instance, would authorize $3.8 billion a year for additional insurance.

But neither version would require farmers to take other measures to reduce their climate vulnerability, like investing in healthier soil. In fact, the draft bills would actually make it harder for farmers to do that because the expanded crop insurance would be paid for by cutting the Conservation Stewardship Program, which helps farmers improve their land’s ecological health…

So it looks like we are going balls out in our race toward oblivion. A technologically advanced civilization, once known for sending spacecrafts to distant planets, looks to be headed toward a bleak existence of huddling in subterranean caves and scavenging for insects to eat.

A Global Experiment with Everyone as the Guinea Pigs

10 Monday Sep 2012

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

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Climate Change Refugees, Climate-Stressed Forests, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Geoengineering, Global Coal Consumption, Runaway Climate Change

Without a doubt, climate change is the elephant in the room that no country is dealing with in a manner that reflects its dire consequences for humans and every other living creature on planet Earth. The oceans grow more acidic and warm, eventually to turn into lifeless and hypoxic dead zones. Tropical jungles continue to disappear under bulldozers to make way for monoculture industrial farming. Forests fall to invasions of beetles and burn from epic wildfires in a warming planet. Vast tracts of farmland are desiccated by relentless drought while the government continues its mandate of turning food into fuel for this country’s mammoth population of vehicles. The central banks continue to print money for the hedge funds and casino capitalists to speculate in “THE MARKET”. And the masses, bombarded with infotainment of carnival politics and Hollywood gossip, walk around in an entertained stupor, comforted in the belief that industrial civilization is infallible and exempt from the laws of physics and bankruptcy of an overexploited planet. Like an obsessive compulsive lunatic, growth is still the word that drips from the tongue of every mainstream economist, politician, and captain of industry. Global coal consumption continues its inexorable rise upward, with astronomical consumption predictions heralded for the distant future…

Intelligence, cooperation and foresight are of no use in a system which is intransigent to change. The final, calamitous destination over the cliff and down into the abyss seems clear to a few, but most still hang onto hope and miracles, the beliefs of desperate and delusional men. Scientists are astonished to see changes happening that just a few years ago were predicted only to become reality by the end of this century. A new study says that extreme scenarios are no longer unthinkable:

2 Hot, Too Soon

A new study to be published in the next issue of Current Science predicts up to 2 degrees rise in temperature in India as early as the 2030s. Climate change’s catastrophic effect, it seems, is here faster than anyone had expected.

A two degrees rise in the average global temperature is considered the danger line beyond which climate change will have intense impacts. Till now the general belief was that there is enough time to avert what scientists call ‘catastrophic’ climate change. Perhaps not any more…

…a large section of people find such extreme scenarios hard to believe. So how reliable are these projections? “Scientists are not speculating,”says R K Chaturvedi, the lead author of the study and a national environmental science fellow . “Our findings are based on robust climate models. In fact, for the first time, we have used an average of 18 climate models to arrive at a finding which will have a smaller margin of error. These models have managed to predict our past correctly. So if the temperature rise in the past has been predicted correctly and we have compared them with real data, why will it throw up incorrect projections for the future?”

Ravindranath reaffirms that the situation is serious. “Jammu and Kashmir and a few other parts of the Himalayan region will be the worst affected. The region is projected to experience the highest mean warming up to 8 degrees by 2080s. I’m not joking when I say there will be no snow in Kashmir. The only way to remember snow fall in Kashmir will be to watch the old Shammi Kapoor flick Junglee,” he says wryly.

Even scientists not connected with the study agree that a future doomsday scenario is possible. “The findings are quite reasonable,” says S K Dash, head of the department of Centre for Atmospheric Sciences at IIT Delhi. “Not many studies have been done based on so many climate models . Therefore, the results of this study are likely to be reliable. Our own studies have shown that India has experienced an average temperature rise of about 1.2 degrees in the past 100 years. So it’s not strange to assume a two degrees rise by 2030,” he says.

