Techno-Narcissism Looking at the just-completed 5.5 million square foot mega-building in Chengdu China, one could hold the mistaken belief that there is no ever-worsening ecological crisis of Earth or that mankind’s dominion over nature, built on a once stable and predictable weather regime, is not in serious jeopardy. The report that just came out a few days ago describing America’s energy infrastructure as “a sitting duck in the face of climate change” can be applied to all of the world’s infrastructure as well. So why is humanity continuing to build ugly monstrosities that will be ripped apart by torrential flooding, epic hurricanes, and other continent-sized storms as described by James Hansen in his book “Storms of My Grandchildren”? Because it’s all about growth, and capitalist carbon man is propping up his “growth” with the Viagra drug of QE money printing and accounting fraud, but Mother Nature ain’t amused and will bobbitize man’s conceit in short order. Industrial civilization’s relentless construction of such projects under the pall of climate chaos is the height of foolishness. We seem to be saying, “Why worry about deadly air pollution, runaway climate change in the Arctic, and a dangerously deformed, agriculture-destroying Jet Stream when you can create an artificial ecosystem complete with its own “sun” and a man-made beach free from algae bloom pollution?”:
…But most impressive of all is the artificial sun. Being an industrial hub, Chendu is known for its rather serious smog problem, with air qualities ranking in the mid to high 100s (unhealthy for people with allergies or respiratory problems). Hence the reason for the 24 hour, 150-meter-long LED screen that serves as a stand-in for the horizon. While inside, people do not have to worry about grey skies preventing them from getting a little warmth and a possible tan.
With this last aspect, China may now lead the world in terms of creating buildings that are more akin to self-contained ecosystems than anything else. In addition to this being a major building milestone, this structure may represent the way of the future for a nation that’s running out of healthy spaces to put its people. It’s no secret that China, with roughly 1,354,040,000 people as of 2013, is severely overpopulated, but even more problematic is the fact that urban population densities and air and water pollution continue to grow apace, leading to hundreds of thousands of respiratory and pollution-related deaths a year.
As more people move to the city, air and water quality becomes more problematic, and more living space needs to be created, the only solution may be to build structures that contain all the facilities needed to make life complete. This would include sun, surf, air circulation and vacation spots – everything that makes indoor living feel like an outdoor experience.
The idea of building such self-contained super structures to house an overpopulated planet from the natural world we are fast destroying is a psychosis of epic proportions. It illustrates the extreme level of detachment industrial civilization has reached in relation to its dependence on a healthy and irreplaceable environment. With the exception of space colonies, insanity and hubris are rarely illustrated on such a grand scale. As a last-ditch effort to survive climate chaos, perhaps hermetically sealed ‘space’ colonies, complete with wall-to-wall and overhead display screens simulating what the ‘outside’ used to look like when we could actually go outside, are what we will soon be building right here on a wrecked planet.
Another behemoth construction plan that caught my eye is this one:
Deep beneath the Bohai Sea, Chinese engineers may soon begin boring the longest submarine tunnel on the planet. At an estimated 76 miles (123km) long, it would surpass the combined length of world’s two longest underwater tunnels—Japan’s Seikan Tunnel and the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France. To connect the bustling northern ports of Dalian and Yantai, the engineers will have to tunnel through two fault zones that have caused a slew of deadly earthquakes in the last century…
…Provincial leaders of Shandong and Liaoning hope the tunnel will stimulate economic growth by connecting China’s northern rustbelt region with the upper reaches of the wealthy eastern coast. A member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering projected annual revenue of $3.7 billion, largely from freight, meaning the project would potentially pay for itself in 12 years. And if that’s not rationale enough, there’s bonus of claiming another world record (the government seems to have a fondness for superlative infrastructure)…
…But depth and length are only part of the challenge—the Bohai Tunnel also will need to plan around two major fault zones…
…Throughout modern Chinese history, the Tanlu and Zhangjiakou Penglai fault zones have been the source of chronic seismic activity. The 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which killed between 250,000 and 650,000 people, is the most notorious, though as you can see in the map above, there have been others. Perhaps the most concerning historical earthquake for the tunnel engineers to consider is the 7.4-magnitude quake of 1969 that occurred under the bay itself.
What exactly is there to do about it? Li Sangzhong, a maritime geology professor at Ocean University of China, told Caixin that the solution was simply to reinforce the strength of the tunnels walls so that it could “withstand at least a magnitude eight earthquake.
Yes growth at any cost and through any tectonic fault line, especially if you can rack up a world record or two, is the undying belief of homo economicus. “Mine is bigger than yours” is the game being played by a species living high on the fumes of fossil fuels and lust of money… madness to the Nth degree. But of course this isn’t madness in the context of an organism simply exploiting an energy source to its full potential under the social cues of capitalism, now is it?
The Reality of Eco-Apocalypse
Despite AMEG’s(Arctic Emergency Methane Group) techno-narcissist support of geoengineering our way out of this environmental crisis, they are one of the more clear-minded groups of scientists when it comes to the severity of our civilization-ending predicament. Here are excerpts from a presentation given by AMEG at the “Davos Atmosphere and Cryosphere Assembly DACA13”, July 12, 2013:
We’re in the midst of a global extinction event and facing mass starvation, yet the world is building even more colossal monoliths to the failing God of global industrial capitalism. The superorganism of capitalist industrial civilization is suicidally barreling down a one-way road which cannot be diverted by the likes of passionate, yet small-numbered groups of activists and conscientious whistleblowers. This thing has a mind of its own and won’t go down for good until the annihilation of eco-apocalypse reshapes its megacities into moth-eaten hulks of concrete and steel.
The gasping beast fell down with a thunderous boom, and all was still and quiet over the war-ravaged Earth. The vanity of man laid claim to the land no longer.
This grimly humorous video comes from Mike Sosebee. A small percentage of us just can’t drink the kool-aid and prefer cold, hard reality over the myth telling and Madison Avenue song-and-dance of capitalist industrial civilization. The entire American hologram is dependent on the masses buying the illusion that all is well. Don’t look behind the curtain. There’s a mountain of corpses and ecological horrors hiding behind that thin veneer of our self-reassuring stories… stories about our corporatocracy democracy, our corporate scripted independent news media, our resource-plundering ‘freedom fighting’ military, our exploitive and destructive wealth-building economy, our move towards a “green-washed” sustainable lifestyle, etc. As commenter Dopamine says, we’re on “a dopamine drip line, a natural morphine intravenous of belief that obscures the less rewarding reality of your existence. That humans are going to turn things around is another belief assuaging the fact that our families have to spend the next hundred years walking through a minefield from which many will not emerge, and for those that do make it, there awaits a planet wasted… And we are completely unable to avoid this perilous journey because our brains quickly substitute a “feel good” fantasy whenever we venture too far into the darkness of our reality. We will walk into the darkness surrounded by pink unicorns, omnipotent Gods, visions of unspoiled paradises, the overflowing font of fusion and so on…”
Although colonizing and enslaving foreign lands and people have always been the modus operandi of this country, I’m sure the elites who founded America never could have imagined that their 1% successors would be able to manipulate the social discourse and behavior of nearly 400 million with consumer goods called TV’s and computers, nor could they have imagined the future Malthusian conditions that would eventually end not only the brief experiment of America, but the entire human experience on planet Earth. When Easter Island became uninhabitable, the rest of the planet never noticed, but now the human footprint will be felt in every nook and cranny of Earth for millennium. Paleontologist Louise Leakey, granddaughter of famed archeologist and naturalist Louis Leakey, uses the analogy of a roll of toilet paper to effectively illustrate the brief but devastatingly influential reign of mankind over the planet.
…To put the history of life on planet earth into a time perspective, imagine unrolling a toilet roll down a hillside. If there are 400 sheets of tissue paper in the roll, then the very first life in the oceans is seen at sheet 240. The age of the dinosaurs begins at sheet 19. Dinosaurs in their many forms and great diversity are around for 14 and a half sheets. Dinosaurs are extinct by the end of the Cretaceous, 5 squares from the end, making way for the mammals. Our story and place on the timeline as upright walking apes begins only in the last half of the very last sheet. The human story as Homo sapiens, is represented by less than 2 millimeters of this, some 200,000 years.
