Extinction is the End Game

10 Saturday Dec 2016

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

≈ 107 Comments

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6th Mass Extinction, Antarctic Ice Melt, Automation, Capitalism, Cargo Cults, Climate Refugees, Cognitive Dissonance, Donald Trump, Ecological Overshoot, Extinction of Man, Global Die-Off of Forests, Great Permian Extinction, Haber–Bosch Process, Hubris of Man, Jared Diamond, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, Mass Media Manipulation, Normalcy Bias, Nuclear War, Overpopulation, Planetary Tipping Points, Technosphere, The Global Elite, The Growth Imperative of Capitalism, The Invisible Hand of the Free Market, The Wealth Gap, Ugo Bardi

Civilizations are living organisms striving to survive and develop through predictable stages of birth, growth, maturation, decline and death. An often overlooked factor in the success or failure of civilizations are cultural memes—the knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors passed down from generation to generation. Cultural memes are a much more significant driver of human evolution than genetic evolution. Entire civilizations have been weeded out when their belief system proved maladaptive to a changing environment. One such cultural meme holding sway over today’s governments, institutions, and society is our economic system of capitalism. The pillars of capitalism represent a belief system so ingrained in today’s culture that they form a sort of cargo cult amongst its adherents. Cargo cults are any of the various Melanesian religious groups which focused on obtaining material wealth(manufactured Western goods that came on cargo ships) through magical thinking, religious rituals and practices. Today the term “cargo cult” is used to describe a wide variety of phenomena that involve superficial imitation of a process or system in order to fabricate a successful outcome without even the basic understanding of its mechanism.

The tenets of capitalism are ritually followed in the proclaimed belief that “a rising tide lifts all boats”, i.e. so-called improvements in the general economy will benefit all participants in that economy. Centuries of unbridled capitalism have demonstrated beyond any doubt that it does not lift all boats. A new study finds that half of Americans are “shut off from economic growth”. The rules of the game are so stacked against the masses that this week a professor said “only all-out thermonuclear war might fundamentally reset the existing distribution of resources.” Capitalism’s imperative for expansion, growing profit levels, and efficiency has ultimately dehumanized our culture. Not even when our basic life support systems are being torn asunder do the vast majority question the path we are on. We are all a captive audience to the system and those few dissident voices are snuffed out under the wheels of “progress”.

Truth be told, the corporate elite have long written off all those people living hand to mouth. Trump’s pick for Labor Secretary said, unlike workers, machines are “always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.” Massive global unemployment resulting from the automation revolution has not yet been addressed by governments. Roughly half of all jobs in the U.S. are at risk of automation and two-thirds in the developing countries. This is all coming at a time when humans are fast destroying the ecosystems underpinning the very foundation upon which human civilization has developed over thousands of years. Mass migration of climate refugees will only further destabilize governments, stoke ethnic and cultural tensions, and give rise to fascist political movements. No conspiracy is needed to exterminate the “useless eaters”, just allow mother nature to take its course and climate change will be killing billions by mid century. Those in military planning know this and periodically express their fear of what is coming, but business-as-usual rolls on.

Capitalism’s constant impetus to shift costs, risks, and burdens off industry and onto the environment and society carries on under the guise of “being more competitive”. It’s a way of externalizing costs to maximize profit and if these costs were truly taken into account, none of the world’s top industries would be profitable(Interestingly, the link to this study has been scrubbed from the internet). It’s the height of magical thinking to put so much faith in some mystical “invisible hand of the free market” to solve existential threats such as an ever-widening wealth gap and the wholesale destruction of planetary life-support systems. There is no benevolent “invisible hand” turning individual self-interest into the common good. The primary mandate of capitalism is to protect and grow capital. The “invisible hand” is just a bunch of people scrambling to make as much money as possible, not caring or oblivious to those they hurt in the process. Fuck the invisible hand of the market. The invisible hand of mother nature will punish those who squander Earth’s rich but finite resources.