Many scientists feel that India, especially , would feel the heat of this projected change in temperature more than others. Sudhir Chella Rajan, professor at the department of humanities and social sciences at IIT Madras, who recently evaluated India’s National Climate Action Plan on Climate Change, says that India is more vulnerable because of a variety of reasons. “First, our vast size and geography has hot spots like the Himalayas and the coastal areas. Then there is poverty. The poor are not resilient enough to deal with intense impacts like very warm periods or even floods. That’s why it’s time we reacted faster to this impending disaster.

Scientists are recording the dying of the planet we once knew, but for all intents and purposes, their work is like that of a pathologist studying a body post-mortem. The process we have unleashed is now unstoppable. A team of scientists are now looking more closely at the disappearing forests:

Climate Change Stress Killing Forests, And Why it Matters

…Until recently, however, ecologists hadn’t really focused on drought-induced die-offs as a discrete category of forest trauma. That began to change, Anderegg said, after a meeting in Austin, Texas, last year. “Several of us decided to sit down, put our heads together and begin to look at the possible effects.”

They looked at dozens of individual studies, and found plenty. The loss of a forest’s dominant tree species has a ripple effect on all the other species that live there, by changing the amount of sunlight that reaches the forest floor; changing the mix of nutrients that enter the soil as leaves or needles decompose; allowing soil to wash away, especially on steep slopes, and — in some cases, at least — encouraging more fires….

…Forests are not only affected by climate; they also affect it. A living tree absorbs carbon from the air; kill the tree, and the carbon stays in circulation to trap heat. Not only that, as the tree decays, the carbon locked inside is gradually released back into the atmosphere. “It’s a double whammy,” Anderegg said….

…Broadly speaking, there are huge gaps in what scientists know. “This whole area has been fairly under-studied until now,” Anderegg said. “We need more research with a really wide net.”

To try and coordinate it, he and several colleagues have created a collaborative website to share knowledge about drought and tree mortality. The urgency of such research is only underscored by the 2012 drought, the worst to hit the U.S. in more than 50 years.

“The droughts of the early 2000’s caught us by surprise,” Anderegg said. “This one is our chance to pay attention as it unfolds.

Desperate calls for geoengineering and a “binge” on nuclear plants to avoid runaway climate change are now surfacing in the headlines:

Climate change expert calls for geoengineering and nuclear ‘binge …

A leading British academic has called for accelerated research into futuristic geo-engineering and a worldwide nuclear power station “binge” to avoid runaway global warming.

Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, said both potential solutions had inherent dangers but were now vital as time was running out.

“It is very, very depressing that politicians and the public are attuned to the threat of climate change even less than they were 20 years ago when Margaret Thatcher sounded the alarm. Co₂ levels are rising at a faster than exponential rate, and yet politicians only want to take utterly trivial steps such as banning plastic bags and building a few windfarms,” he said.

“I am very suspicious of using technology to solve problems created by technology, given that we have messed up so much in the past but having done almost nothing for two decades we need to adopt more desperate measures such as considering geo-engineering techniques as well as conducting a major nuclear programme.”…

…Wadhams, who is also head of the polar ocean physics group at Cambridge and has just returned from a field trip to Greenland, was reacting to evidence that Arctic sea ice cover had reached a record low this summer.

This latest rate of loss is 50% higher than most scenarios outlined by other polar scientists and coincide with alarming new reports about a “vast reservoir” of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, that could be released in Antarctica if the ice melts equally quickly there. Greenpeace said last night that it agreed with the academic’s concerns but not with his solutions.

“Professor Wadhams is right that we’re in a big hole and the recent record sea ice low in the Arctic is a clear warning that we need to act. But it would be cheaper, safer and easier to stop digging and drilling for more fossil fuels,” said Ben Ayliffe, the group’s senior polar campaigner.

“We already have the technologies, from ultra-efficient vehicles to state-of-the-art clean energy generation, to make the deep cuts in greenhouse gases that are needed to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Unfortunately, we’re still lacking the political and business will to implement them,” he added.

Wadhams, who has done pioneering work on polar ice thinning using British naval submarines from 1976 onwards, said these latest satellite findings confirmed his own dire predictions.