Our own individual lifetimes cannot be depicted on this final sheet of the toilet roll as it would be too thin a line, yet we have been witness to more change to the planet, to the diversity of life, global climate and natural habitats in this same time period. We are undoubtedly the cause of the sixth mass extinction event that the planet has seen in its history…
“Doomer”, as in someone concerned with apocalyptic scenarios of global collapse, is definitely a term of modern usage reflecting the growing unease of the population. People who eschew the word “collapse” in favor of “decline” seem to be hoping that the road ahead will be gentle, predictable and somewhat manageable rather than violent, erratic, and uncontrollable. With homo economicus locked into the infinite growth mantra, there appears to be no other outcome other than a sudden crashing into the fast-approaching wall of environmental limits. The aftermath will be as unrecognizable as the mangled metal of a 100 MPH car crash rather than the slow deterioration and failure of a heavily driven automobile. Oh but that’s too horrible of a thought for the masses to entertain, especially since it threatens our tranquil dreams of white picket-fenced homes with well manicured lawns. Things will be as they always have been, with only minor changes or uncertainties. The dopamine drip line is not in danger of running dry any time soon, and as things deteriorate more and more, the dosage of self-delusional drugs will be increased, lest the population starts to wake up from their stupor. The religious fanatic and mass murderer Jim Jones doesn’t hold a candle to the psychos at the helm of capitalist industrial civilization.
Two important papers on capitalism by Richard Smith were published in the last few years explaining how capitalism, due to its structural mechanisms, cannot be reformed in any way to make it “sustainable”. In Smith’s papers, Green Capitalism: the God that Failed and Beyond Growth or Beyond Capitalism, four primary dictates of capitalism illustrate that no matter how herculean the effort to “green the economy”, whether through energy or other areas, the end result of inexorable environmental destruction as well as incredible social inequality are inevitable.
1.) “Grow or die” is a law of survival in the marketplace:
In capitalism most producers… have no choice but to live by the capitalist maxim “grow or die.” First, as Adam Smith noted, the ever-increasing division of labor raises productivity and output, compelling producers to find more markets for this growing output. Secondly, competition compels producers to seek to expand their market share, to better defend their position against competitors. Bigger is safer because, ceteris paribus, bigger producers can take advantage of economies of scale and can use their greater resources to invest in technological development, so can more effectively dominate markets. Marginal competitors tend to be crushed or bought out by larger firms. Thirdly, the modern corporate form of ownership, which separates ownership from operation, adds further irresistible and unrelenting pressures to grow from owner-shareholders. And shareholders are not looking for “stasis”; they are looking to maximize portfolio gains, so they drive their CEOs forward.
“…relentless and irresistible pressures for growth are functions of the day-to-day requirements of capitalist reproduction in a competitive market, incumbent upon all but a few businesses, and that such pressures would prevail in any conceivable capitalism. Further, I contend that, given capitalism, the first result of any serious reduction in economic output (GDP) to get production back down to some reasonably sustainable level, would be to provoke mass unemployment. So here again, there will never be mass public support for de-growth unless it’s coupled with explicit guarantees of employment for redundant workers, which are unacceptable to capital and would require a socialist economy…”
2.) Maximizing profit and saving the environment are inherently in conflict:
“…Corporations can embrace pro-environmental policies but only so long as these boost profits. Saving the world, however, would require that profit-making be systematically subordinated to ecological concerns…”
“Most of the economy is comprised of large corporations owned by investor-shareholders. And shareholders, even those who are environmentally-minded professors investing via their TIAA-CREF accounts, are constantly seeking to maximize returns on investment. So they sensibly look to invest where they can make the highest return. This means that corporate CEOs do not have the freedom to choose to produce as much or little as they like, to make the same profits this year as last year. Instead, they face relentless pressure to maximize profits, to make more profits this year than last year (or even last quarter), therefore to maximize sales, therefore to grow quantitatively…
In the real world, therefore, few corporations can resist the relentless pressure to “grow sales,” “grow the company,” “expand market share”– to grow quantitatively. The corporation that fails to outdo its past performance risks falling share value, stockholder flight, or worse… And if economic pressures weren’t sufficient to shape CEO behavior, CEOs are, moreover, legally obligated to maximize profits — and nothing else…”
3.) Consumerism and overconsumption are built into capitalism:
“…consumerism and overconsumption are not “dispensable” and cannot be exorcised because they’re not just “cultural” or “habitual.” They are built into capitalism and indispensable for the day-to-day reproduction of corporate producers in a competitive market system in which capitalists, workers, consumers and governments alike are all locked into an endless cycle of perpetually increasing consumption to maintain profits, jobs, and tax revenues. We can’t shop our way to sustainability because the problems we face cannot be solved by individual choices in the marketplace. The global ecological crisis we face cannot be solved by even the largest individual companies. Problems like global warming, deforestation, overfishing, species extinction, the changing ocean chemistry are even beyond the scope of nation states. They require national and international cooperation and global economic planning. This requires collective bottom-up democratic control over the entire world economy. And since a global economic democracy could only thrive in the context of a rough economic equality, this presupposes a global redistribution of wealth as well.”
4.) The masses are dependent on the market:
“Capitalism is a mode of production in which specialized producers (corporations, companies, manufacturers, individual producers) produce some commodity for market but do not possess their own means of subsistence. So in a capitalisteconomy, everyone is first and foremost, dependent upon the market, compelled to sell in order to buy, to buy in order to sell, to re-enter production and carry on.”
To illustrate a case study in how impossible it is for even an “environmentally conscious” corporation to be sustainable, Smith discusses Ray Anderson and his company Interface, Inc.
Saint Ray Anderson and the limits of the possible:
“…CEO Ray Anderson has probably pushed the limits of industrial environmentalism as far as it’s humanly possible to go in an actual factory operating within the framework of capitalism. Ray Anderson is everybody’s favorite eco-capitalist and he and his company Interface Inc. have been applauded by virtually every eco-futurist book written since the 1990s as the eco-capitalist example to emulate. But what Ray Anderson’s case really shows us is the limits of the possible, especially under capitalism. For after almost two decades of sustained effort, the goal of “zero pollutants” is still as unreachable as ever at Interface Inc. It is not in the least to diminish Ray Anderson’s sincerity, his passionate dedication, his efforts or his impressive achievements. But the fact is, according to The Interface Sustainability Report of 2009, Interface has “cut waste sent to landfills by more than half while continuing to increase production,” “reduced greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30%,” “reduced energy intensity by 45%,” while “over 25% of raw materials used in interface carpet are recycled and biobased materials in 2007,” and non-sustainable materials consumed per unit of product have declined from 10.2 lbs/yd2 in 1996 to 8.6 lb/yd2 in 2008. Read that last sentence again. Make no mistake: These are impressive, even heroic industrial-environmental achievements. But if after more than fifteen years of sustained effort, the most environmentally dedicated large company in the United States, if not the entire world, can only manage to cut non-sustainable inputs from 10.2 to 8.6 pounds per square yard of finished product, to inject a mere 25% recycled and biobased feedstock into its production process, so still requiring 75% of new, mostly petroleum-based nonsustainable feedstock in every unit of production, then the inescapable conclusion must be that even the greenest businesses are also on course to “destroy the world.” So if the reality is that, when all is said and done, there is “only so much you can do” in most industries, then the only way to bend the economy in an ecological direction is to sharply limit production, especially of toxic products, which means completely redesigning production and consumption – all of which is certainly doable, but impossible under capitalism.”
I’ve heard that 70% of American workers are “disengaged” or “checked out” at their job; in other words, they hate their work. This statistic is as good as any in illustrating the moribund nature of life in 21st century industrial civilization. No wonder zombie movies are so popular these days. In America’s 9 to 5, cog-in-the-corporate-wheel life, a majority of the population feels like the living dead, thoughtlessly going through the motions of slave-wage work in order to race home and crash in front of the boob tube with a microwaved dinner. Not much energy left in the day to do anything but drift to sleep while flipping through endless channels of Hollywood sitcoms, infomercials, and consumer-friendly corporate news. For the vast majority, the best hours of one’s life are spent performing this lifeless routine day in and day out. The banal and deadening existence of industrial civilization appears to be wearing on the masses, and a vague awareness of its unraveling seems to be understood on at least a subliminal level — another 100 species drops off the face of the Earth today, ice sheets and glaciers disappear at a rapid clip, weather patterns become erratic and unstable, street protests erupt in various countries, talk of pulling the plug on the money presses roils “the market”, etc.
