Tag Archives: Economic Growth

Still on Track for the Collapse of Modern Civilization

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

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

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Two recent pieces of scientific evidence really hammer home the predicament of modern industrial civilization, and they have to do with the fact that our globalized, just-in-time economic model is hopelessly wed to carbon-based energy. Once one understands this, then there can be no delusions about why we are on such a catastrophic trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions. As was explained in a previous post, GDP is fundamentally and directly linked to CO2 emissions. Below, two graphs(click to go to source) illustrate this fact:

C02 emissions since 1850 (red); exponential growth (blue); cuts to hit climate target (dashed).

Graphic_PE_CoalUseIncreased

It’s not really about evil fossil fuel companies, although they do certainly exert enormous political clout and do conspire to protect their business model by doing such things as spreading doubt on climate change science, but as with all corporations, externalizing social and environmental costs is endemic to the profit system and the coercive forces of competition in capitalist markets.

Firstly, there is the graph submitted by Professor Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist for the past 30 years, Professor of Geosciences and Atmospheric Sciences, and Co-Director Institute of the Environment, Univ. of Arizona:

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This clearly shows we are firmly on track for hitting 3.2-5.4°C warming by the end of the century or sooner. This kind of rapid warming is incompatible with most life on Earth. To get an idea of what the world will be like at 3°C once lag time catches up to real time, we can look back 3 million years ago in the Pliocene Era when CO2 levels were similar to today and temperatures were 3°C warmer:

The northern hemisphere was free of glaciers and icesheets, beech trees grew in the Transantarctic mountains, sea levels were 25 metres higher [Climate Dynamics, 26, 249-365], and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were 360-400 ppm, very similar to today. There are also strong indications that during the Pliocene, permanent El Nino conditions prevailed. Hansen says that rapid warming today is already heating up the western Pacific Ocean, a basis for a coming period of ‘super El Ninos’ [Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 103, 39, 14288-93]…

…The collapse of the Amazon is part of the reversal of the carbon cycle projected to happen around 3 degrees, a view confirmed by a range of researchers using carbon coupled climate models. Vast amounts of dead vegetation stored in the soil – more than double the entire carbon content of the atmosphere – will be broken down by bacteria as soil warms. The generally accepted estimate is that the soil carbon reservoir contains some 1600 gigatonnes, more than double the entire carbon content of the atmosphere…

…Three degrees would likely see increasing areas of the planet being rendered essentially uninhabitable by drought and heat. Rainfall in Mexico and central America is projected to fall 50 per central. Southern Africa would be exposed to perennial drought, a huge expanse centred on Botswana could see a remobilisation of old sand dunes [Nature, 435, 1218-21], much as is projected to happen earlier in the US west. The Rockies would be snowless and the Colorado river will fail half the time. Drought intensity in Australia could triple, according to the CSIRO, which also predicts days in NSW above 35 degrees will increase 2 to 7 times.

With extreme weather continuing to bite – hurricanes may increase in power by half a category above today’s top-level Category Five – world food supplies will be critically endangered. This could mean hundreds of millions – or even billions – of refugees moving out from areas of famine and drought in the sub-tropics towards the mid-latitudes. As the Himalayan ice sheet relentlessly melts with rising temperatures, the long-term water flows into Asia’s great rivers and breadbasket valleys — the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra, the Mekong, Yangtse and Yellow rivers — will fall dramatically. If global temperatures rise by three degrees, and that’s becoming the un-official target for western governments, water flow in the Indus is predicted to drop by 90 per cent by 2100. The lives of two billion people are at stake.

As the Arctic continue to warm, melting permafrost in the boreal forests and further north in the Arctic tundra is now starting to melt, triggering the release of methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times more powerful than CO2, from thick layers of thawing peat. The West Siberian bog is estimated to contain 70 billion tonnes of CO2. Prof. Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Russia’s Tomsk State University, says: “There’s a critical barrier… Once global warming pushes the melting process past that line, it begins to perpetuate itself.” The West Antarctic ice sheet would likely to irreversibly melt.

At 5-6°C:

Five degrees
• Five degrees of warming occurred during the Eocene, 55 million years ago: breadfruit trees grew on the coast of Greenland, while the Arctic Ocean saw water temperatures of 20C within 200km of the North Pole itself. There was no ice at either pole; forests were probably growing in central Antarctica.
• The Eocene greenhouse event was likely caused by methane hydrates (an ice-like combination of methane and water) bursting into the atmosphere from the seabed in an immense “ocean burp”, sparking a surge in global temperatures. Today vast amounts of these same methane hydrates still sit on subsea continental shelves.
• The early Eocene greenhouse took at least 10,000 years to come about. Today we could accomplish the same feat in less than a century.