And they feed into the alarming scenarios that the Arctic Methane Emergency Group have been warning about.

“What we are now seeing is a fast collapse of the sea ice that means we could see a complete loss during the summer by 2015 – rather than the 20 to 30 years talked about by the UK Meteorological Office. This would speed up ocean warming and Greenland ice cap melt and increase global ocean levels considerably as well as warming the seabed and releasing more methane.”

Asked whether the latest evidence made a ban on drilling for carbon-releasing oil and gas necessary as Greenpeace has contended, Wadhams said “philosophically” such exploration made little sense. “We have been conducting a global experiment with the burning of fossil fuels and the results are already disastrous and this would accelerate them,” he argued saying that there were also practical worries because of the enormous difficulty of dealing with any spillage or a blowout under moving ice where oil would get trapped inside the ice in a kind of inaccessible “oil sandwich’…

The Anthropocene Era promises to leave its mark for hundreds of millenniums.

Ripping Out the Heart and Lungs of the Earth

08 Saturday Sep 2012

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

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, David Attenborough, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Interactive Map of Eutrophication & Hypoxia, Julian Cribb, Ocean Dead Zones, Sylvia Earle

Julian Cribb, the science writer who gained some notoriety with his letter to the journal Nature urging a rename of the not-so-wise Homo sapiens, has written a recent essay entitled ‘March of the Dead Zones‘. Are we quickly cooking the oceans into a state of mass extinction as has happened in Earth’s ancient past?

…The cause of Dead Zones is well understood: they are driven by the avalanche of nutrients which humanity dumps in the oceans – from agriculture, sewage, leaky landfills, urban stormwater, soil erosion, industrial and vehicle emissions. This rich nutrient soup provides the food source for vast blooms of algae – and as these die off they sink to the sea floor and decompose causing blooms of bacteria which strip the essential oxygen from the water column, often resulting in fish kills – their most visible impact. They are also hastened by global warming, which stratifies the water, trapping the stagnant water and preventing it from mixing with the oxygen-rich surface layer.

What many people do not realise is that some of the worst extinctions in the history of life on Earth occurred because of a process very similar to this. In the biggest of the lot, the Great Death of the Permian around 252m years ago, an estimated 95 per cent of marine species were wiped out – rugose corals, nautiloids, armoured fish, trilobites – never to be seen again.

What triggered it is still a scientific mystery – an outbreak of volcanism, striking asteroids, a giant solar storm, colossal seabed methane eruptions: who knows? – but the geological evidence points to a massive global spike in CO2 levels, accompanied by rapid planetary warming, huge outbreaks of anoxia (loss of oxygen from seawater) and the destruction of marine habitats. One thing is fairly clear – by the end of it all fungi and moulds were rulers of the Earth, feasting on the dead.

The multiplying Dead Zones in the world’s oceans today not only resemble the Permian event on a local scale in terms of what drove them – but have two additional drivers: overfishing and pollution from the 83,000 chemicals which humans manufacture on the land and then carelessly liberate into the global environment.

The biggest contributors of all are the 110 million tonnes of nitrogen, 9 million tonnes of phosphorus and other nutrients which we unleash into the planetary ecosystem every year as we try to feed ourselves. That is off-the-scale compared with what the pre-human Earth circulated naturally.

The really unsettling fact is that, if we continue to depend upon agriculture for our food supply, then humanity’s dependence on artificial fertilisers is likely to double by the 2060s – and so will our indiscriminate release of nutrients into the world’s rivers, lakes and oceans. That release, in turn, will spawn more and larger Dead Zones – like that affecting 22,000 square kilometres of sea at the mouth of America’s Mississippi river…

Below is a screen shot of a project called the Interactive Map of Eutrophication & Hypoxia (low-oxygen dead zones) which have spread to nearly 500 sites, all in places where there is significant human development along the oceans and seas of the world.

A study from late last year, indicates that the latest warming of the planet will be catastrophic to the Earth’s aquatic life, turning much of the oceans and seas into oxygen-depleted ‘dead zones’:

…Their study, published in Nature Geoscience, showed that the average global temperature rise of around at least two degrees Celsius between the peak and the end of the last Ice Age (between about 10,000-20,000 years ago) had a massive effect on the oxygen content of seawater.