Amongst the human chatter, some people rationalize such unusual events as acts of God, others as an illuminati conspiracy, while many believe it’s just the natural variability of the world and nothing to worry about. Forming a consensus on anything, let alone climate change, from such a divergent array of thinking in a global population of billions with different languages, governments, and cultures would be a feat of biblical proportions indeed. The hope of any significant portion of the population unplugging from industrial civilization and its carnival-like atmosphere can safely be called a pipe dream. Empire and the allure of industrial civilization entraps nearly all who enter.
Like puppets on a marionette string, the legions of indoctrinated consumers pursue the latest material object to fill a void left by everything industrial civilization destroyed. Those who step foot on this out-of-control treadmill find themselves on a trip to oblivion in which, quite literally, everything will be forgotten, as in ‘NTE’. Although jumping off this treadmill certainly has its benefits, in the bigger picture everyone gets carried over the cliff by the catatonic actions of the majority. There’s no escaping what has been called the greatest “bioevent” in geological history, from which a distinct record of our rampage through the fossil fuel carbon deposits will follow us into the Earth’s strata.
Talk of hardening communities to the effects of a destabilized and fast deteriorating climate will make the phrase “quality of life” a cynical joke; therefore, a redefining of “the good life” is essential in a future of climate chaos. The new definition certainly won’t include vacations in Miami, unless you plan on scuba diving. And the standard American dinner of meat and potatoes will likely change to simply having a stomach temporarily free from hunger pains after dining on insects, roasted rodent, and foraged weeds. And as far as a lifetime of gainful employment, everyone will be self-employed in the field of survivalism, i.e. “every man for himself.” Climbing up the “rungs of progress” will go into reverse, becoming a regress into medievalism. Of course remnants of Techno-fundamentalism will still exist, but they’ll mainly be confined to the realm of the world’s only remaining type of government – totalitarian technocracies.
There are quite a few who believe that we can hang on to some semblance of today’s global planet-killing civilization, but with so many vectors of collapse converging upon us we’ll be lucky if humans themselves survive in any significant number greater than zero. Throughout history, Empires have grown by stealing resources and energy from others. Ours is no different except that now the criminal elite have colonized the entire world under the guise of the “free market.” The school of neoclassical economics assumes unending supplies of cheap energy and resources for continued growth while ignoring waste and pollution, externalizing those costs upon the environmental commons. Money printing hasn’t solved or circumvented this false belief. It has only created phantom wealth in stock markets and asset bubbles. Today’s professional psychopaths in suits are no different than those in the past who took millions of lives with them to the grave, but this time it’s a mass extermination on a global scale — 7 billion people and counting, along with all other living things.
With the infrastructure of America still scoring a “D+” by the American Society of Civil Engineers and needing $3.6 trillion in maintenance repairs by 2020, I find it ironic we are now going to spend $30 billion to militarize the U.S./Mexico border by adding tens of thousands of agents, hundreds of miles of fencing, and of course more surveillance equipment. An additional irony is that illegal immigration from Mexico is the lowest it has been in decades. Both these contradictions make it clear this militarization of the border is just another extension of America’s surveillance and security complex.
What Are We Protecting?
America’s once prosperous middle class was put on the chopping block decades ago by the corporate elite who have looked overseas for profits from cheap labor and the expanding middle class of developing countries like China. As of today, the U.S. middle class now ranks 27th in the world and the wages of American workers just recorded their fastest drop in history. There is a long list of social and economic signs illustrating America’s decay, and none of them benefit from an out-of-control military industrial complex that uses up more than half of every tax dollar. It appears to me that America’s spying apparatus is more about economic hegemony and controlling a possible unruly and impoverished domestic population than detecting the actions of any phantom terrorist.
All About the Benjamin$
The primary driving force behind the expansion of the military and surveillance complex is the corporate cash cow of government contracts:
Speaking about possibly the world’s most powerful man, General Keith “The Emperor” Alexander, ZeroHedge quotes from an article describing the amount of money and resources pouring into the construction of America’s cyber-industrial complex at his behest:
Fascism 2.0
The degree of merging between U.S. state and corporate power have recently been revealed to be disturbingly far-reaching and abusive. As John Pilger points out, it is a modern day, high-tech version of classic fascism:
Preparing for Imminent Collapse
Now we get to where all this is leading. The military analysts are well aware of peak oil and climate change, both of which have been identified as national security threats. Both will bring down industrial civilization in the not too distant future, and the ruling elite are planing for the social and economic chaos that is to come. Not to worry… Disaster Capitalism will save us.
Mankind has constructed a global civilization dependent on such things as interconnected communication and computer networks, shipping and flight routes, international supply chains, just-in-time inventory systems, and an interwoven financial system. The fragility of the system to energy and climate shocks will increase as long as we are tied to a growth-oriented and fossil fuel-dependent economy. The collapse could literally come overnight the longer we resist change and push the biophysical limits of the planet.
One moment humans are “on top of the world”, and the next moment…
More threatening than the recent milestone of reaching 400 parts per million CO2 (ppm) is that of a methane level reaching 1800 parts per billion (ppb) which occured on the morning of June 16, 2013. This is more than two and a half times the methane levels of pre-industrial times.
From a historic perspective, greenhouse gas levels have risen abruptly to unprecedented levels. While already at a historic peak, humans have caused emissions of additional greenhouse gases. There’s no doubt that such greenhouse gas levels will lead to huge rises in temperatures. The question is how long it will take for temperatures to catch up and rise. – source
Robert Scribbler also reports that a persistently stagnant(blocked) and bulging Jet Stream has delivered historic heat waves to that region of Alaska and the Arctic. Melt ponds can be seen from satellite images:
…Yesterday, temperatures in Prince William Sound hit upwards of 93 degrees. Communities there, including Valdez and Cordova, both set new record highs. Talkeetna hit 94 degrees, also an all-time record high for the date. Meanwhile, Seward hit a new record of 88 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures in the interior rose to between the mid 80s and lower 90s.
This pulse of heat was driven by a persistent bulge in the Jet Stream over the Pacific Ocean, the Western United States, and the Pacific Northwest that has been present since mid winter. The bulge has resulted in warmer than normal temperatures and drier conditions for much of the Western US while keeping temperatures warm for western Canada and Alaska. It is a blocking pattern implicated in the ongoing drought conditions in places from Colorado to Nevada and California. A pattern which sees 44% of the US still locked in drought.
Sunday and Monday, this blocking pattern enabled warm air to flood north into Alaska, setting off a record heatwave there. You may not think of 50 and 60 degree temperatures in Barrow, Alaska as a heatwave. But when average highs for June there are about 38 degrees, 50 and 60 degree weather is quite hot for this time of year…
Last month it was reported that America will ‘officially’ see its own first climate refugees within the next four years:
The 350 residents of Newtok, Alaska, will soon be the country’s first “climate refugees.” The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says the village is likely to be underwater in just four years…
…”The snow comes in a different time now. The snow disappears way late,” says villager Nathan Tom. “That’s making the geese come at the wrong time. Now they’re starting to lay eggs when there’s still snow and ice. We can’t even travel and go pick them. It’s getting harder. It’s changing a lot.”…
…The U.S. Government Accountability Office has estimated that the cost of moving Newtok — with 63 homes — might reach $130 million. The people of Newtok do not have that kind of money, Goldenberg says.
“These people are living well below the average income of other Americans. They’re able to live that way because they hunt and fish for what they eat,” she says. “So they can’t all of a sudden go and build and pay for new houses on the other side.”
The money has not been forthcoming from the government either, Goldenberg says. Neither the state nor federal government recognizes climate change as a disaster for the appropriation of relief funds…
Contrast this stark reality with the wildly unrealistic views of man’s technological infallibility. A concept which appeared back in 2008 is the utopia of floating cities, called “Floating Ecopolis for Climate Refugees”, which would hold 50,000 climate refugees as the coasts become inundated with rising sea water. I wonder how well these things, if they even were feasible and the money, materials, and energy were available, would hold up to the kinds of hurricanes that climate chaos would throw at it. No doubt it would fold up and sink to the bottom of the ocean like a tin pan:
Actually, there is another idea similar to the one above which was/is being planned by a billionaire libertarian. I can’t think of a more elitist view towards the Earth and fellow humans than this libertarian wet dream:
Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be “a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.”