Six degrees
• At the end of the Permian period, 251 million years ago, up to 95% of species were extinct as a result of a super-greenhouse event, resulting in a temperatures rise by six degrees, perhaps because of an even bigger methane belch than happened 200 million years later in the Eocene.
• One scientific paper investigating “kill mechanisms” during the end-Permian suggests that methane hydrate explosions “could destroy terrestrial life almost entirely”. Acting much like today’s fuel-air explosives (or “vacuum bombs”), major oceanic methane eruptions could release energy equivalent to 10,000 times the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Another valuable website worth reading describes, degree by degree, the changes that will happen to the Earth from anthropogenic global warming. Due to the unpredictable nature of the internet and web pages disappearing, I have saved that essay as an entire screenshot here.

Keep in mind that the IPCC, an institution that has consistently underestimated the effects of anthropogenic climate change, states that in order to stay below 2°C of warming, emissions will have to be 40-70% lower than they were in 2010 by 2050 and at zero by the end of the century, “or could possibly even require taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, a controversial proposition.” As the Keeling Curve grows ever steeper year after year, the Hail Mary of a techno-fix inevitably becomes the only option left. However, concomitant with the CO2 problem is the acidification of the oceans which will require a miracle solution as well. As was explained in a previous post, if all emissions stopped yesterday, we would still be locked into a warming of 2.65°C.

The second important piece of information is a recent MIT study:

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Above graph, from MIT’s Climate and Energy Outlook 2014, shows a drastic rise in global energy consumption by fuel type.

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 If CO2 levels were to double to 800ppm:

If carbon dioxide levels reach 800 ppm, ocean pH is projected to drop another .3 to .4 units (Today we have measured a decline of .1 pH units from 8.2 to 8.1 in the last century) – one of the scenarios projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by 2100 –raising levels of hydrogen ion, H +, 100 to 150 percent (Orr et al., 2005). As this happens and it will take “tens of thousands of years” for the chemistry of the oceans to return to pre-industrial levels, at least that is what the Royal Society of Britain proclaims. – link

We’re already seeing massive die-offs of oysters and scallops from an acidification (PH-decline) of 0.1PH, but what would happen at a drop of 0.3-0.4 units(150+% more acidic than at the beginning of the industrial revolution)?:

“…we found that reef development ceased below pH level 7.7… Ultimately, what we observed was that the diversity of reefs progressively declines with increasing CO2. At concentrations similar to those predicted for the end of this century at a ‘business as usual’ emissions scenario, the “coral reef” observed was depauperate and lacked the structural complexity of present healthy tropical coral reefs. These changes are simply due to ocean acidification, i.e., even without the projected +2°C warming of the oceans associated with rising greenhouse gases. The 0.5° warming we have already observed in the tropics in the last 50 years has already caused mass coral bleaching events and declining coral calcification.” – link

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Ocean acidification could trigger economic devastation

…The authors of the report, released today from the Third Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World, review the current science on the effects on marine organisms, and write that there is a “medium confidence” level that shellfish harvests will decline. There is also a medium confidence level that economic damage will result from impacts on coral reefs, with tourism, food and shoreline protection suffering. The size of this is unclear but one estimate is for $1 trillion in damage from coral loss alone.

How larger species will fare as oceans acidify is less clear. The report gives only a “low confidence” rating to the idea that top predators and fin fish catches will be reduced. But any losses in this area could hit hard the 540 million people whose livelihoods depend on such fisheries.

Scientists also have a “very high confidence” that the ocean’s capacity to take up carbon decreases as waters acidify. So even larger cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions than currently envisaged may be needed to meet targets set to limit global warming as a result, the authors write….

…The report authors also say that the acidity of the oceans could increase by 170% by the end of the century, corresponding to a drop in surface ocean pH by 0.32. This occurs under a pessimistic scenario of high human emissions. Since the industrial revolution, surface ocean pH has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1. As pH is a logarithmic scale, the increase in acidity since the industrial revolution could reach around 170% under this scenario.

Under lower-emissions scenarios, this decrease would be around 0.07. But current emissions show no sign of dropping to those necessary to achieve such a goal, cautions Riebesell.

“If you look at current trajectories we’re no way below the [high emissions scenario],” Riebesell says. “Of course we hope the human race is smart enough to learn at some point and turn the wheel round.” – link

As long as the shelves in the local grocery store are filled with relatively cheap food, the television is broadcasting the usual “bread and circus”, water is flowing from the faucet, and other creature comforts of industrial civilization are on tap, homo economicus will blithely ride into the dark future of mass extinction, tectonic shifts of the biosphere, and the collapse of an unsustainable lifestyle.

CNN is running a program of their newscasters’ family roots. Why do I feel like this is a slick PR campaign to put a main street face on the mainstream media? Sorry, but I still don’t trust them and we’re still on track for the collapse of modern civilization despite all their smug smiles.

A Walk Along the Beach of Doom with Benjamin Franklin

31 Friday Jan 2014

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

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“When the well’s dry,
we know the worth of water.”
~ Benjamin Franklin  

From Luke’s Journal:
Date: January 2064

I’ve just returned from a salvaging expedition into the heart of what was known as Los Angeles, a vast megalopolis once teeming with millions of people and home to Hollywood movies and TV, hallucinogens for the masses. It is now known as celluloid cemetery. The air was still this evening and off in the distance I could hear the desperate screams of those who had been exiled from our underground colonies.

I’ve got all the public libraries mapped out on my tracking device so that I can hit them up for rare books not archived on our historical databases. Paper books never died because a lot of data has been lost over the years due to grid failure, floods, fires, and arson. A very well-preserved collection of writings by Benjamin Franklin, a true renaissance man of his time, caught my eye as I rummaged through piles of books strewn knee-deep across the floor. Inside the dusty tome I saw the brief essay ‘Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind‘ and read it on the spot. Franklin says, “But not withstanding this (population) increase, so vast is the Territory of North America, that it will require many ages to settle it fully…” A mere 215 years after those words were published, America officially went into overshoot. Thomas Malthus is said to have credited Franklin for discovering the ‘rule of population growth’ which states that when agriculture increases in arithmetic progression(2, 3, 4, …), the population grows in geometric progression(2, 4, 6, …), eventually outpacing the means to feed everyone. Neither Malthus nor Franklin foresaw the discovery of fossil fuels, which fueled the population explosion, or its horrific side-effect of climate change which would act as a catalyst for the spread of virulent diseases and pathogens such as the African Flu Pandemic of 2029, otherwise known as The First Great Culling. Two-thirds of the global population were wiped out. Subsequent pandemics of varying origins and lethality picked away at the remaining 2.5 billion, leaving a few hundred million survivors scattered across the globe. The construction of vast subterranean cities began several decades ago once the world knew that industrial civilization would never be able to survive runaway climate change above ground. Today no one is allowed to have more than two children. Population is strictly monitored by the technocracy which severely punishes those who break this law; no one wants to be banished to the outside where life is short and brutal.

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Franklin must truly have been rolling in his grave at the end result of his expansionist dreams for America: a pockmarked landscape of fracking wells, oil spills, and toxic waste dumps; a corrupt government of corporate sock-puppets; a military that had become a malevolent industrial complex seeking war for profit and destroying fledgling democracies wherever they appeared; an agricultural system of factory farms and frankenfood; a self-proclaimed “free press” of corporate mouthpieces and shills; and a population of citizens that had been reduced to mindless consumers incapable of critical thought. And I think he would be utterly distraught to find that his name had been reduced to a popular idiom by the dumbed-down masses — “it’s all about the Benjamins.“ Knowing what a grotesque monstrosity this country would become, he surely would not have declared America’s cause to be ‘the cause of all mankind’ — wasteful consumerism, monopoly capitalism, and the tyranny of the corporate state. When he was studying dinosaur bones in northern Kentucky back in the mid 1700’s, I’m sure it never crossed his mind that the human species would soon suffer the same fate, becoming the next hapless victim to sink into a tar pit of its own making. Franklin would have said, “It’s inconceivable such a technologically advanced society as this would not look at the scientific evidence and take action at once to preserve life and liberty.” But after witnessing what an irredeemable abomination his Republic had become, he would most likely say, “My God, the only recourse remaining is to clear the entire system with near-term-extinction.”

Snap 2014-01-30 at 00.47.22

Walking with the tortured spirit of Benjamin Franklin along the Beach of Doom where anoxic ocean waves wash plastic debris and dead jellyfish ashore, I explain to him that the seeds of our destruction were planted long ago with the expansionist mindset of the first European settlers. The Indians and buffalo were systematically wiped out, all the virgin forests were chopped down and converted to lumber, and the rest of America was laid wide open for exploitation by the construction of a transcontinental railroad. Technology and the power of fossil fuels only intensified the process; this country never looked back, expanding to foreign shores for control of evermore resources and spreading the same logic and belief system of capitalism throughout every inch of the Earth until there was no place further to go. The system started to cannibalize itself after hitting peak oil, turning inward to burn dirtier, more marginal energy resources and starving the masses whose share of the economic pie kept shrinking while a tiny few gorged themselves on ill-gotten wealth and delusions of grandeur. In its final days, this con game measured everything only with a monetary scale. If there was no profit to be earned, then real solutions to the grave threat of anthropogenic climate change, like “powering down”, were summarily discounted. America and the world had ideologically boxed itself into a death trap called capitalism. No one realized or refused to realize that all the perceived gains in infrastructure, technology, social institutions, and other complexities of industrial civilization would soon fade into oblivion at the hands of an uncaring climate radically and thoughtlessly altered by mankind’s activities. In the end, it was all phantom wealth stolen from nature and built off her back by burning trillions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. The system’s only available avenue was to rush headlong into the dark void of misery, death, and extinction while spinning quixotic tales of “sustainable growth”, “renewable energy”, and geoengineering fixes. Cooperation on a planetary scale to lower greenhouse gases could never be accomplished under a capitalist system, nor would the arms race amongst nations which requires a constant investment of highly dense energy to develop technologically superior weaponry. After knowing for decades that it was far too late to escape the carnage of climate chaos, those in positions of power felt compelled to ignore the facts and keep the gas pedal pressed to the floor, leading all of humanity over the cliff.