“The warmer the global average temperature, the more extended the oxygen minimum zones are, so the volume of these oxygen-poor water bodies is more extended during warm periods than in cold periods,” Jaccard said.

What is worrying is that, currently, global average temperature is predicted to rise by at least two degrees in the coming century due to climate change. This is of a similar magnitude to the warming the planet has undergone since the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago.

“So we would assume that if, indeed, temperatures are increasing in the next 100 years, these oxygen minimum zones would also increase in volume and that the general oxygen concentration of the ocean will decrease,” Jaccard said.

And what is more: “our analysis has shown that not only was absolute temperature important, but also the rate of change, so the faster the warming, the more expanded these zones are…

Along with the rest of the planet, our oceans have indeed been heating up. Here’s a quick screen shot I just did to show you a mere sliver of the destruction these rising temperatures are bringing:

A study to be published Sept. 15 issue in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology indicates that the demise of the dinosaurs was preceded by the death of ocean life via greenhouse gases that warmed the oceans. This sounds eerily similar to what we are doing to ourselves with the burning of fossil fuels. In place of CO₂-spewing volcanic eruptions, we have millions of cars, planes, factories, coal-fired energy plants and an endless list of other fossil-fuel burning machinery doing the same:

The demise of the dinosaurs, thought to have been caused by an asteroid, wasn’t the only mass extinction around that time, according to new international research.

Evidence suggests that many species of ocean organisms were killed by volcanic eruptions before the asteroid impact. The eruptions took place in India, filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gases that warmed the globe and caused seafloor life to die.

“The eruptions started 300,000 to 200,000 years before the impact, and they may have lasted 100,000 years,” said study lead author Thomas Tobin at the University of Washington in a press release.

The scientists discovered this earlier extinction when they studied fossils from Seymour Island near Antarctica. The island has an unusually thick bed of sediment, where more sediment than normal accumulated in each time period.

This allowed the researchers to date fossils more precisely and create a detailed timeline. They used the prehistoric changes in Earth’s magnetic field to date each fossil sample.

“I think the evidence we have from this location is indicative of two separate events, and also indicates that warming took place,” said Tobin.

“It seems improbable to me that they are completely independent events.”

The first extinction event may have seriously affected some species, making them unable to survive the second extinction, although there’s no evidence for this yet….

Since the Earth’s oceans constitute 90% of the biosphere, a significant percentage of the planet’s total biomass is marine microorganisms, producing more than half of the entire global oxygen supply and serving as a vast sink for much of human-generated CO_2.If we destroy the oceans, we will exterminate ourselves. The Earth will not bat an eye. No God will appear to prevent it. No technological solution will arrive to fix it. And no amount of empty platitudes and wishful thinking will mend it. The inexorable process of time and evolution will march on, creating other life forms to fill our vacancy. Humanity had its chance and blew it.

Don’t you think it’s kind of ironic that humans will become extinct from the burning of the very substance that enabled the ascent of the technological age and modern man’s ability to live in electrified and modernized comfort? Our fossil fuel slaves will have become our executioners. I recall hearing some indigenous South American tribesman saying that the people of industrial civilization are just children playing with deadly machines. They know not what grief they have brought unto themselves by raping the Earth of her treasures.

“We are now appearing to wage war on life in the sea with sonars, spotter aircraft, advanced communications, factory trawlers, thousands of miles of long lines, and global marketing of creatures no one had heard of until recent years. Nothing has prepared sharks, squid, krill and other sea creatures for industrial-scale extraction that destroys entire ecosystems while targeting a few species…

The concern is not loss of fish for people to eat. Rather, the greatest concern about destructive fishing activities of the past century, especially the past several decades, is the dismemberment of the fine-tuned ocean ecosystems that are, in effect, our life-support system.

Photosynthetic organisms in the sea yield most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, take up and store vast amounts of carbon dioxide, shape planetary chemistry, and hold the planet steady.