“There are quite a lot of people who think it’s not possible,” Thiel said at a Seasteading Institute Conference in 2009, according to Details. (His first donation was in 2008, for $500,000.) “That’s a good thing. We don’t need to really worry about those people very much, because since they don’t think it’s possible they won’t take us very seriously. And they will not actually try to stop us until it’s too late…
As I said in my previous post, the über wealthy will try to insulate themselves from climate chaos, leaving the masses in their countries as climate refugees and victims of industrial civilization’s climate disaster. And the shit rolls downhill; third world countries and the poor will bear the brunt of it all. As you can see from the first part of this post, Native Americans in Alaska, some of America’s most disenfranchised and poverty-stricken citizens, will be the first to be flushed down the toilet of neoliberal capitalism. Perhaps we should take note of current events in Brazil.
I have yet to meet Guy McPherson, but with a blog entitled “Collapse of Industrial Civilization”, it appears inevitable. Who else on Earth has such an unvarnished view of the horror show modern man is orchestrating? Truth delivered up with no hidden agendas is a very bitter and difficult pill to swallow, but being a true radical means getting at the root of the problem irrespective of “ideological and/or theological prejudice“, or as Guy says…
For those wanting to keep abreast of the deteriorating habitability of the planet, Guy posts periodic updates to the unfolding climate chaos here.
There exists no high quality recording of Guy’s speech at the most recent “Age of Limits” conference that I know of. In order to review his talk I watched this clip and studied his powerpoint slides which he sent me and which are posted here.
I’m certain that many who attend Guy’s speeches don’t internalize all the information he sets forth, fore if they did, their language would lose all the culturally ingrained phrases of hope for any kind of eleventh hour rescue by our technology-worshipping society. If there were a fix, don’t you think we would have implemented it by now before setting off a list of unstoppable positive feedback loops, known and unknown? Hell, even the much-trumpeted cleanliness of natural gas has turned out to be a farce. A recent study shows methane release from natural gas production is much higher than was known.
We seem to be leaking greenhouse gases from every orifice. Yes Moore’s law and the illusion of infinite progress have brainwashed everyone into believing mankind is immortal, forever in control of primal earth forces. In 2000, Chris Bright of the Worldwatch Institute introduced the term “nemesis effect” which refers to the cumulative effect of multiple stressors and conditions that lead to unanticipated consequences. Taken as a whole, the information in Guy’s speech equates to a global nemesis effect which is taking the planetary biosphere past the threshold of human habitability.
After stating the “benefits to the biosphere” from the collapse of industrial civilization, he presented a brief history of climate science’s implication of man as the primary culprit of climate change:
Benefits to the Biosphere from the Collapse of Industrial Civilization
– will slow down climate chaos, but too late to stop it.
– will terminate human population overshoot which is proceeding currently at the rate of 217,000 per day (births minus deaths every single day).
– will slow or stop the 6th Great Extinction proceeding at a pace of roughly 217 species per day (conservative estimate).
– will terminate environmental decay such as the soil we wash away into the oceans, the air we foul, the water we pollute, and all the other consequences of industrial civilization.
Brief History of Climate Change Science and the Pinpointing of Human-Induced Climate Change
In 1847, George Perkins Marsh is credited with being the first person to have implicated human activity as the source of climate change.
In 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, considered the father of climate change science, predicted a 1 degree Celsius rise by the year 2,000. Few quote him today because he thought that a slight warming of the atmosphere would be a good thing for human agriculture. In the end, no such benefits will result from human-induced climate change due to the extreme weather swings and our oil-dependent agricultural system…
Last year, James Hansen (et al), pointed out that extreme weather events of all kinds (hot, cold, wet and dry) are becoming more frequent. In fact, their statistical analysis of historical data (as opposed to computer modelling of future events) demonstrated that extreme events (i.e. more than 3 standard deviation above or below average) are now ten times more likely than they used to be…
Our Oil-Dependent Agricultural System Spews CO2
Over the past 40 years, about 2 billion hectares of soil – equivalent to 15% of the Earth’s land area (an area larger than the United States and Mexico combined) – have been degraded through human activities, and about 30% of the world’s cropland have become unproductive. But it takes on average a whole century just to generate a single millimetre of topsoil lost to erosion.
Soil is therefore, effectively, a non-renewable but rapidly depleting resource.
We are running out of time. Within just 12 years, the report says, conservative estimates suggest that high water stress will afflict all the main food basket regions in North and South America, west and east Africa, central Europe and Russia, as well as the Middle East, south and south-east Asia.
Unfortunately, though, the report overlooks another critical factor – the inextricable link between oil and food. Over the last decade, food and fuel prices have been heavily correlated…
Past Predictions of Mass Extinction and Human Die-Off
Despite the rantings of wingnuts like Alex Jones, free-market ideologues, and conspiracy theorists, the following warning given in 1986 by Robert Watson, who was the director of NASA’s upper atmospheric program at that time, remains prescient…
A dramatic loss of ozone over antarctica proves the “greenhouse effect” is real and presages a gradual warming of the Earth that threatens floods, drought, human misery in a few decades and – if not checked – eventual extinction of the human species, scientists warned Tuesday…
Recent Findings of Hansen and the NASA scientists…
James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warned Wednesday that human-made climate change could lead to the deaths of millions of species.
“If we continue with business as usual this century, we will drive to extinction 20 to 50 percent of the species on the planet,” he told Current TV host Eliot Spitzer. “We are pushing the system an order of magnitude faster than any natural changes of climate in the past.”
In a recently published study, Hansen and his team concluded that the drastic increase in record high temperatures in recent years could be directly traced to human-made climate change, particularly the increase in greenhouse gases…
Large-Scale Climate Assessment Projects
Guy then goes into some large-scale climate assessment studies which do not include data for:
(a) Positive Feedbacks (tipping points)
(b) Economic Collapse
Back in 1990, the U.N. Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases warned:
Beyond 1 degree C may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.
Our Dying Oceans and Back to the Future with Mass Extinctions
CO2 levels are now at 400ppm which does not account for methane and other greenhouse gases accumulating from human activity. CO2 has never exceeded 280 ppm in the last million years (based on actual readings of atmospheric chemistry from Antarctic ice-core data.) The last time greenhouse gases were at 400 ppm was three million years ago — a time when no humans existed. Humans have managed to radically alter the chemistry of the atmosphere to such a degree as to replicate pre-historic levels when no humans walked the Earth.
Phytoplankton has plummeted in the last century due to ocean warming and acidification:
A 2012 Science study found that the paceof ocean acidification today is ten times faster than during the PETM – the most rapid acidification event in the geologic record. Looking as far back as 300 million years, the study found that at current trends the projected rate of acidification of the world’s oceans will be the worst ever – worse than all the major extinctions of this time span: the end-Cretaceous, the end-Triassic, and even the end-Permian 250 million years ago, when 96% of marine species went extinct.
The current rate of (mainly fossil fuel) CO2 release stands out as capable of driving a combination and magnitude of ocean geochemical changes potentially unparalleled in at least the last ~300 million years of Earth history, raising the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change.
Considering the projections of increasing temperatures from the numerous large-scale assessments listed above, we can logically predict that the remaining phytoplankton, the base of the food chain, will suffer catastrophically.
Can CO2 Emissions and Economic Growth Be Decoupled?
Even with the economic meltdown of 2008, carbon emissions only slowed temporarily, quickly rebounding in 2010.
What this implies is that only a complete collapse will prevent runaway climate change. Others seem to agree. A censored 2012 study [original paper here] by University of Utah professor Tim Garrett explains that energy efficiency gains actually accelerate global energy consumption and CO2 emission rates and that only collapse can stop this process:
…Taking [a] global perspective with respect to the economy, the implication is that efficiency gains will do the exact opposite of what most claim it will do. If technological changes allow global energy productivity or energy efficiency to increase, then civilization grows faster into the resources that sustain it. The consequence is that energy consumption and CO2 emissions accelerate.
CO2 emissions can be stabilized despite efficiency gains. But this is possible only if decarbonization occurs as quickly as energy consumption grows. At today’s consumption growth rates, this would require roughly one new nuclear power plant, or equivalent, to be deployed each day. Barring this, since wealth and energy consumption rates are linked, it can only be through an economic collapse that CO2 emissions rates will decline. If the size of civilization enters a long and profound decline then wealth, energy consumption and CO2 emissions will all decrease at roughly the same rate. If the collapse is sufficiently rapid then it may be possible to maintain atmospheric CO2 concentrations below levels that are normally considered dangerous.
Perhaps there is a way out of this admittedly grim sounding double-bind. But Jevons’ Paradox tells us that it will not be by way of increasing energy efficiency. Quite the opposite…
Although it “feels good to conserve energy,” he said, “there shouldn’t be any pretense that it will make a difference.”
These views, both radical and controversial, will be published this week in Climate Change, an online academic journal edited by renowned Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider. Other research journals declined to publish Garrett’s research.
Garrett believes current options to potentially avert climate change — increased energy efficiencies, reduced population growth and a switch to power sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide, as well as underground storage of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning — are “not meaningful.”
“Fundamentally, I believe the system is deterministic,” Garrett said. “Changes in population and standard of living are only a function of the current energy efficiency. That leaves only switching to a non-carbon-dioxide-emitting power source as an available option.” Some economists are critical of his approach, but his solution is targeted to solve economic issues as “physics problems,” looking at civilization as one big problem instead of calculating individual problems based on population growth, increasing energy efficiency and other things.
“I end up with a global economic growth model different than they have,” he said. Garrett treats civilization as a “heat engine” that “consumes energy and does ‘work’ in the form of economic production, which then spurs it to consume more energy,” he said.
Ominous Signs of Disturbing a Fragile Planet
Following in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau’s 1851 observations of flowering plants, Richard Primack, a professor of biology at Boston University, and his then-graduate student, Abe Miller-Rushing, observed the habits of the same species and found drastic changes:
…An analysis of Thoreau’s observations, those of another 19th-century naturalist and their own modern records indicate the first flowering date for 43 of the most common species has moved up by an average of 10 days. What’s more, species that aren’t shifting their flowering times in response to warmer springs are disappearing…
Recently, researchers at Penn State reconfigured the habitability zones for planets and Earth was calculated to be much further to the edge of what is called the ‘Goldilocks Zone’. The Goldilocks Zone is defined as…
…a narrow belt around a star where an orbiting planet would be warm enough to support life, but cool enough that life wouldn’t just go around bursting into flames all the time, a factor that can significantly delay evolutionary development. The term was introduced nearly two decades ago, and hasn’t been substantively updated since then.
Guy said that this suggests “relatively minor changes in the chemistry of the planet will produce significant impacts that might take us out of the habitable zone for humans.”
Back in 2010, researchers calculated the maximum wet-bulb temperatures reached in a high carbon dioxide emissions future climate scenario:
Reasonable worst-case scenarios for global warming could lead to deadly temperatures for humans in coming centuries, according to research findings from Purdue University and the University of New South Wales, Australia.
Researchers for the first time have calculated the highest tolerable “wet-bulb” temperature and found that this temperature could be exceeded for the first time in human history in future climate scenarios if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate…
…”Whole countries would intermittently be subject to severe heat stress requiring large-scale adaptation efforts,” Huber said. “One can imagine that such efforts, for example the wider adoption of air conditioning, would cause the power requirements to soar, and the affordability of such approaches is in question for much of the Third World that would bear the brunt of these impacts. In addition, the livestock on which we rely would still be exposed, and it would make any form of outside work hazardous.”…
…”We found that a warming of 12 degrees Fahrenheit would cause some areas of the world to surpass the wet-bulb temperature limit, and a 21-degree warming would put half of the world’s population in an uninhabitable environment,” Huber said….
Since 1998, global surface air temperatures have flattened despite continued increases in greenhouse gases. Climate change deniers have used this as proof that there is no human-induced climate change happening. Where is all the heat going? Into the deep oceans…
…If extra heat is temporarily stored elsewhere thanks to natural climate variations, we won’t necessarily notice it.
But sooner or later it will inevitably emerge, which means that the current slowdown in warming may well be balanced by a period of rapid warming in a few years — nobody knows how many — from now. Scientists have always said that global warming would proceed in fits and starts, not in a smooth upward trend in temperatures…”
Another factor (global dimming or the aerosol effect from Asian industrialization) causing the dampening of current surface air temperatures in the last 15 years was mentioned in a previous post by David Wasdell:
…The effects of global dimming have been enhanced during this period [Asian Industrialization] by the mixing of more surface heat down to deeper ocean water, by the dominance of La Nina (cooler) conditions in the Pacific, and by a prolonged period of minimal solar radiation. The absence of temperature increase has also blocked all amplification from the temperature-dependent feedback mechanisms…
Unstoppable Feedback Loops
The following list of positive feedbacks are identified by Guy (with one added by me) as irreversible, although the last one appears to be hampered by the increasingly treacherous conditions that the resource extraction corporations are faced with as they try to set up shot in the melting and warming Arctic. I have added links to articles and essays, a few of which are very recent and add new information about these feedback loops (increased CO2 from hidden fires in the Amazon, boreal forest migration, and loss of top predators)
Standing on the Beach of Doom and waiting at the Last Chance Saloon for the waves to come in…Brace for Impact.
Irreversible Positive Feedback
1.) Methane hydrates are bubbling out the Arctic Ocean (Science, March 2010)
2.) Warm Atlantic water is defrosting the Arctic as it shoots through the Fram Strait (Science, January 2011)
3.) Siberian methane vents have increased in size from less than a meter across in the summer of 2010 to about a kilometer across in 2011 (Tellus, February 2011)
4.) Drought in the Amazon triggered the release of more carbon than the United States in 2010 (Science, February 2011)
Using an innovative satellite technique, NASA scientists have determined that a previously unmapped type of wildfire in the Amazon rainforest is responsible for destroying several times more forest than has been lost through deforestation in recent years…
…In years with the most understory fire activity, such as 2005, 2007 and 2010, the area of forest affected by understory fires was several times greater than the area of deforestation for expansion of agriculture, according to Morton. The study goes further and fingers climate conditions – not deforestation – as the most important factor in determining fire risk in the Amazon at a regional scale…
…The new knowledge about the scope of understory fires could have implications for estimates of carbon emissions from disturbed forests. How experts account for those emissions depends on the fate of the forest – how it is disturbed and how it recovers.
“We don’t yet have a robust estimate of what the net carbon emissions are from understory fires, but widespread damages suggest that they are important source of emissions that we need to consider,” Morton said…
5.) Peat in the world’s boreal forests is decomposing at an astonishing rate (Nature Communications, November 2011)
…The planet’s boreal forests won’t expand poleward. Instead, they’ll shift poleward. The difference lies in the prediction that as boreal ecosystems follow the warming climate northward, their southern boundaries will be overtaken by even warmer and drier climates better suited for grassland.
And that’s a key difference. Grassland stores a lot of carbon in its soil, but it accumulates at a much slower rate than is lost from diminishing forests…
6.) Methane is being released from the Antarctic, too — over ten tens more carbon than parts of the Arctic (Nature, August 2012)
7.) Russian forest and bog fires are growing (NASA, August 2012)
8.) Cracking of glaciers accelerates in the presence of increased carbon dioxide (Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, October 2012)
9.) The Beauford Gyre has apparently Reversed Course (U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, October 2012)
10.) Exposure to sunlight increases bacterial conversion of exposed soil carbon, thus accelerating thawing of the permafrost (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 2013)
11.) Summer ice melt in Antarctica — highest level in 1,000 years and the most rapid melting has occurred in the last 50 years (Nature Geoscience, April 2013)
I would add one more here…
12.) The Disappearance of Top Predators accelerates CO2 emissions (Nature Geoscience, Feb 2013)
People play a big role in predator decline and our study shows that this has significant, global implications for climate change and greenhouse gases,” says Atwood.
“We knew that predators shaped ecosystems by affecting the abundance of other plants and animals but now we know that their impact extends all the way down to the biogeochemical level.
Reversible Positive Feedback?
13.) Arctic drilling was fast-tracked by the Obama administration during the summer of 2012
Do they owe us a living- of course they f*cking do!
White Punks on Hope
The fine art of visualization has always been the domain of the artist, savant, musician, and others ostensibly outside of the obfuscation of bourgeois economics. Unfettered by the crushing gravitational pull of media propaganda, mainstream thinking and the lure of cash for the “right” perspective, occasionally an individual, a group, or infrequently, a culture emerges that can shed the blindness of false class consciousness and reveal what is hidden.
Some emergents are forgettable, some pedantic and clichéd, but all can be admired for at least daring to speak freely.
Reconstituted from the false promise of the ‘60’s hippie culture, and responding to the nihilism that infected an entire generation of Reagan and Thatcheresque refugees, a dissident core began to emerge.
The natural format given the disappointments of the ‘60’s was a hardened, cynical and violent counterculture vehemently opposing the peace, love, psychedelics, and innocence doctrine of the earlier eras.
Isolated from the mind numbing bombardment of institutionalized media messaging, alienated by the false promises of a decaying wage labor economy, and profoundly impacted by the specter of diminishing social mobility, the coming of age young adult was left with an inchoate rage against an unknowable and seemingly undefinable malaise.
It is said that the root of anger is fear. Fear of the unknown and unknowable, fear of denial of sustenance income, fear of failure, but mostly fear of prospects of mandatory participation in a system consisting of equal parts alienation, exploitation, and the active and unwilling transfer of wealth from those that produce to those that are the ownership class.
Lacking the clarity of class consciousness, what we are left with is fear and anger.
While much of the mainstream society is content with empty promises of lottery winnings, Las Vegas flights of fancy, and stores stocked with useless goods giving the perception of abundance, choice and liberty, those that are fearful and angry see other perspectives, and from these perspectives we can formulate a different narrative.
One such example was the ‘80’s punk collective Crass, consisting of Steve Ignorant, Penny Rimbaud, Eve Libertine, and Joy DiVerve and artist Gee Vaucher (whose work is featured here). This group was noteworthy as they had a reasonably well organized collective, and took particular satisfaction in critiquing the then active Falklands War, exposing the Thatcher administration as capitalizing on this act of State violence to bolster her home image.
They raised the ire of the US government as well as MI5 when they concocted a staged phone call between Reagan and Thatcher purporting to disclose US targeting of Europe with nuclear weapons as a response to the Soviet cold war threat.
Unfortunately, such antics that reach the highest forms of power are rare, and mostly we are left to view the world through the right side of a telescope, with a viewfinder supplied by the dissident.
From Her to Eternity
In the same vein as Crass, and at the same time, the punk band Poison Girls emerged from the collective with its unlikely front person, radical feminist and middle aged housewife Vi Subversa.
Vi Subversa provided vanguard class consciousness to young women of the day, as well as instructive peer examples questioning authority and male dominated counterculture. Illuminating and ridiculing female subservient expectations were (and still are) important steps to overturning bourgeois politics.
Venom laced vocals coupled with a whiskey toned, gravelly delivery were the hallmarks of the ska infused sound.
Our metaphoric viewfinder gives multidimensional focus to our predicament, a field dimension of time, space, geography, and focal plane, and while connected to a large scale telescope from the vantage point of the proper end, we can see the interconnectivity of capital over space and time, the diffuse tendrils of exploitation and alienation as they span continents.
The heft of the knurled wheel belies its frictionless connection as we spin the focusing knob through a dizzying kaleidoscope of images rapidly scrolling past the optic.
The wheel slows, the images in the telescope coalesce, and we can bring into focus a strange scene of dust, smoke, and the smell of charred wood and bodies. The date is Jan 10th 1860, and the location is Lawrence, Massachusetts, the site of the Pemberton Textile Mill, which has just collapsed and killed 145 workers, mostly immigrant women and children. In what will become a disturbing scene of repetition throughout the next 1 ½ centuries, the factory was expanded in a frenzy of production, with new floors added to substandard codes. The floors were supported by iron pillars, and the new floors were promptly laden with heavy machinery. During that fateful January day, the machines were all running simultaneously, and the cumulative harmonics of the machinery started a destructive oscillation in the iron support beams- and they failed catastrophically, bringing the entire structure down in seconds and trapping nearly 600 people.
Later that evening, in the process of extricating the trapped women and children, who were singing to console each other as the rescuers labored to clear the wreckage, a lantern was kicked over and ignited the oil soaked floor material, incinerating the trapped women.
Capital from the very beginning has sought access to immigrants, minorities and other disenfranchised and marginalized members of society to fulfill its boundless needs for low cost labor, and as a bonus, it prefers those that cannot protest or defend themselves.
The Mercy Seat
Another whimsical spin of the viewfinder knob advances us to March 25th, 1911, in New York City, where once again we image a collapsed building and smell the arid stench of burning flesh. 50 years of Industrial Revolution has changed very little it seems, robber barons are in their ascendancy and the accumulation of profits at enormous social cost is in full swing.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory has just burned to the ground, extinguishing the lives of 146 immigrant women and children. Once again, capital has attached its tentacles to the downtrodden and dispossessed, with wide spread deployments of factories incorporating abominable working conditions- hastily constructed with regard only for profits, blocked safety exits and locked fire escapes, where they existed at all, no doubt to minimize any theft of materials or unauthorized leaving of the workspace, no matter the circumstances.
The conventional wisdom of the 19th and early 20th century was that the working class was essentially a criminal class, particularly children were deemed to be vagrant and much better off in the throes of a 14 hour work day in the factories than “running the streets” getting into trouble. The narrative continued to adult males, who were portrayed as alcoholics, deadbeats, and candidates for debtor’s prisons if not “gainfully” employed in the service of the factories.
In this fashion, capital had begun its now time honored strategy of concocting false narratives meant to valorize and link its banal pursuit of profits at the expense of others, to peer reviewed social behavior “worthy” of the eager to please citizen. At various points the narrative linked religion, purity of purpose, and virtue with populating the various factories at the beck and call of capital.
The impressive aspect of this sham is the degree of acceptance that the calculus of exchanging wage labor for sustenance income is able to achieve. Tens of thousands are drawn off small farms for work in the factories, unwittingly substituting self dependence and true independence for wage servitude.
It is tempting to dismiss these tragic events as anomalies, but in fact the conditions in these factories were widespread, and a good representation of typical conditions.
We’ll close this vignette with a chilling account from Nick Cave (of Birthday Party fame)
as he recounts his appointment with the electric chair.
…….In Heaven His throne is made of gold
The ark of his Testament is stowed
A throne from which I’m told
All history does unfold.
Down here it’s made of wood and wire
And my body is on fire
And God is never far away.
Into the mercy seat I climb
My head is shaved, my head is wired
And like a moth that tries
To enter the bright eye
I go shuffling out of life
Just to hide in death awhile
And anyway I never lied……….
War to the Palaces, Peace to the Huts
It came by mail wrapped in cellophane like some type of indiscreet porn magazine, the spring issue of Jacobin magazine. You can of course get it online, but I prefer the hard copy, the artwork, the acid smell of high quality paper and above all the irony and hypocrisy of receiving such a publication in my predominantly Republican neighborhood.
Emblazoned though the wrapper was the large font, bold lettering from the heading above, the other side a schematic of a guillotine with the notation “some assembly required”.
Indeed.
You might be tempted to think that advances in material science and structural engineering over the last nearly century and a half would preclude the chances of such a disaster such as happened in 1860 Massachusetts from ever happening again, but you would be wrong.
On April 24th of this year, the eight story Rana Plaza garment factory collapsed in Bangladesh, trapping more than 3000 people, and ultimately killing more than 1100, mostly women and children. The building collapsed due to the improper addition of new upper floors necessary to accommodate production expansion. A power outage occurred on the day of the collapse, and when the power generators restarted the machinery oscillations precipitated the building collapse. Sound familiar? Serious structural cracks were observed the day before the collapse, but the recalcitrant workers were threatened with the loss of one month’s pay if they did not enter.
So they went in.
Just a few months prior, the nearby Tanzeen sweater factory caught fire and 117 workers were burned to death.
Bangladesh has about 5000 garment factories, employing about 4 million workers, 90% whom are women. The Bangladeshi workers earn about $37 per month compared to the “extravagant” Chinese wage rate of $350 per month. Because of this wage disparity, Bangladesh is the second largest manufacturer of textiles (and growing) as they displace the more expensive Chinese competition.
