Tag Archives: Greenwashing

Age of Annihilation

04 Friday Sep 2020

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

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“We must now understand that our own well-being can be achieved only through the well-being of the entire natural world around us.” ~ Thomas Berry

As governments stared glass-eyed at what was unfolding in China earlier this year, the fragility of modern life’s interconnectedness was soon to be laid bare by a microscopic organism. Within a couple months of the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, airline travel from China had spread the novel virus to more than 60 countries. Despite decades of warnings about the inevitability of such an event, politicians had paid about as much lip service to preventing the next pandemic as they had to dealing with climate change. As has been warned by health experts, the best we can hope for is to blunt the effects of the COVID-19 disease on the global population; eradicating it will be futile. Something similar could be said of the legacy effects of our CO2 emissions which will haunt life on Earth for time immemorial.

A study from 2014 found the total number of infectious disease outbreaks has more than quadrupled between 1980 and 2010. Approximately 75% of all emerging infectious diseases originate from animals and chances for pandemics are increasing as humanity’s growing assault on the natural world disrupts what remains of the planet’s ecosystems. If you need further evidence that we are annihilating life on Earth, consider that the microscopic mite, among the oldest and most plentiful invertebrates on the planet and a keystone species in many ecosystems, is disappearing at least 1,000 times the natural rate. More novel zoonotic diseases will eventually be unleashed into the bloodstream of the globalized economy as corporations revive parasitic growth at the expense of a habitable planet. The coronavirus pandemic is a symptom of our unfolding Anthropocene Mass Extinction which is accelerating.

The current pandemic may well mark the beginning of the end for growth as we knew it. In the U.S. right now, there are 29 million unemployed and tens of thousands of small businesses that have closed during the pandemic will never reopen. In the Age of Environmental Breakdown, there can never be a return to normal. For the normal that industrial civilization has become accustomed to is the very thing ripping to pieces those white picket-fenced lives in suburbia. A Biden presidency may bring back some sense of sanity and order to those pursuing the illusion of the American Dream, but it won’t alter global civilization’s current trajectory toward an increasingly chaotic world of never-ending disasters. The synergistic effects of biodiversity collapse, climate change, and industrial pollution will act as a growing weight on the economy.

We just learned that Greenland’s ice sheets crossed a tipping point two decades ago and will never recover, as far as human timescales are concerned. Nothing will bring them back except another ice age, and humans have managed to erase the next one scheduled to have occurred some 50,000 years hence. 100,000 years will have past before the planet completely rids itself of the CO2 humans have loaded into the atmosphere. Second only to Antarctica in terms of ice volume, Greenland’s melt-off could eventually contribute 23 feet of global sea level rise. Antarctica’s ice sheets have also been found to be much more vulnerable to collapse than previously known, as rising atmospheric temperatures melt their surface and a warming ocean destabilizes them from below. Coastal erosion, flooding, and soil salinization from sea level rise are growing drags on the economy. About 40% of the global population lives near the coast and will account for the largest mass migration in human history. Indeed, billions of U.S. tax dollars are now being used in a new strategy to relocate entire neighborhoods from coastal regions persistently hit by flooding in recent years.

With the meltdown of the Earth’s cryosphere, we are witnessing a large-scale catastrophic disruption to a critical part of the Earth system under which all life has adapted. In particular, the relatively stable climate of the Holocene is what allowed for the development of agriculture and human civilization. We no longer live in that era; We have entered the chaos of the Anthropocene, a time of deadly climate disruption, social upheaval, mass extinction, and ultimately collapse of industrial civilization. With arctic amplification weakening jet streams, larger and more intense heat domes now form over geographic regions to help spark megafires, power grid blackouts, and heat-related deaths. In Phoenix AZ, a heatwave just obliterated a previous record of most days over 110°F (50 plus), and another record-breaking heatwave is on its way as I speak. California’s Death Valley just recorded the highest temperature on Earth since reliable records began. The six most recent years (2014-2019) and 2020 have been the hottest ever recorded, with each decade since 1980 being hotter than the previous.

The recent heatwave that thawed Siberia’s tundra, set it on fire, and caused an ecological disaster by collapsing a diesel fuel reservoir, could never have happened without the massive spike in CO2 emissions from mankind’s fossil-fuel binge. Summer wildfires in the Arctic set a record this year, emitting 34% more CO2 than in the prior year. Fires in the Amazon jungle are the worst in a decade. Wildfires in Arizona this year have already scarred more land than in the prior two years. Colorado just logged the biggest fire in its history and California’s wildfires are already on track to break records even though the fire season has just begun. Globally, wildfires have increased 13% over the prior record-breaking year of 2019. A more apt name for the Anthropocene might be the Pyrocene – Age of Fire.

Heatwaves aren’t just striking on land; they are also cooking the oceans. Increasingly severe and frequent marine heatwaves(MHWs) have surged by more than 50% in recent decades. Warming oceans help create more destructive and more frequent hurricanes and typhoons. They also threaten biodiversity and ecosystem function on a global scale. Scientists have observed that stony corals around the world are hunkering down into survival mode, exhibiting the same traits as they did prior to the last great extinction. Let that sink in for a moment…Yes, a relatively primitive organism with a rudimentary nervous system is actually preparing for a mass extinction while the so-called ‘Wise Ape’ blissfully carries on destroying his very own life-support systems.

“It was incredibly spooky to witness how corals are now exhibiting the same traits as they did at the last major extinction event,” said Professor David Gruber, a researcher and marine biologist with The Graduate Center, CUNY and Baruch College. “Corals seem to be preparing to jump across an extinction boundary, while we are putting our foot further on the pedal.”

Apparently, coral are not hampered by politics in their decision-making processes. These creatures of the primordial seas will likely outsurvive the Self-Absorbed Ape who has insulated himself in a technological cocoon of false security, oblivious to the harsh physical laws of nature indifferently working to take him down. Hell, scientists are now finding microplastics in every human tissue they examine, and the health effects are unknown. How’s that for forethought?

Scientists can issue warnings about our impending demise until they are blue in the face, and they have, but they and the public are at the mercy of economic, financial, and political forces beyond anyone’s power. Couple that with the fact that the average person on the street has a Trump-level of comprehension about these existential crises and is being bombarded on social media by fake news that plays on emotions and deep-rooted inter-group distrust. Cheap energy and the individualistic consumer culture have created an illusion of abundance and destroyed any sort of communal cooperation which was once the basis of everyday life. I’ve walked this Earth for over five decades and have seen a steady and continuous degradation of the natural world; corporate greenwashing is rampant. The growth in ‘green energy’ has not displaced fossil fuel fuel consumption to any great degree; fossil fuels still supply 84% of global energy consumption. Worse yet, just to maintain our current growth in energy consumption would require an unattainable expansion in alternative energies. If one connects all the dots on our current state, then there is no refuting this most clear-eyed of scientific assessments:

“Given the momentum in both the Earth and human systems, and the growing difference between the ‘reaction time’ needed to steer humanity towards a more sustainable future, and the ‘intervention time’ left to avert a range of catastrophes in both the physical climate system (e.g., melting of Arctic sea ice) and the biosphere (e.g., loss of the Great Barrier Reef), we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse.”

The end of the world is the ‘cha-ching’ of a cash register as the last vestiges of nature are converted to dollars. Lest we forget, 71% of global emissions come from just 100 companies and more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988 originated from 25 corporate and state-owned entities. While the ultra-wealthy reap the profits of a poisoned ecology, the rest of the world is left to take the brunt of consequences from a world that grows more dangerous by the day. Those living on the edge who lost their livelihood during this pandemic are the collateral damage of an out-of-control socio-economic system whose incompatibility with life on Earth becomes more evident with each passing year. There’s nowhere to escape for most people because, to one degree or another, we are all entrapped in this system. The immutable laws of biology, physics, and chemistry have set an expiration date on America’s non-negotiable way of life, ensuring that many more will soon fall victim to the short-term greed of capitalism. As Stephen Hawking warned, “Stupidity and greed will kill off humans.”

In the Ashes of Civilization

16 Tuesday Sep 2014

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

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False Gods

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

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

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

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

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

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Entropic Wastelands

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

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

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

A passage from The World Without Us:

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There Will Come Soft Rains


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

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

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

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

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

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


~ Sara Teasdale

The Yellow King

23 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire

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TrueDetective_1 Set in the foreboding shadow of Louisiana’s oil refineries, Matthew McConaughey recounts an ominous story, while the camera lens brings into focus a modern day monster.

Made popular in the current television drama of some note, True Detective is the story of a psychotic serial killer who leaves behind cryptic talismans of occult origin, with unknown meaning. The killer invokes oblique references to the Yellow King, a mythical exiled ruler from the lost city of Carcosa, a dystopian city not unlike the capital of a doomed planet.

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 Over all the dismal landscape a canopy of low, lead-colored clouds hung like a visible  curse. In all this there were a menace and a portent — a hint of evil, an intimation of doom. Bird, beast, or insect there was none. The wind sighed in the bare branches of  the dead trees and the gray grass bent to whisper its dread secret to the earth; but no other sound nor motion broke the awful repose of that dismal place. A few blasted trees here and there appeared as leaders in this malevolent conspiracy of silent expectation.

This is also the name of a play nearly 200 years old, never completed except in short story form. It is said if the entire play is read, the reader will go insane. Indeed, the protagonists in the TV show edge closer to insanity as they circle the truth.

carcosa_by_irrealist-1 We don’t know much about the Yellow King, or Carcosa except that its sky has black stars and two suns, and its dead landscape is ravaged by centuries of evil. Existence in this city is purportedly centered in a fourth dimension, where time is represented as a flat circle, a Nietzscheian reference indicating the inhabitants are doomed to repeating the same events over and over again, unable to change and unable to stop the repetition.

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A sudden wind pushed some dry leaves and twigs from the uppermost face of the stone; I saw the low-relief letters of an inscription and bent to read it. God in Heaven! My name in full! — The date of my birth! — The date of my death! A level shaft of light illuminated the whole side of the tree as I sprang to my feet in terror. The sun was rising in the rosy east. I stood between the tree and his broad red disk — no shadow darkened the trunk! A chorus of howling wolves saluted the dawn. I saw them sitting on their haunches, singly and in groups, on the summits of irregular mounds and tumuli filling a half of my desert prospect and extending to the horizon. And then I knew that these were ruins of the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.

There is speculation that Carcosa was never really a place, but a destination for a future of collapse, and the Yellow King was not an exiled ruler, but a disguise- a mask of sorts that once worn, occludes the truth from those who might see.

Carcosa_Night_by_harakeke Once the mask is removed, the truth is laid bare and the viewer is transported to Carcosa. If so, the Yellow King is with us in force today manifest in many forms, most of these designed to disguise the true nature of our world. For we stand to inherit a Carcosa, a towering existential recreation of hell, with circular, unbreakable patterns of dysfunctional behavior.

And the Yellow King walks among us, unabated, spreading misinformation amplified by mass media, advising us, extolling us to ascend to the power of liberty and free markets, get what’s yours while the gettin’ is good, and valorizing those who crush the most souls on the way up.

Free market apologists reign supreme, their carnival barking and incessant media chatter filling the airwaves with blather and bloviation, coiffed and blow dried edifices of carefully constructed perfection lecturing the faithful in the ways of the good and righteous. The downtrodden and sullen worker class unabashedly enamored by the sparkling white teeth and tanning parlor afterglow of the likes of Ann Coulter, with her simmering promise of bleach blond playdates in Republican nirvana.

Give the finger to the underclass, step up to a Brooks Brothers suit with power tie, and the kingdom is yours.

Long considered just an annoyance, at worst, a screeching nails-on-the-blackboard offense endured among polite company as the uniformed contrivances of the political class, merely the monosyllabic utterances of the unenlightened. Which is to say, to be ignored, or in a flight of compassion, to debate the helpless bastards in the hopes that common sense may prevail, and they may see the light, amongst earnest and heartfelt protestation.

Why, forgive them as they know not what they do.

But perhaps they do.

For the Yellow King, with his sycophant protégés donning the mask of illusion lay forth this banter of iniquity, they hold sway as full participants in the court of world opinion. Their voices of reason, their faces of envy, and their politics of grace conspire to deliver a message finely honed through the millennia.

A message warned of for more than 2000 years by an institution not treated well in the Age of Reason. An institution of former glory consumed from the inside out by the very evil it warned of, now one of the largest Capitalist entities on the planet, its crippled and corrupt exoskeleton only occasionally eking out a coherent message, a sporadic, diminutive cry of caution.

Such a cry can be heard by 19th century Cardinal John Henry Newman, in a quote recently featured on Jesse’s blog:

Do you think he is so unskillful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against the truth? No; he offers you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform.

This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you; he tempts you to rail against your rulers and superiors; he does so himself, and induces you to imitate him; or he promises you illumination, he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind.

He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them. He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods.

Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his.

J.H.Newman, the Times of Antichrist (Circa 1850)

  He makes the disturbing claim that such representations are not mere affectations of the less enlightened, not musings of a political counterfactual, not the flip side of rationed debate, but the deliberate and finely considered dialogue of evil.

The ascendancy of the evangelical right has long mouthed consternation that society is decaying, and claimed vindication when they should be claiming responsibility. Their inversion of right and wrong, their overt sponsorship of capitalist society, in fact their insistence of capitalism as the only Christian means of life moves them well beyond the moniker of fascism firmly into the category of evil incarnate.

For the Yellow King the disguise of illusion is a world of opposites, a world of up really being down, not a matrix style hologram of technology, but a bending of light, an Alice in Wonderland vignette where three lefts make a right and the fun house mirrors portray you to be wealthier than you really are. A world where you argue against your best (or anyone else’s) interests, a world where you degrade, prostrate, and mutilate yourself on the advice of those gleaming faces of prosperity.

In the hope that you may be like them, someday to exchange your station in life, to become that gleaming face and to dispense the wrath of your tortured ascendancy on the filthy groveling masses sullying your shoes as they struggle to feed themselves.

Much is made by the armchair economist and pundit as to causality for our American nightmare as it careens from crisis to crisis. The Yellow King advises this is purely monetary in nature, we have simply oversubscribed our creation in money-capital and succumbed to the avarice of too much government. Why it’s just too much fiat money, and too much government, let’s get back to sound money and free markets, and let her rip.

The narrative takes on fairy tale proportions, indeed, even a child can see through such gas baggery. But a child does not have a vested interest in this belief system, and the rest simply apply religious fervor to the notion that capital just has to succeed, and will accept any preposterous explanation, however dubious, to keep the mask firmly in place.

One of the more hysterical diversions is the demonization of the Federal Reserve System. Made popular by demagogues such as Ron Paul, who stifles his repulsive free market evangelization long enough to divert attention away from this atrocity onto a tangible target that can mobilize the “base”- he and his gullible minions make fast with the scam that all things bad are due to financial manipulation of the monetary system- and nothing more.

With only the occasional, yet telltale reference to the “free market” in his rhetoric, he directs the majority of the pent up frustration of the populace towards an institution that he knows full well will never change or be made obsolete. He knows that the Federal Reserve and the existing monetary system are not only endemic to capitalism- but required for capitalism to function.

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As capital’s organic growth becomes more visible, new and ever more insidious ways of extending its reach is realized. In San Francisco, privatized Google buses now make the morning rounds to pick up employees at city municipal bus stops, ostensibly to make a “green” contribution in lower emissions. But The Deceiver’s fingerprints are all over this one as well, green emissions is but a public PR job, the real concept is an extension of the social contract between employer and employee.

By providing privatized mass transportation into a living community that does not require a car for subsistence transportation, Google can add a value dimension for being an employee, and increase dependency on Google for not just wages, but transportation as well.

google-bus-human-centipede This extends also to the long provided “loaves and the fishes” style cafeteria, wherein free food (and as much as you want) is given without charge to employees through the company cafeteria, discouraging off campus lunch breaks and building dependency.

Corporate planners know full well that large scale provisioning of food and transportation eventually allows the company to reduce cash compensation, as the use value of their products is directly tied to the cost of labor reproduction.

The next natural steps forthcoming are no doubt company provided housing, “on campus” of course, again to be pitched as some environmentally favorable/humane means of freeing up communities with impacted housing (such as San Francisco) so that “others less fortunate” may procure much needed housing.

All that’s missing is the FoxConn standard issue suicide nets- because you just never know when a “team member” might just want to step out for a smoke- from the ninth floor.

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King’s X  

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In a most sadistic twist of labor relations, the recent voting down of UAW expansion to VW’s new car plant in Tennessee shows the Yellow King to be in his cups. The usual suspects lock horns to first admonish the workers that any yes vote for unionization will “force” VW to locate subsequent plants out of state in a parade of displeasure. Or so say the Republican lawmakers from this state.

This is an obvious case of the captured legislature doing the bidding of capital. Oddly, VW remains silent, and uncharacteristically encourages the vote.

But the UAW is voted down, the workers are no dummies and are well aware of their predicament, they can see who owns the means of production and the ominously cold winds of a gut hooked Detroit blow even in Tennessee.

The real agenda is soon brought to light, first noticed with VW’s “disappointment” with the lost election, as they had hoped to bring forth their legendary company sponsored “Work Councils”, and required a union vote to legally deploy this tactic.

In a master stroke of labor relations, modern Capital does not fight organzied labor, it simply steps in pro-actively to organize itself. Why leave to chance a critical control level when you can step in and hold the controls yourself? By self-organizing and seeding the work council with specially trained “conflict managers” they can discretize any grievances and head off at the ground floor any dangerous mobilization against management’s interest.

The work councils become modern day privatized versions of the Stasi, with employed informants providing up to the minute labor logistics to the council members. And the beauty of it all, why, it’s all in the name of employee empowerment.

The noose of universal commoditization is tightening, the ligature marks are getting harder to hide as we inch closer to the realm of a dying sun……

A Walk Along the Beach of Doom with Benjamin Franklin

31 Friday Jan 2014

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

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

From Luke’s Journal:
Date: January 2064

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

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

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

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

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

Extinction is Profitable, in the Short Term

25 Saturday Jan 2014

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

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

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

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

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

Energy Unicorns and Delusional Greenwashing of Industrial Civilization

13 Tuesday Aug 2013

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

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Clinging to the Status Quo

Through my experience on this website I’ve learned that the pro-fossil fuel/climate change skeptics share something in common with the pro-renewable energy/climate change realists. Neither wants industrial civilization to fade away. This is the fatal flaw shared by both – that industrial civilization with all its toxic trappings of materialism, instant gratification, and objectification of nature can continue with perhaps a few tweaks and modifications here and there. Nothing that the capitalist free market cannot correct, right? Others even fantasize with the idea that there will be some sort of a post-crisis prosperity. So-called “renewable energies” fit nicely into the greenwashing of capitalist industrial civilization. Ignoring the fact that abrupt climate change is well under way with multiple extinction-causing feedback loops having already been set into motion, the right course of action would have been a rapid downsizing and simplification of our mode of living:

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We would also have to ignore the reality of the corporate state’s all-pervasive power. With its techniques of inverted totalitarianism, the corporate state has extinguished everything but the façade of democracy. Serving as the corporate mouthpiece, the mainstream media frames public discourse on socio-economic issues in very oversimplified terms while lumping the population into a very stark, cartoon-like dichotomy of Left versus Right. Thus there is never a substantive debate about our predicament; the dominant paradigm is never questioned except in small and obscure circles whose views never see the light of day. Refusing to acknowledge that fossil fuels are causing planetary ecocide and that renewable energy will not, by any stretch of the imagination, meet the high energy consumption levels of consumer capitalism are both fatal flaws of thinking. Neither group will admit that the root cause of the disease is our way of living. To do so would undercut their belief system, the principal tenants of which are that mankind’s superior adaptive capabilities and technological innovations will carry us through. Self-delusion on such a massive scale results in strange conspiracy thinking to emerge such as the following right-wing tripe:

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Never mind that our government has become nothing more than a feeding trough and revolving door for corporations seeking market control and revenue streams. The people truly latched to the teat of government are those with the money to hire armies of lobbyists, bribe officials with lucrative private sector positions, ‘buy’ government contracts and game the system fully in their favor.

The Fantasy of Energy Unicorns Rescuing Industrial Civilization

The second law of thermodynamics states that energy flows or dissipates from concentrated forms to diffuse forms. Fossil fuels are very concentrated forms of energy, but renewables like wind and solar are very diffuse and intermittent energies. According to leading energy experts like Professor Charles Hall, the EROEI of renewable energy continues to be too low when compared with fossil fuels. Thus in the free market system, the lowest-priced energy (with environmental costs externalized) will always win out and be utilized.

Energy Costs

“2013 EIA new plant capital costs of various energy technologies and
pumped storage for balancing intermittent renewables”

As Ted Trainer has shown, claims of renewables running the industrialized world are numerous and avoid any critical evaluation of their claims:

…Unfortunately people working on renewable energy technologies tend not to throw critical light on the difficulties and limits.  They typically make enthusiastic claims regarding the potential of their specific technologies.

There are now several impressive reports claiming that renewable can meet world energy demand, and almost no literature questioning the claim…” – link

“..Trainer’s general point on technology is that the extent of ecological overshoot is already so great that technology alone will never be able to solve the ecological crises of our age, certainly not in a world based on economic growth and with a growing global population… – link

Trainer and other analysts identify several factors that limit large-scale renewable energy projects:

– Transmission losses: Distant solar thermal, photovoltaic farms, and wind farms must transmit their generated energy through long distance high-voltage direct current cables. The best places for harnessing wind power are usually in remote locations far from populated areas, but solar lends itself more to a model of decentralized electricity generation which can avoid transmission losses and the high cost of transmission lines.

– Embodied Energy Costs: The energy to produce the steel, mine the minerals and raw material, and manufacture the wind turbines and solar panels, then deliver and install them, and later repair and maintain them, finally disposing of them. In a recent study, Charles Hall and Pedro Prieto have found that such costs have been unaccounted for in the estimates of solar PV’s EROEI. Spain’s boom and subsequent bust in solar energy production was found to have generated an abysmal EROEI of 2.45 thermal units of energy output for 1 thermal unit invested, as poor as biofuels.

Just to make the silicon used to trap the sun’s rays on manufactured wafers requires the melting of silica rock at 3,000 Fahrenheit (1,649 Celsius). And the electricity of coal-fired plants or ultrapurified hydrogen obtained from fossil sources provide the heat to do that. It also takes a fantastic amount of oil to make concrete, glass and steel for solar modules…

…Prieto calculates, for example, that to replace all electricity made by nuclear and fossil fuels in Spain would take a solar module complex covering 6,000 sq. km of the country at the cost the entire Spanish budget (1.2 billion Euros in 2007). It would also require the equivalent of 300 billion car batteries to store the energy for night-time use.

Prieto is not alone in reaching such sobering conclusions. A 2013 Stanford University report, for example, calculated that global photovoltaic industry now requires more electricity to make silicon wafers and solar troughs than it actually produces in return. Since 2000 the industry consumed 75 per cent more energy than it put onto the grid and all during its manufacturing and installation process.

Moreover it won’t pay off this energy debt or energy consumed in its construction until 2016. As a consequence, ramping up of industrial solar production produces more greenhouse gases than it saves for nearly a decade… – link

– Plant Lifetime: 20 years is estimated for wind (Sharman, 2012) and 35 years for photovoltaic. To quote Kevin Moore, “Gaia pulverises everything in the long-term and converts it all into sediment (except certain partially degraded plastics, which seem destined to drift in the oceans for eternity).” Another factor perhaps not discussed much is the effect climate change will have on the variability and volatility of weather patterns where solar, wind, and other renewable energy projects are constructed. Wind, cloud, and rain patterns will be altered, rendering energy plants ill-suited to their originally targeted sites. The world’s energy infrastructure will be increasingly vulnerable to the ravages of climate chaos with more intense flooding, droughts, and shifting weather patterns. Hydroelectric power, solar farms, nuclear plants, and biofuel plantations are dependant on water to run and cool the turbines, clean the solar panels and mirrors, mine the uranium as well as cool the reactor core and spent fuel rods, and grow the biomass. Hotter temperatures will tax the electric grid because of increased electricity demand for cooling in the summer, reduction in the performance and capacity of transformers and above-ground transmission lines, and infrastructure damage from wildfires. Sea level rise will also wreak havoc with coastal erosion, storm surges and flooding.

Creation is Subject to the Bondage of Decay

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Excerpt from House on the Borderland…

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The Short Story of Carbon Man and Industrial Civilization

19 Friday Oct 2012

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

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Locked within the Earth for millions of years was an energy source that fueled the rise of Humans and gave them dominion over every last inch of the planet. With traces of industrial chemicals and junk even finding its way into orbit around Earth, no corner of the planet escaped the tinkering hand of man.

His large brain gave him the ability to invent and build an army of machines to do his bidding. From their creation and until the last day of their operation, these fossil fuel-powered machines served man tirelessly in every conceivable manner, from personal transportation to food production.

Soon the lifeblood of this automated empire began running short, driving man to evermore extreme measures of securing carbon energy in order to feed his world of machines. Water, air, and land were sacrificed to keep the system going.

But For every force, there is a counter force. For every positive, a negative. The counter weight to man’s unrelenting urge for carbon was the inexorable build-up of atmospheric CO2 as the rest of the world rushed to join industrial civilization. The world’s leaders flew to popular vacation spots and drank cocktails while discussing the growing menace of climate change:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” That is precisely what global leaders entrusted with the stewardship of the world are doing. Their lives revolve around glittering banquets and long and dreary conferences, where they listen to each other in endless process-driven negotiations – so far from the reality of the day-to-day hardships of more than half of humanity.

A domino of numerous climate tipping points was set into motion, upsetting a once-benign climate. At first, fire seasons grew longer with more frequent and intense conflagrations. Ocean corals turned white from warming waters. The Arctic melted with astonishing speed, unleashing a host of warming feedback loops. Small, imperceptible temperature changes that took decades to occur were now happening more rapidly.

A warming planet opened the door for exotic tropical diseases to spread northward and around the globe. Talk of adaptation to human-induced climate change became a cruel joke. Torrential floods and crop-withering droughts of biblical proportion occurred more regularly, propelling the hungry masses to riot. The food vaults of impoverished countries were the first to be raided, followed soon after by those of wealthy nations. Weaker nation states fell first as their resource-strapped and overwhelmed governments collapsed under the weight of climate-induced starvation and energy blackouts. Various desperate geoengineering schemes were carried out in a hail Mary attempt to save man and his fossil fuel-addicted way of life, but to no avail. The master had become the slave; servile devotion to an unsustainable mode of living turned around to bite us in the ass. An overdrawn Earth had come calling to collect on humanity’s debt and close the account. Within the blink of a geologic eye, the habitability of the planet for humans as well as most other creatures had disappeared.

Oh, and he was really good at making bombs…

~ THE END ~

 

Keeping the Machine Well Fed

29 Saturday Sep 2012

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

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One of the recent headlines that caught my eye:

And of course the cartoonist Polyp had the perfect response…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Therefore, which makes more sense?

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

Global efforts to slow extinctions lag pledges, UN says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Capitalist Carbon Man

28 Friday Sep 2012

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

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Sometime next week I’ll post part two of climate tipping elements, but I want to emphasize right now that industrial civilization’s undoing will be its transgression of environmental elements which will cause dramatic and worsening rates of climate change. The delusion that there will be nice, slow and predictable changes from anthropogenic climate change has already been destroyed by the first tipping point of the melting Arctic sea-ice sheet and its multiple, concomitant feedback loops. The Arctic is now irreparably altered, never to recover from the clumsy tinkering and meddling of human hands. Arctic animal species face mass extinction not only from the loss of their habitat but also from hybridization and competition from southern species migrating northward as well as the spread of diseases. Bid adieu to those disappearing glacial Arctic landscapes once designated as World Heritage sites.

Concerning rapid development of climate chaos:

The consequences for the biosphere of accelerating climate change are discussed by Baronsky et al in the following terms:

Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence.

Climates found at present on 10–48% of the planet are projected to disappear within a century, and climates that contemporary organisms have never experienced are likely to cover 12–39% of Earth. The mean global temperature by 2070 (or possibly a few decades earlier) will be higher than it has been since the human species evolved.

At 400ppm CO2, potential climate conditions have reached levels which last existed in the peak Pliocene epoch (5.3-2.6 million years ago). Given an increase in extreme weather events under conditions of +0.8C, an even higher rate of extreme events is expected under conditions of +2.0C currently shielded by industrially emitted sulphur aerosols.