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“He cannot complain of a hard sentence, who is made master of his own fate.”
~ Johann Friedrich von Schiller

“For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn.”

02 Monday Dec 2013

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

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Dystopian-Worlds-1Despite mounting evidence of our grim reality, the world’s psychopathic leadership remains willfully deaf, dumb, and blind to the unfolding global ecocide and humanicide. A persistent sounding of the alarm by a tiny minority of the population only seems to have irritated and offended those in the elite class who are pressing the fossil-fueled industrial machine onward, full steam ahead. However, it’s not a cliff we are headed towards because surely the psychopaths would have hidden their parachutes underneath their business suits. There will be no Bottleneck for humans because we’re headed toward the black hole of extinction from which nobody gets out alive. Yes, they’ll be a few hangers-on for a brief period until there is only one lone straggler… and then darkness for the human species along with 99% of all other life. We’re doomed by a pathocracy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. 2012 saw the lowest ever summer ice area.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

*John Key: NZ Prime Minister.

**Jonathan Young: MP for the city

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

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

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

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

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Our Consumptive Madness

06 Wednesday Nov 2013

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

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Snap 2013-11-06 at 14.31.28

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Also…

and…

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

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

Last Man on Earth

20 Sunday Oct 2013

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

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An achieved goal of capitalist industrial civilization was the systematic reduction of nature to a simple component of the economy. Landscapes of rivers, lakes, forests, and meadows were replaced by the concrete, steel, and asphalt of cityscapes. The build-up of toxic wastes and byproducts of industrial civilization were seen merely as external problems to be solved via engineering and technology. In the grand narrative of material progress, industrial man put himself at the center of the universe, the lead actor and hero who would always survive and triumph. He saw no problem with the complete subjugation of the wilderness, taking more from the land than was given back, and reducing biodiversity to a shell of its former self in the name of economic growth. The dominant mindset was summed up thusly…

“…nature is a malignant force with useful aspects that must be harnessed, and useless, harmful ones that must be shorn of their power. They spend their energy adapting nature to their purposes, instead of themselves to her demands. They destroy pests of crops and men, they build dykes and great dams to avert floods, and they level hills in one spot and pile them up in another. Their premise is that nature will destroy them unless they prevent it…” ~ Clyde Kluckhohn

In the collective consciousness of industrial civilization, man was exempt from falling victim to the 6th mass extinction. The future narrative of people in the modern age never included:

    • …that they would be among the last humans to walk the Earth.
    • …that their children would not live long enough to grow old.
    • …that all cultural, artistic, and scientific achievements of the human species would soon be forgotten in time, no longer practiced and appreciated.

Cocooned away from the elements as they were, few city dwellers noticed the creeping deterioration of the planet’s biosphere. Their artificial world, filled with the digital screens of computers, televisions, electronic billboards, and sundry other micro-computer devices, kept the public preoccupied with a constant stream of infotainment, celebrity gossip, sports, and political spectacles. The popular line of thought was that the natural world was too resilient to collapse from man’s activities; periodic efforts of environmental remediation would be all that was needed to keep business-as-usual afloat. Generational amnesia cast a false sense of security over the unwashed masses. Rivers and streams, once teeming with fish and aquatic life, were now laden with toxins, heavy metals, and plastics. Moose and bison no longer roamed the fragmented wilderness; the remaining few were set aside for bioengineering experiments in a last-ditch effort to save them. The whole web of life with all its keystone species from microbes and insects to large terrestrial and aquatic mammals was unravelling. Pests, viruses, and pathogens ran rampant in the new disorder of the planet. Scientists talked of tipping points, but no one really knew when such red lines in biospheric stability would be crossed or if they had already been breached. Like a runaway freight train, industrial civilization had indeed passed many tipping points long ago. Few thought there would be such an abrupt downward spiral, seemingly without warning. The first law of thermodynamics was being realized on a system-wide scale.

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Modern man was thought to have been infinitely adaptive and clever, but the linear-thinking that dominated the culture was riddled with too many blind-spots to prevent its inevitable downfall. As long as the same economic system and mode of living persisted, no amount of new technology would solve the root problems. Since the mid 1970’s, the industrialized world had been living beyond the total carrying capacity of the Earth for decades and even created a day to recognize the transgression which would arrive a few days earlier each year. Various reports of imminent catastrophe were published, but to no avail. Everyone had their mental crutch to fool themselves into believing that the day of reckoning would never come. Some, like the fanatical zealots of religion, rejoiced that the end was upon us while others were paralyzed with fear and despair. The all-pervasive mainstream cult of money worship, consumption, and economic growth gave rise to other doomsday cults who heralded the end of time.

Mother nature took no prisoners; there was no escaping her ironclad laws. Mass starvation, war, and pestilence rapidly whittled the human population down to small pockets of survivors, but then even those few post-apocalyptic tribes soon declined and disappeared until the day arrived that only one human walked the Earth. One lone human survivor out of the billions that once were.

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He survived the pandemic that wiped out roughly three-quarters of the global population. He survived the nuclear meltdown and craziness of the food wars and nuclear terrorism. And thus far he survived climate chaos by constantly moving. MRE’s were mass-produced for the general public and stored in most cities when the agricultural system started to show signs of imminent collapse. Even after all these years, the last human still found these warehouses of preserved food to be an invaluable source of sustenance, supplementing his diet with the occasional cockroach, rat, or wild pig.

How did the last man on Earth spend his time when not scavenging for food, water, and other essentials? He was on a search to find other humans of course. How could he have known that he was the sole survivor? Without electricity, there no longer existed any sort of global communication system. The one solar-powered/hand crank shortwave radio he had in his backpack had yet to pick up any signals, but he would religiously take it out every night to scan the frequencies for an hour or two. To break the deathly silence of the world, he would occasionally play the assorted music files that were on his wind-up mp3 player. He especially loved their sound inside the expansive corridors of old libraries he visited during his trek across the continent. With his life always in jeopardy, he found that a good book was the best form of escapism; compromising his health and safety with mind/mood-altering drugs was not an option in a world devoid of hospitals and medicine. And sex? Well, you’ll have to use your imagination for that. He certainly did. Such solitude, a prison cell of solitary confinement spanning the entire planet, would have driven most to madness and suicide, but he handled the loneliness day by day and with stoicism.

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In his early years, he experienced a taste of working at a 9-5 job, driving a car and flying on jumbo jets, but he didn’t miss any of it really. He had been one of those who had read extensively about the unsustainability of the global economy and about the nature of ecological overshoot and collapse, and he had prepared for it. He held no illusions of a new civilization being reborn out of the ashes of capitalist industrial civilization. Capitalism, he knew, held too tight of a grip on modern man, and the psychological barriers of the masses prevented them from seeing the end of everything concerning the human experience …forever. As the weeks, months, and years passed by and he grew older, he began to reconcile with the idea that he was very likely the last person left alive. No need to leave any more messages on roof tops, in vacant parking lots, or over the empty airwaves. No one was listening. No one was coming. There really was no prospect of growing old gracefully in this new reality. He had yet to find some small pocket of unpolluted land that did not register on his Geiger counter. So he made a pact with himself and the pistol he carried that when his health and strength no longer allowed him to eke out an existence, he would not be alive when the wild dogs came for him.

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”

~ Arnold J. Toynbee

The Dysfunction of Man & The Persistence of Time

14 Saturday Sep 2013

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

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In his hubris, mankind went about subduing, indexing, commodifing, and exploiting all of Earth. He paid very little heed to the consequences of the shrinking richness that once characterized the natural world. Everything had a price since money had become the sole criteria by which all things, animate and inanimate, were valued. From the anthropocentric perspective, if it didn’t serve people in some way or another, what good was it? If need be, man could use his superior intellect to fix or outright replace what he had permanently destroyed. “A better life through technology” became the law of the land. Just as with the accepted tenet of never-ending economic growth, there was the unquestioned belief of technological solutions for all manmade problems brought on by industrial civilization. Hence, bees dying from a chemically saturated environment could be genetically modified to survive in our toxic soup. Extinct flora and fauna could be brought back to life with bioengineering. Where we would put such resurrected organisms in a world overloaded with humans, other than in zoos or other tiny cutouts of artificial habitat, was a question never answered.

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Man became so assured of himself and his technological abilities that he began to lose track of the steadily mounting environmental assaults promising to make Earth uninhabitable for all but a few heat-loving bacteria like thermophiles. In fact many denied outright that such dangers even existed. And those whose livelihood depended on maintaining business-as-usual were more than willing to pay public relations experts who could mold popular thought in favor of such a suicidal path. Most of the truly eco-aware humans, whose numbers were so small as to be inconsequential, spent all their time refuting the ignorance and propaganda of the masses, but to no avail. How could any root causes and solutions ever really be identified if the vast majority were kept at each other’s throats? The climate change deniers fought with the scientists; the capitalists fought with the environmentalists and steady state/degrowth alternative economists, the conspiracy theorists fought with the realists, and ad infinitum. Thus consumed with dissension the human species raced over the cliff of eco-apocalypse and human extinction.

She does not measure time in years, decades, or even centuries, but in millennia. She watches unamused by the tragicomedy of humankind. She is unmoved by the self-inflicted suffering and death that is and will be wrought by our own self-serving behavior. Gaia patiently awaits the extinction of man.

…The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr’d within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before;
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.”