it’s been clear for some time that we have past the point of no return, triggering multiple tipping points in Earth’s living systems. New findings are continually confirming scientists’ worst nightmares. A key glacier in the Antarctic that holds back 10 feet of sea level rise was just described as breaking apart from the inside out. In other grim news, the long feared carbon bomb has now been quantified and is projected to release the emissions equivalent of an industrial country like the U.S. in the next few decades, prompting researchers to say that “climate change may be considerably more rapid than we thought it was.” Biodiversity loss is another critical threshold we have breeched: “New research shows that local extinctions have already occurred in 47% of the 976 plant and animal species studied.” A new study also reveals that the planet’s tallest animal is facing extinction after its numbers have plummeted in recent years, with the ominous warning that “many species are slipping away before we can even describe them.” Forests are being wiped out by armies of invasive insects. Because of a rapidly changing climate and the vast scale of the problem, the idea that reforestation will somehow save us is a pipe dream. Those forests won’t stay healthy enough to serve as carbon sinks and besides, seven times Earth’s land area would need to be in cultivation in order to reduce the planet’s atmospheric CO2 level down to 350ppm.

Note that the Permian Mass extinction is estimated to have happened anywhere over the course of 200,000 years to 15 million years. The current 6th mass extinction is happening orders of magnitude faster due to a multitude of factors including deforestation, habitat fragmentation, chemical pollution, poaching, etc., making this current disaster very unique in Earth’s history:

The team of geologists and biologists say that our current extinction crisis is unique in Earth’s history due to four characteristics: the spread of non-native species around the world; a single species (us) taking over a significant percentage of the world’s primary production; human actions increasingly directing evolution; and the rise of something called the technosphere. – Link

Perhaps the fate of humans was written in stone once we stood upright and developed tools. To a large degree, modern technology has been an expression of the energy-dense hydrocarbon fuels we discovered and are not willingly giving up anytime soon. Once fossil fuels ignited the Industrial Revolution and the Haber–Bosch process unleashed the human population bomb, nothing could stop the deadly carbon consumption feedback loop, not even decades of scientific warnings.

From a throwback to our primate ancestors, modern humans have been hard-wired to ignore threats that are not immediate or local; global ecological overshoot(of which climate is just one aspect) is imperceptible to the real-time cognitive processing of humans and represents the ultimate under-the-radar threat able to undermine our reasoning and response:

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

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

We evolved to react to imminent dangers, not slow-rolling and seemingly invisible catastrophes as an unintended consequence of our cushy lifestyle. From lofty corporate boardrooms to the filthy streets of skid row, the mass of humanity is following the same biological script of overshoot and collapse seen in every organism from bacteria to reindeer herds. Fossil fuels only enabled the destruction to multiply a million-fold, culminating in one final and spectacular explosion of human activity that will leave the planet nearly barren for eons.

Open-ended growth appears to be inherent in nature, all the way from the DNA to the arthropods to mammals, including humans. Open-ended growth is the psychology of a cancer cell. I am not sure I know of a species which has learnt how to limit its own growth. Unfortunately species which transcend their environmental resources can hardly survive – the final arbiter of the climate impasse will be nature itself. ~ Andrew Glikson, Earth and paleo-climate scientist, Australian National University

The beauty and wonder of this planet is being trashed by a naked ape whose cleverness in tool-building has far outstripped his ability to handle it in any restrained or judicious manner. Nature’s rich book of life is being pancaked into a cheap, crumpled comic book.

Add in the development of mass consumerism, planned obsolescence, and the hypnosis of corporate-sponsored TV and you have a passive, malleable population happily marching towards the slaughterhouse. It’s fitting, then, that the masses would be swindled by a megalomaniac bankruptcy artist who dabbled in Reality TV. Every one of Trump’s cabinet picks is a big middle finger in the faces of those who fell for his pseudo-populist rhetoric: billionaires, Wall Street sharks, Goldman Sachs alumni, and hardcore laissez-faire capitalists chomping at the bit to deregulate, monetize, and privatize every last bit of what remains. The allure of capitalism has always been that you’re just one lucky break away from becoming one of those fat cats, if only someone would give you a chance. A prescient observation by Ugo Bardi from earlier this year:

Trump is a symptom of the ongoing breakdown of the social pact…capitalizing on this breakdown by…playing on the attempt of the white (former) middle class to maintain at least some of its previous prosperity and privileges. Trump is…an unavoidable consequence of resource depletion. – Link

The bottom line is that a swing towards authoritarianism happens when resources become scarce. Climate change is simply a symptom of humans overshooting the planet’s carrying capacity. Free market ideologues are nearly always climate ‘skeptics’ because acknowledging the reality of human-induced climate change would be an admission that industry must be curtailed or controlled. Left-leaning people nearly always accept the science because it goes along with their criticisms of capitalism which externalizes social and environmental costs for the benefit of just a few at the top of the economic hierarchy. Thus we see parasitic Trump surrounding himself with right-wing, climate denying, fossil fuel corporatists and insiders who will be doing everything in their power to dismantle health and environmental regulations including privatizing social services which are barriers to capitalist expansion.

To be blunt, our chance of developing a sustainable culture passed us by a long time ago. People will try to adapt until they cannot, and myths will be created to explain away harsh realities. A dystopic future in all its horrific glory has arrived: baked-in biospheric collapse, the inherent and irreconcilable contradictions of techno-capitalism, a dysfunctional political system unable to come to terms with root causes, and the cognitive dissonance of the masses blind to the bigger picture. Our numbers are not a safeguard from extinction.

Radioactive Wastelands at the End of the Anthropocene

13 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex, Pollution

≈ 70 Comments

Tags

'Atoms for Peace' Propaganda Campaign, Capitalism, Chernobyl, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Fascism, Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, Fukushima's Underground Ice Wall, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mako Oshidori, Mass Media Manipulation, Militarism, Military Industrial Complex, Near-Term Extinction, Nuclear Proliferation, Political Economy of Aristocracy, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Regulatory Capture, Security and Surveillance State, TEPCO, The Revolving Door Between Government and Corporations, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)

A History of Cover-Ups and Ineptitude Leads to Catastrophe

One of the most costly, self-inflicted wounds engineered by techno-capitalist man is the never-ending Fukushima nuclear disaster. The groundwork for epic failure at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant began in the 1960’s when TEPCO bulldozed 25 meters off of a 35-meter-high hill in order to facilitate the delivery and set up of the plant’s large equipment, which was delivered by boat, as well as to provide easier and cheaper access to seawater used as a coolant pumped through the reactors. TEPCO then dug even further downward another 14 feet to construct the basement where emergency diesel generators would be installed. Decades later a tsunami would easily flood this area, knocking out the emergency electrical back-up generator and making nuclear meltdown a certainty.

In the early 1970’s, several memos circulated within the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) expressing concern over design flaws of the Mark I nuclear reactors made by General Electric, the same type installed at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant. Recommendations were made to stop licensing reactors with these faulty designs and the top safety official at the AEC, Jospeh Hendrie, agreed with them but rejected their implementation on the grounds that it could do irreparable damage to the nuclear industry:

“..the acceptance of pressure suppression containment concepts by all elements in the nuclear field, including Regulatory and the ACRS, is firmly embedded in the conventional wisdom. Reversal of this beloved policy, particularly at this time, could well be the end of nuclear power. It would throw into question the continued operation of licensed plants, would make unlicensable the G.E. and Westinghouse ice condensor plants now in review, and would generally create more turmoil than I can stand thinking about.”

The last line of defense in preventing the ionizing alpha, beta and gamma radiation and radioisotopes inside melting fuel rods from spewing out into the environment is the containment vessel. The poor design of the now ruptured Mark 1 containment vessel in Fukushima is most certainly contributing to the ongoing disaster there. The U.S. apparently has 23 reactors just like the ones that melted down in Fukushima as well as the risky storage of spent fuel rods next to the reactor building itself.

When the Tōhoku tsunami struck at Fukushima, reports describe chaos and incompetency as workers had to bring protective gear and manuals from distant buildings as well as borrow equipment from contractors. The failure of the Japanese government and TEPCO to imagine such a catastrophic event and guard against it is highlighted by the fact that this exact scenario was predicted in a Japanese magna comic book.

Years went by with only a few lone voices questioning the safety of the Fukushima nuclear plant such as former engineer Toshio Kimura who worked there:

I asked my boss back in the late ’90s what would happen if a tsunami hit the Fukushima reactors. I said, “Surely a meltdown will happen.” He said, “Kimura, you are right,” but it was made clear that the issue of a big tsunami was taboo. A few years later I quit the company because of its culture of cover-ups…

…When officials from the nuclear safety agency or the ministry came to the plant for inspections, they were entertained with drinks the night before. Then they would inspect the plant and give it a hundred per cent pass mark. Then on the way home the inspectors were given beer and snacks and taxi vouchers.