Like 99.999% of the population, I do have to generate a living which means coercive participation in the predominant economy. This forced inclusion in the globalized capitalist model is illustrated quite well in the following article. If you’re in a hole, quit digging. But if you are capitalist carbon man, then you can’t help but keep digging:

KANGERLUSSUAQ, Greenland – President Lee Myung-bak said Sunday Korea wants to help Greenland pursue economic development in an environmentally friendly way, expressing sadness and concern after seeing the Arctic glaciers that are melting due to global warming…

‘Development’ is the code word for supplanting nature with the money-generating schemes of capitalist carbon man.

Lee arrived in Greenland earlier in the day to take a first-hand look at problems resulting from climate change and to hold talks with Premier Kuupik Kleist of the Danish autonomous territory about green growth, resource development and Arctic shipping routes…

There’s that oxymoron again – “green growth”. Development and growth by industrial civilization is neither green nor sustainable. It’s simply another nail in the coffin for the natural world and all other species that don’t have an opposable thumb, walk upright, and trade shares on Wall Street.

Upon arrival at the airport in the small town of Kangerlussuaq, Lee flew on a light plane to Ilulissat, a Unesco World Heritage site known for its famous icefjord, one of the best locations to observe melting Arctic glaciers, icebergs and ice sheets…

Was that “light plane” another product of “green growth” and “sustainable development”? Perhaps it was buoyed in the air by magical green technology.

Premier Kleist and Danish Crown Prince Frederik traveled together with Lee.

“This is a tragic site,” Lee said aboard an icebreaker while touring the ice-floating sea, apparently meaning that global warming, caused by economic development, is having serious impacts on the environment…

…Increasingly warm weather has led to Arctic ice melting dangerously…

No shit, it’s caused by “economic development”! But these twits think attaching the word ‘green’ to the word ‘development’ will make everything all better. Capitalist carbon man is apparently no smarter than yeast in a petri dish. Yeast in a petri dish never choose degrowth over reproducing and consuming ever more.

Melting occurred on about 40 percent of the surface of Greenland’s ice sheets on July 8, but it expanded to 97 percent only four days later. A massive glacier twice the size of Manhattan broke off from Greenland recently, officials said.

Lee’s entourage also included three special members: prominent Korean climber Um Hong-gil, who is the world’s first to scale the globe’s 16 tallest mountains; famous cartoonist Hur Young-man; and Shin Soo-min, a college student chosen for his enthusiasm about green growth.

Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are blamed for warming the globe.

In an effort to tackle the issue, Lee has championed what is dubbed the “low carbon, green growth” policy, one of Lee’s trademark policies that calls for seeking economic growth through environmentally friendly technologies and industries without releasing greenhouse gases…

Oh, so now we will also attach the words ‘low carbon‘ to the word ‘development’. Sugar and spice and everything fucking nice!!!

Greenland is also rich in oil, rare earth materials and other resources. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, about 17 billion barrels of oil are estimated to be buried along Greenland’s western coast, with another 31.4 billion barrels along the northwestern coast. 

Greenland is also believed to be holding the world’s largest reserves of rare earth materials. At least 10 regions have been confirmed to be holding the increasingly important resources, with the southern region holding enough reserves to meet 25 percent of global demand, officials said.

During the flight to Ilulissat, Prince Frederik told Lee that he hopes countries like Korea will help develop Greenland while preserving its environment. Lee said in response that he came to Greenland with “the spirit of green growth.” 

Later in the day, Lee held talks with Kleist about ways to boost cooperation in green growth and resources development, saying Korea is willing to work actively together to transform “environmental crisis” into “economic opportunities.”

The two sides also signed four memoranda of understanding calling for cooperation in resources development, geological survey and Arctic science and technology. The agreements are expected to serve as a foothold for Korea’s participation in Greenland’s development. 

“South Korea wants to seek economic development in a way that Greenland remains green,” Lee said during the signing ceremony. “I hope Greenland will be preserved as Greenland forever. In this sense, South Korea can be a good partner.

So now the truth comes out from under the cloak of feel-good greenwashing. We just can’t wait to get our hands on all that newly revealed, CO2-polluting carbon energy. How else would we be able to run our fossil fuel-based economies? Oh boy, we really do have more than enough fossil fuels to destroy every living thing on Earth, and like a moth’s fatal attraction to a flame, we just can’t stop ourselves. A few types of heat-loving bacteria will be the last remaining survivors in this brave new world of our own creation.