~ Lord Byron, excerpt from ‘Darkness‘

Reckless Terraforming of the Earth and ‘The End of More’

21 Sunday Jul 2013

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

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Hello fellow realists. I haven’t spent much time in the last 14 months at Chris Martenson’s Peak Prosperity site, but I just listened to a podcast he made with climate scientist Dr. Mark A. Cochrane who gives an informative talk on extreme weather, the mangled jet stream, the overly conservative IPCC, the global climate debt, and other interesting topics on climate change. It’s worth your time. Martenson had originally relegated the talk of climate change and even Cochrane’s own climate change thread to the “Controversial Topics” forum at PeakProsperity.com, but Martenson has apparently become more accepting in the last year of the near 100% scientific consensus of climate change. Being a money man, it’s no surprise that Martenson would be nervous and reluctant to speak out on what capitalist industrial civilization is doing to the life support system of every living thing on the planet. To say that human-induced climate change is a “challenging issue” is perhaps the understatement of the millennium. The environmental conditions will continue to change and degenerate for the next 1,000 years even were we to halt all GHG emissions today. I’m sure homo economicus will find ways to profit from the eco-apocalypse just as he has profited from hunger, war, the prison industrial complex, the frantic exploitation of even dirtier and more dangerous fossil fuels, and every other ill that has befallen man. Thanks to Mike at DamnTheMatrix for originally posting this podcast.

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[Warning on Dr. Cochrane’s statement that water vapor is the “main culprit” in causing global warming: See the comments section of this post.]

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I’m currently reading the book “The End of More“(aka ‘Your Medieval Future’) which, if I remember correctly, had the working title of ScareCities, apparently in reference to what is going to happen to all the megacities of the world as we fall down the cliff of peak net energy and suffer a thousand cuts from a climate thrown out of balance. When I’m done with the book, I’ll post a review of it. It’s turning out to be a real page-turner. You can download the kindle book here for the U.S. and here for the UK. The authors state that the purpose of their book is to explain the evolutionary history of modern man and how he “has used all his ingenuity and his fighting skills to bring energy, food, water, and other natural resources to the brink of exhaustion.”

Here is an excerpt:

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Kevin Moore is a frequent visitor here and leaves very erudite and informative comments. He’s written a few books that we may want to look into as well. Here are the links to a couple of them:

Does the lady on the cover come with the book? 🙂

The Easy Way

and

Burn Baby Burn

The CFR and Their Deranged Vision for Arctic Exploitation

18 Thursday Jul 2013

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

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Snap 2013-07-18 at 04.52.15

Before I get into a particular discussion on the new business opportunities afforded by a rapidly melting Arctic, I need to preface it with a short explanation and history of who wrote the article in question and what this group’s agenda is. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) was established after the First World War to formulate and plan the imperial ambitions of the U.S. as the world’s new superpower. The CFR is composed of top officials in the banking, manufacturing, commerce, and finance industries, as well as lawyers, university bureaucrats, and public figures from the media networks. CFR meetings are often held in secret. The primary funders of the CFR have been The Ford Foundation, the federal government, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation. There exists a revolving door between positions held in the CFR and those in the government. The CFR represents the U.S. financial oligarchy and the wealthy elite of America. Lawrence H. Shoup wrote a seminal book on the CFR entitled ‘Imperial Brain Trust – Council on Foreign Relations’. I have a link to it under “Notes and Documents’ on the left side of this website. A quote from page 278 of that book best summarizes what the CFR is truly about: 

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A recent article by Shoup puts some familiar faces to the CFR with Democratic Party politician Dianne Feinstein and her husband finance capitalist Richard C. Blum, both members of the Council. In the following selection from that article, you can see how environmental protection is subverted for the financial interests of the power elite:

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So now we go to the ecological catastrophe unfolding in the Arctic which the CFR and the ruling class see as simply another doorway through which capital accumulation can be carried out via environmental exploitation. The title of the CFR’s article is ‘The Coming Arctic Boom‘ published in the July/August 2013 edition of their journal ‘Foreign Affairs’.

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In this deranged essay, the CFR gushes over the busine$$ opportunitie$ afforded by such a once-in-a-lifetime event as the melting of the Arctic:

[My comments are highlighted red and in brackets]

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Yeah that’s who forms foreign policy for this country. The Mack Truck of climate chaos is barreling full speed ahead with mankind straight in its path, but all Homo Stupidicus can see are dollar signs.