The ocean is a living system that makes our lives possible. Even if you never see the ocean, your life depends on its existence. With every breath you take, every drop of water you drink, you are connected to the sea…” ~ Sylvia Earle

Free Markets and the Extinction of Mankind

07 Friday Sep 2012

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

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Anthropogenic Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Free Market Ideologues, Record Arctic Ice Melt

In a previous post entitled ‘Free Market Blinders and the Coercion of Industrial-Corporate Capitalism‘, I posted arguments on why the free market ends up being anything but free. In the pursuit of profit, the shortest path taken includes usurping the instruments of the state. It also means all problems are forced into the ‘free market’ box and what comes out are phony solutions that only serve capitalism such as the scheme of carbon trading which has been described as “halfway between fantasy and fraud.”

Due to the lag time of its effects, climate change is a problem that the ‘free market’ cannot fix:

Whistling Past the Graveyard on Climate Change

…This is the sort of problem that democracies and free markets are mostly incapable of solving. Politicians who have to come up for reelection every two to four years aren’t good at annoying business interests in order to solve problems that won’t even show up in a significant way for the rest of their lifetimes.

And even in its most ideal form, the logic of “free market solutions” is predicated on companies getting punished by angry consumers if they don’t do the right thing. There are all sorts of things wrong with this approach, of course: if a bunch of people die due to food poisoning, it’s not as if it’s always easy to identify where in the production chain the problem occurred, or which corporations to punish by not buying their product (not to mention the obvious fact that the deaths should have been stopped by regulation and oversight in the first place.) But in its most simplistic form it might work if the impact of corporate malfeasance is immediate.

But how does a “free market solution” work when it comes to carbon emissions? Whom do consumers punish? Whom do consumers reward? On what timescale? By the time the problem is advanced enough to penetrate consumer consciousness, it will have been far, far too late for the market to change organically.

And that’s, as I’ve said before, why climate change is such a threat to the conservative enterprise. It’s not just that big energy interests would be impacted. It’s that the entire conservative model of problem solving would be rendered obsolete if the realities of climate change were accepted in our public discourse.

So absent some sort of organizational metamorphosis for human societies, business interests will continue to divide nation states against one another as politicians in the major industrialized democracies dawdle and pretend the problem will go away.

CO2 levels continue to rise despite the sham carbon trading scheme (NOAA):

As you can see from the following video, the warming effects of the CO2 we have been pumping into the atmosphere over the last 130 years are becoming much more pronounced (this video is from NASA and only goes up to 2011).

In regards to the future stability of the human race, consider the conclusions from top climate scientists in a recent article of the highly regarded journal Nature:

The mean global temperature by 2070 (or a few decades earlier) will be higher than it ever has since the human species evolved.” [Human-induced climate change creates] “the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience.” “The net effect is that once a critical transition occurs, it is extremely difficult or even impossible for the system to return to its previous state.”

You see, the problem is that we are bringing on these changes to the climate and environment so rapidly that we, along with many other species, will NOT be able to adapt in time. Certainly our food supply will be in grave danger as weather patterns shift and droughts become more intense. The vast and expensive infrastructure we built to take advantage of the stable climate that we enjoyed in the past will no longer apply. Imagine a game of musical chairs with the entire global population scrambling for the last remaining seat. That’s the future in which a chaotic climate makes the access to dwindling resources even more tenuous. Arguing over cause and effect as we all go over the cliff is not an option, but that is the avenue we are taking.

The only hope is a radical and abrupt shift away from the use of all CO2 emitting energy, as referred to in this excerpt from an updated statement by the American Meteorological Society on global warming:

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth’s lower atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; sea level is rising; and snow cover, mountain glaciers, and Arctic sea ice are shrinking. The dominant cause of the warming since the 1950s is human activities. This scientific finding is based on a large and persuasive body of research. The observed warming will be irreversible for many years into the future, and even larger temperature increases will occur as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere. Avoiding this future warming will require a large and rapid reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions.

The results of industrial civilization’s binge on fossil fuels are happening in full Technicolor right before our eyes: