• About

Collapse of Industrial Civilization

~ Finding the Truth behind the American Hologram

Collapse of Industrial Civilization

Tag Archives: Geoengineering

Concerning Humanity’s Future: Interview with Nick Humphrey, Climatologist and Geoscientist

29 Friday Mar 2019

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

≈ 57 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Abrupt Climate Change, Antarctic Ice Melt, Desertification, Extreme Weather Events, Geoengineering, Monoculture Farming, Nick Humphrey, Nuclear Energy, Overpopulation

NOAA image of the “bomb cyclone” that struck the Midwest earlier this month, triggering flooding in three states and taking the lives of humans and livestock. The National Weather Service described it as “incredible” and a “Great Plains cyclone of historic proportions.”

I first discovered the writings of meteorologist/geoscientist Nick Humphrey with his brutally honest essay The Conversation No One Knows How To Have and since then have followed his posts and comments. He has been featured or quoted in a number of publications such as Mother Jones, New York Times, Washington Post, and Science Alert. Few scientists will publicly tell you how dire things are, but Nick Humphrey is not one to shy away from the truth. What follows is a Q&A interview I held with him on a variety of questions concerning humanity’s future.

ML: Can you give us a brief summary of your background and why you became interested in studying the detrimental effects of climate change?

NH: My background is in meteorology, geosciences and interdisciplinary studies. I have a Bachelor of Science in Interdisciplinary Studies from South Dakota State University. I completed a Master of Science in Geosciences with a concentration in Applied Meteorology from Mississippi State University in 2016. My education and research studies have been in the societal impacts of weather/climate, natural hazards, and advanced forecasting techniques. I also have a background in global climatology. I did undergraduate research into human decision-making in response to tornado warnings and graduate research in tropical cyclone impacts.

I have been following news and research into climate change for about the past decade. However, I became more intensive in my personal research as a result of an apparent acceleration in climate impacts in the past 4-5 yrs. My study took me to look into the research of scientists such as Dr. Natalia Shakhova, Dr. James White, Dr. Peter Wadhams, Dr. James Lovelock, and Paul Beckwith. I also looked into the interdisciplinary connections between ecological and environmental variables by Dr. Guy McPherson.

~~~~~~~~~~~

ML: What is the most disturbing aspect of anthropogenic global warming that you are seeing today and what are its implications for the future?

NH: To me, the most disturbing aspect is the destruction of ice on the planet. It is commonly discussed among climate scientists that the planet has a high “inertia”. This means in natural climate change, there is typically a significant lag between what is happening in the atmosphere (rise in greenhouse emissions) and climate response (warming of the planet), forcing a more gradual temperature rise.

There are two very important components of Earth’s inertia.
1) Water (which can gain/lose a huge amount of heat with a gradual temperature change) and 2) Ice.
Ice, in my view, is the biggest climate regulator because it can do two things:
1) In the process of melting and freezing, heat is latent or “hidden”. Meaning it does not contribute to temperature, but to melting (heat gain) or freezing (heat loss) of ice.
2) Ice is white, so as a result, it is a high reflector of visible light, preventing absorption of heat at the surface. So it has a double impact. As the planet loses ice because of warming temperatures, there is less total ice to melt and more heat goes into warming the oceans, land and atmosphere. It takes nearly 80 times more heat to melt ice than to warm the same amount of liquid water by 1 degree C/1.8 degrees F. The less ice there is, the lower the planetary albedo, resulting in more heat entering the climate system, creating a feedback loop to destroy ice faster and accelerating planetary heating. The loss of sea ice in the Arctic is a planetary catastrophe.

Trends in sea ice thickness are another important indicator of Arctic climate change. While sea ice thickness observations are sparse, here we utilize the ocean and sea ice model, PIOMAS (Zhang and Rothrock, 2003), to visualize mean sea ice thickness from 1979 to 2019. Updated through February 2019. https://sites.uci.edu/zlabe/arctic-sea-ice-volumethickness/

~~~~~~~~~~~

ML: With the environmental damage that has already been put into the pipeline, modern organized human society may not survive this century and we are already seeing signs of this with the destruction caused by recent extreme weather events. The city of Beira in Mozambique, recently hit by Cyclone Idai, is said to be “the first city to be completely devastated by climate change.” Do you think it’s possible to transition to a net-zero carbon emission civilization within a brief period? Would this not require a radical reconfiguration of every sector of our economy and the way in which we treat each other and the environment?

NH: In short, no, I do not think it is possible to transition to a net-zero carbon emission civilization within a decade. The idea itself is simply absurd because it would require basically returning to a pre-industrial society with none of the benefits which came from building the society provided by fossil fuels. There are some economists and environmentalists who believe you can have “green growth” but such growth leads to further environmental destruction as population and energy demands continue to grow exponentially. In order to go to a net-zero carbon civilization, you must first, ironically, increase carbon usage. More building of solar panels around the world, more building of wind farms, more building of electric cars, more concrete, more metal manufacturing, more highly polluting mining, not only of the land, but more rare Earth metals will be needed from the seas, harming ecosystems and polluting the oceans. Meanwhile, none of this stops climate change because, as you mention, there is already much damage in the pipeline.

At 500 parts per million of equivalent carbon dioxide concentration, enough greenhouse gases are currently in the atmosphere to ultimately warm the planet 4-5 degrees C/7-9 F above 1700s temperatures, raise the sea level by 220 feet/67 meters (assuming 1 ppm CO2 equivalent = 1 ft sea level rise, based on past longer-term paleoclimate change response), remove significant amounts of soil moisture, leading to the destruction of agriculture. And this is without any other carbon releases or feedbacks. Building more in an attempt to maintain civilized society with high energy consumption makes this all worse.

~~~~~~~~~~~

ML: There are around 454 nuclear reactors around the world with several dozen more currently under construction. At least 100 U.S., European and Asian nuclear power stations are built just a few meters above sea level. With accelerated sea level rise and stronger storms on the horizon, we should be planning right now to decommission and close down these future nuclear disasters. What is your stance on nuclear energy?

NH: Nuclear reactions themselves are an effective way to produce energy. The problem is that, like any form of energy, it requires energy to produce it and leaves waste products. Fossil fuels are needed to build the nuclear reactors (especially all the concrete), water is needed to keep the reactors fuel rods cool, and nuclear waste results from the use of the reactors which must be stored safely for thousands of years. It requires civilization to function for thousands of more years to keep it functional and safe or alternatively decades to properly decommission them. Given sea level rise is accelerating with a doubling of approximately 7-10 years (possibly causing a meter of sea level rise as early as the 2040s-2050s, faster in some regions like the US East Coast), I do not believe we should be building more nuclear reactors and should decommission all others as quickly as possible to save what remains of the natural world from devastating impacts of nuclear failures if civilization collapses and humans are unable to care for those sites.

I make note, it is not only nuclear power stations on coastal areas which are of concern. Stations located along rivers are at risk as well…from increasingly larger floods, drying rivers which are used for cooling, and warming rivers which do not bring in cool enough water to keep the reactors cool. These events are already happening.

~~~~~~~~~~~

ML: What do you think about geoengineering schemes by scientists to dim the sun in order to reduce global warming and buy humanity more time to “fix” the problem? Proposed technology that could pull CO2 out of the atmosphere at the scale required is generally considered a pipe dream. At what point do you think our civilization will lose faith in technology to solve all our problems?

NH: Geoengineering schemes, to me, are equivalent to using a small band-aid for a large stab wound. It is and will be completely overwhelmed by what is happening. Spraying aerosols over the Arctic to try to cool the Arctic with increased summer cloud formation doesn’t solve the fact that there is 500 ppm of equivalent carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere which cannot be removed with the speed and scale required. You are not dealing with regions where the geoengineering is being done in closed systems. You cool one area, other areas will respond by warming further. You cool one region, atmospheric and ocean circulations will develop and intensify to transport heat to the cooling area to try to equalize the temperature imbalance. Direct ocean heating from below the ice will make it difficult to grow thick ice and not allow ice to reform in the polar night. These heat balances have always existed of course, but it was still cool enough to allow significant ice to exist in the Arctic. The atmosphere is now too altered to allow widespread sea ice to exist in the near future and geoengineering doesn’t prevent this or even delay it in a meaningful way.

~~~~~~~~~~~

ML: In the recent extreme flooding in the U.S. Midwest, farmers suffered devastating losses with similar food shocks on the rise around the world. How do you see the world feeding itself in such an uncertain future, especially when industrial monoculture is actually increasing worldwide?

NH: In short, I do not see a way for humans to feed themselves in an organized manner. Using the worse-case estimate for warming since pre-industrial times, the planet’s land air and sea surface has averaged around +1.2 C relative to pre-industrial the past 5 years with a peak of +1.4 C in 2016. The Northern Hemisphere land masses (where most of the food on the planet is grown) are quickly approaching +2 C. And we are already seeing the impacts of both extreme heat and extreme precipitation events on crops which depend on stability at mild temperatures and an expected range of moisture. This will only worsen and in between +1.5-2 C, we will conservatively see a reduction of US crop yields by between 30-46% of recent levels. By +4 C, that falls to 63-82% as aridification —droughts which are never-ending— dominate the Great Plains/Midwest and California Central Valley with very extreme summer heat and occasional intense rainfall as well as destructive flood events, exacerbating soil erosion.

We are entering a range of weather conditions not supportive of agriculture. And not simply monoculture. All agriculture. Even other ways of doing Ag require stable weather conditions, seasonality, soils and ability to conduct economic activity between peoples. None of this will be possible in these conditions. And that assumes the ecosystems which support agriculture also remain stable and available and that is not likely given the ongoing global extinction of insects.

NASA before/after imagery of flooding near Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska.

~~~~~~~~~~~

ML: Many mainstream scientists feel that to “work within” the system, they have to use language that politicians and economists can understand in order to maintain credibility, i.e. the “value of ecosystem services”. Attempting to place a monetary value on every aspect of nature while externalizing the environmental cost of pollution is a major flaw of our economic system. Inaction by governments and corporations on climate change may have already condemned a large percentage of the global population to a premature death. Do you think ecocide should be an international crime?

NH: If ecocide were an international crime, we would all be guilty in some way. Obviously, I do not believe all humans are *equal* in terms of blame. A person living in the US is a far far larger consumer of energy with a bigger carbon footprint than a person in say, Kenya or Indonesia. And of course, the developing world receives cheap products (coal, plastics, etc) from the developed world. However, while greenhouse gas pollution is significant from countries such as the US and China, plastic pollution is significant *everywhere*. Mining pollution is significant everywhere. Deforestation either is or has been in the past significant from Canada to Europe, increasing in the Amazon, the continent of Africa, etc. Water is nearing depletion on the Great Plains, parts of Europe, Australia and falling quickly in the Amazon. We’ve required more energy on this planet for all the technologies which many would consider have enhanced human life and existence on this planet…improved infrastructure, medicines, monoculture farming which did allow for much higher and resilient production of crops, etc. But all of those “improvements” to the human condition come at a cost and that cost is the destruction of the natural world, and ultimately ourselves.

~~~~~~~~~~~

ML: I understand wealthy countries have much larger carbon footprints per capita than the rest of the world due to our unsustainable consumption patterns, but the other much overlooked factor is overpopulation. We are adding roughly 90 million more people onto the planet per year, many of whom are striving to attain a similar western standard of living. Is there any ethical way to control population growth or will nature be the final arbiter? What do you think is the maximum carrying capacity for the Earth’s human population?

NH: Overpopulation is a major problem and factor in the mass extinction ongoing on the planet. However, given the scales required to fix the problem, I do not see a way to fix it which would fix the damage already done to the planet within the timeframes necessary. The only *ethical* means to control overpopulation is to educate a free population (in particular, women must have reproductive freedom) on the benefits to humans by improving the natural world. Laws will fail because it is ultimately an issue of personal physical sovereignty and humans will always fight for personal sovereignty over their bodies as it relates to sex and reproduction vs. govt interference. China’s one-child policy had a lot of unintended consequences. There are other ways to try to “control” but ultimately, what would really be needed is population decline. Given humans are a relatively large land mammal, in order for Earth to have kept ecosystem stability, the human population would have to have stayed in the millions, spread thinly across hospitable regions of the planet as hunter-gatherers. The population of hunter-gatherer/early agricultural humans in the Early Holocene (10-12,000 years ago) is estimated at 1-10 million.

Ultimately, nature appears to be “loading the gun” to make it difficult for the human population to grow much longer; and really, it will crash. The 6th mass extinction is underway and humans will be a part of this given we are at the top of the food web.

~~~~~~~~~~~

ML: Who, living today, serves as a role model and inspiration for you and in what way? Do you follow any particular philosophy in your life?

NH: I’d say one role model of mine is my father. He died in January 2017 after a battle with cancer. He spurred my interest in science as a child and was one who always strongly emphasized the importance of finding the truth, no matter how difficult it was or the barriers that happened to be in the way. Another is Dr. Albert Einstein, who had many personal flaws, but wanted to use science to improve society and found its uses for killing and destruction of life abhorrent. He spoke the truth even when it marginalized him. Also Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who works hard to communicate complex topics in a way that can be understood and appreciated by the average person.

My only philosophy in life is to live my life to the fullest, given the incredible changes underway, and bring truthful information to people who can see what’s happening and want to know “why?”. I’m an interdisciplinarian and work to bring a more comprehensive understanding of the predicament we face to anyone willing to listen.

~~~~~~~~~~~

ML: What do you think of the Dark Mountain Project whose members have “stopped believing in the stories our civilization tells itself”? What new stories should we be telling ourselves in this age of ecological catastrophe and extreme economic inequality?

NH: I’m not familiar with the Dark Mountain Project; however to answer the questions, I think we should stop telling stories about how grand our civilization is and celebrating its attempts to dominate Nature and impose fake human superiority. Civilization, which served the purpose of insulating humans from the dangers Nature posed, has destroyed Nature at the expense of its own growth. This was true long before the development of the modern fossil-fueled world. In order to be sedentary and not be dependent upon the local forces of Nature, we needed to build towns and cities. This requires destroying forests, damming rivers, taking over land with agriculture we would control the growth and development of. This means other species, who could not stop us, lost territory. Each improvement in protecting ourselves from Nature meant more population growth, more resource needs, more energy, which in turn meant more destruction and more attempts at control. Humanity, as a hunter-gatherer species, meant our growth was dependent upon what we could find for food and water within the bounds of the climate. Our ability to enclose and mass manipulate our environment and resources meant we could grow beyond our resources and, in the process, mass pollute the world. Civilization has been an 8,000 year attempt to win a war against Nature. A war we are losing because Nature —following the laws which have governed the Universe for 14 billion years— always wins.

Nature is in control, not humans. Even our current catastrophes which were sparked by humanity’s activities were ultimately governed by the laws of Nature (physics, thermodynamics, chemistry, etc). We never were separate from it all, but a part of it. We should be telling ourselves to do what we feel is right to respect Nature and its unbreakable laws, accepting our place in the Universe as just one of many species which have a finite existence on this planet.

Nick Humphrey’s blog can be found here: https://www.patreon.com/MeteorologistNickHumphrey

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Some Fun Facts for a Dystopic Future

02 Wednesday Nov 2016

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

≈ 62 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Abrupt Climate Change, Antarctic Ice Melt, Arctic Blue Ocean Event, Arctic Sea Ice Melt, Capitalism, Donald Trump, Dr. James Orbinski, Geoengineering, Greenland Ice Sheet Melt, Hillary Clinton, James Hansen, Mass Coral Bleaching, Overpopulation, Planetary Boundaries, Professor Harold R. Wanless, Sea Level Rise, Techno-Fix, The Great Barrier Reef, The Limits to Growth

“When you cannot feed your children, you will do anything, even if it means going to war. This is the reality of climate change.” ~ Dr. James Orbinski

80% of the world’s productive agricultural land is in river deltas which are vulnerable to flooding from storm and tidal surges as well as salt penetration inland –as much as 20 km in some cases. Just 1 meter(3.28ft) of sea level rise(SLR) would threaten one third of this food-producing land and render nearly all the barrier islands of the world uninhabitable. (Overly-)Conservative estimates from the IPCC in 2013 predicted 1m of SLR rise by 2100, but the last two decades have seen global sea level increase more than twice as fast as it did in the 20th Century and only recently have scientists realized the true rate of SLR has been grossly underestimated(here and here). James Hansen (et al) has argued all along that 5 meters of sea level rise by the end of the century is possible, taking decades to happen rather than centuries. They conclude that glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica will melt 10 times faster than previous consensus estimates. The last time CO2 levels were at 400ppm was during the Pliocene Era when sea level was 5 to 40m higher (16-131ft); unfortunately, Earth is warming 50 times faster than when it comes out of an ice age. Professor Harold R. Wanless who has studied the geologic sedimentary record says that we are in for a nasty surprise within this century:

Most of the models projecting future sea level rise assume a gradual acceleration of sea level rise through this century and beyond as ice melt gradually accelerates. Our knowledge of how sea level rose out of the past ice age paints a very different picture of sea level response to climate change. At the depth of the last ice age, about 18,000 years ago, sea level was some 420 feet below present level as ice was taken up by large continental ice sheets. Subsequent ice melt was not a gradual acceleration and then deceleration process. Rather it was a series of very rapid pulses of sea level rise followed by pauses. These rapid pulses of rise, from three to thirty feet, were fast enough to leave drowned reefs, sandy barrier islands, tidal inlet deltas, and other coastal deposits abandoned across the continental shelf. That is what happens when climate change warms enough to destabilize some ice sheet sector. It rapidly disintegrates, resulting in a rapid rise.

We are already witnessing the demise of the Great Barrier Reef, the oldest and largest living organism on the planet, which continues to suffer the lethal effects of a warming and acidifying ocean. We’ve destroyed the planet’s air conditioner in the Arctic and set the stage for an impending Blue Ocean Event where 24 hours a day of summer sunlight penetrating the uncovered dark Arctic waters will create another tipping point for runaway climate change. The Arctic climate is changing so fast science can barely keep track of what’s happening or predict global consequences. On top of this, nature’s carbon sinks have been severely weakened over the last few centuries, hindering the ability of the planet to absorb ever-increasing greenhouse gases. And these things are happening before a large destructive pulse of SLR hits the planet.

History has proven considerably worse than the Club of Rome’s projections. The original report made only passing reference to some of the most critical environmental problems of today. In response to this, the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified a set of nine ecological processes regulating land/ocean/atmosphere and their accompanying boundaries within which humans must stay to avoid biospheric collapse. In 2015, researchers found that four of these planetary boundaries had already been breached: biodiversity loss, damage to phosphorous and nitrogen cycles, climate change and land use. None of these critical boundaries were picked up by the original Limits to Growth report. We have destroyed the stability of the Holocene Epoch and continue to wreak havoc with every passing day. In other words, there are many other environmental crises too numerous to list that are coming to a head, and catastrophic sea level rise is just the icing on the burned cake. The last time Earth had such a disruptive species, cyanobacteria altered the atmosphere and killed off all the anaerobic life forms including itself. Ironically, oxygen was the byproduct of the cyanobacteria that proved lethal to those ancient lifeforms and paved the way for the rise of photosynthetic organisms. The cyanobacteria had a 500 million year run, but modern man has only been around for 0.01% of that time. Our large brain has made it possible for us to destroy ourselves in record time.

Global warming is happening 5,000 times faster than a major food source can adapt. As the global monoculture food system breaks down and leaves vulnerable Third World countries to fend for themselves, I expect the last remaining vertebrates to be hunted to extinction in short order while wealthy nations carry out land grabs in an effort to keep their citizens fed. Humans are pushing all other life off the planet; the ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ is not a metaphor.

So you would think that these stark facts laid out before us would be causing panic in the global markets and seats of power around the world because, clearly, no one is safe from this unfolding apocalypse. In what many call the ‘most powerful nation on Earth’, surely a leader must be on the verge of taking the helm of this sinking ship. In any rational world, they would be compelled to battle this planetary emergency with the war-time urgency it demands. In the election year of 2016 there are only two prospects in our corporatocracy, one of whom is so frightening that hundreds of the world’s scientists felt compelled to issue a warning against his possible election. The other candidate seems much more palatable on the surface, but her record and recent emails illustrate just how tortured her positions are on environmental issues. Anyone who has studied the numerous practices that make modern civilization truly unsustainable, the depths of corruption and waste in its global socio-economic system, and how predatory one has to be in order to survive and “succeed’ in it realizes in the end that it wouldn’t matter much who fills that figurehead position. Toeing the line of the dominant culture is a prerequisite for the job. That’s one reason why nations are building walls in response to climate change refugees and putting faith in unproven and unrealistic techno-fixes to save themselves while at the same time drilling for new oil, financing new coal plants, allowing climate goals for corporations to add up to only a quarter of the amount needed to limit warming to 2°C, and giving the shipping industry a pass on curbing its emissions(if shipping was a country it would be the world’s 8th biggest carbon polluter).

Meanwhile, CO2 levels continue to climb at breakneck speed and recent paleoclimate research indicates today’s greenhouse gas levels could produce a ‘game over’ warming of 7°C within our lifetime. We already have no carbon budget left for a 1.5°C warming limit from 2017 onwards. We’re betting our species’ future on vaporware, and no country on Earth is taking the 2°C climate target seriously. Celebrity breakups get more attention than real threats to the continuation of our species. Apocalypse tourism has become a ‘thing’.

The biosphere is collapsing under the weight of 7.5 billion people living off the combustion of a one time endowment of ancient carbon energy, from the factory-farmed produce they eat to the petroleum-based medical supplies that keep them alive. And global population growth may be accelerating at an even greater rate than recent predictions. As Germany has shown, “renewable energies” are nothing more than ‘fossil fuel extenders’ still wedded to fossil-fueled extraction processes for the production and maintenance of those technologies. It’s a shell game of sorts. Industrialized countries will say their carbon footprint has gone down without telling you they’ve moved their dirty industrial operations to Third World countries. Developing countries will make promises of “green growth” while their state-owned banks and companies expand fossil fuel production overseas. We’ve been fooling ourselves for a very long time about what is truly sustainable and will continue to do so as the system falls apart, geoengineering fixes are applied, interstellar space colonization fantasies are dreamed up, and wars are fought for what remains. Humans have constructed a reality incompatible with the well-being of the natural world and the stability of the biosphere, but we won’t be able to escape the rules of physics, chemistry, and biology. We’ve spent generations making the bed we’re going to be lying in, never realizing it’s also our death bed. Time is not on our side.

Most are not listening and our leaders are misleading, so it bears repeating: ‘The Oil Age’ made us all confident idiots with short attention spans. To both candidates: runaway, catastrophic climate change resulting in loss of habitat and mass starvation is our biggest threat.

 

Update 11-10-2016:

The proles have now elected a man who has put a climate science denier in charge of his EPA team, vowed to kill the Paris climate deal, end all efforts to help other countries deal with climate change, stop domestic climate action, reinvigorate coal, and zero out all climate science research & clean energy, but physics doesn’t really care who was elected.

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

No One Gets Out Alive

02 Tuesday Feb 2016

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

≈ 52 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Alternative Energy, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, Authoritarianism, Big Oil Propaganda, Capitalism, Carbon Sequestration, Climate Chaos, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate Trade Agreements, Cryosphere, Ecocide, Ecological Collapse, Ecological Overshoot, Energy Bail-Outs, Eric Zencey, Exxon's Climate Cover-Up, Fascism, Financialization of the Economy, Geoengineering, Jeb Bush, Johan Rockstrom, Keeling Curve, Mass Die Off, Michael Mann, Oil Price Crash, Overly Conservative IPCC Estimates, Overpopulation, Peak Fish, Peak Oil, Philanthrocapitalism, Planetary Boundaries, Planetary Tipping Points, Plasticizing the Planet, Techno-Fix, Techno-Optimists, The Age of Oil, The Global Elite, Zika Virus

tumblr_n6k2x951T71ts2oqko1_500

As China’s appetite for resources wanes with the bursting of its real estate bubble and America’s shale oil boom fueled by easy credit comes to an end, floundering petrostates are beginning to queue up for bail-outs. Financialization appears to have exacerbated the collapse in oil prices. Of course none of this capitalist boom-bust cycle negates the fundamentals of peak oil; prices will swing upwards again in a few years as marginal producers get weeded out. After all, the world still consumes nearly three million gallons of oil per minute, and only a relatively thin margin separates surplus from a shortage. Most of our energy usage does not involve electricity which is what alternative energies like wind and solar produce. Electricity comprises just 18% of the total global energy consumption of which alternatives make up a tiny sliver. 250 new human beings are added to the planet every minute; each born into a world of depleting resources and mounting pollution; each scrambling to secure the necessities of life. The black stuff will remain the primary fuel supporting this growing population of a globalized technological civilization.

A recent study estimates that if we are serious about implementing alternative energies to satisfy the goals of the Paris climate accord, then upwards of 12 trillion dollars will have to be spent over the next 25 years. This price tag is an investment that is 75% more than current growth projections. At a time when governments have spent their last ammo pumping more electronic money into the economy to try to stimulate economic growth, the prospects of decarbonizing the entire global energy system appears daunting, especially considering the many shortcomings of alternative energies. Time constraints on a planet indifferent to our energy needs are also bearing down on us:

CO2 levels must now be kept below 405ppm(where we’ll be in under 3 years at current emission rate) to avoid 2C warming.

As the Keeling curve creeps irreversibly higher and the gap between rhetoric and reality widens, pipe dreams like geoengineering and carbon sequestration will become desperate Hail Marys for a species whose time is running out. The New York Times editorial by Piers Sellers, a NASA Earth Sciences director who has terminal cancer, perfectly sums up this techno-fix mindset: “…it will be up to the engineers and industrialists of the world to save us.” Keep calm, keep shopping, and await further instructions; the elites have it all under control. Jeb Bush’s recent comment that we should pin our hopes on “someone in a garage” fixing climate change illustrates the widespread delusion that technological innovation, good ol’ entrepreneurial spirit, and capitalist market-based solutions will be our saviours. Ironically, Jeb belongs to the political party hell-bent on defunding public education, a policy that would seem to make those plucky garage inventors even more implausible.

We cannot possibly rely on a system that profits from the very disaster it has helped to create, yet that is the dead-end feedback loop we are locked into. Mexico is a good example of how landscapes and communities are being carved up for alternative energy farms and carbon trading schemes that benefit only large corporations. Even philanthrocapitalism promotes the convenient myth that market forces and the whims of billionaires will solve systemic problems. The precautionary principle has been thrown out the window in the pursuit of short-term profits and power. We have only a vague inkling of nature’s rich complexity and interdependence. The scale of our ignorance is frightening considering our oversized impact.

tumblr_n6scpfSLcT1qln2e2o1_500

The truth of our predicament has been criminally concealed since the 1970s by the fossil fuel industry which all the while knew that an overheated Arctic would melt away, exposing fresh deposits of carbon for them to exploit. Unfortunately the bonanza they planned for has not materialized; melting permafrost wreaks havoc on infrastructure and exploration. The cryospheric regions of earth, key geographic features regulating the planet’s climate, were systematically dismantled within the geologic blink of an eye; such environmental changes are imperceptible to the real-time cognitive processing of humans, but in geological ‘deep time’ these events are cataclysmic and portend a dire future for humans. There are more signs that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is slowing down.

“We’re sitting on these planetary boundaries right now, argues Rockstrom, and if these systems flip from one stable state to another — if the Amazon tips into a savannah, if the Arctic loses its ice cover and instead of reflecting the sun’s rays starts absorbing them in water, if the glaciers all melt and cannot feed the rivers — nature will be fine, but we will not be.” ~ Johan Rockstrom, director of the Stockholm Resilience Center

4311422140_653193fe43_b

The time to avoid critical tipping points in those decades has passed. The projections from the IPCC were downplayed and underestimated in order to continue the destructive business-as-usual:

“…new scientific findings were more than twenty times as likely to support the ASC perspective [that disruption through AGW may be far worse than the IPCC has suggested] than the usual framing of the issue in the U.S. mass media. The findings indicate that…if reporters wish to discuss ‘‘both sides’’ of the climate issue, the scientifically legitimate ‘‘other side’’ is that, if anything, global climate disruption may prove to be significantly worse than has been suggested in scientific consensus estimates to date”.

We’re in the early throes of economic and ecological system failure; headlines grow more alarming each year:

Plastic is projected to outweigh fish in the world’s oceans by 2050. This may happen much sooner since it was just discovered the number of fish remaining in the ocean has been grossly overestimated. We only recycle 5-10% of plastics today and many are not recyclable. It’s cheaper for industry not to recycle and the quality of plastic is degraded when it is recycled. No international body exists that can hope to regulate dumping in the oceans. International ships dump freely without consequence. Unenforceable legislation is heroically passed in bodies of government from time to time, but it remains ineffective. Waste is also shipped across borders to more “business friendly” countries where waste can be cost-effectively dumped.

The warming Indian Ocean is becoming an ecological desert. According to new research, rising water temperatures over the last half century appear to have reduced phytoplankton numbers, threatening to cascade through the food chain and crash the ecosystem. Climate change has been implicated in a rash of recent animal die-offs across the planet. The changes are too abrupt for animals to adapt. Today’s build-up of atmospheric CO2 and other heat-trapping gases is much, much faster than past hyperthermal events. In fact, scientists now fear climate change is happening faster than it has in all of Earth’s history.

Hot days are occurring 145 times more often over the last 10 years than just a few decades ago. Unique World Heritage Sites are being destroyed by climate change. The latest one, an ancient Gondwana ecosystem in Tazmania, burned down to the ground from fires sparked by dry lightning strikes, a direct result of climate change. A warming planet is also providing a growing range of favorable places for mosquitoes, the bane of mankind, to spread pestilence and disease. Our interconnected world can fast-track their dissemination with the help of a single intercontinental plane flight. At the moment, the Zika virus is grabbing headlines with its explosive expansion. Scientists are on the verge of confirming that it has jumped to the common mosquito and the WHO recently declared it an international health emergency. Microcephaly appears to be just the tip of the iceberg for the fallout of this virus. Normal-appearing newborns are suffering ill effects as well. It is believed that the Zika virus was introduced into Brazil during the World Soccer Cup in 2014 when an influx of tourists visited cities throughout Brazil. The 2016 Olympics in Rio will provide a perfect vehicle for the worldwide distribution of Zika.

The refugees fleeing from the war-torn Middle East are only a foreshadowing of the mass exodus to come from regions racked by climate chaos. With ethnic, religious, racial and ideological tensions simmering, we can already see the welcome mats being pulled up in host countries. Recent studies have shown a loss of freedoms for citizens and rise in authoritarian governments around the world over the last decade; this trend tracks with our net energy descent, deregulation, rollback of environmental protection, and pursuit of corporate trade agreements. It also follows historic patterns:

“…history tells us that civilizations experiencing dramatic declines in their net energy uptake usually develop authoritarian political systems in an effort to stave off collapse, but then crash and disappear anyway.” ~Eric Zencey

Historically speaking, the elite are last to feel the effects of their hubristic decision-making, insulated as they are in their positions of wealth and power. Modern ideals and virtues of human rights, social justice, and a strong American middle class have all been aberrations of a civilization built atop a surfeit of energy.

political-graffiti-athens-greece1-e1451738094409-1024x355

The disparity between MSM news and real world problems like climate change, pollution, growing wealth inequality, the unraveling food chain, etc. are breathtaking. Wrecking the biosphere and bringing on a mass extinction leaves no one unscathed or in any position to survive long-term. Secret plans of survival by the “elite” are simply another myth. The wealthy may be buying up tracts of land in remote areas, but they are perhaps more delusional than anyone else because of how their wealth insulates them from hard realities. Without all those just-in-time supply chains operating seamlessly across a stable planet, no one gets out alive.

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

On the Supersonic Track to Extinction

15 Thursday Jan 2015

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

≈ 113 Comments

Tags

Canfield Ocean, Capitalism, Chemical Pollution, CO2 Emissions, Extinction of Man, Geoengineering, Greenhouse Extinction, Greenhouse Gases, Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S), Industrial Civilization, Jevons Paradox, Keeling Curve, Lee R. Kump, Machine Fetishism, Mass Die Off, Mass Extinctions, Misanthropocene, Peter D. Ward, Ron Cobb, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming - the Mass Extinctions of the Past - and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future

2012_by_Dudek3

Where is the “Misanthropocene” right now in relation to past extinction events? The chart below tells the tale. Notice that our current rise in GHG’s is essentially instantaneous in relation to past warmings which took place over thousands of years. As far as scientists can tell, the current warming from industrial civilization is the most rapid in geologic time. Ice core and marine sediment data in the paleoclimatology archive have revealed brief periods of rapid warming and there is no reason to believe modern man is immune to such catastrophic and abrupt climate events. In fact, we know that the Arctic is already warming twice as fast as anywhere else on the planet. Earth sensitivity to climate change is now thought to be possibly double that of previous estimates. An entirely different planet can result from just a slight change in temperature:

Snap 2015-01-14 at 23.36.48

We’re about halfway towards the same CO2 levels as the Paleocene Thermal Extinction, but our speed of trajectory surpasses even that of the Permian Extinction:

wardco2big

In 2005, Lee R. Kump and fellow scientists published a paper describing what would become known as the Kump hypothesis, implicating hydrogen sulfide (H2S) as the primary culprit in past mass extinctions. According to OSHA, “a level of H2S gas at or above 100 ppm is immediately dangerous to life and health.” Prior to Kump’s study, the working theory had been that some sort of singular, cataclysmic event such as an asteroid strike was to blame for all mass die-offs, but Kump and colleagues proposed that a global warming-induced asphyxiation via hydrogen sulfide gas(H2S) was to blame for snuffing out life under the sea, on the land, and in the air. In past mass extinctions, volcanic eruptions and thawing methane hydrates created greenhouse-gas warmings that culminated in the release of poisonous gas from oxygen-depleted oceans. Humans with their fossil fuel-eating machines are unwittingly producing the same conditions today. The Kump hypothesis (elevated CO2 with lowering O2 levels) is now regarded as the most plausible explanation for the majority of mass extinctions in earth’s history:

Excerpt from Lights Out: How It All EndsSnap 2015-01-14 at 19.58.23

In the short term as both poles completely melt away and the Equator-to-Pole temperature gradient declines, the hydrologic cycle and storms will intensify, jet streams will be altered, global air circulation and ocean currents will be rearranged (especially in northern latitudes), and sea levels will rise. While some local winds will slow down, other areas may actually increase due to local temperature gradients becoming more influential than global ones. New research has indicated early warning signs of a collapse in ocean circulation. When that happens, the oceans ultimately turn into stagnant, anoxic pools belching deadly hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere.

As others have noted, our energy, transport and building infrastructure was not constructed to withstand a mutated planet blindly molded by over seven billion humans. For example, think of all those massive wind farms rendered useless by alterations in local wind patterns, hydro-power shut down due to devastating droughts, solar farms destroyed by large hail storms, etc.

Many are under the delusion that we’ll be able to turn this process around with “green energy” while ignoring that such technologies are derivatives of fossil fuel or that increased efficiencies will lower our carbon footprint while ignoring Jevons paradox. Countless other self-reinforcing feedbacks loops driving our socioeconomic system come into play as well such as rampant overpopulation (Overpopulation key driver of climate change, mass extinction), chemical pollution (“Every year, up to 400 million tonnes are produced and a thousand new substances concocted“), and capitalism’s inherent growth dynamics:

The monstrous capitalism we see today is the result of capitalism’s inherent growth dynamics. To give one modern-day example, the solar energy industry/movement began with the conception of local, i.e. decentralized, and roof-top solar electricity generation for local consumption. Today we see projects like Desertec (huge solar power plants in the Sahara that would supply 15% of Europe’s total electricity needs) and competition between European and Chinese solar panel producers for larger chunks of the world market. – Link

The destructive trend has been inexorably cumulative:

…the central trend is verifiable: mass die-offs are on the rise, increasing by one event per year for the last 70 years.

“While this might not seem like much, one additional mass mortality event per year over 70 years translates into a considerable increase in the number of these events being reported each year,” explained co-author Adam Siepielski, a biologist at the University of San Diego. “Going from one event to 70 each year is a substantial increase, especially given the increased magnitudes of mass mortality events for some of these organisms.” – Link

If we shed our anthropocentric blinders, the harsh reality is that nothing of substance is being done to prevent our own extinction, and after looking back at humanity’s track record for slowing down this beast of globalized industrial civilization even one iota, any sane and rational person would have to conclude that there are forces at work well beyond the control of any one group of people, any state, or even any one country. Humans have the dubious honor of being the earth’s first sentient beings to have thoroughly documented their own demise while arguing with each other over whose fault it is. And the longer the Keeling Curve stretches skyward, the greater the odds that we will pull the trigger on a geoengineering scheme to slow down the inevitable:

Do these experts—the top scholars and scientists researching the subject in the world—think we will see geoengineering in our lifetime?

“Let’s see it for ten years,” the emcee said. A few scientists cautiously raised their hands. Twenty and 30 years saw some more converts. When he called out “fifty years,” more than half the room had their hands up.

That, according to the experts, is a 50-50  shot that someone is going to try, this century, to engineer the Earth’s climate. To hack the planet. – Link

Techno-capitalist carbon man’s fetish with high-tech gadgetry has already gotten the best of him. Just look at us glued to our iphones, tv’s, internet, and sundry other social media tools. We’re addicted to and dependent on our technology, and the idea of pulling the power plug on this way of life is unthinkable, not to mention fatal, for those raised within its confines.

20131112-163332

“In Earth’s history we see climate changes over time, and we know that some of these climate changes were associated with enormous biological destruction. How could we believe that the same sort of experience moving into the modern-day wouldn’t do the same thing?” ~ Dr. Peter D. Ward

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Locked-Up Inside the Complexity Trap

18 Thursday Dec 2014

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

≈ 71 Comments

Tags

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

imageedit_40_3593764711

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

broadcast_from_the_playground_by_inz_feelgood-d46s71d

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snap 2014-12-16 at 08.56.34Snap 2014-12-16 at 09.15.51Snap 2014-12-16 at 11.00.31Snap 2014-12-16 at 11.33.30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

nuclear_antem_by_inz_feelgood-d38xad8

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

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Accelerating Towards an Arctic Blue Ocean Event

08 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State

≈ 127 Comments

Tags

Abrupt Climate Change, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Arctic Blue Ocean Event, Arctic Ice Melt, Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG), Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, COP-20 UN Climate Change Conference, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Geoengineering, John Nissen, Mass Die Off, Methane Time Bomb, NASA'S CARVE project (Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment), Natalia Shakhova, Paul Beckwith, Peter Wadhams, Sea Level Rise, Stuart Scott

icecaps-gif

“For the last 8,000 years we’ve had [relatively] amazing stability with constant weather temperatures and sea level. This stability has allowed the development of agriculture, civilization, industrialization, and a population of 7 billion and rising. This apparent stability is entirely a fluke. It is by amazing good luck that we are here today looking back on the past.”
~ John Nissen (12-4-2014), Arctic Methane Emergency Group

On the 4th, 5th, and 6th of December of the year 2014, the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG) held press briefings at the COP-20 United Nations Climate Change Conference that is taking place in Lima, Peru. For those unfamiliar with AMEG, here is a summary about them from their website that illustrates their proven track record of predictions:

AMEG is a group of determined scientists, engineers, communicators and others, dedicated firstly to establishing what really is happening to our planet (especially in the Arctic) using best scientific evidence, secondly to finding effective and affordable means to deal with the situation, and thirdly communicating these matters to authority and the general public.

AMEG aims to position itself in the centre ground – neither overstating nor understating the dangers of climate change. We are only alarmist in the sense that we are drawing attention to the more unpleasant realities of rapid Arctic warming and climate change, which have been downplayed or ignored by IPCC, unwittingly backed up by the media. We are determinedly optimistic as regards promoting an intervention strategy against all the odds, believing that mankind must have the collective intelligence to sort out the mess that mankind has got itself into.

In early 2012, AMEG gave evidence to the UK’s Environment Audit Committee in their inquiry on protecting the Arctic. Much of our evidence was dismissed by government advisers, but all our evidence has been borne out by subsequent observations and events, including: the rapid rise in temperature of Arctic ocean and atmosphere; the dramatic decline of sea ice to a record minimum in September 2012 (following the exponential downward trend we had warned the committee about); the exponential increase in release of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, from the Arctic Ocean seabed; the exponential increase in melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and consequent sea level rise; and the continuing disruption of the jet stream patterns we expected from Arctic warming, with resulting climate change in the form of weather extremes (despite a continuing hiatus in global warming), causing widespread crop failures and increase in the food price index above the crisis level, thus promoting civil conflict in a number of Asian and African countries where food prices have recently escalated, including most notably Syria.

Recent independent research, by scientists in AMEG and elsewhere, puts beyond reasonable doubt our assertion that the Arctic is locked in a vicious cycle of warming and melting, with the sea ice well past its tipping point. The current albedo forcing from snow and sea ice retreat is now estimated at around 0.4 to 0.5 Watts per square meter, averaged globally, amounting to 200 to 250 terawatts heating in the Arctic – more than mankind’s total energy consumption.  This albedo forcing is liable to double within a few years as the snow and sea ice further retreat. AMEG believes that the vicious cycle of warming and melting can only be broken by rapid intervention to cool the Arctic.  

Although AMEG’s research has concentrated on the Arctic and its effect on climate change, our study of IPCC’s own evidence suggests just how serious are the long-term prospects of climate change due to both CO2 and methane – far more serious than claimed by IPCC itself. The carbon budget for CO2 – the allowable amount of CO2 to avoid dangerous climate change – has already been used up, if one takes into account the effect of methane and other greenhouse gases. If one also takes into account the climate forcing through albedo loss in the Arctic, then it is clear that the world is heading for extremely dangerous global warming by mid-century, even without Arctic methane. The only way to head off such a disaster is by reducing the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere well below their current levels, using a combination of aggressive reduction in both CO2 and methane emissions but also by removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.

The videos of all three press briefings are below. They essentially cover much of the same material, but are all worth watching for the details that the different speakers give illustrating mankind’s dire predicament. Following the videos, I summarize AMEG’s discussions along with their conclusions. We truly are at a turning point in the survival of our species.

SUMMARY OF AMEG PRESS BRIEFINGS:
• The tipping point for the collapse of Arctic glaciers has been breached and a runaway meltdown of the North Pole ice cap is currently unfolding. Arctic ice is decaying exponentially. (For a better visualization, picture an area of ice the size of the state of Maine being lost every year since 1979.):

Highly reflective snow and ice is being replaced by dark sea water which is much more [absorbent] of solar energy causing the Arctic to warm much, much faster than the rest of the planet. This is destabilizing the atmospheric air circulation and ocean circulation. It is reducing the temperature gradient or difference between the equator and the pole which slows down the jet stream making it wavier with higher ridges and troughs. The jet stream has also become prone to stagnating in the same region. Very warm, humid southerly air can go to much higher latitudes than before, and cold arctic air can go to much southerly latitudes than before. This in itself is representing an enormous positive reinforcing feedback (not positive for humans) which is carrying more and more heat up into the Arctic and more and more coldness from the Arctic further south. What this will do is fracture the jet streams, leading us to a very different world, a less predictable climatic world where weather extremes such as torrential rains and extended droughts and floods come to dominate the weather system. The frequency, severity, and duration of these events all increase. These events also occur in regions where we did not have this before. For example, we get 80cm(32 inches) of snow in the Atacama Desert which is the driest region of the planet – an unprecedented event. We get torrential rains where we had desert before. We get desert where we had moderate temperatures before. This is already happening now with just 0.85 °C of warming that the world has experienced since the start of the industrial revolution. This situation is very dependent on the conditions in the Arctic. As the Arctic continues to exponentially decline in snow and sea ice cover, these extremes will undoubtedly have to increase. The physics of the system says so. Because we now live in a warmer planet, there is more evaporation of the oceans leading to more water vapor in the atmosphere which fuels stronger storms. (The atmosphere can hold 7% moisture for every 1°C increase in average temp. Since we have increased the average temp by ~0.8°C from pre-industrial times, we have 6% more water vapor in the atmosphere). Because we have changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, we have changed the planet’s weather and climate.

• Once we reach a point of no Arctic sea ice, perhaps as early as September 2015, this will create a “blue ocean event” in which all the heat from the sun will be able to penetrate Arctic waters, vastly accelerating the rate at which the Arctic is warming. Consequently, massive disruption of atmospheric circulation and ocean currents will ensue, thus locking the Arctic into an ice-free state. Global sea levels will rapidly rise and climate chaos will ramp up.
• The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, containing hundreds to thousands of times more heat trapping gases than what are presently in the atmosphere, is in the process of releasing a catastrophic amount of greenhouse gases.
• Climate models do not take into account fractures, imperfections in the sea floor, regions of unfrozen subsea methane and other weak points in methane deposits. The models simply treat these areas as uniform slabs that will act in a predictable and symmetrical manner.
• Historical ice core and sediment records show numerous instances of the Earth having undergone abrupt climate change of 5-6°C or greater within a very short time period, one or two decades.
• The initial heat-trapping strength of methane(CH4) is up to several hundred times more powerful than CO2 during the first couple decades of its release into the atmosphere before degrading into CO2.
• Collapse of Civilization is assured at a 4°C rise in global temperature.

Scientists consider a global warming of 6°C to be a threat to the survival of humanity, and anything beyond an increase of 2°C to be intolerable (as recorded at the Asia-Europe Summit by Khor, September 2006). – Link

• Even conservative IPCC projections of BAU predict a 4°C rise in global temperature by the end of the century and this estimate does not include the methane release from the Arctic seabed, permafrost and tundra. No where in its reports does the IPCC state that a 4°C would be catastrophic to civilization and life on Earth.
• Simply attempting to “adapt” to anthropogenic climate change is not a realistic option.
• The meme of money and profit holds sway over all of society.
• The operating system of global civilization, i.e. neoclassical economics, is fatally flawed and it will kill us.
• The consequences of predicted drought from global warming will make food production impossible in most of the world…

imageedit_27_9878978785

AMEG’S CONCLUSIONS ARE:
• A life-affirming system of ecological economics must replace the current ecocidal model of neoclassical economics.
• Institutions must divest from fossil fuel investments and burst the carbon bubble.
• Techniques for cooling the Arctic need to be implemented now, such as spraying salt into the atmosphere to thicken clouds. Additionally, carbon sequestration techniques need to be implemented now, such as biochar burial which is a carbon negative technology that also enriches soil fertility.
• The world must recognize that a 2°C target is not the benchmark we need to worry about right now. We need to worry about and immediately deal with the destabilization and disruption of our climate and weather patterns that are already occurring today at 0.85 °C.
• Only a concerted international effort will provide us with a chance to mitigate and adapt to climate change by building a deep toolbox of approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, reducing emissions alone will not be sufficient. An active withdrawal of CO2 from the atmosphere will need to be a part of managing climate change.

AMEG does not mention the Antarctic which was recently found to be melting three times faster than a decade ago:

The glaciers in the embayment lost mass throughout the entire period. The researchers calculated two separate quantities: the total amount of loss, and the changes in the rate of loss.

The total amount of loss averaged 83 gigatons per year (91.5 billion U.S. tons). By comparison, Mt. Everest weighs about 161 gigatons, meaning the Antarctic glaciers lost a Mt.-Everest’s-worth amount of water weight every two years over the last 21 years.

The rate of loss accelerated an average of 6.1 gigatons (6.7 billion U.S. tons) per year since 1992.

From 2003 to 2009, when all four observational techniques overlapped, the melt rate increased an average of 16.3 gigatons per year — almost three times the rate of increase for the full 21-year period. The total amount of loss was close to the average at 84 gigatons.

Also in the news a few months ago was the realization that Greenland’s ice sheet loss has doubled in just the last five years. Greenland’s ice is much more unstable and prone to collapse than previously thought, and it alone holds enough ice to raise sea levels by nearly twenty-three feet. Paul Beckwith notes that the rate of change in ice melt from Greenland and Antarctica has doubled every seven years for the last couple decades and that if we continue on this trend, then the world will indeed experience a sea level rise of nearly twenty-three feet by 2070.

Last month a seemingly reassuring headline stated that ‘Alaska shows no signs of rising Arctic methane‘ according to NASA’s CARVE project (Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment), but any hopes about the ticking methane time bomb in the Arctic were quickly dashed after reading the article:

…High concentrations of atmospheric methane have been measured at individual Arctic sites, especially in Siberia. This adds to the concern that massive methane releases are already occurring in the far North. NASA’s multiyear Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE) is the first experiment to establish emission rates for a large region of the Arctic…

Alaska composes about one percent of Earth’s total land area, and its estimated annual emissions in 2012 equaled about one percent of total global methane emissions. That means the Alaskan rate was very close to the global average rate.

“That’s good news, because it means there isn’t a large amount of methane coming out of the ground yet,” said lead author Rachel Chang, formerly at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in Atmospheric Science at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Charles Miller of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, the principal investigator for CARVE, noted that results from a single year cannot show how emissions might be changing from year to year. “The 2012 data don’t preclude accelerated change in the future,” he said.

Vast amounts of carbon are stored in undecayed organic matter—dead plants and animals—in Arctic permafrost and peat. Scientists estimate that there is more than twice as much carbon locked in the frozen North as there is in the atmosphere today. The organic material won’t decay and release its carbon as long as it stays frozen. But climate change has brought warmer and longer summers throughout the Arctic, and permafrost soils are thawing more and more. If large amounts of undecayed matter were to defrost, decompose and release methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the impact on global temperatures would most likely be enormous.

Because no other program has made measurements as comprehensive and widespread as CARVE’s, Chang said, “One of the challenges is that we have nothing to compare our results to. We can’t say whether emissions have already increased or stayed the same. Our measurements will serve as a baseline.”

We already know that methane levels have increased two-and-a-half times since the pre-industrial era and “since 2007 atmospheric methane has been on a renewed sustained increase… due to planetary feedback emissions.” Methane has “more than doubled its 800,000 [year] maximum”:

This increase in atmospheric methane started as a result of carbon feedback feedback methane (CH4) from anomalously high temperatures in the Arctic and greater than average precipitation in the tropics, rather than from increased industrial emissions (Dlugokencky et al, 2009). – Link

We also know that scientists continue to be shocked and awed at the increasingly accelerated rate at which glaciers around the world are melting. Essentially, industrial civilization is whistling past the graveyard.

Because of AMEG’s honest assessment about the climatic state of the world and the horrific future mankind faces, I support their efforts. We have no time left for philosophical musings about the ethics of AMEG’s geo-engineering ideas to cool the Arctic or debating why, how, and who is responsible for the mess we are in. The Blue Ocean Event is coming and time is not on our side.

“The end of the Arctic will be the noose gently placed around our necks. Get your affairs in order, Humankind.” ~ The Final Stand

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Death by Dollar$ and Suicide by CO2

08 Saturday Nov 2014

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

≈ 179 Comments

Tags

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

befunky_artwork.jpg

Unresponsive and Corrupt Governments

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

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

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

You Are What You Eat

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

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

dxtku

The Dopamine Rush of Fossil Fuels

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

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

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

tumblr_neljxvFubj1ru5h8co1_500

Hydropower is Not Green

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

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

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

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

aaeb751b-77fe-4fa1-8969-3e20927fbde5

The Unraveling Web of Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10494612_10152825071748824_7136472336218372296_n

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

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

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

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

Paul gives the following further explanation for the graph:

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

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

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

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

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

manofsteel12043 copy 3

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

The Black Road of Technology

14 Tuesday Jan 2014

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

≈ 99 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Anishnabek, Capitalism, Casino Capitalism, Chris Christie's Traffic-Gate, Climate Change, Clive Hamilton, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Commodification of Nature, Consumerism, Death of Languages, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecocide, Extinction of Man, Genocide, Geoengineering, Loss of Biodiversity, Mass Die Off, Monoculture Farming, Murphy's Law, Native Wisdom, Ojibwe, Runaway Climate Change, Rust Cohle of 'True Detective', Techno-Optimists, The Limits to Growth, The Rat Race, The Seventh Fire Prophecy

Bryce 5.5 render enhanced in Photoshop

“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that shouldn’t exist under natural law… The honorable thing for our species to do is to stop reproducing and walk hand in hand, brothers and sisters, into extinction — one last midnight.”
~ Rust Cohle, ‘True Detective‘

Sitting comfortably within their climate-controlled homes and buildings, a tiny percentage of eco-conscience humans watches with morbid fascination as large numbers of animals drop like flies in a bug zapper. In the latest die-off, bats rain down from Australian skies; parrots, kangaroos and emus perish from heat exhaustion. Ominous signs of an unraveling web of life are everywhere to see, but the industrial world has become utterly disconnected from nature and pays little heed to such warnings. Rather, what holds their interest is Chris Christie’s Traffic-Gate. That our fate is bound to the well-being of Earth is a belief lost with the genocide of so many indigenous cultures. Capitalist carbon man resides in a totally fabricated world — he eats food mass-produced from fossil fuel inputs, drinks ‘purified’ water bottled in plastic, and at bedtime drowns out the noise of energy-gluttonous cities with the electronic recordings of ocean waves and forest sounds. But most absurdly, he ‘communes with nature’ through staged wildlife TV shows and eco-trip adventures. Rather than allow poachers and farmers free rein, the capitalists thought it wiser to extract profit out of the Earth’s dying ecosystems by tapping into the “green” industry of eco-tourism, another in a lost list of anthropocentric oxymorons.

tumblr_mz3sjpRld71qj6juso1_500

Relentless marketing on TV, internet, radio, billboards, print, etc has created an unending cycle of desire and consumption, fueling the trivialization of life that feeds its commodification. The individual is reduced to a “buying unit” by the skyscrapers, institutions, and bureaucracy of capitalism, but in a future world of spent resources and civilization-destroying weather, the market won’t have much use for so many “buying units”. Introspection by many rational, sober, and clear-minded people since the publication of ‘The Limits to Growth’ has not altered the course of history to date; why would I think the human species would suddenly alter their behavior after having tripped so many ecological tipping points and feedback loops? Hindsight is 20/20 only if a lesson was learned the first time.

“…The basic truth between the lines of this press event [National Research Council (NRC) briefing on abrupt climate change] was that we are facing a world that is becoming increasingly hostile to humankind.

We are literally making the planet into a wasteland like this is some post-apocalyptic science fiction story. It is just shocking. And the most horrifying aspect of it all is that we’ve waited to reduce emissions so long that we’re exiting the win-win field of possible climate responses. We’re now headed into a world of lose-lose. That’s the news nobody wants to convey – or hear. But there it is.” – link

Untitled 1

The cancer of hyper consumption and economic growth for never-ending profit has trashed the planet, but blind faith in the markets and techno-optimism are the siren’s call beguiling industrial civilization over the cliff. Capitalism likes efficiency; in its quest for greater efficiency, diversity – the essence of life – is being exterminated. Monoculture is death. More biodiversity means more resilience. A recent scientific paper purports to prove this long-held maxim:

“…when a lot of species are interacting and competing in an ecosystem, the ‘average’ interactions that any one species experiences are likely to be weaker than in a simpler, less diverse system. When there are a lot of different niches occupied by different species, we also expect different responses to environmental fluctuations among the community, meaning that some species inherently do better than others depending on the specific disturbance. Species-rich systems also tend to have more of what we call ‘functional redundancy‘, meaning that if one species providing an essential ecosystem function (e.g., like predation) goes extinct, there’s another, similar species ready to take its place…”

Biodiversity loss is not the only aspect of life being degraded. The planet is also losing cultural diversity – languages, crafts, religions, histories, ancient knowledge, etc. are disappearing as globalization reduces all of life to the status of a marketable commodity. Thousands of languages were once spoken in North and South America before the invasion of European powers. It’s interesting to note that in the Ojibwe language, and perhaps in most if not all native languages of North America, there exists no word to describe “greed” or the concept of personal property, but there are endless numbers of verbs to describe “every movement and temperature and visual sense of water.” After a few hundred years of progress, the white man has Wall Street and the natives have gambling casinos.

casino-capitalism

“In the Seventh Fire prophecy of the Anishnabek, each of the seven fires represent an era in human history. We are now in the time of the Seventh Fire. The task of the people of this age, including the Anishnabek and other red people, the yellow people, the black and the white, is to come together through choosing the road of cooperation. Without this, there will be no Eighth Fire, or future for Natives and others…

…Today, in the age of the Seventh Fire, the races are again faced with a choice. The two roads are the black road of technology and overdevelopment leading to environmental catastrophe, the other is the red road of spirituality and respect for the earth. Together, people of the world have to choose the right road, be of one mind, or the earth cannot survive…” ~ The Seventh Fire (Ojibwe) Prophecy

The “black road of technology and overdevelopment” is paved with the fallout of dead bodies and poisoned landscapes —nuclear meltdowns, oil and chemical spills, factory fires and explosions, etc., but to a very tool-centric species just itching to keep this omnicidal train going, geoengineering looks like the perfect ticket. It promises to allow industrial civilization to continue burning carbon while avoiding the nasty side-effect of catastrophic climate change. Unfortunately, human error and miscalculation, the bane of so many other industrial endeavors, will undoubtedly come into play. The ‘hacking’ of the Earth’s entire climate system represents the peak of hubris for modern man. Describing the conceit of our technological domination of the planet, Clive Hamilton states:

“Pursuing abatement is an admission that industrial society has harmed nature, while engineering the Earth’s climate would be confirmation of our mastery over it — final proof that, whatever minor errors made on the way, human ingenuity and faith in our own abilities will always triumph. Geoengineering promises to turn failure into triumph.”

The Earth’s carbon sinks are filling up and the twin problem of ocean acidification will need a techno-fix too. Complexity begets even more complicated problems. Our culture avoids the simple fact that humanity is vulnerable and dependent on the Earth, that life is fragile and interconnected, and that the importance of Murphy’s law is amplified exponentially when playing GOD with technology. Let’s also hope that the psychological effects of climate change don’t make the nuclear powers lose their cool.

The_End_by_super_sheep

…A warm dry wind is all that breaks the silence
The highways quiet scars across the land
People lie, eyes closed, no longer dreaming
The earth dies screaming…

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

It Only Happens in the Movies

29 Tuesday Oct 2013

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

≈ 85 Comments

Tags

Arctic Ice Melt, Capitalism, Charlie Smith, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Eric Schlosser, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Geoengineering, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Natalia Shakhova, Normalcy Bias, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Peter Wadhams, Regulatory Capture, Resource Wars, Robert Callaghan, Runaway Climate Change, Simon Hasleton, Sunken Costs, Techno-Optimists, The Convergence of Crisis

tumblr_mhrehrSUR81qj73e2o1_500-8787

In spite of their own economic and scientific data overwhelmingly pointing towards a very bleak future, the experts in their various chosen fields appear to be happy-faced optimists about the world our descendants will inherit. So says columnist Charlie Smith:

Snap 2013-10-28 at 21.53.31

He concludes his essay with the following remarks:

“…I confess that I’m troubled by all the optimism I encounter from leading thinkers on inequality, climate change, overpopulation, and oil depletion.

Adding up all the variables, I’ve concluded that more global food shortages and increased famine are inevitable. Despite this, our premier plans to build a new bridge to Delta that will result in the loss of some of Canada’s finest farmland.

Having a cheery disposition may make someone sound more pleasant in radio and television interviews.

It might even enhance a person’s likelihood of obtaining book contracts, becoming a media or entertainment executive, or getting elected to high public office.

But it has a way of sugar-coating problems, diminishing the sense of urgency that we should all be feeling about these crises.”

The apocalypse has been commodified as a Hollywood thriller to be viewed in the comfort of a movie theater or living room sofa. Faith in technology, normalcy bias, sunken costs, and the mass propaganda of vested interests are just a few of the human blinders preventing any change from the status quo. To say that there is no future for the human species would be to admit that we are all living in a fictitious construct whose time is quickly running out. Who openly discusses such things in their place of work? I would wager to say that the answer is zero. In his essay ‘The Convergence of Crisis‘, Simon Hasleton writes:

“…There is, also, a sense in which denial should be seen as a psychological defense operating on the personal level. AGW presents an immense challenge to our lives: to our health and safety and the survival of our grandchildren, and their grandchildren. How will we handle it, when the water fails or the crops fail and the food reserves are empty as the population passes the nine million mark? When  when Amsterdam or Kolkata are inundated? When (as in Texas) temperature pushes into the high 30s, for weeks on end? This is the future AGW promises. And there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about it, so we blank it out, or prefer the trivia of the tabloids, or retreat into a blinkered concentration on the immediacy of everyday concerns….”

There is no escaping the capitalist system which now encompasses the entire world. Who is stopping the Brazilians from clearing the Amazon just as America and Europe slashed and burned their own virgin forests to make way for cities, highways, railroads, farms, etc.? Who is stopping China from burning through the world’s remaining fossil fuel? This is how industrial civilization defines “progress”. Our next step is to try to control the climate through seeding the atmosphere and other geoengineering experiments. Aside from nuclear weapons and their evil counterpart, nuclear energy, I can’t imagine a more dangerous and hubristic scheme. Charlie Smith has an article on that subject as well, entitled ‘Eric Schlosser raises alarm in Vancouver about nuclear weapons and nuclear power‘:

“…Schlosser also told the audience that his research into nuclear weapons has strengthened his opposition to nuclear energy. He cited the research of Charles Perrow, who examined the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear-power plant in 1979.

This helped Schlosser understand how a seemingly minor event—a dropped socket in a missile silo in Damascus, Arkansas in 1980—nearly caused an explosion that could have killed millions of people.

“These are complex technological systems,” Schlosser said. “Again and again, we find ourselves inadequate to manage them.“

His biggest concern is that the waste from nuclear reactors remains deadly for tens of thousands of years. He said that it’s “highly irresponsible for us to be creating poisons that future generations might suffer from“.

There has never been a central storage facility created in the United States, which means that the waste remains at the nuclear-reactor sites.

“And these reactor sites were never designed to store nuclear waste in the way it’s being stored,” he said. “They are huge targets, potential targets, for terrorists. But they are also at enormous risk in a natural disaster, in earthquakes, things like that. And a lot of these nuclear reactors are near large urban areas…”

He didn’t mention that all nuclear plants are built on the shores of lakes, rivers, and oceans in order to satisfy their cooling water needs. Not such a great idea in a future that includes the ravages of climate chaos – sea level rise, shrinking and flooding rivers, and violent storms. Sea level rise will also increase the damage from earthquakes as this 2014 study for the city of Berkley, CA mentions:

“…Like regions across the globe, the San Francisco Bay Area is experiencing and will continue to increasingly experience the impacts of the changing climate. By 2100, average temperatures in the San Francisco Bay Area will increase up to 11° F. In 2100, Berkeley will have 6-10 additional heat waves each year, which will disproportionately impact the elderly, children under five, and the low-income community members.

Climate change will also cause additional extreme rainfall events, which will lead to more flooding. San Francisco Bay sea-levels will rise up to 55” by 2100, impacting infrastructure and community members in west Berkeley. Climate change impacts will also exacerbate the natural hazards of concern outlined in this plan. Rising sea levels will increase Berkeley’s exposure to earthquake liquefaction, tsunami inundation, and flooding. Increases in precipitation and severe storms will make flooding more frequent, and will increase the landslide risk in the hills. California’s water security will be reduced, and drought will become a more persistent issue….”

How does San Francisco adapt to an 11°F increase in average temperature? It doesn’t. It will be a ghost city by then; the human population will have crashed and be well on its way to the black void of extinction. The city officials of Berkley have not figured that out yet since climate change is a newly added threat to their plans:

“…Climate change is a newly-introduced hazard of concern for the 2014 plan. The climate change section describes the anticipated impacts to Berkeley from climate change. It also outlines how climate change exacerbates other hazards identified in this plan. The City discusses potential impacts from sea-level rise on Berkeley’s western coast, and maps areas in Berkeley that are vulnerable in 55-inch sea-level rise…”

Modern industrial civilization with its exploding human population is protected from the laws of nature only for as long as resources are plentiful and the climate remains stable. Technology cannot be created and supported without inexpensive and highly concentrated energy. Technology is simply a byproduct of human ingenuity and energy expenditure. For over four billion years everything on Earth has evolved and adapted, most recently under the benevolence of the Holocene climate. The current climate catastrophe is a manmade disruption that is several orders of magnitude greater than the average rate of change over the last 300 millenia.

The primary problem with most ‘news’ today is that its filtered through corporate gatekeepers. Another problem with the ‘news’ is that its fragmented and does not connect all the dots to give a person the full picture. As Neil Postman said, “The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on a page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page.” So let’s connect some dots, courtesy of Robert Callaghan:

FUN WITH NUMBERS:
The acidity of the oceans will more than double in the next 40 years. This rate is 10 times faster than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine life occurred. It is also faster than during 4 of earth’s biggest mass extinction events during the last 300 hundred million years — faster than even the great Permian mass extinction event where 95% of life on earth vanished 250 million years ago. The oceans are now 30% more acidic than in pre-industrial times. In less than 40 years they will be 60% more acidic than then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/08/1976351/acidification-arctic/
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/2951
http://readthescience.com/2012/09/17/climate-change-book-review-under-a-green-sky/

When ice ages come and go the planet can change temperature 5°C in as little as 5,000 years. 50 times slower than what we are doing to earth now. In the past, a 5°C change normally takes 20,000 years, we are going to do 5°C in 50-100 years, 200 times faster.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page3.php
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/pd/climate/factsheets/iscurrent.pdf

Climate change is happening 100 times faster than in the past.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=todays-climate-change-proves-much-faster-than-changes-in-past-65-million-years

By 2025, humans will impact 50% of earth’s biosphere. This will cause a planetary ecological state shift leading to a mass extinction event that is unstoppable and irreversible once started.

http://www.ecoshock.info/2012/06/planet-shift-no-return.html

Why does nobody talk about the thousands of 1-kilometer wide bubbling methane seabeds recorded in 2011.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/vast-methane-plumes-seen-in-arctic-ocean-as-sea-ice-retreats-6276278.html

Only 1% of methane needs to be released to cause total disaster.
Peter Wadhams interview.

Natalia Shakhova interview:
Do you believe scientists
who spent 30 years in the arctic,
or do you believe scientists
who spent 30 years at their computer?

And the latest on the methane monster:

Snap 2013-10-29 at 08.22.37

Extinction is a taboo word – bad for busine$$ and a real downer for everyone involved. Best to keep to the cultural storyline that such horrible things only happen on the silver screen with the aid of expensive CGI effects.

Snap 2013-10-29 at 00.35.31

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Post-Apocalyptic Musings

17 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 36 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Geoengineering, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, The End of More, Theocracy, unwashed public

gasmask

Having conquered every last inch of Earth, humans now dream of spilling their burgeoning numbers out into distant planets, even whilst our own blue orb reels from climate chaos and our ever-growing consumption. Every iota of nature is now at the whim of the free market which sees no other path than to convert everything into a profit scheme. Thus a deadly game of musical chairs will be played out in the last days of capitalist industrial civilization as the foreign lands and water reservoirs of indigenous people are stolen to feed the mouths and gas tanks of cash-paying consumers in the First World. As the industrial world clamors for the last pockets of high-density energy sources to feed its energy-starved economic machine, desperate governments and businesses will continue to cut their country’s social safety net, throwing more and more people to the wolves. If you happen to live in a so-called developed country, you will have to run faster and faster on the cutthroat treadmill of the free market in order to stay afloat, lest you fall into the same boat as those of the malnourished and starving Third World. Wary of growing instability, governments will continue to strengthen their security and surveillance apparatus to control the growing unrest. For many, the confines of a prison cell may become the only place that a meal and secure place to sleep can be found. The last remaining chairs of this perverse game will be saved for the cosseted elite who sit at the top of the capitalist pyramid scheme. This social system may seem savage and ‘uncivilized’, but little has changed since the brutal reign of medieval kings up to today’s rule of international bankers and corporate overlords…

…The laws of survival for them are the same now as they were in mediaeval times, when eating above subsistence level was a privilege of those with the means to pay for it… The market economics of the Middle Ages has been brought into the twenty-first century, its brutal indifference unchanged in 500 years…

~ End of More

Thus we are headed for a modern Dark Age: a tyrannical corporate state wielding overwhelming fire power and surveillance capabilities, a collapsing biosphere with unpredictable weather patterns and superstorms, and a blissfully ignorant population eager to find a scapegoat. The time to avert disaster was decades ago, yet the public believes technology is a source of energy as well as a solution to every conceivable problem, that economic growth is a prerequisite to living on Earth, and that anthropocentric climate change is still debatable, if not an outright lie. Our house is on fire and we’re still watching TV. The exit doors have all been super-glued shut with hopium and MSM propaganda. There is no place to run; the deathtrap is foolproof.

media_manipulation_by_nickoiv-d5wr09w

Reality filtered through the most effective propagandist tool in history, i.e. the television, has made even climate change a boring non-event for the masses awash in disaster flicks and Hollywood CGI effects.

Some have predicted that we will embrace theocracy as our world falls apart and the myths of modern life can no longer be maintained. The wrath of climate chaos could be interpreted and used as a sign of retribution from God; some already declare such disasters as divine vengeance:

Snap 2013-08-17 at 14.27.02

In the absence of government, bishops ruled for decades and even centuries during the Middle Ages with religion as the law and morality system. It’s highly conceivable that the surviving populations will fall back on this authority when governments lose legitimacy, providing that the climate does not spiral too far out of control and allows some humans to reorganize into post-industrial communities. Of course there are other manmade booby traps lying in wait around the globe, as explained by a Guardian reader:

“A sudden cessation of industrial activity, besides financial collapse and the end of a regular and plentiful food supply, will affect every industry from nuclear and chemical to oil and electrical. Deep-sea oil wells, left to themselves when workers desert them to return home to their distressed families, will eventually escape into the oceans. With no-one willing or able to plug them, entire oil-fields will vent until depleted. Nuclear power stations, already the repository of all the nuclear waste of decades of power production will eventually meltdown and every molecule of radioactivity will ultimately escape into the biosphere, irradiating the entire planet to one degree or another while leaving much of it uninhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years. Poisoned water sources, from chemical leaks and spills as well as polluted underground aquifers created from frenetic and frantic fracking will add to the mess. Returning to even a medieval style of living will be impossible.”

When entire civilizations crumble, megalomaniacs come out of the woodwork to institute their warped agendas and visions of how the world should be. The luxuries and wealth of today’s corporate elite will simply be transferred to this new circle of self-proclaimed holy leaders – televangelists of the post-apocalyptic world. With electricity in short supply, low-tech forms of punishment such as execution by the wheel, quartering, and of course hanging would come back into fashion. Human muscle would make a comeback in a post-fossil fuel world. Given enough time and with the absence of our fossil fuel servants, large-scale human slavery would likely become acceptable again. If you think about it, the wage slaves of today toiling away in mindless, soul-crushing corporate slots are not that far off from forced labor in a rock quarry.

In the mean time, we’ll all be a captive audience to the onslaught of geoengineering schemes soon to commence once governments of the world figure out that food does not grow very well in a destabilized climate and that the 99% will not go quietly into the dark night of ecological overshoot. In a future of catastrophic sea level rise, the phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats” will not apply.

underwater museum mexico inertia man watching tv obese fast food junk fat lazy couch potato statue sculpture art

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...
← Older posts

Connect with me on Twitter:

Connect with me on Tumblr:

Who really pulls the strings?:

The megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. The bought-and-paid politicians sitting in Washington are simply the marionettes of the corporations and financial elite who are dictating public policy and regulations.

Preserving the Status Quo

There is no right wing or left wing, only the aristocracy and the serfs (a vertical paradigm). To know this is to be like a fish who has broken the surface of the water, realizing he was in water the whole time.

A Kabuki Play

"What we have, in what passes for US democracy in 2012, is a kabuki play that Cicero put to papyrus 1948 years earlier. All historical empires and war aggressors have used propaganda to claim their looting and police states were necessary and helpful to the 99%. Instead, a sorrowful history tells us they were almost always for the sole benefit of the 1%." - Albert Bates

Climate Change & Global Warming Myths (Click on Icon)

Climate Change Videos

Topics

  • Basic Rules of this Website
  • Capitalism
  • Climate Change
  • Consumerism
  • Corporate State
  • Cyber-Warfare
  • Cyberwarfare
  • Ecological Overshoot
  • Empire
  • Environmental Degradation
  • Inequality
  • Intro
  • Military Industrial Complex
  • Neo-Colonialism
  • Peak Oil
  • Pollution
  • Wall Street Fraud
  • Weekend Funnies for the Depressed Collapsitarian
  • Year-End Review

Doomsday Clock Stats

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Archives

  • January 2022
  • July 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • September 2020
  • January 2020
  • September 2019
  • June 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • March 2018
  • May 2017
  • February 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012

Movies and Videos

  • 1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed
  • 1976 Hubbert Clip
  • A meteorite is not the greatest danger of environmental change – The Sixth Extinction
  • After Armageddon – A SHTF scenario
  • American Blackout 2013 National Geographic
  • American Coup
  • An Unreasonable Man (Ralph Nader)
  • Anima Mundi
  • Answering Climate Change Skeptics, Naomi Oreskes
  • Apocalypse, Man (Full Documentary)
  • Apologies Of An Economic Hitman (Full Documentary Movie)
  • Arctic Death Spiral and the Methane Time Bomb
  • Arctic Emergency: Scientists Speak
  • Are Humans Inherently Unsustainable? …Yes.
  • Are Humans Smarter Than Yeast?
  • Atomic Wounds
  • BBC Global Dimming Documentary About Geoengineering & Global Warming
  • Blind Spot
  • Born Into This – Charles Bukowski Documentary
  • Cabot Institute Annual Lecture 2012
  • Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction
  • Capitalism Hits the Fan – Richard Wolff
  • Capitalism is the Crisis (Full Movie)
  • Cinema Politica
  • Clive Hamilton 'Requiem for a Species'
  • Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
  • Conspiracy Rising
  • Consumed – Is Our Consumer Culture Leading to Disaster?
  • Conversations with Great Minds – Climate Scientist Dr. Curt Stager
  • Dark Days – Documentary by Marc Singer
  • David Fridley – Green Dreams: Future or Fantasy?
  • Developing a Sustainable Community – Simon Michaux
  • Do Fox News Viewers Understand Basic Science At All?
  • Do Fox viewers understand the propaganda they are watching?
  • Earth 2100 – Full Documentary / Movie Full HD
  • Earth Days (2009) – Full Movie
  • Earth Under Water – Worldwide Flooding | Sea Level Rise (SLR)
  • END CIV Resist Or Die (Full)
  • END:CIV 2011
  • Facing the Anthropocene: fossil capitalism and the crisis of the earth system
  • Final Warning Limits to Growth
  • Four Horsemen
  • Garbage Warrior [Full Length Documentary]
  • Gasland Part II
  • Geo Scarcity – Geo Destinies in the Coming Age
  • Geologic and human time scales: How can we salvage our global civilization?
  • Green Illusions
  • Green Illusions: "Solar Cells and Other Fairy Tales"
  • Guy McPherson – Earth Extinction 2030
  • Guy’s Climate Chaos Presentation from Pauline Schneider
  • Harvest of Empire
  • Hoodwinked: Who Stole Our World – Presented By John Perkins
  • Into Eternity ( A Nuclear Waste World )
  • Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers • FULL DOCUMENTARY
  • Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs, & Steel
  • Jeremy Jackson: Ocean Apocalypse
  • Joseph Tainter: The Energy Crisis and the End of The Industrial Age
  • Journeyman Pictures
  • Koch Brothers Exposed
  • Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance
  • LAST CALL: the untold reasons of the global crisis
  • Last Hours for Humanity?
  • Lecture on Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter
  • Life After People
  • Manufacturing Consent
  • Modern Black Death – The Next Pandemic – BBC Horizon
  • Nate Hagens – Limits to Growth: Where We Are and What to Do About It
  • Noam Chomsky – Propaganda & Control of the Public Mind
  • Obey
  • Ocean Acidification
  • Ocean Acidification in Earth's Past: Insights to the Future – James Zachos
  • Oil, Smoke & Mirrors
  • Peak mining & implications for natural resource management
  • Permian – Triassic Mayhem: Earth's Largest Mass Extinction
  • Peter Ward Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps
  • Peter Ward The Medea Hypothesis II
  • Peter Ward: The Medea Hypothesis I
  • Photographing the Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima
  • Pirate Television: Financializing America with Randy Mandell
  • Professor Al Bartlett – Arithmetic, Population and Energy
  • Professor Kevin Anderson: Real Clothes for the Emperor – Facing Climate Change
  • Rick Wolff // A Cure for Capitalism
  • Six degrees could change the world
  • Somewhere In New Mexico Before The End Of Time
  • Submedia TV
  • Surplus: Terrorized Into Being Consumers
  • Surviving Progress
  • Techno Fix – Why Technology Won’t Save Us Or the Environment
  • Techno-Fix – Dr. Michael Huesemann interview
  • The Age of Stupid
  • The Big Fix
  • The Century Of The Self
  • The Chomsky Videos
  • The Coming Famine
  • The Corporation : The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
  • The Crash Course
  • The Crisis of Civilization : Full Movie
  • The Day the Earth Nearly Died
  • The Domino Effect – Overpopulation
  • The False Solutions of Green Energy – Wilbert & Foley (PIELC 2014)
  • The Flaw
  • The Fuck-it Point
  • The Long Emergency
  • The Man who Quit Money
  • The Methane Ticking Time Bomb has Struck Again…..
  • The Myth of Capitalism with Michael Parenti
  • The Myth of Sustainability – Guy McPherson
  • The Myth of the Liberal Media: The Propaganda Model of News
  • The Ordinary Madness of Charles Bukowski
  • The Overview Effect
  • The Permian–Triassic Extinction Event [FULL VIDEO]
  • The Planet by Johan Söderberg
  • The Power Principle: (Full Length Documentary)
  • The Secure & the Dispossessed: How the Military and Corporations are Shaping a Climate-Changed World
  • The Shock Doctrine 2009
  • The Sixth Extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert)
  • The Twin Sides of the Fossil Fuel Coin – Guy McPherson
  • There's No Tomorrow (peak oil, energy, growth & the future)
  • Threads (Nuclear War)
  • Tom Murphy: Growth has an Expiration Date
  • TOXIC: AMAZON – FULL LENGTH
  • Up & Coming Liquid Fuel Crisis by Tom Murphy
  • VICE Documentaries
  • What A Way To Go: Life at the end of Empire
  • Who's Afraid Of Machiavelli?

Notes and Documents

  • 'Conspiracy Theories' and Clandestine Politics
  • (2019) UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’
  • 2019 UN Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services(One Million Species At Risk of Extinction)
  • American Empire and Killing Hope – The Essays of William Blum
  • An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security
  • An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for US National Security
  • An Anarchist FAQ Webpage
  • An Inconvenient Truth: Does Responsible Consumption Benefit Corporations More Than Society?
  • Animal Minds and the Foible of Human Exceptionalism
  • Averting Collapse: 6 Steps
  • “Are Humans Unsustainable by Nature?”
  • Book review of Turchin’s “Secular Cycles” and “War & Peace & War”
  • BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED
  • Burning Energy to Keep Cool: The Hidden Energy Crisis in Saudi Arabia
  • Capitalism cannot solve our ecological collapse: articles by Richard Smith
  • Capitalism's Ideological Crutches
  • Carmageddon and Karl Marx
  • Carmaggedon or Rational Discourse?
  • Charles Eisenstein Essays
  • Chatham House: Sustainable Energy Security
  • Christopher Clugston ~ Research Papers and Essays
  • Climate and collapse: Only through the insurrection of civil societies will we avoid the worst
  • Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis (2012)
  • Climate Change is Simple – We Do Something or We're Screwed
  • Climate Change: Just the Facts.
  • Consistency in American Foreign Policy
  • Could the 'Black Death' Strike Again?
  • Dangerous Climate Warming: Myth & Reality
  • Dangerous Speech Project
  • Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis
  • Dennis Meadows: “There is nothing that we can do”
  • Desert
  • DieOff.org
  • Dinosaur, We
  • Dispelling myths about oil
  • Dr. Steven Best – Writings
  • Drill, Baby, Drill
  • Earth may be 140 years away from reaching carbon levels not seen in 56 million years
  • Ecoglobe: Requiem
  • Edward Morbius
  • Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) for photovoltaic solar systems in regions of moderate insolation
  • English version of German military peak oil study
  • Entropy and Economics
  • Eric R. Pianka: The Vanishing Book of Life on Earth
  • Fleeing Babylon
  • FOURTH NATIONAL CLIMATE ASSESSMENT Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States
  • FRACKING GONE WRONG: FINDING A BETTER WAY
  • Getting to the Nearest Star? Not in Our Lifetimes…If Ever!
  • Gleanings for an Understanding of the Endgame
  • Global Drought Monitor
  • Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism
  • Global Warming & Climate Change Myths
  • Globalization and the Emergence of a Transnational Oligarchy
  • Green Capitalism: the God that Failed
  • Green Capitalism: The God That Failed (Updated)
  • GRIFFIN: The political writings of G.S. Griffin, activist and author
  • Hirsch Report
  • How a Culture Dies
  • How Many Gigatons of Carbon Dioxide?
  • How to Avoid Population Overshoot and Collapse
  • Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind
  • Humans will not 'migrate' to other planets, Nobel winner says: The 77-year-old said he felt the need to "kill all the statements that say 'OK, we will go to a liveable planet if one day life is not possible on earth'."
  • Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future
  • Implication of our technological species being first and early
  • Intentional Ignorance
  • Interview with Jay Hanson
  • Is Global Collapse Imminent?
  • Jason W. Moore: Essays
  • Johnny Reb's Freethought Website
  • Julian Cribb
  • Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II – Part I by William Blum
  • Le Monde interview with Dr Robert Hirsch from September 2010
  • Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
  • Living Dangerously: Stories of Climate Change
  • Living for the Moment while Devaluing the Future
  • Lloyd's adds its voice to dire 'peak oil' warnings
  • Looking Back on the 'Limits to Growth'
  • MARY BOOTH ON THE MYTH OF “GREEN” ENERGY FROM WOOD
  • Michael E. Mann
  • Mysterious Siberian Crater Found at "End of the World" May Portend Methane Climate Catastrophe
  • NATURAL CAPITAL AT RISK: THE TOP 100 EXTERNALITIES OF BUSINESS
  • Natural Law
  • Natural Way of Farming Masanobu – Fukuoka Green Philosophy
  • Nature’s Laws No Longer Apply…
  • Net Energy and The Economy
  • New scientific study predicts that plastic pollution and toxic chemical-induced ocean acidification will cause a trophic cascade collapse of the entire marine ecosystem, destroying human society within the next 25 years.
  • NOAA & U.S. Geological Survey Interactive Sea Level Rise Map (up to 25 ft)
  • Noam Chomsky on human extinction: The corporate elite are actively courting disaster
  • Oil and gas industry using military psyops techniques to reduce opposition to fracking
  • OilCrash.com
  • On Human Nature
  • Partnership for Civil Justice
  • Peak Energy, Climate Change, and the Collapse of Global Civilization
  • Peak Oil – A Turning Point for Mankind by Dr. Colin J. Campbell
  • Peter H. Gleick : Has the U.S. Passed the Point of Peak Water?
  • Plastic and toxic chemical-induced ocean acidification will cause a plankton crisis that will devastate humanity over the next 25 years, unless we stop the pollution.
  • Poles Threaten “Climate Chaos” from Continued Warming
  • Policy Makers Slow to Take Peak Oil Action
  • Power Point Presentation on “Corporate Globalization, Corporate Power, Free Trade, Mega Trade Agreements and the Negative Impacts of TPP” by Janet M Eaton, PhD
  • Power Shift Away From Green Illusions
  • Primitivism
  • Professor Charles Hall
  • Renewable energy – Hope or hype?
  • RENEWABLE ENERGY – THE ARGUMENT AGAINST ITS CAPACITY TO SUSTAIN AN ENERGY-INTENSIVE SOCIETY
  • Richard Reese on 'Near Term Extinction'
  • Saudi Arabia May Become Oil Importer by 2030
  • Searching for a Miracle: 'Net Energy' Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society
  • Secular Cycles, Chapter 1
  • Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter planet, by Mark Lynas
  • Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
  • Stephanie McMillan's 'Capitalism Must Die'
  • TED talks – a recipe for civilisational disaster
  • The Anarchist Library
  • The Authoritarian Personality
  • The Bichler & Nitzan Archives
  • The climate threat: What our children can expect
  • The Coming Reality of Sea Level Rise: Too Fast Too Soon
  • The Consumer Trap
  • The Current Mass Extinction
  • The Damage of Current Human Activities Without Precedent in Past 'Mass Extinction' Fossil Records.
  • The Discovery of Global Warming
  • The End of Growth, Seven Years Later
  • The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
  • The evolution and psychology of self-deception
  • The Final Empire THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION
  • The Final Empire: THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION
  • The Free Press
  • The Future of Ice Sheets and Sea Ice: Between Reversible Retreat and Unstoppable Loss
  • The Gore Vidal Pages
  • The Great Oil Swindle
  • The human brain is in Denial.
  • The Human Nature of Unsustainability
  • The Idiot's Guide To Buying A Congressman
  • The Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & U.S. Policy
  • The Last Great Global Warmıng
  • The Limits to Growth (PDF scanned version)
  • The Loss of Biodiversity: a Dangerous Game
  • The Meritocracy Myth
  • The moral environment on Wall Street is pathological — money rules all
  • The Myth of the 1970′s Global Cooling Consensus
  • The myth of US self-sufficiency in crude oil
  • THE NEED FOR A NEW ECONOMIC SYSTEM: "…he feared that human society is headed for a crash."
  • The Network of Global Corporate Control
  • The New Middle Ages
  • The physics of long-run global economic growth
  • THE POPULATION PROBLEM AND SOCIALISM
  • The Power Elite
  • The Principle of Imminent Collapse
  • The Science of Apocalypse
  • The Story of P(ee)
  • The Story of Phosphorus: 7 reasons why we need to transform phosphorus use in the global food system
  • The Temptation of The Technofix (The Quest for “New Nature”)
  • The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
  • There Is No "Green" Energy
  • Thomas Homer-Dixon
  • Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar Photovoltaics
  • Tipping Towards the Unknown
  • Too many bodies? The return and disavowal of the population question
  • Trade-Off: Financial system supply-chain cross contagion – a study in global systemic collapse
  • Twenty Premises on Industrial Civilization from Derrick Jensen
  • Twenty-First Century Collapse
  • Underminers: A Practical Guide to Radical Change
  • We Are All Madoffs
  • Wealth and Inequality – Pareto, Gini and Contingency
  • What Evolution Is?
  • Who Rules America: An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%
  • Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power
  • Why shale gas won’t end our energy woes
  • Why Space Opera Won't Fly
  • Why won't planting trees stop global warming?
  • Zygmunt Bauman

RSS 3 Quarkes Daily

  • 3 Quarks Daily has moved! April 29, 2018
  • polixeni papapetrou (1960 - 2018) April 29, 2018

RSS A Closer Look

  • Cookies August 17, 2025
  • The structure of this blog November 4, 2024
  • Congressional antics May 5, 2022

RSS A Prosperous Way Down

  • A really inconvenient truth August 25, 2019
  • Energy ethics for survival of people in nature June 23, 2018

RSS Adam Curtis Blog

  • SAVE YOUR KISSES FOR ME November 30, 2012
  • WHILE THE BAND PLAYED ON November 14, 2012
  • HE'S BEHIND YOU October 21, 2012

RSS Adam Vs The Man

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS AdBusters

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Against the Grain

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Aljazeera

  • Japan’s Q1 GDP shrinks as Ukraine, cost of living cloud outlook May 18, 2022
  • Sri Lanka faces ‘man-made’ food crisis as farmers stop planting May 18, 2022
  • Taiwan stunned after deadly shooting at Taiwanese-American church May 18, 2022
  • California church attack suspect charged with first-degree murder May 17, 2022
  • US plan to remove Kahanist group from ‘terror’ list draws concern May 17, 2022

RSS Aljazeera – Opinion

  • Japan’s Q1 GDP shrinks as Ukraine, cost of living cloud outlook May 18, 2022
  • Sri Lanka faces ‘man-made’ food crisis as farmers stop planting May 18, 2022
  • Taiwan stunned after deadly shooting at Taiwanese-American church May 18, 2022
  • California church attack suspect charged with first-degree murder May 17, 2022
  • US plan to remove Kahanist group from ‘terror’ list draws concern May 17, 2022
  • ‘One million empty chairs’: The US families torn apart by COVID May 17, 2022
  • Inside the US communities where many are still unvaccinated May 17, 2022

RSS All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go

  • Jesse Jackson on poverty September 17, 2020
  • Quote of the day September 12, 2020
  • Voting and the ‘rule by law’ September 12, 2020
  • Wendy Brown on neoliberalism and democracy September 7, 2020
  • Thomas Ferguson discusses our situation September 7, 2020
  • This way doth dictatorship lie September 1, 2020

RSS Alternative Radio

  • [Katrina vanden Heuvel] Russia, Ukraine, the War & the U.S. May 12, 2022

RSS AlterNet

  • 'What they are doing is war': Kremlin spox labels United States & allies as 'hostile enemies' of Russia May 18, 2022
  • 'Here we go': Legal experts muse over Merrick Garland's request for January 6th panel's transcripts May 18, 2022
  • The sneaky way that despotic Mississippi Republicans are eyeing a ban on contraceptives: report May 17, 2022
  • The United States wins the 'shameful distinction' of being number one in enabling financial secrecy: report May 17, 2022

RSS Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

  • Bank of England has made 'serious mistakes', former Governor says May 17, 2022
  • Darktrace executive was part of 'clique' behind Britain's biggest ever fraud May 17, 2022
  • Twitter pushes Elon Musk to complete $44bn deal as he calls for SEC investigation May 17, 2022
  • EU will rely on Russian oil for a ‘long time’, claims Putin May 17, 2022
  • Andrew Neil urges BBC to launch subscription service May 17, 2022

RSS Anarchist News

  • The Cost Of Living Crisis – An Anarchist Analysis May 17, 2022
  • Attacks in Solidarity with Atlanta Forest in Alabama and Albany, NY May 17, 2022
  • The Age-Old Question: Is Anarcho-Capitalism Anarchism? May 17, 2022
  • Position on our solidarity work in Ukraine May 17, 2022
  • System Fail 11: Lamborghinis and Tear Gas May 17, 2022

RSS Antony Loewenstein

  • Will the Australian election give voice to Palestinians? May 12, 2022
  • When is the time to boycott? April 5, 2022
  • When will I praise Israeli hegemony, Israel lobby asks? April 1, 2022

RSS Apocadocs

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Arctic Emergency Institute

  • Declining Summer Sea Ice Threatens More than Arctic Wildlife August 25, 2012

RSS Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG)

  • AMEG Strategic Plan December 8, 2012
  • Breaking the Chain November 27, 2012
  • AMEG Policy Brief September 23, 2012
  • The biggest story of all time September 1, 2012

RSS Arctic News

  • Carbon dioxide reaches another record high May 16, 2022
  • Carbon dioxide crosses 422 ppm April 28, 2022
  • Runaway temperature rise by 2026? April 16, 2022

RSS Arctic Sea Ice

  • PIOMAS December 2019 December 17, 2019
  • PIOMAS November 2019 November 13, 2019
  • PIOMAS October 2019 October 14, 2019
  • PIOMAS September 2019 September 16, 2019
  • PIOMAS August 2019 August 7, 2019

RSS Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis

  • Springtime in the Arctic May 3, 2022
  • Spring in fits and starts April 5, 2022
  • Arctic sea ice maximum at tenth lowest in satellite record March 22, 2022

RSS Around the Coast Mountains

  • The name’s Mark… Mark BC March 18, 2014
  • Packrafting / Fatbiking Buntzen Lake March 3, 2014
  • My New Surly Pugsley Fatbike Build February 11, 2014

RSS Arthur Silber

  • Moving Interruptus, and Why Hospitals Suck July 1, 2019
  • Crisis May 16, 2019
  • How Many Damn Fucking Times Do I Have to Explain This? May 15, 2019
  • So Close, Yet So Far April 7, 2019

RSS Arundhati Roy

  • This is no ordinary spying. Our most intimate selves are now exposed | Arundhati Roy July 26, 2021
  • ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe – podcast May 7, 2021

RSS Arundhati Roy Says

  • A perfect day for democracy February 9, 2013
  • Arundhati Roy speaks about the issue of rape in India December 22, 2012
  • We Call This Progress December 17, 2012

RSS ASPO – USA

  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 13 April 2020 April 13, 2020
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 6 April 2020 April 6, 2020
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 30 March 2020 March 30, 2020
  • Peak-Oil.org is now The Energy Bulletin March 24, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 23 March 2020 March 23, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 16 March 2020 March 16, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 9 March 2020 March 9, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 2 March 2020 March 3, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 24 February 2020 February 24, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 17 February 2020 February 18, 2020

RSS Avedon’s Sideshow

  • We're in for nasty weather May 14, 2022
  • 'Cause I couldn't stand the pain April 30, 2022
  • Play it right and bide my time April 14, 2022

RSS Bad Astronomy

  • Tucker Carlson Is Deflecting
  • Why Hundreds of Thousands of People Are Reading Dracula Together Right Now
  • I Always Told My Patients IUDs Were Over 99 Percent Effective. Then I Got Pregnant.

RSS Barbara Ehrenreich

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS BBC: Science & Environment

  • Climate change swells odds of record India, Pakistan heatwaves May 17, 2022
  • Farm machinery exacting heavy toll on soil - study May 17, 2022
  • Full lunar eclipse creates rare super blood Moon May 16, 2022

RSS Big Picture Agriculture

  • BIG PICTURE AGRICULTURE'S LATEST NEWS February 26, 2022
  • How to Stay Informed About Agriculture, Food, and Farming Issues October 15, 2019
  • Dr. Walter Falcon's 2019 Iowa Farm Report September 11, 2019
  • Agriculture Reading Picks October 31, 2018
  • The Merits of Amaranth October 30, 2018

RSS Bill Moyers

  • Trump-Russia-Ukraine Timeline April 12, 2022
  • Insurrection Timeline March 13, 2022
  • Juneteenth: America’s Other Independence Day April 20, 2021

RSS Bit Tooth Energy

  • Waterjetting 37e - Using Cavitation to disintegrate rock November 18, 2015
  • Waterjetting 37d - Underground Drilling with Waterjets November 16, 2015
  • Waterjetting 37c - A Drilling Diversion October 14, 2015

RSS Bizarro Blog

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Brane Space

  • Extremist State Judiciaries Or Judicial Sanity - Today's Primaries Are A First Test Of Dem Voter Passion, Commitment To Liberty May 17, 2022
  • The Vitamin D Controversy Off The Radar - Even Of Most Physicians May 17, 2022

RSS Brave New World

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Breaking the Set

  • Abby Martin Breaks the Set One Last Time February 28, 2015
  • Never Stop Breaking the Set! February 28, 2015
  • Cuba Part III: The Evolution of Revolution February 27, 2015
  • Cuba Part II: Ebola Solidarity & Castro’s Daughter on Gay Rights February 26, 2015
  • Why Are Americans Getting Their Medical Degrees in Cuba? February 26, 2015

RSS Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Business Insider

  • Live updates: Pennsylvania primaries come to a dramatic close, while Rep. Madison Cawthorn in electoral peril May 18, 2022
  • Rep. Madison Cawthorn ousted from office amid scandals and opposition from his own party May 18, 2022
  • RESULTS: Republican Doug Mastriano wins Republican primary in a crucial race for Pennsylvania governor May 18, 2022
  • LIVE RESULTS: John Fetterman wins the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania's Senate race May 18, 2022
  • Trump and his associates just had a very bad day thanks to a cascading series of Justice Department moves May 18, 2022
  • LIVE RESULTS: Pennsylvania holds congressional and state legislative primaries May 18, 2022
  • Republican Ted Budd and Democrat Cheri Beasley set to face off in competitive Senate race in North Carolina May 17, 2022
  • LIVE RESULTS: North Carolina and Kentucky hold mayoral primaries May 17, 2022
  • LIVE RESULTS: North Carolina holds congressional and state legislative primaries May 17, 2022
  • The Walton family lost nearly $19 billion on Tuesday after Walmart's biggest stock slide in about 35 years May 17, 2022

RSS C-Realm

  • Automation and SJWs: A Conversation with James Howard Kunstler February 12, 2016
  • It's official. The Age of Limits gathering is on hiatus January 22, 2015
  • Three Conferences in Three Weeks June 13, 2014

RSS Cagle: Premium Cartoon News

  • Peter Kuper INterSECTs on May 25th May 17, 2022
  • Exxon Extinction May 17, 2022
  • Empty May 17, 2022
  • Nature to Nukes May 17, 2022
  • Black Hole May 17, 2022
  • The Price of Gas May 17, 2022

RSS Cassandra’s Legacy

  • Cassandra is Dead. Long Live Cassandra! April 15, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect": The Collapse of Saudi Arabia's Water Supply April 12, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect" April 5, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest post on "The Seneca Effect" April 1, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's latest post on "The Seneca Effect" March 29, 2021

RSS Censored News

  • Sisters in Defense of the Amazon Rainforest: Oil Companies Bring Terror to Ecuadorian Amazon May 17, 2022
  • Rights of Nature: Attorneys Describe Emerging Movement in Indian Country May 16, 2022
  • Nick Estes and Sikowis at Bioneers, Sunday, May 15, 2022 May 15, 2022

RSS Center For Biological Diversity

  • Court Rules Federal Agency Wrongly Withdrew Bi-State Sage Grouse Protections May 17, 2022
  • Massive Kootenai National Forest Timber Sale Challenged by Conservation Groups May 17, 2022
  • Lawsuit Challenges California Biofuel Refinery Expansion May 16, 2022

RSS Center for Investigative Journalism

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Center for Economic & Policy Research

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Charles Eisenstein’s Blog

  • Peace-building March 25, 2022
  • FASCHISMUS UND DAS ANTIFESTIVAL November 16, 2021

RSS Chomsky

  • The Kind of Anarchism I Believe in, and What's Wrong with Libertarians June 9, 2013
  • Upcoming speaking event in Boston with Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, and Jeremy Scahill April 19, 2013

RSS Chris Hedges

  • Imagining A New World on the Other Side of the Pandemic March 20, 2020

RSS Class Warfare Blog

  • How to Resolve the Abortion Issue May 16, 2022
  • There Are No Contradictions . . . May 16, 2022

RSS Cliff Schecter

  • Japan’s Q1 GDP shrinks as Ukraine, cost of living cloud outlook May 18, 2022
  • Sri Lanka faces ‘man-made’ food crisis as farmers stop planting May 18, 2022
  • Taiwan stunned after deadly shooting at Taiwanese-American church May 18, 2022
  • California church attack suspect charged with first-degree murder May 17, 2022
  • US plan to remove Kahanist group from ‘terror’ list draws concern May 17, 2022
  • ‘One million empty chairs’: The US families torn apart by COVID May 17, 2022

RSS Climate and Capitalism

  • IMF ‘double standard’ displays capitalism’s inherent inhumanity May 16, 2022
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, May 2022 May 9, 2022
  • How vested interests rewrote the IPCC’s latest report April 28, 2022
  • Darwin: ‘Commonsense and Wonder’ April 19, 2022
  • ‘Rain Bomb’ kills over 300 in South Africa, exposing political hypocrisy April 14, 2022
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, April 2022 April 10, 2022

RSS Climate Central

  • The looming threat for Maine’s iconic potato industry
  • Ellis Island, lighthouses among historic NJ sites flooding as seas rise
  • Still rare in Iowa, electric car powers Des Moines family’s home during blackouts
  • Storied Maine ski resort bets future on reining in high costs of warmer winters

RSS Climate Change: The Next Generation

  • Flip Flop: Why Variations in Earth's Magnetic Field Aren't Causing Today's Climate Change February 22, 2022
  • Let's call climate change deniers what they really are: CLIMATE LIARS! May 9, 2021
  • Amy Westerfelt: The Reason COVID-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation April 27, 2020

RSS Climate Citizen

  • Carbon Credits & Offsets | Honest Government Ad April 16, 2022
  • Climate consideration case not to be appealed to High Court, but Students vow to keep pushing for climate action April 12, 2022
  • UN Secretary General calls out Australia: "the truly dangerous radicals increasing the production of fossil fuels" in launching IPCC WGIII report on climate solutions April 6, 2022

RSS Climate Code Red

  • 1.5 degrees Paris climate target not ‘safe or appropriate’ given climate tipping point risks, ‘major rethink’ required: new report May 16, 2022
  • Tullamarine’s dream of a third runway is an emissions nightmare May 4, 2022
  • Are renewables decreasing global fossil fuel use? May 3, 2022

RSS Climate Connections

  • Climate Connections Update February 5, 2015
  • CIC’s environmental and social justice photography contest open for entries January 9, 2015
  • FBI Harassing Activists in Pacific Northwest January 7, 2015

RSS Climate Denial Crock of the Week

  • Creaky US Power Grid is Critical Factor Limiting Renewables, and Anything Else May 17, 2022
  • Lake Mead Leaving Fish High and Very Dry May 17, 2022
  • Cambridge has Concrete Evidence of Low Carbon Cement May 17, 2022

RSS Climate Progress

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Climate Snapshot

  • "Carbon tsunami" lead by Enbridge Northern Gateway takes aim at BC June 18, 2014
  • BC's tar sands? Thirteen proposed LNG projects equivalent to 13 times current BC emissions June 9, 2014
  • Car Carbon series: cool new animation, plus the jaw-dropping impact it left out May 13, 2014
  • Climate change fuels both California's record drought and "polar vortex" storms May 6, 2014

RSS ClimateSight

  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia (Part 2) March 23, 2021
  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia. March 11, 2021
  • Talking, typing, and the social model of disability July 22, 2020

RSS Club Orlov

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS ClusterFuck Nation

  • Feeding the Narrative May 16, 2022
  • That Sinking Feeling May 13, 2022

RSS Cocktailhag – FDL

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Colin Tudge

  • Let's not bet the farm | Colin Tudge April 3, 2013
  • Why the world needs a renaissance of small farming | Colin Tudge September 18, 2012

RSS Common Dreams: News

  • Climate Campaigners Demand Oxford, Cambridge Stop Taking Fossil Fuel Money May 17, 2022
  • Palestine Defenders Hail Rep. Tlaib's 'Historic' Nakba Resolution May 17, 2022
  • Earth's Atmospheric CO2 Hasn't Been This High In Millions of Years May 17, 2022
  • 'A Shameful Distinction': US Ranked World's Biggest Perpetrator of Financial Secrecy May 17, 2022
  • Progressives Vow to Fight as DeSantis Signs Bill Banning Protests at Florida Homes May 17, 2022

RSS Consortium News

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Consumer Energy Report

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Corp Watch

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS CorrenteWire

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS CorrenteWire – Quick Hits

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Counter Currents

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS CounterPunch

  • Less Freedom, More Money: Tony Blair’s Vaccine Passport June 14, 2021
  • The U.S. Dares to Criticize Israel October 3, 2014
  • Gaza – Betrayed In Thought and Deed August 5, 2014
  • Boeing Workers Take a Stand & Take the Heat December 31, 2013
  • Bank Corruption Down Under December 31, 2013
  • Europe’s Deadly Transition From Social Democracy to Oligarchy December 9, 2011
  • Pakistan Stares Into the Abyss December 29, 2007
  • Seeing in the Dark December 29, 2007
  • What We Can Not See December 29, 2007
  • The Sham of Homeland Security December 29, 2007

RSS Crooked Timber

  • Guest Post: Survey on Exploitation May 17, 2022
  • Sunday photoblogging: Rose May 15, 2022
  • The Thirty-Nine Steps May 13, 2022
  • American history as imagined in liberal political philosophy May 9, 2022

RSS Crooks and Liars

  • White Mom Sues School; Her Teen Won't Listen Because CRT! May 18, 2022
  • Primaries Open Thread: Five States Go To The Polls - UPDATE 3 May 18, 2022
  • Trump Lawyer Stumped When Asked About Dr. Oz' Refusal To Say 2020 Stolen May 17, 2022
  • Russian Host: By Voting For Ukraine At Eurovision, Europe Voted For Fascism! May 17, 2022

RSS Cryptome

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Culture Change

  • Low Cost Polluting: The Real American Dream?
  • We Did It: Sailing Cargo in the Aegean
  • Cure for Depending on 90K Oil Spewing Cargo Ships: Sail Power Makes Inroads, Now in Mediterranean

RSS Dahr Jamail

  • For a Worse Tomorrow November 18, 2021
  • Covid-19’s Not Through With Us Yet September 21, 2021

RSS Daily Kos Comics

  • Cartoon: Lone wolf May 17, 2022
  • Cartoon: Moments of clarity May 17, 2022
  • Cartoon: Goofball and Galahad May 16, 2022
  • Cartoon: Susan Collins's concerns May 13, 2022
  • Cartoon: Alito’s DIY Precedent Kit May 13, 2022
  • Cartoon: The Education of Louis - What a boring dance May 12, 2022

RSS Damn the Matrix

  • Great Simplification with Tom Murphy May 11, 2022
  • House update 2022 May 11, 2022

RSS Dan Hagen

  • Dr. Strange on the Yellow Brick Road May 8, 2022
  • Wind Waves Their Ears May 6, 2022

RSS Dangerous Intersection

  • Woke Math, Revisited May 16, 2022
  • Needing More War News, NBC Analyzes Impending War with China May 16, 2022
  • The Mass Media’s Distorted Lens When It Decides Who to Blame for Mass Murders May 15, 2022

RSS Dark Ages America

  • Doomer Optimism April 26, 2022
  • The Sadness of War April 18, 2022
  • 450 March 28, 2022
  • Eminent Post-Victorians March 13, 2022

RSS David Bollier

  • Alanna Irving on Distributed Leadership and Infrastructures for Commoning May 1, 2022
  • Farewell to Christopher Alexander, Edgar Cahn, and Gustavo Esteva April 7, 2022
  • The Radical Open Access Collective: Building Better Knowledge Commons March 31, 2022

RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – National Memo)

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – Tax Analysts)

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS David Harvey

  • The ABC of Contemporary Capital | Session 13 May 4, 2022
  • The ABC of Contemporary Capital | Session 12 April 27, 2022
  • The ABC of Contemporary Capital | Session 11 April 18, 2022

RSS David Hilfiker

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS David McNally

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS David Roberts

  • Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck June 5, 2015
  • Please support Grist April 10, 2015
  • There’s an emerging right-wing divide on climate denial. Here’s what it means (and doesn’t) April 8, 2015

RSS Death by Car: Capitalism’s Drive to Carmageddon

  • Let’s go to the movies! a maple restaurant opened in a car theater May 12, 2022
  • Electric Vehicle Charging Station, No Compensation for Accidents May 12, 2022
  • Acting driver of Yongsan electric vehicle fatalities claims to jump ship in court May 4, 2022
  • A series of electric vehicle ‘heat runaway’ fire explosions April 28, 2022
  • Traffic accidents increase in April when highway repair work is heavy…”Driver needs to be careful” April 20, 2022

RSS Decline of the Empire

  • Defending Reality
  • Fascism And The Uniparty

RSS Deep Green Resistence News Service

  • Collapse is Coming. An Unsustainable Society Will Not Last. May 16, 2022
  • Eco-Terrorist or Water Protector? Jessica Reznicek Appeals Terrorism Charges May 13, 2022
  • How to Organize: The Spectrum of Allies May 9, 2022
  • An Alliance Between Human and Non-Human May 7, 2022

RSS Deepak Tripathi’s Diary

  • Afghanistan Awaits Uncertain Future After US Withdrawal July 7, 2021
  • UK’s Brexit Maze October 29, 2019

RSS Democratic Underground

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Democratic Underground – Breaking News

  • Doug Mastriano, a far-right 2020 election denier, is Pennsylvania Republicans' choice for governor. May 18, 2022
  • Fetterman wins Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary May 18, 2022
  • Pennsylvania Democrats elect Josh Shapiro as their nominee for governor. May 18, 2022
  • Casino mogul Wynn sued for acting as agent for China May 17, 2022
  • Justice Dept. Requests Transcripts From Jan. 6 Committee May 17, 2022
  • Chicago archdiocese settles sex abuse suit for $1.2 million May 17, 2022
  • Twitter's account of deal shows Musk signing without asking for more info May 17, 2022
  • Nearly 43,000 people died on US roads last year, agency says May 17, 2022
  • UPDATE: John Fetterman to undergo procedure to implant pacemaker days after suffering stroke May 17, 2022
  • Conservative MP arrested on suspicion of rape May 17, 2022

RSS Democratic Underground – Good Reads

  • he Supreme Court green-lights political corruption -- again May 18, 2022
  • Ten Black people were murdered for merely being. Silly me, I thought they were the real victims May 18, 2022
  • Prejudices That Led to Witch- Hunts Still Affect Women Today, Says Historian May 17, 2022
  • White Nationalist pretzel logic. May 17, 2022
  • Finding Fellow Democratic Voters Near You May 17, 2022
  • Washington Post Opinion: A woman who takes on neo-Nazis sees ominous signs in mass shooting May 17, 2022
  • Even after 1 million deaths, covid fight isn't over May 17, 2022
  • Private Equity Investors Rigging Economy, Driving Up Costs- Housing, Healthcare, Hospitals, More... May 17, 2022
  • EXPLAINER: Why is Turkey wary of Nordic states' NATO bid? May 17, 2022
  • Conspiracy theorists flock to bird flu, spreading falsehoods May 17, 2022

RSS Democracy Now

  • David Dayen on the Baby Formula Shortage & Monopolies in the Age of Corporate Power May 17, 2022
  • Do Online Forums Act as "Radicalization Machines" for White Supremacists & Mainstream GOP? May 17, 2022
  • Buffalo Massacre & Racist Manifesto Fuel Push to Regulate Social Media Platforms Where Hate Flourishes May 17, 2022
  • Headlines for May 17, 2022 May 17, 2022
  • Abortion Activist Renee Bracey Sherman: Democrats Demand Our Votes But Fail to Protect Our Rights May 16, 2022
  • Antiracist Scholar Ibram X. Kendi: Republicans Must Address How White Supremacists Target Youth May 16, 2022
  • Buffalo Massacre: Gunman Cited Racist "Great Replacement" Conspiracy Theory Popularized by Fox News May 16, 2022
  • Now Is the Time for Reparations: India Walton on Buffalo Mass Shooting That Targeted Black Community May 16, 2022
  • Headlines for May 16, 2022 May 16, 2022
  • German Peace Activist Warns Finland Joining NATO Could Be Step Toward Nuclear War with Russia May 13, 2022

RSS Derrick Jensen

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Desdemona Despair

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Desertification

  • King Mohammed VI Calls for Action Against Climate Change, Desertification May 11, 2022
  • COP15: we explain desertification in the world in figures May 11, 2022
  • Ivory Coast aims to raise $1.5 billion to restore forests, land May 11, 2022
  • Desertification and how to deal with it May 11, 2022
  • Talks over desertification start at COP15 as Earth faces ’emergency’ May 11, 2022

RSS deSmog Blog

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Digbys Blog

  • Untitled January 12, 2020
  • They can save the world by @BloggersRUs January 12, 2020
  • Just drifting: R.I.P. Buck Henry By Dennis Hartley January 12, 2020
  • It looks like he wants to take Iraq's oil money January 12, 2020
  • Untitled January 11, 2020
  • Let's not forget who worked with Suleimani's IRGC January 11, 2020

RSS Disinfo – Ecology

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Dispatches from the Underclass

  • How Sweden & Denmark Ride the Imperialist Wave, w/ Torkil Lauesen May 6, 2022
  • Why So Many Pakistanis Believe the US Backed a Coup Against Imran Khan, w/ Azhar Imran May 6, 2022
  • Ukraine War: Europe Shackles Itself to America’s Reckless Foreign Policy, w/ Prof Wolfgang Streeck May 6, 2022
  • Israeli Violence & Western Hypocrisy: Where Are the Palestinian Flag Emojis? w/ Ali Abunimah May 6, 2022
  • Was Imran Khan’s Ouster a US-Backed Coup? It’s Complicated, Says Pakistani Leftist Taimur Rahman May 6, 2022

RSS Dissent Magazine

  • A New Cold War? May 16, 2022
  • Bloody Sunday at Fifty May 13, 2022
  • Tech Workers Lie Flat May 11, 2022
  • Letters May 9, 2022

RSS Dissident Voice

  • NWO Crisis Actor Casting May 18, 2022
  • The Truth of Forced Pregnancies May 17, 2022
  • NDP onboard with Cons, Liberals in warmongering over Ukraine May 17, 2022
  • How China’s 1942 Yan’an Forum Inspired the Culture of National Liberation in the Third World May 17, 2022
  • Hey Elon Musk, I want my cut of Twitter! May 17, 2022
  • The British Art of Black Propaganda May 17, 2022
  • “Booming” Economy Leaves Millions Behind: Part Four May 16, 2022
  • Henry Kissinger, the World Economic Forum and Population Control May 16, 2022

RSS Do the Math

  • Human Exceptionalism February 16, 2022

RSS Dollars & Sense Blog

  • The Last Tour Guide to Leave Cuba April 16, 2022
  • New Issue! March 31, 2022
  • Ukraine: What Will Be Done and What Should Be Done? February 26, 2022
  • Asking the Right Questions about the Robinhood/GameStop Meme-Stock Mania February 16, 2022
  • Our Latest Issue February 12, 2022
  • Henry George: Prophet of the Gilded Age February 12, 2022

RSS Doug Stanhope

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Douglas Rushkoff

  • Survival of the Richest May 9, 2022
  • Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires May 9, 2022
  • Rise to the Occasion May 4, 2022

RSS Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

  • Ukraine Government Orders Neo-Nazi Azov regiment to save their lives by Surrendering to the Russian forces who have the Neo-Nazis trapped May 17, 2022
  • The War in Ukraine. Scott Ritter’s Switcheroo: “Why I Radically Changed My Overall Assessment” May 17, 2022

RSS Dredd Blog

  • On The Origin Of The Home Of COVID-19 - 29 May 17, 2022
  • Appendix Mutant Omicron May 17, 2022
  • Appendix Mutant Wuhan May 17, 2022
  • Appendix Omicron May 17, 2022

RSS Ear to the Ground – Truth Dig

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Early Warning

  • New York Not Close to Exiting Lockdown April 17, 2020
  • Is New York Containing Covid? April 8, 2020
  • New York vs Italy March 23, 2020

RSS Earth First

  • “UNC Dildo-Boy” accosts homophobic preacher, releases anti-technology declaration March 2, 2014
  • Subpoena caps bad week for fossil fuel March 2, 2014
  • Less Than 60 Hours Left to Support Indigenous Land Defenders! February 18, 2014

RSS Earth Observatory: Image of the Day, Natural Hazards, and News

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Earth Observatory: Image of the Day

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Earth Observatory: Natural Hazards

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Earth Policy Institute Blog

  • Data Highlight - Wind Power Beats Nuclear Again in China
  • Data Highlight - Plastic Bag Bans or Fees Cover 49 Million Americans
  • Plan B Update - Fossil Fuel Development in the Arctic is a Bad Investment

RSS Ecocide Alert

  • How to Find a Casino Online May 18, 2022

RSS Ecohuman World

  • Our mission November 23, 2016
  • Ecohumanist society and ecology November 23, 2016

RSS Eco-Shock News

  • Radio Ecoshock: Can We Avoid Mass Extinction of Ocean Life? May 11, 2022

RSS Ecological Headstand

  • Dilke, Chapman, and Dahlberg Pop-ups May 15, 2021
  • For the Abolition of the Wages System! June 18, 2015
  • The Incredible Shrinking Blog June 9, 2015
  • Keynes "hadn't got round to it" May 25, 2015

RSS Ecological Sociology

  • Commons Enabling Infrastucture August 31, 2013
  • A Short History of Progress: Book Review August 26, 2013
  • Foucault, Power, Truth and Ecology August 14, 2013

RSS Ecologise

  • Charles Eisenstein: The Coronation May 16, 2020
  • Visakhapatnam gas leak accident: A preliminary modelling study May 15, 2020
  • The electric car must fail March 30, 2020
  • Economy and ecology are now in conflict; it’s time to integrate them with wisdom March 27, 2020
  • War, mismanagement and climate change: Iraq’s environment on the brink March 20, 2020
  • Big Farms make Big Flu: The deadly connection between industrial farming and pandemics March 17, 2020
  • The Songs of Trees: Stories From Nature’s Great Connectors March 13, 2020
  • Charles Hugh Smith: Could Covid-19 overwhelm us in the months ahead? March 10, 2020
  • Just like the economy, India’s forests too are thriving only on paper March 7, 2020
  • New Zealand’s ‘well-being budget’ and the unnecessary evil of economic growth March 4, 2020

RSS Economic Hardship Reporting Project

  • NATAL Season 2, Chapter 10: Returning May 17, 2022
  • I was wrongly detained at the border. It’s part of a larger problem. May 13, 2022
  • News from Somewhere May 10, 2022
  • NATAL Season 2, Interlude: The Sisterhood May 10, 2022
  • “Women afraid of dying while / they are trying to find their life.” Poetry of Abortion by Alissa Quart May 6, 2022
  • Short Circuit May 4, 2022

RSS Economic Undertow

  • The Death of Economics June 9, 2021
  • Cars and More Cars … March 22, 2021
  • Repost From 2015: Pied Piper of Dumb Money January 26, 2021

RSS EcoWorldView

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Empire Burlesque

  • Generation of Vipers: The Original Sin and Continuous Crimes of America’s Involvement in Afghanistan August 17, 2021
  • Reich and Reality: Culture Wars of the Conquerors August 10, 2021

RSS Empirical Magazine

  • From the Empirical Archives: Genius or Folly? August 30, 2013
  • From the Empirical Archives: Nights Such as These August 29, 2013
  • From the Empirical Archives: Second Time Foster Child August 28, 2013

RSS EmptyWheel

  • EDNY Accuses Tom Barrack of “Harvesting Assets” by Crafting Policy to Help UAE in a Trump Presidency
  • Comings and Goings on the Proud Boy Leaders Prosecution
  • Scene-Setter for the Sussmann Trial, Part Two: The Witnesses

RSS End of More

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Energy Balance

  • “Reading Hydro” – Microhydropower on the River Thames at Caversham Lock (Reading, UK). May 17, 2022
  • “Four Meals From Anarchy” – We Must Grow More Food Locally. April 23, 2022
  • Russia-Ukraine War and the Changing Energy Landscape. March 16, 2022
  • Confronting the Changing Climate: COP26 - Scientists’ Warnings into Action, from Local to Global. November 14, 2021
  • The Energy Crisis and the Climate Crisis. October 4, 2021
  • IPCC Climate Report Signals “Code Red” for Humanity, but the reality is so much worse. August 15, 2021

RSS Environment & Food Justice

  • National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Statement on the Climate Crisis October 31, 2019
  • La Lucha por La Sierra | Scion of Texas Oil Barons Seeks to Overturn Historic Use Rights to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant August 30, 2018
  • Biopiracy in Mexico | Foundation stealing wild beehives in Yucatán June 14, 2018

RSS Envisionation Blog

  • Sir David King on Heatwaves, Action, & Activism: “No one will escape..” May 15, 2022
  • Fungi-based meat alternatives to help save Earth’s forests May 4, 2022
  • McGovern Leads Calls on President Biden to Pardon Environmental Lawyer Steven Donziger April 27, 2022
  • Dr Delton Chen | Ministry For A Living System Economy April 20, 2022

RSS Extraenvironmentalist Blog and Podcasts

  • [ Episode #95 // Economy of Things ] January 28, 2017
  • [ Episode #94 // Rocking the Google Bus ] October 25, 2016
  • [ Episode #93 // Climate Agreements ] September 5, 2016

RSS ExtraEnvironmentalist’s Videos

  • Untitled
  • Untitled

RSS ExtraGeographic

  • Brexit, empire and cultural dementia. David Andress demolishes lazy nationalism
    A leave voter at the Save Brexit Rally wants Brexit so that Britain can “get back to being a British Empire”.… Read more The post Brexit, empire and cultural dementia. David Andress demolishes lazy nationalism first appeared on Extra Geographic.
  • Brexit explained in three tweets
    Three recent tweets encapsulate the misinformation, corruption and mess of Brexit Britain. They’re a window into a peculiar time. The UK government’s Department for International Trade (DIT) “helps businesses export, drives inward and outward investment, negotiates market access and trade deals, and champions free trade”.… Read more The post Brexit explained […]
  • Ann Pettifor on Carillion: ‘a grand Ponzi scheme’
    In a recent interview Ann Pettifor, global financial analyst, spoke about the corrupted crony capitalism that led to the collapse of Carillion, a major Government contractor.… Read more The post Ann Pettifor on Carillion: ‘a grand Ponzi scheme’ first appeared on Extra Geographic.
  • James Joyce in summary: escape is a key theme in his work
    Throughout his life James Joyce attempted to escape – from war, religion, convention, narrative structure, language… “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.… Read more The post James Joyce in summary: escape is a key theme in his work first appeared on Extra Geographic.
  • Jeremy Clarkson buys an electric car: an optimistic vision of the UK’s EV future
    A nation’s stories play a large part in its future. Established ideas become conventional wisdom in social institutions. The institutions then draw on this wisdom when enacting public policy.… Read more The post Jeremy Clarkson buys an electric car: an optimistic vision of the UK’s EV future first appeared on Extra Geographic.

RSS Facts for Working People

  • Frederick Engels and Mary and Lizzy Burns May 16, 2022
  • Michael Roberts: Crypto unTethered May 15, 2022
  • Books: The John Carlos Story May 14, 2022

RSS Fair: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

  • Cherry-Picking Polls to Hide Public Support for Biden’s Spending Plan October 15, 2021
  • Jailing of a British Blogger Should Worry Journalists on Both Sides of the Atlantic  August 10, 2021
  • The Far Right’s Manufactured Meaning of Critical Race Theory August 4, 2021

RSS Fairewinds

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Fairfax Climate Watch

  • The Day 2 Antigen Test When Travelling From The UK  November 19, 2021
  • Steps Towards Reducing Clinical Trials Footprint August 31, 2021
  • What Are CDISC Standards And Why Does It Matter? August 30, 2021

RSS Farooque Chowdhury’s Diary

  • Road rage faces student spirit August 4, 2018
  • Fires within the Arctic Circle July 28, 2018
  • A Facebook post on quota mobilisation July 14, 2018

RSS Feasta

  • Online discussion, May 18: Cross-sectoral economic measures to support biodiversity in Ireland April 28, 2022
  • Online discussion: moving the economic goalposts of Irish agriculture, April 28 April 21, 2022
  • Theda Skocpol names the problem, and the solution involves climate dividends March 31, 2022

RSS FireDogLake

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Fish Out of Water

  • East Coast Bomb Tomorrow - Atlantic Ocean Current Shift Blowing up Coastal Storms: Climate Brief March 11, 2022
  • Russians attack and Seize Ukrainian Nuclear power plant, Major Nuclear Accident possible March 4, 2022
  • Polar Vortex is splitting now bringing on severe mid-continent storms & Atlantic bomb cyclones March 2, 2022
  • Climate Brief: A very deadly tornado season is likely this spring starting in March February 4, 2022
  • Record heat ahead of historic storms & winds late today in Iowa, Minnesota & Wisconsin December 15, 2021
  • COP-26 Abandons 1.5 C Target, Sticks with Big Net Zero Lie, but Hope is Rising out of the Ashes November 10, 2021

RSS Foreign Confidential

  • Film History: the French New Wave July 2, 2021
  • Nine Beautiful Places to Visit in Slovenia July 2, 2021
  • Top 10 European Islands to Visit July 2, 2021
  • Little Europe: the Amazing Microstates July 2, 2021

RSS FracTracker

  • Oil and Gas Brine in Ohio May 13, 2022
  • 8 Maps to Strengthen Environmental Justice Policy in Pennsylvania May 6, 2022
  • PA Environment Digest Blog: Conventional Oil & Gas Drillers Dispose Of Drill Cuttings By ‘Dusting’ May 3, 2022

RSS George Monbiot (Alternet)

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS George Monbiot (Official Home Page)

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Get Real List: Chris Nelder

  • Moving on… July 9, 2021
  • My new gig December 5, 2015
  • Announcing the Energy Transition Show October 14, 2015

RSS Gil Smart

  • With Gil Smart on guns, the NRA January 19, 2015
  • Gil Smart right on development February 8, 2015
  • Gil Smart makes sense May 19, 2014
  • Right on, Gil Smart February 17, 2014

RSS Glen Ford – Black Agenda Report

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Global Guerrillas

  • The Long Night is Coming January 4, 2019
  • Disruption, Drones, and Big Airports December 20, 2018

RSS Global Occupy News

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Global Oneness Project

  • Student Curiosity and The Human Spirit During COVID-19 March 2, 2021

RSS Global Research

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Global Research CA

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Gonzalo Lira

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Green is the New Red

  • Trump Supporter Promises Legislation to Label Protest as “Economic Terrorism” November 22, 2016
  • Violence against environmentalists is now at an all-time high July 8, 2016
  • “To Build a Fire”: New Split EP With “Old Lines” and Will Potter June 13, 2016
  • “It changes who you are—forever. What you do with that change is what defines who you are.” April 28, 2016
  • Exclusive: New Virtual Reality Investigation Goes Inside Factory Farms April 13, 2016
  • New Sticker — Animal Rights Activists Must “Join or Die” February 22, 2016
  • “Truth and Power” TV series features Will Potter on “eco-terrorism,” ag-gag laws, and investigative journalism February 15, 2016
  • This woman rowed straight into a hurricane. And you should too. February 11, 2016
  • 6 Lessons From How the FBI and Media Treat Militia Groups January 12, 2016
  • Here’s How One Activist Convinced the FBI to Leave Him Alone December 7, 2015

RSS Green on Huffington Post

  • Tennessee Couple Finds Stray Dog Cuddled Up Next To Them In Bed May 17, 2022
  • How A Major Tar Sands Pipeline Project Threatens Indigenous Land Rights May 15, 2022
  • 'Like An Inferno:' U.S. West Burning At Furious Pace So Far May 13, 2022
  • Urine Luck: Michigan Researchers Are Putting The “Pee” In Peony May 13, 2022
  • Scientists Grow Plants In Lunar Soil For First Time Ever May 12, 2022
  • 91% Of Surveyed Corals Bleached Along Great Barrier Reef, Australia Says May 11, 2022
  • Great Barrier Reef Condition Now 'Very Poor' May 11, 2022
  • Dog Rescued From Cage Thrown Into River Finds New Home: 'He Still Loves People' May 10, 2022

RSS Greenpeace Blogs

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Greg Palast

  • GOP frontrunners — from Jan 6 Riot to Governor’s Mansion? May 17, 2022
  • 2,000 Mules: Belly Laughs, Belly Aches from Film’s “Proof” that Trump Won May 8, 2022

RSS Gregor Macdonald

  • Oil Fall December 31, 2018

RSS Grinning Planet

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Grist

  • Why Boulder and Flagstaff are enlisting cities to suck carbon out of the atmosphere May 17, 2022
  • Report: Europe’s chicken supply chain has a human rights problem May 17, 2022
  • ‘Flash droughts’ are Midwest’s next big climate threat May 16, 2022
  • North Carolina house that collapsed into the sea is a warning for millions of Americans May 16, 2022

RSS Growth Busters

  • Chickens are Coming Home to Roost May 11, 2022
  • Paul Ehrlich, Unfiltered (Special Earth Day Episode) April 19, 2022
  • Obsessive-Compulsive’s Guide to Cutting Your Carbon Footprint March 30, 2022
  • Can Living a 1.5 Degree Lifestyle Make a Difference? March 9, 2022

RSS Guernica Mag

  • On Stoicism May 16, 2022
  • Song of the Lake May 12, 2022
  • Cut Off May 11, 2022
  • The Pearl Pavilion May 10, 2022

RSS Guy McPherson’s Blog

  • Science Snippets: Schultz Extracts May 16, 2022
  • War, Environment, and Society: A Discussion May 12, 2022

RSS Health After Oil

  • Public Health’s Response to Decline: Loyalty to the 1% December 15, 2014

RSS Hot Topic: Global Warming and the Future of New Zealand

  • Postcards from La La Land #132: time warps and twaddle June 7, 2018
  • The final cut: crank paper on NZ temperature record gets its rebuttal – warming continues unabated May 2, 2018
  • Anthropogenic climate change is real: pithy post-punk anthem for the Trump generation December 9, 2017

RSS How to Save the World

  • Facing My Misanthropy May 16, 2022
  • How Many Canadians Have Died From CoVid-19? May 15, 2022
  • Links of the Month: May 2022 May 14, 2022

RSS I am Not a Number

  • Alt-Right conspiracy theories are obviously true… except they are not. January 24, 2022
  • The civil war in the LP was NEVER about antisemitism. November 20, 2020
  • English patriotism and the left – a political conundrum October 3, 2020

RSS I Cite

  • "Feudalism Lives on in the Delta" -- Ray Sprigle August 17, 2020
  • Critical Theory and Climate Change 2 April 2, 2020
  • Critical Theory and Climate Change 1 March 23, 2020
  • Untitled July 18, 2019
  • America's obsession with rooting out communism is making a comeback September 25, 2018

RSS Iamronen

  • Born to fight May 8, 2022
  • The Art Of Life May 7, 2022
  • Celebration and … the Sacred? April 13, 2022
  • Realms Beyond Reason April 12, 2022
  • Who By Fire – Leonard Cohen, Israel … and I April 11, 2022

RSS Ian Welsh

  • Who Wins and Loses Because of the Ukraine War? May 16, 2022

RSS Idea Explorer

  • Learning As We Go October 29, 2021
  • Values and Responsibilities March 11, 2021
  • Habitat Loss November 9, 2020
  • Marginal Hope August 24, 2020
  • A Pandemic-Altered Future April 15, 2020

RSS Idea Explorer – Big Pic Explorer

  • Consumption Drop November 25, 2020
  • Habitat Loss November 9, 2020
  • General Update February 24, 2020

RSS Idea Explorer: Land of Conscience

  • Remembrance September 22, 2021
  • Seeking Miracles July 15, 2021
  • Emergence May 3, 2021

RSS If You Love This Planet – Helen Caldicott

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Indybay Features

  • The Supreme Court Intends to Overturn Roe v Wade
  • St. Mary's Sunday Mass Disrupted, Catholic Patriarchy Denounced
  • Russia Moves to Take All of Ukraine by Military Force
  • Bay Area Groups Mobilize to Protest the Drumbeat to War

RSS Indybay Newswire

  • How Foster Care Affects Outcomes in Adulthood
  • The Great Reboot and Investing in Death
  • Ads and Body Image in Society
  • Florida Approves Risky Release of Billions of Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes in Scientifically Flawed Experiment
  • Green Party endorsements, and also the "Green Voter Guide"

RSS Information Clearing House

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Inside Left – The OFFICIAL Anti-Olympics Blog™

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Institute for Public Accuracy

  • Crisis in Science Labs: The Supply Chain Spiral May 17, 2022
  • Facebook Lifting Ban on Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion “Stunning” May 16, 2022
  • Ukraine: “Horrible Dangers” of a Proxy War; Nuclear War May 12, 2022
  • Amazon Terminated Paid Sick Leave for Covid-19 After Union Vote May 12, 2022
  • Israeli Killing of Palestinian Journalist a “Calculated Act of Savagery” May 11, 2022
  • Marcos Win in Philippines: Dynasties and Social Media Manipulation May 11, 2022

RSS International Debt Observatory

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS io9

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS iWatch: Global Muckraking

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer Blog

  • Five Things We Need to Know About the “Fiscal Cliff” December 10, 2012
  • Wasteful Pentagon Spending and Costly Wars Hurting Minnesota Communities November 6, 2012

RSS Jacobin

  • Meet the Socialist Refugee Running for Australia’s Senate May 17, 2022
  • Homeless People in the US Are Being Murdered at a Horrific Rate May 17, 2022
  • How Labor Board Delays Hurt Starbucks Workers’ Union Organizing May 17, 2022
  • South Asia’s Devastating Heat Wave Is the New Normal May 17, 2022
  • Was Ozark Actually About the Clintons? May 17, 2022
  • The Democratic Party’s Leadership Is Trying to Destroy Progressives May 17, 2022

RSS Jeremy Scahill

  • But What About Hamas’s Rockets? May 14, 2021

RSS Jill Stein

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Joe Bageant

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS John Cook Video Uploads

  • The Science of Cranky Uncle Part 3: Fighting Misinformation with Critical Thinking December 29, 2021
  • The Science of Cranky Uncle Part 2: Inoculation Theory December 21, 2021
  • The Science of Cranky Uncle Part 1: Why We Can't Ignore Misinformation December 14, 2021
  • Climate misinformation: Will Happer on CO2 being plant food January 24, 2021

RSS John Hively

  • The War Over Global Warming is Class Warfare on Many Fronts July 24, 2021
  • How the Billionaires Corporate News Media Have Been Used to Brainwash Us May 1, 2021

RSS John Pilger

  • WAR IN EUROPE AND THE RISE OF RAW PROPAGANDA

RSS John Perkins

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS John W. Whitehead

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS John Zerzan: Anarchy Radio

  • Anarchy Radio 05 10 2022 May 11, 2022
  • Anarchy Radio 04 12 2022 April 13, 2022
  • #143 | The New Primitives: The Reverse Teleology Of Primitivist Transformation w/ Ben Etherington April 8, 2022

RSS Jonathan Turley

  • Wisconsin Files Complaints Against Three Students Who Refused to Use Approved “Pronouns” May 17, 2022
  • The GW Commencement Controversy: A Response To Rep. Susan Wild May 16, 2022
  • The Post-Roe World: A Reality Check on the Implications of the Leaked Supreme Court Opinion May 16, 2022
  • “Silence the Voices of Hatred”: N.Y. Governor Hochul Uses the Buffalo Massacre to Renew Calls for Censorship of Social Media May 15, 2022

RSS Karl Grossman

  • I've switched from this site to my website -- www.karlgrossman.com -- for my blog. November 29, 2015
  • The End of Police Raids -- at Long Last -- on Gays of Fire Island July 1, 2015
  • "Fire Island Was Paradise,Truly Paradise" June 21, 2015
  • My First Big Story June 1, 2015
  • Disaster Waiting to Happen at Indian Point May 12, 2015

RSS Karl North Eco-Intelligence

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Kate Ausburn

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Keith Farnish

  • Uprooting Civilization (Part 2) May 7, 2014
  • Uprooting Civilization (Part 1) February 21, 2014
  • The Problem With…Conspiracy Theories January 7, 2014

RSS Knight Science Journalism – MIT

  • The Tracker Now Lives Here … November 1, 2015
  • A farewell post: Three reasons why good science writing is worth defending. January 6, 2015
  • Globe story on non-invasive prenatal testing offers murky argument. December 31, 2014
  • (UPDATED/2*) What Ho? A 2014 List of Lists of best, worst, or otherwisest in 2014 December 30, 2014
  • Cancer & poverty: When a reporter’s journey becomes part of the story. December 23, 2014

RSS Kulture Critic

  • In the Folds of the Flesh: Philosophic Reflections on Touch November 6, 2021

RSS Kunstler Cast

  • John B. McLemore Email to JHK: Huffing gas fumes in shittown alabama June 1, 2017
  • Release: S-Town Podcast Prequel: KunstlerCast Ready for Binge Listening May 31, 2017
  • KunstlerCast: S-Town May 31, 2017
  • James Howard Kunstler on John B. McLemore of S-Town May 31, 2017
  • Transcript: KunstlerCast: S-Town May 31, 2017

RSS Kurt Kobb

  • Just a hint from the mainstream that limits precipitate rising oil prices May 15, 2022

RSS Lack of Environment

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Law and Disorder

  • Law and Disorder May 16, 2022 May 16, 2022
  • Law and Disorder May 16, 2022 May 15, 2022
  • Law and Disorder May 9, 2022 May 9, 2022

RSS Le Monde diplomatique – English edition

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Le Monde diplomatique – Open Page

  • Lebanon: ‘Preserving the past in hope of building the future' May 16, 2022
  • US Supreme Court: a law unto itself May 15, 2022
  • May: the longer view May 10, 2022
  • China's delicate balancing act May 9, 2022
  • French far right's fight to keep Algeria May 3, 2022

RSS Leaving Babylon

  • Even Iran is laughing at us November 9, 2020

RSS Lee Camp

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Lee Fang

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Leonardo Boff

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Les Leopold

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Life Itself

  • Bad Karma April 9, 2022
  • Hope Dies Last March 10, 2022
  • Ascent of the Angry and Stupid December 27, 2021

RSS Limited, Inc.

  • The oracles are not dead May 15, 2022
  • sometimes an ugly thought becomes a poem - Karen Chamisso May 13, 2022
  • pain pain pain May 11, 2022

RSS Link TV – Earth Focus

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Low-Tech Magazine

  • How to Build a Practical Household Bike Generator March 7, 2022
  • The Revenge of the Hot Water Bottle January 21, 2022
  • The Printed Website: Volume III & The Comments December 2, 2021

RSS LRB Blog

  • Stolen Time May 17, 2022
  • Who’s best? May 17, 2022
  • Shireen Abu Akleh 1971-2022 May 16, 2022
  • I am not a robot May 13, 2022
  • These are our neighbours May 13, 2022

RSS Luis J. Rodriguez

  • Help Luis J. Rodriguez become California governor January 5, 2022
  • Stand Firm on Election Day November 3, 2020
  • 50th Anniversary of Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War August 31, 2020

RSS Mabinogogiblog

  • Letter to QUNO 1.5 April 8, 2022
  • Preventing a repetition of the Ukraine tragedy April 3, 2022
  • Solving the Chimpanzee Problem that led to the invasion of Ukraine February 24, 2022
  • Examining the Covid claims of Dr Robert Malone February 5, 2022

RSS Manicore – Accueil

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Marginal Revolution

  • Podcast with the excellent Patrick O’Shaughnessy May 17, 2022
  • Tuesday assorted links May 17, 2022
  • The State of Public Transit in the Nation’s Capital May 17, 2022

RSS Mark Biskeborn – Underground Essays

  • Kafkaesque November 11, 2014
  • Larry Summers Still Living Large April 9, 2013
  • War and Corruption Deficits: Insects and Leviathans January 21, 2013
  • Breaking News: Lt. Col. Shaffer Accuses Former CIA Dir. Tenet December 29, 2012

RSS Mark Fiore

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Mark Lynas

  • Clock is ticking in race to slow carbon dioxide emissions, scientists warn January 13, 2022
  • COP26: Crunch time for the climate October 29, 2021
  • COP26 climate change summit: Here’s what each degree of global warming would mean for the planet October 25, 2021
  • Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature October 20, 2021
  • Forget net zero – let’s have a ‘fossil freedom day’ October 20, 2021

RSS Martin Wolf

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Matt Bruenig

  • Reactions to the Alito Opinion May 4, 2022
  • Conservatives and Corporate Power April 29, 2022
  • Jill Filipovic On Compensating Non-Market Care Work April 12, 2022

RSS Matt Taibbi

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Matt Wuerker

  • Cartoon: Freedom of speech is absolute, but... April 30, 2015
  • Cartoon: Clinton Inc April 23, 2015
  • Cartoon: Reince's Women Issues April 16, 2015
  • Cartoon: The way to win April 9, 2015
  • No Cake for you! April 2, 2015

RSS Max Keiser

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Media Lens

  • The Price Of ‘Selective Inattention’ – Iraq, Ukraine, Libya, And The Climate Apocalypse May 5, 2022
  • Burying ‘An Atlas Of Human Suffering’: Climate Breakdown And The Tory Chancellor March 25, 2022
  • Doubling Down On Double Standards – The Ukraine Propaganda Blitz March 4, 2022

RSS Media Matters – Environment

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Media Matters – Everything

  • Fox guest on possible troop withdrawal from Afghanistan: "The solution is more blood, sweat, and tears" 
  • Fox host defends Trump: "Just because you use harsh language doesn't mean your intent is to denigrate another race"
  • Fox News is talking more about abortion than the Democratic debates did

RSS Media Roots

  • Media Roots Radio: How Billionaire Military Industrial Complex Tech Giant Elon Musk Will Save Free Speech April 24, 2022
  • Empire Files Podcast: A Russian Anti-War Perspective on Ukraine April 21, 2022
  • Peter Joseph on Abby Martin’s New Podcast DOSED April 13, 2022

RSS Methane Hydrates

  • Joint New Zealand - German 3D survey reveals massive seabed gas hydrate and methane system May 12, 2014
  • Noctilucent clouds: further confirmation of large methane releases December 10, 2013
  • Earthquake M6.7 hits Sea of Okhotsk October 2, 2013

RSS Michael Hudson

  • The Destiny of Civilization May 16, 2022
  • Calling to Account the Hereditary Warrior Class May 12, 2022
  • Ukraine 4 Steps On May 4, 2022

RSS Michael Miller – Viewpoint

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Michael Parenti

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Mike Philbin – Free Planet

  • STAR CITIZEN - HALF A BILLION DOLLARS - TEN YEARS AND COUNTING September 1, 2021
  • ELECTRO-BULLET: reinterpreting a classic... August 28, 2021
  • LAST OF THE CATHEDRA available in trade paperback from Amazon. October 24, 2020

RSS Mondoweiss

  • Dems’ calls for investigating Abu Akleh killing are unprecedented — but a ‘cog in Israel’s whitewashing machine’ May 17, 2022
  • July 8 2022: Ghassan lives, Palestine lives! Call to organize for the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Ghassan Kanafani May 17, 2022

RSS Mons Angelorum: Deadly Serious 3

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Mons Angelorum: Waiting for Good Weather

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Mother Jones

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS MR Zine

  • Yoshie Furuhashi, "After MRZine" January 1, 2017
  • Louis Allday, "Controlling the Narrative on Syria" December 14, 2016
  • Marta Harnecker, "Fidel, Today and Forever" December 11, 2016
  • Prabhat Patnaik, "Developing 'Infrastructure'" December 9, 2016
  • Susie Day, "Forward Ever, Normal Never: Taking Down Donald Trump" December 6, 2016
  • Samir Amin, "The Election of Donald Trump" December 1, 2016

RSS Musings on Iraq

  • Sadrist Plans To Take Over Iraq’s Parliament Continue May 17, 2022
  • This Day In Iraqi History - May 17 British planes bombed Mosul and Baghdad Anglo-Iraq War May 17, 2022
  • Security In Iraq May 1-7, 2022 May 16, 2022

RSS Nafeez Ahmed

  • IDF's Gaza assault is to control Palestinian gas, avert Israeli energy crisis | Nafeez Ahmed July 9, 2014
  • World Bank and UN carbon offset scheme 'complicit' in genocidal land grabs - NGOs | Nafeez Ahmed July 3, 2014
  • The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy | Nafeez Ahmed June 19, 2014
  • Iraq blowback: Isis rise manufactured by insatiable oil addiction June 16, 2014

RSS Naked Capitalism

  • 2:00PM Water Cooler 5/17/2022 May 17, 2022
  • Public Safety Under Covid: Temporary Restraining Order Sought Against Williamstown, MA Over Refusal to Hold Town Meeting in Safe Venue May 17, 2022
  • Links 5/17/2022 May 17, 2022
  • Peru Sues Spanish Oil Giant Repsol for Billions After “Worst Ever” Oil Spill May 17, 2022
  • When Central Bank Saviours Are the Problem May 17, 2022

RSS Naomi Klein

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Naomi Klein – Guardian.UK

  • Naomi Klein: how big tech helps India target climate activists March 4, 2021
  • We were told Joe Biden was the 'safe choice'. But it was risky to offer so little | Naomi Klein November 8, 2020

RSS Nature Protects, As She is Protected

  • No Name Calling Please, Give Us Evidence Which Proves GM Crops Are Safe March 30, 2017
  • Let’s Be Honest About Genetically Modified Crops March 9, 2017

RSS Navdanya’s Diary

  • Food for health: the right to health is to live healthy lives June 3, 2020
  • Making peace with the Earth. 600 organisations urge a sustainable new start April 24, 2020
  • The Seed War March 20, 2020

RSS New Internationalist

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS New Left Project

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS New World Notes

  • Observations on Work June 20, 2021
  • The GOP and the Dems: Hypocrisy and Betrayal June 13, 2021
  • Can Technology Save Us? June 8, 2021

RSS News Junkie Post

  • Forget Wars on Covid and Terror: War on Climate Collapse Is the Only War of Necessity for Human Survival August 22, 2021
  • Covid Fear Management Policies: Distractions from and Tests for Looming Climate Collapse August 4, 2021
  • France Neoliberal Macron: Vanguard of a Covid Global Corporate Dictatorship? July 24, 2021
  • Magic Woman of Haiti’s Mountains July 18, 2021
  • Afghanistan War Outcome: Hope for Sovereign Nations Fighting the Scourge of Neocolonial Imperialism July 17, 2021
  • Afghanistan: Deadly Costs of a War for Profit Won by the Taliban July 9, 2021

RSS NOAA: Monthly State of the Climate Report

  • April 2022 Monthly National Climate Report

RSS Notes from the Aboveground

  • On Inequality July 27, 2015
  • Shameless is as shameless does July 21, 2015

RSS NYT Examiner

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Occupy.com

  • The Rise and (Not So Fast) Fall of Londongrad March 18, 2022
  • How Students Struggling to Get Educated in Kashmir Came Up With Collective Solutions During the Pandemic March 10, 2022
  • Reckoning with Britain’s Cost-of-Living Crisis: Causes and Solutions January 28, 2022
  • GND 15: Chile's Popular Political Revolution Offers Lessons Far Beyond its Shoreline January 28, 2022
  • The Threat of Republican Fascism, Part II: The War on Fair Elections January 6, 2022
  • How India’s Farmers Achieved Victory After a Yearlong Protest December 17, 2021
  • Green New Deal XIV: Climate Catastrophe Demands We Tear Down Deadly Borders December 3, 2021
  • 10th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street November 28, 2021

RSS Occupy las Vegas

  • Crypto Boom Alternativen April 22, 2022
  • Stortingen en opnames bij Bitcoin Revolution December 25, 2021
  • Alternativen zu PC Health Advisor October 21, 2021

RSS Occupy Wall Street

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Oddity Central

  • Indian Woman Lived Disguised as a Man for 36 Years to Raise Child Alone May 17, 2022
  • Car Sickness Hell – A Winding Mountain Road With 600 Hairpin Turns May 17, 2022
  • Clive Wearing – The Man With a 30-Second Memory May 17, 2022
  • Mom Draws Criticism for Giving One-Year-Old Son Realistic Temporary Tattoos May 16, 2022
  • Colombian Makeup Artist Creates Mind-Boggling optical Illusions May 16, 2022
  • True Romantic – Man Proposes to Girlfriend at Her Father’s Funeral May 16, 2022

RSS Of Two Minds

  • Checking In On Five Long-Term Cycles May 16, 2022
  • Curveballs in the Housing Bubble Bust May 13, 2022
  • Herd on the Street May 11, 2022

RSS One Penny Sheet

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS One Struggle – South Florida

  • We Scream for Change and They Respond by Supporting the Status Quo March 29, 2022
  • We Must Take Our Cities Back from the Bourgeoisie! February 10, 2022
  • It’s Time to Expose the Fuckery January 9, 2022
  • Kenbe Fèm: Film Screening and Discussion with a Member of Batay Ouvriye September 13, 2021

RSS Orion Magazine

  • Five Questions for Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of How Strange a Season March 29, 2022
  • 17 Poetry Collections to read during Women’s History Month March 23, 2022
  • Orion Staff Recommends: What We’re Reading, Watching, and Doing This Month March 8, 2022

RSS Our Finite World

  • Is the debt bubble supporting the world economy in danger of collapsing? May 17, 2022
  • The world has a major crude oil problem; expect conflict ahead April 21, 2022
  • No one will win in the Russia-Ukraine conflict March 28, 2022

RSS Pando Daily

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Paul Haeder

  • Reality Privileged: Orwell/Huxley/McLuhan on Steroids May 11, 2022
  • mother moves her body to feed the world May 8, 2022
  • May Day is International ‘Thank a Worker’ Day May 1, 2022

RSS Paul Kingsnorth – Elswhere

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS Paul L. Street

  • Reflections on Ukraine and the Broke-Brain “Left” April 15, 2022
  • Abortion Rights: Beyond the Killing Confines of Liberal Mis-leadership April 15, 2022