The vast majority of these exports are shipped to the US and the UK. A growing percentage of these garments are part of the West’s recent obsession with the so-called “fast fashion” movement, wherein consumers purchase what amounts to disposable clothing items which knock off the latest high couture fashion look at bargain basement prices.
Much of the remaining garments are T shirts and other undergarments for which consumers will not spend money.
About 2 dozen of the Bangladeshi members of Parliament own garment factories.
These facts illustrate the connectivity that the bourgeoisie political economy demands between capital, the levers of government, the exploitation of workers, and to the point of this post, the complicity of the consumer who can’t be bothered if children are being roasted alive in the manufacture of their underwear.
The mortal enemy of capital is transparency. As has been the case since the publication of “Capital” in 1867, the primary weapon of obfuscation is the focus on the means of exchange, e.g. the free market, and to hide the means of production where the atrocities reside.
But beyond this is the ugly, unspeakable truth. The consumer must have 3 for $5 T shirts, $.59 burritos and $1 cheeseburgers- because this my friends is sustenance survival. This is how the capitalist economy stair steps its way down the death spiral. Alternating between investing in production efficiencies in the form of machine automation, labor beat downs in the form of union busting, and dismantling the regulatory environment to further externalize costs, the last rung on the ladder is reducing sustenance costs of the worker. Why? Because profits are determined not by supply and demand as bourgeois neoclassical economics would have you believe, but by labor value. And in the face of an oversupply of willing workers, wage labor is largely determined by how cheaply the worker can be sustained. It is no coincidence that Walmart is the world’s largest company (measured by employee headcount), the capitalist economy makes room for any firm that works hard to globally reduce the sustenance costs for the US labor pool.
The Feeding of the 5000
I often get dragged into dinner party ruminations with libertarians, a hopeless ideology if there ever was one, particularly the Austrian version, and I am regularly subjected to patience shearing metaphors illustrating liberty and a tiny, impotent government as a way to correct the improprieties of global capitalism.
One of the more popular metaphors is the illustration of a marathon race, such as the Boston marathon. It goes something like this, our intrepid racers have a personal responsibility to train for the race, and based on the efficacy of their training and dedication, expect to race against a field of peers. The role of the race organizers (government) is simply to layout effective course markers and to administrate the race, prevent cheating, etc. The government must not interfere with the race, may not assist weaker racers, and may not impede stronger participants.
It’s a meritocracy, where one succeeds or fails on the merits of their own preparation, strength, and moral character. (Note the strong moralistic sub text)
Having put forth such a compelling case for self reliance, the argument quickly reverts to familiar claims of moral decay, lack of self sufficiency, and reliance on a nanny state for prosperity as causality for the contemporary tribulations of capital.
But due to the voluntary nature entering a race for the sole purposes of recreation, I think we can see this is a false narrative.
A better descriptor of the real world might be more accurately likened to the running of the bulls at Pamplona Spain.
With one exception- and that is that the race is now mandatory, and everyone must run. Run until you can run no more and are trampled or gored.
So the masses flee in terror, inches ahead (or sometimes behind) the sharpened point of the bull’s horns. It’s everyman for himself in this valorized blood sport, the low frequency rumble of cloven hooves just behind you, the hot breath of flared nostrils and the spray of animal spittle on the back of your neck. You run.
To the side of you a woman falls, immediately trampled under the cascade and fury of hooves, muscle and fur. A blur of sinew and flank, she disappears amid screams and dust. You run.
Like a bad Camus novel, one by one they fall around you, stricken, stumbling from exhaustion, they fall, as this race has been going on a long time, and will continue until you die. If you should be so lucky as to pull ahead of the masses, pushing and elbowing your way to the fore, you soon learn that you do not have to be faster than the bulls, just faster than the guy behind you. Jostling and pushing- tripping others to buy precious time, the bodies consumed under the stampeding livestock slow the herd so you may advance.
Once ahead you can run unhindered, free of those who would grab your shirt before they are pulled under, selecting short cuts and back alleys, gaining first yards, then blocks of advantage. Some get so far ahead they may stop to enjoy respite in a side café, but the rumble on the horizon, the rising dust, and the distant screams makes these stops short and full of worry.
When you see the tip of the horn and fully appreciate the nature of the race, you will never forget. It damages you in such a way as there is no recovery, remove yourself from the carnage and you will still run reflexively, in fact you will always run reflexively, from this point on.
And a very few get so far ahead they can never be caught by the herd, they are miles ahead in different cities and different countries, some do not even know there is such a race.
And so they buy their own bulls.
Travesty in the Garden of Gethsemane
But the hypocrisy is noticed by the mailman when he delivers my magazine. He chuckles at the irony. The interconnectedness and extant participation in the bourgeois economy cannot be subverted by hollow protest, not rectified by reading or writing.
The focusing wheel on our telescope is spun once more with a mighty thrust. It freewheels, and in the optics we see clouds, oceans, and continents. The continuum in time is passed through, the geography changes, the images begin to settle down.
We see a town that looks familiar. Your town. The focus sharpens and we see a house that seems familiar. Your house. We see a bedroom that seems familiar. Your bedroom. And in the dresser we see a neatly stacked pile of T shirts with blood stains on them. Your shirts.
I’ll admit, I don’t really read far into any of the scientific analyses. They all point the same direction: massive discontinuity and unpredictability, what some describe as nonlinear. Armed as I am with only a modest science education, the most basic fact still able to be grokked by the masses is that we live on a water world, where oceans are both the base of the food chain and the creator/regulator of the air we land-based creature breathe. The oceans need not die in their totality before withdrawal of their support functions kills us, yet we behave as if it’s all expendable. We can’t even admit such basic biological mechanisms, so the oceans are simultaneously overharvested and used as dump sites for everything. Real smart, like the rest of collective mistakes.”
Hello fellow collapsitarians, train wreck rubberneckers, concerned citizens, and everyone in between. My time for respite from the horrors of capitalist industrial civilization has arrived wherein I let this site sit fallow for a couple of weeks. When I rail against capitalism, this doesn’t by default make me a proponent of communism or any other ‘ism’. Globalized capitalism is what has conquered the world and it happens to be the current ‘ism’ destroying the biosphere with the industrial efficiency and speed of a Nazi gas chamber. The time to have created another ‘ism’ which may have saved humans from omnicide has long since passed. We are hurdling towards the end of the Anthropocene and into a period I call ‘The Great Cleansing’, whereby Mother Nature scrubs the Earth of all the hubristic artifacts and baggage of modern man. Of course there will quite a bit of noxious material that she’ll have to deal with and absorb such as radioactive waste, plastics, and CO2, but what is a few million years of remediation when compared to the Earth’s age of nearly 5 billion years with perhaps another 7.5 billion to go until consumed by the Sun. Despite all the insults and neglect that she has suffered at our hands, she will probably allow a small tribe of humans to survive the bottleneck. It would be a shame for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to have no beneficiaries, would it not?
What was our major downfall? I think we put too much faith in technology. Indeed we have used our big brains to solve many seemingly insurmountable obstacles, but we’ve put our technological cleverness on a pedestal at the expense of everything else. Technology has become the God of the 21st Century, the saviour for all of industrial civilization’s increasingly complex and insoluble problems. Granted, it has allowed man to search the stars and decode the DNA of life, but in the process it has clouded our memory of where we’ve come from, the womb from whence we were born. We’re just temporary visitors here with no preeminent right to rule the world above all other living things, and it looks increasingly like we have overstayed our welcome. While Homo sapiens are busy arguing about who or what is responsible for their current predicament, Mother Nature is slowly ramping up her fury. Geophysical forces on a planetary scale have been unleashed; they can no longer be contained by the scientific computations and laboratory tinkerings of mankind. The die has been cast and our fate sealed. No geo-engineering scheme or whiz-bang techno fix can contain her. As the Arctic melts away, followed by the Greenland ice sheet, and then the West Antarctic, our coastal cities will succumb to the sea. Jet streams and hydrologic cycles will transfigure themselves. Our once hospitable and stable seasons for agriculture will become erratic, the water sparse, and the land barren. The great oceanic currents will stall and break down, creating the anoxic and purple-hued waters of a ‘Canfield Ocean‘. As Paul said, the human race is “living in some kind of fantasy land, a land in which truth is avoided”, but a handful of us have peered into the abyss of the unfolding eco-apocalypse, and the stark reality of mankind’s own extinction has been seared into our brains.