 

Doomer

07 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

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This grimly humorous video comes from Mike Sosebee. A small percentage of us just can’t drink the kool-aid and prefer cold, hard reality over the myth telling and Madison Avenue song-and-dance of capitalist industrial civilization. The entire American hologram is dependent on the masses buying the illusion that all is well. Don’t look behind the curtain. There’s a mountain of corpses and ecological horrors hiding behind that thin veneer of our self-reassuring stories… stories about our corporatocracy democracy, our corporate scripted independent news media, our resource-plundering ‘freedom fighting’ military, our exploitive and destructive wealth-building economy, our move towards a “green-washed” sustainable lifestyle, etc. As commenter Dopamine says, we’re on “a dopamine drip line, a natural morphine intravenous of belief that obscures the less rewarding reality of your existence. That humans are going to turn things around is another belief assuaging the fact that our families have to spend the next hundred years walking through a minefield from which many will not emerge, and for those that do make it, there awaits a planet wasted… And we are completely unable to avoid this perilous journey because our brains quickly substitute a “feel good” fantasy whenever we venture too far into the darkness of our reality. We will walk into the darkness surrounded by pink unicorns, omnipotent Gods, visions of unspoiled paradises, the overflowing font of fusion and so on…”

Although colonizing and enslaving foreign lands and people have always been the modus operandi of this country, I’m sure the elites who founded America never could have imagined that their 1% successors would be able to manipulate the social discourse and behavior of nearly 400 million with consumer goods called TV’s and computers, nor could they have imagined the future Malthusian conditions that would eventually end not only the brief experiment of America, but the entire human experience on planet Earth. When Easter Island became uninhabitable, the rest of the planet never noticed, but now the human footprint will be felt in every nook and cranny of Earth for millennium. Paleontologist Louise Leakey, granddaughter of famed archeologist and naturalist Louis Leakey, uses the analogy of a roll of toilet paper to effectively illustrate the brief but devastatingly influential reign of mankind over the planet.

…To put the history of life on planet earth into a time perspective, imagine unrolling a toilet roll down a hillside. If there are 400 sheets of tissue paper in the roll, then the very first life in the oceans is seen at sheet 240. The age of the dinosaurs begins at sheet 19. Dinosaurs in their many forms and great diversity are around for 14 and a half sheets. Dinosaurs are extinct by the end of the Cretaceous, 5 squares from the end, making way for the mammals. Our story and place on the timeline as upright walking apes begins only in the last half of the very last sheet. The human story as Homo sapiens, is represented by less than 2 millimeters of this, some 200,000 years.

Our own individual lifetimes cannot be depicted on this final sheet of the toilet roll as it would be too thin a line, yet we have been witness to more change to the planet, to the diversity of life, global climate and natural habitats in this same time period. We are undoubtedly the cause of the sixth mass extinction event that the planet has seen in its history…

“Doomer”, as in someone concerned with apocalyptic scenarios of global collapse, is definitely a term of modern usage reflecting the growing unease of the population. People who eschew the word “collapse” in favor of “decline” seem to be hoping that the road ahead will be gentle, predictable and somewhat manageable rather than violent, erratic, and uncontrollable. With homo economicus locked into the infinite growth mantra, there appears to be no other outcome other than a sudden crashing into the fast-approaching wall of environmental limits. The aftermath will be as unrecognizable as the mangled metal of a 100 MPH car crash rather than the slow deterioration and failure of a heavily driven automobile. Oh but that’s too horrible of a thought for the masses to entertain, especially since it threatens our tranquil dreams of white picket-fenced homes with well manicured lawns. Things will be as they always have been, with only minor changes or uncertainties. The dopamine drip line is not in danger of running dry any time soon, and as things deteriorate more and more, the dosage of self-delusional drugs will be increased, lest the population starts to wake up from their stupor. The religious fanatic and mass murderer Jim Jones doesn’t hold a candle to the psychos at the helm of capitalist industrial civilization.

We Are All Cogs in the Bone-Crushing Wheel of Capitalism

05 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Neo-Colonialism, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

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Snap 2013-07-04 at 11.46.08

Two important papers on capitalism by Richard Smith were published in the last few years explaining how capitalism, due to its structural mechanisms, cannot be reformed in any way to make it “sustainable”. In Smith’s papers, Green Capitalism: the God that Failed and Beyond Growth or Beyond Capitalism, four primary dictates of capitalism illustrate that no matter how herculean the effort to “green the economy”, whether through energy or other areas, the end result of inexorable environmental destruction as well as incredible social inequality are inevitable.

1.) “Grow or die” is a law of survival in the marketplace:
In capitalism most producers… have no choice but to live by the capitalist maxim “grow or die.” First, as Adam Smith noted, the ever-increasing division of labor raises productivity and output, compelling producers to find more markets for this growing output. Secondly, competition compels producers to seek to expand their market share, to better defend their position against competitors. Bigger is safer because, ceteris paribus, bigger producers can take advantage of economies of scale and can use their greater resources to invest in technological development, so can more effectively dominate markets. Marginal competitors tend to be crushed or bought out by larger firms. Thirdly, the modern corporate form of ownership, which separates ownership from operation, adds further irresistible and unrelenting pressures to grow from owner-shareholders. And shareholders are not looking for “stasis”; they are looking to maximize portfolio gains, so they drive their CEOs forward.
“…relentless and irresistible pressures for growth are functions of the day-to-day requirements of capitalist reproduction in a competitive market, incumbent upon all but a few businesses, and that such pressures would prevail in any conceivable capitalism. Further, I contend that, given capitalism, the first result of any serious reduction in economic output (GDP) to get production back down to some reasonably sustainable level, would be to provoke mass unemployment. So here again, there will never be mass public support for de-growth unless it’s coupled with explicit guarantees of employment for redundant workers, which are unacceptable to capital and would require a socialist economy…”

