The Biophysics of Civilization, Money = Energy, and the Inevitability of Collapse

27 Thursday Mar 2014

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

Tags

Biophysical Economics, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Energy is God, Environmental Collapse, Jevons Paradox, Money = Energy, Offshoring of CO2 Emissions, Second Law of Thermodynamics, Superorganism of Industrial Civilization, Tim Garrett

“…the Second Law also demands that nothing can do anything without consuming concentrated energy, or fuel, and then dissipating it as unusable waste heat. For example, the Earth “consumes” concentrated sunlight to power weather and the water cycle, and then radiates unusable thermal energy to the cold of space. Like the weather in our atmosphere, all economic actions and motions, even our thoughts, must also be propelled by a progression from concentrated fuel to useless waste heat. The economy would grind to a halt absent continued energetic input. Buildings crumble; people die; technology becomes obsolete; we forget. Civilization must constantly consume in order to sustain itself against this constant loss of energy and matter…” ~ Tim Garrett

On average the human brain experiences 70,000 thoughts daily and requires roughly 24 watts or roughly 500 Calories during that time to function. To keep modern civilization running, 17 trillion Watts of power are consumed, 4% of which goes to keeping humanity’s 7 billion bodies alive while the rest powers our buildings, machines, and agriculture. The laws of thermodynamics require that all systems, whether natural or inorganic, evolve and grow through the conversion of environmental potential energy into a dissipated form known commonly as waste heat. Most of the energy we need to run industrial civilization still comes from fossil fuels with coal being the primary source, and projections are that this will remain so far into the future. Since fossil fuels give off nasty greenhouse gasses that heat up the planet and destabilize the biosphere, the obvious question is whether our economic engine can be decoupled from CO2 emissions.

Atmospheric scientist Tim Garrett has a few papers on this subject and a new paper on collapse which I’ll mention at the end, but first let’s review and get an understanding of what he said in his censored paper, ‘Are there basic physical constraints on future anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide?‘, as well as the following recorded speech. I consider Garret to be a biophysical economist firmly rooted in geophysics and reality, much like Albert Bartlett and Charles Hall.

Conclusions of the paper entitled ‘Are there basic physical constraints on future anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide?’:

Improving energy efficiency accelerates CO2 emissions growth.
Absent collapsing the economy (In other words turning the inflation adjusted GDP to zero), emissions can be stabilized only by building the equivalent of one nuke plant per day globally (or some other non CO2-emitting power supply)
Emissions growth has inertia (due to the high probability of points one and two)

The present state and growth of civilization are determined by the past, and the past fundamentally cannot be changed. Thus we are set on a trajectory that can lead to simplified predictions of the future.

Where does the value of money come from?

An economist would say that its value is fundamentally belief-based. I believe it has value and you believe it has value; therefore, it has value.

From a physics perspective, this explanation is a bit unsatisfactory because it doesn’t really explain where that belief comes from. Why is that belief so resilient? Presumably that belief has some physical representation because civilization certainly is part of the physical universe. It’s not separate from it. We are all pat of the physical world.

Civilization is an organism that can be defined by how it consumes/transforms energy. Physics can be used to describe civilization. There are basic laws of thermodynamics and, fundamentally, physics is about the transformation of energy from one state to another or really the flow of energy downhill, or more strictly, the flow of material downhill from a high potential state to a low potential state. You can think of a ball rolling from a high gravitational potential to a low gravitational potential.

Money is a representation of some energetic flow [economic activity] from high potential to low potential. Economic wealth represents the rate of consumption of energy in civilization. An example of this in nature would be a beaver dam which represents civilization.

The energy reservoir for the beaver dam (civilization) is the water behind the dam. The flow of water across the dam from a high gravitational potential to a low gravitational potential represents the size of the beaver’s ‘civilization’. Something similar applies to human civilization which represents a gradient between available energy supplies (coal, oil, uranium) and a point of low potential (outer space).

We consume energy, things happen in civilization due to the flow across that potential gradient (high to low) releasing waste heat which radiates to outer space at a cold temperature of about 255 Kelvin (-18ºC).

We can treat civilization as a single organism that interacts on a global scale with available energy reservoirs and through the transformation of that energy (stuff is done, economic activity occurs). Money is a representation of that capacity to do stuff physically (or how fast it can consume that energy).

This is a testable hypothesis and it can be expressed mathematically which means we can look at this quantitatively.

Wealth is the value of something that has accumulated over time. Based on what we currently have, we are able to produce more which gives us more power to produce even more in the future. It’s through this spontaneous feedback process that civilization (or a beaver dam) is able to grow.

The question is, “How do you calculate this accumulated wealth?”

Economists use GDP as a wealth indicator. All the economic production added up from the beginning of history up to the present is the total accumulated wealth for civilization.

GDP has units of currency per time, so it’s a production per year. Inflation-adjusted production is producing something new to be added to what we currently have and that added over time creates our wealth. The hypothesis says that this process is related to our rate of energy consumption through a constant value λ (9.7, plus or minus 0.3, milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar].

This can be tested with various historical GDP statistics along with records of world total energy production and CO2 emissions.

This hypothesis is supported by the data to an extremely high degree of confidence.

What turns that piece of paper (currency) into a potential to do something is the milliwatts per dollar, as calculated in the chart below:

The graph below shows statistics from the year 1700 onward for inflation-adjusted world GDP(P) Green line. The time integral of GDP, or wealth of civilization(C), is represented by the blue line which has increased by a factor of 6 or 7($300 trillion to $1700 trillion) since 1700. Bursts of growth are seen around 1880 and 1950 in the purple line(η) which is the annual percentage growth rate of world GDP, calculated by dividing the GDP(P) by the wealth of civilization(C). Today the world GDP is about 100 times larger than it was in 1970.

The growth of red line(a), primary energy consumption rate, is essentially moving in tandem with the wealth of civilization (blue line). This suggests that, fundamentally, money is power.

The black line represents the constant coefficient of the power of money λ (9.7, plus or minus 0.3, milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar).

How is emissions related to wealth?

It is the relation of energy consumption and the resultant emissions. Emission rates are fundamentally linked to the wealth of civilization:

You cannot reduce emission rates without reducing the “wealth” of civilization. Wealth is energy consumption; energy consumption is carbon dioxide emissions. The two are inseparable.

In order to just stabilize CO2 levels, you would have to decarbonize as fast as the current growth rate in energy consumption which would work out to about one nuclear power plant per day (or some other comparable non CO2-emitting energy supply).

If you look at atmospheric CO2 concentrations in parts per million by volume (from various sources including ice cores) and compare that to the world GDP going back to 2 A.D., the values increase pretty much in tandem through history:

“If we want to reduce CO2, something has to collapse.”

In more recent years, the world GDP plotted against atmospheric CO2 shows an even more tight relationship between the two:

“You could just go to the top of Mauna Loa with a CO2 monitor and measure the size of the global economy to a high degree of accuracy.”

The positive feedback of building wealth in civilization

Wealth is a representation of energy consumption rates. Real GDP is a representation of the growth rate in energy consumption rates. This cycle is fundamentally linked to physics through the parameter lambda λ (9.7 milliwatts per inflation-adjusted dollar).

GDP is really just an abstract representation of an ability to increase our capacity to consume more energy in the future. That’s what the production really represents.

Civilization is always trying to expand its energy consumption to accumulate more wealth, or reduce the cost of maintenance by improving energy efficiency. More available energy translates into more accumulated wealth which in turn requires more energy for maintenance, creating a vicious circle of unending growth. Energy conservation essentially does not help. The fear of contraction permeates every corner of the economy.

In nature a tree takes available energy in sunlight through photosynthesis to incorporate nutrients from the soil and air in order to grow, and as it grows, it is able to do more of that process in the future. For a healthy tree, increased efficiency speeds up this process. If the tree is diseased, then the efficiency would be compromised until it dies, creating exponential decay.

We could apply this to civilization. If we increase efficiency, it leads to accelerated growth and more energy consumption. This phenomenon is known as Jevon’s paradox, first noted in 1865.

Increased energy efficiency increases the positive feedback of building wealth in civilization which can lead to super exponential growth, and that leads to an ever accelerated increase of CO2 emissions. This feedback loop (rate of return) for building wealth in civilization has increased from about 0.1% per year in 1700 to 2.2% per year, the highest it’s ever been in history.

As mentioned before, there are a couple of inflection points in history for this rate of return, one in 1880 and another in 1950 which likely correspond to new energy reservoirs coming online. This means the problem is fundamentally a geologic problem. 1950-1970 was a boom time for the wealth rate of return. This rate of return has been stagnant in recent years for the first time since the 1930’s, probably related to the current economic crisis. The sheer size of modern civilization has vastly overshot the Earth’s regenerative abilities. Biophysical limits on resource extraction are likely a major contributor to this stagnant rate of return. The extraction of low-grade, dirty fossil fuels is a sign of civilization’s energy desperation.

Future Scenarios

Emissions Impossible…

We aren’t really decarbonizing. Perhaps we’re trying to, but not really.

The model shows that reducing carbon requires a rapid reduction in the size of maintained wealth, as well as rapid abandonment of carbon-burning energy sources at the global rate of 300 GW of new non carbon-emitting power capacity—approximately one new nuclear power plant per day.

“Extending the model to the future, the model suggests that the well-known IPCC SRES scenarios substantially underestimate how much CO2 levels will rise for a given level of future economic prosperity. For one, global CO2 emission rates cannot be decoupled from wealth through efficiency gains. For another, like a long-term natural disaster, future greenhouse warming can be expected to act as an inflationary drag on the real growth of global wealth. For atmospheric CO2 concentrations to remain below a “dangerous” level of 450 ppmv, model forecasts suggest that there will have to be some combination of an unrealistically rapid rate of energy decarbonization and nearly immediate reductions in global civilization wealth. Effectively, it appears that civilization may be in a double-bind. If civilization does not collapse quickly this century, then CO2 levels will likely end up exceeding 1000 ppmv; but, if CO2 levels rise by this much, then the risk is that civilization will gradually tend towards collapse.” ~ Tim Garrett

With business-as-usual, by 2100 the world GDP would be 10 times higher than today and the atmospheric CO2 would be around 1200 ppm.

The developed countries like the U.S., Britain, and Europe have simply offshored their manufacturing base to China and elsewhere for the most part:

Summation

Garrett’s latest paper “Long-run evolution of the global economy: 1. Physical basis” explains key components determining whether civilization can “innovate” itself toward faster economic growth through new energy reserve discovery, improvements to human and infrastructure longevity, and more energy efficient resource extraction technology. Growth slows due to a combination of prior growth, energy reserve depletion, and a “fraying” of civilization networks due to natural disasters… While growth must initially be positive for civilization to emerge, positive growth cannot be sustained forever. Civilization networks are always falling apart, and presumably in a world with finite resources, we will eventually lose the capacity to keep fixing them.” Future loss of useable Land and Water is already in the pipeline from all prior carbon emissions, and CO2 emissions continue to rise unabated. “Whether collapse comes sooner or later depends on the quantity of energy reserves available to support continued growth and the accumulated magnitude of externally imposed decay… Theoretical and numerical arguments suggest that when growth rates approach zero, civilization becomes fragile to such externalities as natural disasters, and the risk is for an accelerating collapse.”

Rip rip woodchip
Turn it into paper
Throw it in the bin
No news today
Nightmare dreaming
Can’t you hear the screaming
Chainsaw I saw more decay

The Technological Sublime

08 Saturday Mar 2014

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

≈ 153 Comments

Tags

"The Relive Box", 6th Mass Extinction, Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Dystopic Future, Environmental Collapse, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Luis Suarez-Villa, Passenger Pigeon, Peak Oil, Richard Heinberg, Richard Wolff, T. C. Boyle, Tasmanian Aborigines, Techno-Optimists, Technocapitalism, Technocapitalism: A Critical Perspective on Technological Innovation and Corporatism, Technophelia

“Life is tragic and absurd and none of it has any purpose at all. Science has killed religion, there’s no hope for the future with seven billion of us on the planet, and the only thing you can do is to laugh in the face of it all.”
~ TC Boyle

This past Thursday night I went to a reading by author T.C. Boyle at Northern Arizona University’s Cline Library. Outside the entrance of the auditorium were a couple of tables lined with signed copies of his numerous novels and collections of short stories and manned by a few young people, perhaps college students, taking people’s money. I had already bought a copy of T.C. Boyle Stories at the local bookstore before coming and read a few of the short stories before the auditorium doors opened. I seldom go to such events, but what had first caught my eye were the titles of some of his books, one of which is A friend of the Earth whose premise is rather dystopic.

While waiting in line for the event, I opened up my book and read “The Extinction Tales” from the author’s first volume of short stories. The title of this particular short story states exactly what it’s about, taking the reader across continents and centuries from the massacre of the passenger pigeon to the genocide of the aboriginal Tasmanians. A couple of modern-day vignettes serve as the bookends to this vast sweep of history, at the beginning the hunting skills of a lighthouse caretaker’s pet cat snuff out the remaining population of the island’s unique bird species and at the end a man is haunted by the death of his father whose funeral he neglected to attend.

The doors opened and perhaps 100 to 200 people filled the seats. After a few fawning introductions by a couple of NAU faculty members, Tom Coraghessan Boyle took the lectern. Tall and lanky with a goatee, wearing red sneakers, and dressed in black with the glowing cat eyes of a printed t-shirt peaking through his opened sports jacket, he appeared more hipster than a sixty-something tenured English professor, but spoke as eloquently and articulately as one would expect.

He read two stories, but the second one resonated with me the most. “The Relive Box” is an allegorical tale of a middle-aged single father who becomes obsessed with the latest hi-tech escapism device which mentally transports people back to any specified time in their life by reading their memories. He’s stuck reliving various moments of his past while his present life falls apart. The ‘here and now’ simply becomes lifeless space and time to be filled by the ‘relive box’.

The parallels with today’s addiction to computers, video games, iPhones, and social media are obvious; our inseparable relationship with technology has made us virtual cyborgs. Our enslavement to technology extends to a societal level with the wide-held assumption that geoengineering and adaptive technologies will evolve in time to spare us from the worst of a collapsing environment, allowing business-as-usual to continue no matter how dire current scientific reports and future projections may be. Unarmed by a blind faith in technology, industrial civilization barrels headlong into a world growing more violent and unstable by the day. Technocapitalists live by the sword of technology and will die by it as well.

In the hands of corporate capitalists, our socio-economic system brings us terminator seeds from Monsanto, predatory banking instead of public banking, the military industrial complex’s war for profit instead of national defense, viagra instead of antibiotics, a government for the ultra wealthy and not the majority, corporate rule with Citizens United instead of representative democracy, and so on.

In the words of David Simon, “There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show.”

Technology is no different in capitalism’s overriding dependency on the successful accumulation of capital:

The system within which institutions, cultures, and people operate determines its policies, beliefs, and behaviors. Those operating within a capitalist system conform to the dictates of corporations. Capitalism cannot be reformed and its resiliency to stay afloat during environmental collapse is remarkable:

Nonetheless, in the final analysis, our entire way of life based on fossil fuels and infinite growth on a planet of finite resources is untenable…

“A small minority — people who are at the margins of the system and who are thus able to observe it as if from outside, who are not tied into any of the major influence groups, and who have learned to seek out alternative sources of information and think critically — will gradually come to the conclusion that the entire system of industrial civilization is inherently unsustainable.”
~ Richard Heinberg, Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World

A “post-carbon world” may very well not include people, but building an alternative system demands that we believe a post-collapse world does include survivors.

Message from the Corporatocracy?

26 Wednesday Feb 2014

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

≈ 97 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-terrorism, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Homeland Security, Iraq Invasion, No-Bid Government Contracts, Runaway Climate Change, Science Applications International Corporation(SAIC), Security and Surveillance State, Techno-Optimists, The Revolving Door Between Government and Corporations, War for Profit, War on Terror, Will Potter: Green is the New Red

This website got an interesting comment in the ‘About’ section from a well-educated fellow who works in the technology sector of the economy. His credentials are impressive. I did some checking to see if he really was who I thought he was and it definitely appears so. His IP address takes me directly to the Science Applications International Corporation(SAIC). SAIC is a major defense contractor with “friends in high places”, having received numerous no-bid contracts from the government. Its top personnel move freely within the government/corporate revolving door. A noteworthy fact in their history is that they were “instrumental” in fabricating the myth that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and they pushed war as the only option. SAIC was the contractor that waisted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on the failed Trailblazer project which was an attempt to create a system that would spy on cell phone, internet, and other electronic communications. Needless to say, they have an extensive and dark history:

Additional information on SAIC is here. Now that I’ve gotten that introduction out of the way, let’s look at the message from Tihamer Toth-Fejel:

Tihamer,

I’m happy you got a chuckle out of this website. We here at CoIC try to deal with the angst of the collapse of industrial civilization by treating the situation with gallows humor. Yes the Roman Empire did take some time to collapse, but I’m very confident that we don’t have the luxury of “hundreds of years” to see modern civilization disappear into the dustbin of history. The reasons for such an accelerated crash have been documented here and elsewhere numerous times. You only have to read The Limits to Growth to know much of what was accurately predicted decades ago. Collapse doesn’t happen overnight, but occurs in pulses and waves. Nothing as large and extensive as modern civilization will simply disappear overnight and no one here pushes such a theory. Ecologic overshoot is not a hard concept to understand and mankind is subject to it just as any other organism, although we have proven very adept at ‘extending and pretending’ our overexpansion. Cognitive biases are “an inevitable feature of adaptive behavior in all organisms, including ourselves.” Perhaps mankind can exhibit a collective free will and turn this ship around, but I highly doubt it. Our political system is beholden to Wall Street money and everything in Washington is predicated on the short-term election cycle. The same goes for our economy which needs constant growth and quarterly profits at the expense of a habitable planet. Dealing with climate change interferes with profits, so the capitalists feel better when they bury their heads in the sand. Unfortunately, humans did not evolve to deal with seemingly invisible, long-term, existential threats such as climate change and ocean acidification, many of their effects being nonlinear and complex.

Concerning your second point, I am indeed using the internet to write about the collapse of industrial civilization. What is your point? I think you are implying that I am anti-technology, encouraging mankind to live in caves. If you read my core beliefs for this site, you’ll find your answer; nonetheless, we do recognize the rule that technology is a byproduct of available energy resources, and at the rate that humanity is exhausting the plant, animal, and mineral wealth of this planet, I’m not sure what pixy dust the techno-optimists think is going to maintain our current set of unsustainable living arrangements. Perhaps you can tell us. And if humans were able to bend the laws of physics and create some new energy source, we would still be in trouble due to overpopulation and our enormous consumption of natural resources. I think Brutus had it right when he called humans “locusts” stripping the land bare.

On your third point, yes planet Earth will eventually die… in about five billion years when our sun becomes a red giant, maybe. Does this inevitability give us the green light to exterminate everything within a mere century? This would be somewhat analogous to a three-year-old committing suicide because they have come to the realization that they only have roughly 80 more years to live. And what about future generations? Is that even a consideration in your thinking? Perhaps you could even expand your thinking to include this planet’s myriad other life-forms whose biological functions support a vast web of life that makes our very own existence possible. Humans are currently overseeing the 6th mass extinction which will likely take us all down as well, but I’m sure you are well aware of this crisis and are working diligently on some sort of techno-fix for it. Your last sentence implies that you are a person of the anti-environmental, right-wing persuasion who sees those concerned about the habitability of the planet as eco-terrorists. This is a predictable viewpoint from someone who is an apparent contractor for the DoD and servant of the corporatocracy, but I assure you that future biospheric events will change the minds of even the most greeny-hating, military-industrial-complex loving demagogues on the planet.

No Escape

15 Saturday Feb 2014

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

≈ 161 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Regulatory Capture, Security and Surveillance State, Surplus Value, The Black Angels: Young Men Dead, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud

A DJ on the radio mentioned the flooding in England the other day and exclaimed, “The climate is going crazy!”. The shallowness of the conversation and its failure to dig any deeper as to the reasons why the climate is “going crazy” is mirrored in the mainstream media and our society. Real journalism is simply another casualty of our rotting consciousness. Like a leper, those who cannot see or feel are oblivious to their own self-inflicted wounds. The flywheel of industrial civilization continues to spin out of control, taking out chunks of ecological bricks making up a once diverse and vibrant living planet. In some parts of the world, epic drought is desiccating cropland and exposing the cracked surface of lake beds, while on the other side of the globe unceasing rain is causing deluges of biblical proportion. Still other regions are experiencing freak snow and ice storms. The damage is done, but humans will continue to scour the earth for resources to maintain a house whose foundation now rests on the shifting sands of a destabilized biosphere.

If you thought shale gas was a nightmare, you ain’t seen nothing yet. A subterranean world of previously ignored reserves is about to be opened up. These are the vast coal deposits that have proved unreachable by conventional mining, along with gas deposits around them. To the horror of anyone concerned about climate change, modern miners want to set fire to these deep coal seams and capture the gases this creates for industry and power generation.
– Fire in the hole: After fracking comes coal

Weather patterns once held in place by an ice-locked Arctic are unraveling at an unsettling pace, yet industrial man can’t seem to pull himself away from his carbon burning orgy long enough to see that the monkey wrench inside Earth’s intricate and homeostatic climate system is himself. Never in the history of Earth has a single species become a geologic force for mass planet-wide extinction. The worshippers of the “free market” proclaim solutions to climate change will be forthcoming in the form of technology, yet all environmental laws and regulations are simply window dressing around the resource consuming pit of capitalism. Technology cannot replenish depleted resources or restore the relative ecological equilibrium that existed prior to the industrial revolution. Natural law is nonnegotiable and those who transgress it, repeatedly ignoring clear and present warning signs, are doomed to suffer the unforgiving consequences. Modern man will leave behind a toxic and radioactive wasteland for eons.

The corporate state is impotent in the face of the environmental meltdown since its only real purpose appears to be an enabler and enforcer to the plunder of the commons and the concentration of wealth into the most ruthless and greedy hands. There is no escaping this system that is locked into a path of self-destruction except through death, as Kevin Moore describes on this blog:

“…in general terms the purpose of government is:

a) to facilitate the looting-and-polluting of local regions and the planet as a whole in order that a small minority can acquire material wealth and enjoy themselves.
b) to facilitate the transfer of wealth from those lower in the hierarchical system to those near the top.
c) to keep the general populace uninformed and compliant.
d) to provide sufficient ‘trickle down’ for the misinformed and deluded masses to think they are not being exploited.
e) [more recently] to promote the agendas of transnational corporations, which are focused on complete control of populations and resources and maximization of short-term profits.

The purpose of environmental laws is:

1. to facilitate the looting-and-polluting of local regions and the planet as a whole but to limit the impact of severe pollution in specific cases where that pollution would be detrimental to other planet-destroying money-making activities..
2. to provide the pretence that governments care about the welfare of the general populace.
3. to provide looters and polluters with official mandates for looting and polluting, i.e. an environmental impact process having been gone through and ‘no significant impacts identified’, the activity of the looter-and-polluter is given the stamp of approval.

Under such a system it become inevitable that all politicians are, or quickly become, bought-and-paid-for professional liars and that all senior environment officers become lackeys to the system and therefore enemies of the people.

The entire political-economic system of western nations is geared to making everything that matters worse, so everything that matters gets worse.”

These are the unvarnished and stark rules of the game for those who care to know the truth. Becoming fully aware is a hope-destroying and soul-wrenching realization, but the truth is never measured by its popularity and very few ever face and accept it. The welfare and safety of the public and future generations will continue to be sacrificed at the altar of stock markets and mass consumerism. As commenter James says:

“…Murdering extant humans NOW to gain wealth is accepted government policy and in some cases personal policy…”

Nowhere is this more true than in the one country that comprises 5% of the world’s population, but consumes 25% of its resources; others are furiously trying to catch up.

So as the industrial world whistles past the graveyard on its civilization-ending trajectory, we watch the signposts of doom whiz by us each day and wonder what is the point of getting up every morning to participate in this omnicidal culture. With virtually the entire planet having been plotted, demarcated, sold off for exploitation and surveillance by drone, I’m afraid no one is getting out of this trap alive so you might as well learn to respond to current news events with a certain black and morbid humor. We are the pathologists of capitalist industrial civilization, dissecting its potholed road to collapse just as a coroner would conduct the postmortem examination of a morbidly obese person who gorged themself on twinkies and high fructose soft drinks.

Many have used the phrase “the climate is moving to a new normal” or “moving to a new paradigm”. Such phrases give a false sense of security, as if the damage has stopped and the Earth’s systems can now recalibrate to a new settled state, but human forcing of the biosphere by way of GHG emissions continues unabated and in fact has now tripped multiple climate tipping points. There is no “new paradigm”, but an ongoing cascading collapse of all known stability and equilibrium.

When you go into your mindless 9-to-5 job and your micromanaging boss harasses you for petty little things, you’ll think about how meaningless it all is in an age where governments will crumble, billions will starve to death, and the earth will soon become just another lifeless rock floating through space.

“…Run for the hills, pick up your feet and let’s go.
 We did our jobs, pick up speed now lets move.
 The trees can’t grow without the sun in their eyes.
 And we can’t live if we’re too afraid to die….”

Undone by Our Own Success

04 Tuesday Feb 2014

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

≈ 115 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Overpopulation, Social Justice, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit

Archeologists tell us that, even before the Neolithic Era, man used fire to shape the distribution of flora and fauna in local environments. After several hundred thousand years of evolving a greater capacity for high level thinking and social networking, modern man has armed himself with technology giving him the ability to alter the ecosphere globally, and he has done so with devastating results. No place on the planet has escaped the effects of mankind’s activities. Isolated Arctic sea floors have even been found to have bits of plastic debris, and polar bears are becoming the most toxic creatures on Earth.

In the twilight of the Anthropocene Age, the writing on the wall has become painfully clear. The high-tech civilization modern man erected with fossil fuels will likely be undone by its own success. For about the last half million years, CO2 levels fluctuated between 180 and 300 ppm until mankind discovered an energy source that would catapult his numbers and planetary footprint into the stratosphere. CO2 and other polluting greenhouse gasses are breaching levels never before seen in human history and they continue to be spewed into the thin layer of atmosphere that is essential for life on Earth at the rate of nearly 10,000 million metric tons every year. We are the first humans to breathe air with 400 ppm CO2. The last time CO2 levels were this high was during the Pliocene Age when there was no Arctic ice, temperatures were 19°C warmer in the Arctic, average global temperatures were 2° to 3.5°C warmer, and global sea levels were 20 plus meters higher. The climate lag time has decades to catch up to what we have already done, and we’re still forcing the climate system with both feet on the gas pedal. Decades of studies and warnings by scientists have not moved the needle one iota, and unheeded warnings will still be coming as we plummet over the cliff into the mangled pile of corpses below. Living under the oncoming threat of climate chaos is a compounding stressor because it affects the security of food, water, shelter, economy, government, civilization, and the existence of the human species itself. There is no tangible enemy to conquer or sanctuary to escape to. It will turn each of us against each other and goad nations to war. Climate change is a monster of our own creation that mankind refuses to face even as its malignant presence grows stronger and stronger.

The natural carbon cycle has been blown to smithereens. Carbon sinks such as the oceans and forests appear to be reaching capacity as evidenced by the dying coral reefs and the global die-off of forests. Vegetation will cease to act as a sink at 4°C warming, according to recent research. Like a petri dish microbe which has reached the last fatal doubling of its exponential growth cycle, humans have filled the Earth to the brim and triggered the collapse of their own life support system. Over 50% of earth’s ice-free land surface is now occupied by human industry and activity — farms, crops, plantations, strip malls, city sprawl (Hooke et. al. 2012). Nonetheless hope springs eternal; some wishful thinkers say that if we stopped our fossil fuel binge cold turkey right now, then perhaps we could stabilize the damage to 2°-3.5°C warming which would be four to six times the warming the Earth has already experienced in the last century (0.5°C). Yet any prospect of pulling the plug on industrial civilization is more remote than aliens from outer space intervening to save humans from themselves. Coal plants continue to be built at a frantic pace and all the various manufacturing activities of modern-day life continue to churn along from the mass production of plastic novelty trinkets to the construction of behemoth aircraft carriers. With catastrophic damage from climate chaos already happening before our very eyes, I shudder to think what the future holds as we blissfully go about our daily lives damning future generations to a world with average global temperatures of 5°-9°C or greater.

The Earth cares no more for the selfish concerns of humans than for any other living thing which has upset the ecological balance of nature and gone extinct. It cares nothing about the profits calculated by humans with their mountaintop removal for coal, boreal forest clearance for tar sands excavation, or blowouts from deep sea drilling for oil and gas. In the deep time of geologic history, these are all the foolish endeavors of one destructive and unsustainable hominid called Homo economicus. Corporations pay to protect their privilege to pollute through political lobbying and legal bickering, but the laws of nature cannot be altered or bought off. Technology and adaption strategies are based on linear thinking and will ultimately prove to be the futile efforts of an arrogant, out-of-touch and increasingly desperate species. Nature and the laws of physics cannot be compromised by any amount of greenwashing, international ‘Earth Summits’, or eco-friendly product labels. Climate chaos and environmental destruction march onward in full technicolor display as self-serving humans continue to argue, cheat, lie, collude, deceive and stick their collective head in the sand. The victims of industrial pollution will not just be confined to the impoverished Third World, but will grow to encompass the entire human race. And the one country who proclaims itself the “shining city on a hill”, a beacon of democracy, and global leader is herding everyone down the path of climate genocide.

The ecological crisis and social justice issues are intimately intertwined and one could never be solved separately from the other. The cosmology of capitalism demands the objectification and commodification of nature as well as the appropriation and commercialization of all aspects of society. The social-ecological problem of fossil fuel dependency can be clearly seen when an energy company targets a people’s land to be used as a sacrifice zone such as with West Virginia mountaintop coal mining or fracking in Texas. Social and ecological decay will persist and worsen without adopting a way of life that respects both the integrity of the land and rights of people.

“These are sacrifice zones, areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. And we’re talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed. And because there are no impediments left, these sacrifice zones are just going to spread outward.”
~ Chris Hedges

Each day that passes without a change to the status quo is another upward ratchet in the scale and strength of climate chaos. Each day passes and the same rhetoric of denial and false hope fills the airwaves, TV, and internet. Some conscientious bloggers document the worsening state of the world almost in real time, but they soon come to the realization that our fate seems to be written in stone as if we are following a script with only one ending. The super-organism of capitalist industrial civilization has no national, cultural, or environmental allegiance, and will sacrifice billions of people to keep business-as-usual going.

In a ravaged world, death will be big business.

“In horror of death, I took to the mountains – again and again I meditated on the uncertainty of the hour of death, capturing the fortress of the deathless unending nature of mind. Now all fear of death is over and done.” ~ Milarepa

A Walk Along the Beach of Doom with Benjamin Franklin

31 Friday Jan 2014

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

≈ 129 Comments

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Benjamin Franklin, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Greenwashing, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Security and Surveillance State, Thomas Malthus, War for Profit

“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.

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.”

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.

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

Extinction is Profitable, in the Short Term

25 Saturday Jan 2014

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

≈ 53 Comments

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Arctic Ice Melt, Benjamin Franklin, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporatocracy, Derrick Jensen, Dystopic Future, Eco-Apocalypse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Free Market Ideologues, Greenwashing, Inverted Totalitarianism, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, Mass Die Off, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Pink Floyd - Money, Privatization, Runaway Climate Change, The Elite 1%, Venus Syndrome, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit

“Hey, my name’s Luke. The year is 2060 and I live in what was once called America. As you can see, the ‘developed world’ never was able to kick its fossil fuel habit. They just kept turning to dirtier sources and more extreme processes to burn the stuff, like the liquefaction and gasification of coal. The entire planet became a sacrifice zone for the sake of keeping mega cities lit up and the machinery humming, but ultimately it was death by a thousand cuts. Entropy was the victor. GHG’s continued to rise, warm the planet, and wreak havoc on the biosphere. Cancer and industrial disease spread to every corner of the globe. Weather patterns were drastically altered until the world’s food production was forced to move indoors. Large-scale cloning of animals became common practice in order to feed the several hundred million surviving people. War, drought, floods, fresh water scarcity, and a rash of pandemics crashed the world’s population from a high of 8 billion. The agricultural bread baskets of the world became wastelands of dust and weeds. International cooperation failed and the world’s existing powers scrambled for the last remaining resources. There are none who buy into the propaganda of a “better world” any longer because the stark evidence of what we have done to the planet cannot possibly be hidden from view. There is no utopian sanctuary for anyone to escape to, no matter how many gold coins one has managed hoard. Despite this realization and even after all the geoengineering mishaps, people still cling to the belief of salvation through technology. Everyone lives in fortified bunkers to escape the hot, drying winds that sometimes carry poisonous and toxic clouds. When we do venture out, gas masks are always worn as well as long clothing to protect from the thinning ozone layer. Industrial smoke stacks still belch plumes into the air to keep the underground cities running.”

“When above ground, I’ll spend hours walking through the wreckage of industrial civilization, the skeletons of its skyscrapers blotting out the sun like the mythical Redwood trees once did along the west coast. The occasional sound of a steel beam crashing to the ground or a glass window shattering breaks the ghostly silence. These deserted cities are infested with rats the size of small dogs, and the ray of my flashlight is reflected in their staring eyes. The endless and self-defeating rat race of humans has now been replaced by the scurrying, scavenging, and fighting of real rats. I find it amazing that my ancestors spent their entire lives living and working inside these little office cubicles. That was a time when Earth was still green and you could hear the birds chirping and singing outside your window. I’ve got a digital recording of various holographic scenes depicting bygone days of nature that I project inside the confines of my subterranean home, but I’d give my right arm to experience the real thing. To think that people were once surrounded by nature all the time amazes me. Its true value had never really been calculated. Rather, money seems to have been what people were most preoccupied with back then. On one of my excursions I came across a dwelling whose crumbling walls were packed with stacks of moldy paper money. Whoever lived there must have worked an entire lifetime to eke out a savings of that size, stuffing it into every wall cavity like it was insulation. Many thought humans would go extinct long before money would ever cease to exist. I guess they were wrong.”

“They say the people of this country went mad, obsessed with money as it overtook their every thought, decision, and activity. One of America’s forefathers once said, ‘He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money.‘ All things were framed within the context of money. Environmental damage was discussed in terms of financial setbacks to the economy. Political leaders made decisions based, first and foremost, on the financial interests of those powerful few who put them in office. Choices on matters involving the well-being of humanity were made solely in the interests of corporations and stockholders. Even as the overwhelming evidence mounted that mankind’s place on earth was becoming evermore tenuous, the money worshippers continued to find ways to profit from calamity and mayhem. Preserving the Earth simply was not profitable, so they let it die. The Arctic melted, so they raided its open waters. The land became parched, so they invested in water rights. CO2 levels skyrocketed, so they put their money into carbon credits. Our continued existence became a crap shoot in the marketplace. The vultures of capitalism were able to profit from the collapse; thusly, such nightmarish and dystopian scenarios as botched geoengineering schemes, a Venus syndrome on earth, and ultimately human extinction were allowed to become sober realities….”

‘No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.’
~ Derrick Jensen

Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings

08 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by Brutus in Climate Change, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 86 Comments

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Bill Mckibben's The End of Nature, Climate Change, Climate Tipping Points, Eco-Apocalypse, Environmental Collapse, Hypothermia, Polar Vortex, Runaway Climate Change, The Butterfly Effect

Let’s start with a quote from Wikepedia:

In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependency on initial conditions in which a small change at one place in a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The name of the effect, coined by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the theoretical example of a hurricane’s formation being contingent on whether or not a distant butterfly had flapped its wings several weeks earlier.

In the popular mind, which is arguably more heavily influenced by myth, fiction, and propaganda than by science (especially something as esoteric as chaos theory), the butterfly effect is often understood as a minor disturbance to a timeline resulting in a substantial divergence downstream. It’s an alteration from one likelihood or expectation to another one, typically carrying major impacts. We have no trouble believing in fates and destinies being fundamentally altered by arbitrary choices and happenstances. Hindsight sometimes even affords the opportunity to wonder what might have happened if one had zigged instead of zagged, knowing that every instant has the unbeknowst potential for a life-changing development. (What bus?) The foresight to recognize those linchpin moments escapes us most of the time, but we believe in them nonetheless.

My reason for bringing this up is to make the observation that with the biosphere now manifesting major impacts that are highly discontinuous from the historical record, we don’t really believe in the butterfly effect, or at least ignore/deny it. Minor perturbances, from population pressure to pollution to paving to purported prosperity, are frequently thought to be too tiny to affect something as large as the planet and its finely tuned systems. Yet ripples and eddies have accumulated over time and are now lapping shores like tsunamis, causing the face of the Earth to be quite different from its state, say, 250 years ago, before the fossil fuels era kicked off in earnest.

This week’s biggest news is a good case in point: an artic vortex has brought dangerously low temperatures and wind chills to North America. This phenonenon, where the mass of extremely cold air slides off its normal center at the North Pole, may not be entirely unknown in modern history, but its reappearance this week reminds us that small changes to the systems of the Earth’s thermal regulation can wreak substantial havok. (Please stop reporting the damage in terms of cost in dollars!) Further, in answer to the question, “Are these cold temps due to climate change?” at least this article at Common Dreams answers unequivocally “yes.” It argues that all weather events major and minor are now attributable to climate change because, like the fate or destiny aspect of the butterfly effect, we have embarked on a new timeline that diverges from a calmer, steadier state we might have enjoyed had we not made unwitting, wholesale alterations to the Earth’s climate systems. This is essentially the same argument made by Bill McKibben in The End of Nature way back in 1989, namely, that Nature (capital N) didn’t really exist anymore because humanity’s imprint is now everywhere: in the air, water, and soil. (Incidentally, this is the book that awakened me to ecological issues that in the ensuing 25 years have only grown progressively gloomier and doomier.) Put another way for the entertainment-bred masses, we now have the equivalent of J.J. Abrahm’s reboot of Star Trek TOS with a new timeline, offering the opportunity to depart from canon as desired. The major difference is that, in our reality, we can only project and extrapolate how it would have been had we not messed everything up — except to say that it wouldn’t have been, well, nearly so messed up.

From my home and workplace in Chicago, it’s been curious to see how people have responded to the extreme cold. Fashion has been displaced in favor of function, with men and women on the street mummified under multiple layers to the point they look like the Michelin Man. Traffic (air, train, bus, automobiles) has not ground to a complete halt but it’s been slowed to a crawl, with many cancellations, delays, and accidents. The huddled masses (read: the homeless and unhoused) are congregating unapologeticaly in warming locations (public buildings such as libraries, underground pedways, on public transportation, etc.) to avoid the very real threat of freezing to death. Nonetheless, several freezing deaths have already been reported. School and business closures kept many at home, with many others calling in to complain of their inability to get to work. Four days of snow just prior to the extreme cold snap has everything covered in snow and ice, and plumes of water vapor behind every vehicle and over every building testify to the ongoing maintenance of an inside/outside temperature delta of 80+ deg. F. In addition, everything is encrusted in salt, which inevitably gets tracked indoors.

The look and feel of this experience may not yet be apocalyptic, but the sense of hunkering down to endure, if not survive, is palpable. Most individuals are cooperative and aware of others facing the same difficulties, but there are always a few douchebags arguing and pushing their way forward as though no one else matters. Such idiots turn out to be yet another part of the entire package to be tolerated, though my suspicion is that worsening conditions in repeat events will eventually lead to intolerance, violence, and mayhem. It’s a sneak peek, perhaps, of what many of us expect when collapse of services and utilities, financial institutions, and infrastructure impacts all of us directly, like the weather is impacting us this week.

We’ll Have Nothing Left to Lose!!!

05 Sunday Jan 2014

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

≈ 61 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smoke ’em if ya got ’em.

28 Saturday Dec 2013

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

≈ 75 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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