How do we go on from here? …one day at a time. What once was important has become trivial. This would include all of the trappings and illusions of mainstream culture. Functioning in this “fantasy world” and going through the motions seems otherworldly and fake. We feel like blurting our what we know to those around us, but we can’t. There’s a straitjacket awaiting us at the nearest insane asylum. No one believes what the cold hard facts and trends have told us after we discarded the rose-tinted glasses society demands everyone wear. And why should they? It’s a traumatic experience to the psyche. Everything about the world you have been taught, all the myths of eternal progress and man’s place in the universe, comes crashing down in a thousand pieces.
So the question remains of how to live in a world of illusions and fakery. Gravitate towards that which is real. Shut off your TV and walk outside to breath in the summer air and run your fingers along the bark of an ancient tree, hike into the wilderness and watch the stars at night, spend one-on-one time with those close to you. They don’t need to know what you know; most will refuse to believe the facts even when meticulously laid out before their eyes. Leave them in their comfort zone, at least for a little while longer or until they become curious. A citizen of modern industrial civilization who confronts the horrific future awaiting their unsustainable way-of-living is like a drug abuser trying to deal with his self-destructive addiction. Both are under the spell of a very powerful force that does not let go until death. They are prisoners, mentally and physically. To talk about this dark subject, the collapse of industrial civilization and mankind’s impending extinction, join a group of like-minded people. Such clubs seem to be growing these days.
It’s a bit odd talking into the ether of the internet to people I will never meet or hear the voices of, but such a venue is really the only place a dissident voice can be heard in today’s atomized and one-dimensional society. For the reasons discussed above, I cannot speak of these disturbing topics to anyone else. This is my only outlet.
On a higher level, we have a superorganism, our civilization, which has accessed an energy gradient the same way that old growth forests have.
The human population makes up this superorganism’s myriad of cells. The nervous system is made up of the various mediums that transmit information – internet, television, phone, print media, etc… The circulatory system is the transportation system providing paths of production and distribution – roads, bridges, trains, airline and shipping routes, etc… Of course energy, primarily oil and fossil fuels, are the life-blood that fuels this system. If you have ever tried to fight against this Leviathan, you will have its immune system, the law and security apparatus, thrust upon you so that you may be hammered into conformity or isolated and quarantined in a tiny prison cell. Of course there are many malcontent cells within the belly of the beast, but capitalist industrial civilization is fortified with self-perpetuating social structures which ensure its survival.
Take for instance its education system which churns out countless drones who lack the ability to think critically and are filled with fragmented and specialized knowledge which prepares them as cogs for the corporate world. Everything, including one’s relationship with fellow humans, is reduced to a “business relationship” or “investment”. The various institutions of modern society are configured to reinforce capitalist industrial civilization. The media are corporate mouthpieces and echo chambers for the dominant capitalist system – materialism, conspicuous consumption, atomization and alienation of man from nature and from his own humanity, etc… The entertainment industry fosters an acquisitiveness for high consumption lifestyles. It relies on the corporate state to mass market and mass produce these values. The primary metric of social worth in the corporate state is money, and the class which has managed to accumulate vast sums of it are those who have usurped the levers of governance. You have heard of the two-tiered justice system we have in this country which coddles the elite and discards everyone else. Thus the ethos of society flows downward from those who have at their disposal the power to mold and influence society’s perceptions and norms.
Will man go extinct? He certainly seems to be doing everything in his power to make sure it happens:
…the worship of an economic system that reduces everything to a financial object.
…the continued exploitation and burning of an increasingly more expensive and environmentally damaging energy source which is causing the climate to swing out of control with various feedback loops.
…the dismantling and perversion of regulations and the rule of law to satisfy greed and a grossly unjust social hierarchy.
…the indoctrination of the population into a materialist society detached from the appreciation of nature’s fundamental role in our survival.
…the degeneration of public debate into infomercial sound bites by way of mass media manipulation.
…the wholesale destruction of the natural world and the latest attempts of a so-called green economy to monetize every bit of nature in order to save capitalism.
…and the spread of the above described culture through globalization.
If you think about the modern globalized civilization as a super-organism, then you come to realize how futile it is to think that an organism, any organism, would voluntarily starve itself or constrict its own growth. If you plant a tree in a pot, it will eventually become root-bound or send its roots over the lip of the container or straight through the ceramic wall. This is exactly what our capitalist industrial civilization is doing.
It has utilized every resource available to sustain growth, and now speaks of manipulating the weather in order to avoid the threat that climate chaos poses to its vitality. As far as mineral depletion, there has even been plans drawn up to mine asteroids for their deposits. The next frontier is to break the bonds of Earth itself. But we have irreparably cracked the vase that is our home. The Arctic will soon have an annual “window” in September through which the sun’s rays will work their way inside, prying that annual crack ever wider every year. In addition, we have pushed most other species, the building blocks of biodiversity, out of their habitat and onto the one-way path of extinction. The life-giving fluids of our vase have slowly been poisoned and acidified by the waste from our fossil fuel energy slaves. The hydrologic cycle within our little world has been hopelessly fouled with. The superorganism of capitalist industrial civilization is now starving the majority of its cells in order to keep healthy a few of its privileged cells who sit in places of power and Mammon worship. This potted plant or superorganism we call industrial civilization is looking rather pale and shriveled these days. As a matter of fact, it’s like a tree whose bark has been peeled off. It’s still standing at the moment and it does not know it’s dead, but its days are surely numbered.
The hope of environmentalists can no longer be that this corrupt system will run out of energy(Peak Oil), that the money presses will break down, or that it can be changed through capitalist schemes of “greening the economy”. The only thing that would have stopped the destruction would have been to build a new system that holds the health of the natural world as the primary metric through which all human activity is viewed and planned. Suffice it to say that such a system would not have been capitalism. Of course such a sentiment would brand you as an “eco-terrorist”, but the purpose of this essay is not to give hopium, but to describe the entrenched power structure which has laid waste to the environmental movement and our planet. Although small and ineffective, individual acts of moral courage and sacrifice are all that is left as this Beast of industrialized civilization tumbles to the ground, dying from self-inflicted wounds too numerous to count.
Since I was young, I knew I’d find you
But our love was a song sung by a dying swan
And even now you’ll hear me calling
You’ll hear me calling
And in your dreams you’ll see me falling, falling
Breathe in the light
I’ll stay here in the shadows
Waiting for a sign, as the tide grows
Higher, and higher, and higher…
Looking at the just-completed 5.5 million square foot mega-building in Chengdu China, one could hold the mistaken belief that there is no ever-worsening ecological crisis of Earth or that mankind’s dominion over nature, built on a once stable and predictable weather regime, is not in serious jeopardy. The report that just came out a few days ago describing America’s energy infrastructure as “a sitting duck in the face of climate change” can be applied to all of the world’s infrastructure as well. So why is humanity continuing to build ugly monstrosities that will be ripped apart by torrential flooding, epic hurricanes, and other continent-sized storms as described by James Hansen in his book “Storms of My Grandchildren”? Because it’s all about growth, and capitalist carbon man is propping up his “growth” with the Viagra drug of QE money printing and accounting fraud, but Mother Nature ain’t amused and will bobbitize man’s conceit in short order. Industrial civilization’s relentless construction of such projects under the pall of climate chaos is the height of foolishness. We seem to be saying, “Why worry about deadly air pollution, runaway climate change in the Arctic, and a dangerously deformed, agriculture-destroying Jet Stream when you can create an artificial ecosystem complete with its own “sun” and a man-made beach free from algae bloom pollution?”:
The idea of building such self-contained super structures to house an overpopulated planet from the natural world we are fast destroying is a psychosis of epic proportions. It illustrates the extreme level of detachment industrial civilization has reached in relation to its dependence on a healthy and irreplaceable environment. With the exception of space colonies, insanity and hubris are rarely illustrated on such a grand scale. As a last-ditch effort to survive climate chaos, perhaps hermetically sealed ‘space’ colonies, complete with wall-to-wall and overhead display screens simulating what the ‘outside’ used to look like when we could actually go outside, are what we will soon be building right here on a wrecked planet.
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