2.) Maximizing profit and saving the environment are inherently in conflict:
“…Corporations can embrace pro-environmental policies but only so long as these boost profits. Saving the world, however, would require that profit-making be systematically subordinated to ecological concerns…”
“Most of the economy is comprised of large corporations owned by investor-shareholders. And shareholders, even those who are environmentally-minded professors investing via their TIAA-CREF accounts, are constantly seeking to maximize returns on investment. So they sensibly look to invest where they can make the highest return. This means that corporate CEOs do not have the freedom to choose to produce as much or little as they like, to make the same profits this year as last year. Instead, they face relentless pressure to maximize profits, to make more profits this year than last year (or even last quarter), therefore to maximize sales, therefore to grow quantitatively…
In the real world, therefore, few corporations can resist the relentless pressure to “grow sales,” “grow the company,” “expand market share”– to grow quantitatively. The corporation that fails to outdo its past performance risks falling share value, stockholder flight, or worse… And if economic pressures weren’t sufficient to shape CEO behavior, CEOs are, moreover, legally obligated to maximize profits — and nothing else…”

3.) Consumerism and overconsumption are built into capitalism:
“…consumerism and overconsumption are not “dispensable” and cannot be exorcised because they’re not just “cultural” or “habitual.” They are built into capitalism and indispensable for the day-to-day reproduction of corporate producers in a competitive market system in which capitalists, workers, consumers and governments alike are all locked into an endless cycle of perpetually increasing consumption to maintain profits, jobs, and tax revenues. We can’t shop our way to sustainability because the problems we face cannot be solved by individual choices in the marketplace. The global ecological crisis we face cannot be solved by even the largest individual companies. Problems like global warming, deforestation, overfishing, species extinction, the changing ocean chemistry are even beyond the scope of nation states. They require national and international cooperation and global economic planning. This requires collective bottom-up democratic control over the entire world economy. And since a global economic democracy could only thrive in the context of a rough economic equality, this presupposes a global redistribution of wealth as well.”

4.) The masses are dependent on the market:
“Capitalism is a mode of production in which specialized producers (corporations, companies, manufacturers, individual producers) produce some commodity for market but do not possess their own means of subsistence. So in a capitalisteconomy, everyone is first and foremost, dependent upon the market, compelled to sell in order to buy, to buy in order to sell, to re-enter production and carry on.”

To illustrate a case study in how impossible it is for even an “environmentally conscious” corporation to be sustainable, Smith discusses Ray Anderson and his company Interface, Inc.

Saint Ray Anderson and the limits of the possible:

“…CEO Ray Anderson has probably pushed the limits of industrial environmentalism as far as it’s humanly possible to go in an actual factory operating within the framework of capitalism. Ray Anderson is everybody’s favorite eco-capitalist and he and his company Interface Inc. have been applauded by virtually every eco-futurist book written since the 1990s as the eco-capitalist example to emulate. But what Ray Anderson’s case really shows us is the limits of the possible, especially under capitalism. For after almost two decades of sustained effort, the goal of “zero pollutants” is still as unreachable as ever at Interface Inc. It is not in the least to diminish Ray Anderson’s sincerity, his passionate dedication, his efforts or his impressive achievements. But the fact is, according to The Interface Sustainability Report of 2009, Interface has “cut waste sent to landfills by more than half while continuing to increase production,” “reduced greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30%,” “reduced energy intensity by 45%,” while “over 25% of raw materials used in interface carpet are recycled and biobased materials in 2007,” and non-sustainable materials consumed per unit of product have declined from 10.2 lbs/yd2 in 1996 to 8.6 lb/yd2 in 2008. Read that last sentence again. Make no mistake: These are impressive, even heroic industrial-environmental achievements. But if after more than fifteen years of sustained effort, the most environmentally dedicated large company in the United States, if not the entire world, can only manage to cut non-sustainable inputs from 10.2 to 8.6 pounds per square yard of finished product, to inject a mere 25% recycled and biobased feedstock into its production process, so still requiring 75% of new, mostly petroleum-based nonsustainable feedstock in every unit of production, then the inescapable conclusion must be that even the greenest businesses are also on course to “destroy the world.” So if the reality is that, when all is said and done, there is “only so much you can do” in most industries, then the only way to bend the economy in an ecological direction is to sharply limit production, especially of toxic products, which means completely redesigning production and consumption – all of which is certainly doable, but impossible under capitalism.”

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