Run by the Utility Gangs

Entire communities have been bought off by corporate interests to become ruled by what is known as the “nuclear village” in Japan:

Tokyo has been able to essentially buy the support, or at least the silent acquiescence, of communities by showering them with generous subsidies, payouts and jobs. In 2009 alone, Tokyo gave $1.15 billion for public works projects to communities that have electric plants, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Experts say the majority of that money goes to communities near nuclear plants.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg, experts say, as the communities also receive a host of subsidies, property and income tax revenues, compensation to individuals and even “anonymous” donations to local treasuries that are widely believed to come from plant operators.

Unquestionably, the aid has enriched rural communities that were rapidly losing jobs and people to the cities. With no substantial reserves of oil or coal, Japan relies on nuclear power for the energy needed to drive its economic machine. But critics contend that the largess has also made communities dependent on central government spending — and thus unwilling to rock the boat by pushing for robust safety measures.

In a process that critics have likened to drug addiction, the flow of easy money and higher-paying jobs quickly replaces the communities’ original economic basis, usually farming or fishing.

The Japanese news media, just as in the U.S., has also been corrupted and taken over by monied-interests:

The mainstream media has long been part of the press-club system, which funnels information from official Japan to the public. Critics say the system locks the country’s most influential journalists into a symbiotic relationship with their sources, and discourages them from investigation or independent lines of analysis…

…Japan’s power-supply industry, collectively, is Japan’s biggest advertiser, spending ¥88 billion (more than $1 billion) a year, according to the Nikkei Advertising Research Institute. Tepco’s ¥24.4 billion alone is roughly half what a global firm as large as Toyota spends in a year.

And just like in the U.S., corporations have used “donations” to capture Japan’s political system:

Members of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled Japan since 1955 except for a year in the 1990s and for a three-year period ending in 2012, have been rewarded for their pro-nuclear stance with campaign donations from the ten giant electrical utilities that control around 96 percent of the nation’s power supply.

The largest of these, the Tokyo Electric Power Company or Tepco, formally ended its direct corporate donations in 1974. But it systematically encouraged “voluntary” donations by company executives and managers to a fund-raising entity created by the ruling party, according to a 2011 investigation by Asahi. At least 448 Tepco executives donated roughly $777,000 in total to the entity between 1995 and 2009, according to documents obtained by Asahi and shared with the Center.

Roughly 60 percent of Tepco’s executives participated, a rate similar to that at other utilities. Together, they funded $2.5 million of the party’s expenses, based on today’s exchange rates. A Tepco spokesman told Asahi that the donations were “based on the judgment of the individual and the company is not involved. We do not encourage such donations.”

The culture of complicity between the Japanese nuclear industry and the government is firmly entrenched with generations of high level bureaucrats having landed jobs at Japan’s large utility companies. This revolving door between corporations and the Japanese government mirrors that of the U.S.:

Tepco’s influence has also been enhanced by its enthusiastic participation in revolving door-employment practices similar to those involving bureaucrats and companies in Washington, D.C.

A METI report in 2011, prepared at the insistence of nuclear opponents in Japan’s tiny Communist Party, said for example that between 1960 and 2011, Tepco hired 68 high-level government officials. From 1980 to late 2011, the report said, four former top-level bureaucrats from METI’s own Agency for Natural Resources and Energy became vice presidents at other electric utilities. The practice is known here by the amusing term, amakudari, for appointees who “descended from heaven.”

Tepco officials also regularly move into key regulatory positions, part of a migration known as ama-agari, or “ascent to heaven” that has involved dozens of top utility officials. More than 100 such utility executives between 2001 and 2011 were able to keep drawing an industry paycheck while also working part-time for the government, a practice that is legal here, according to a former member of the Japanese Diet Lower House Economy and Industry Committee, who spoke on background. An official working in the Nuclear Regulation Authority’s research division, in an interview, said on condition of anonymity that the ama-agari system is “like having cops and thieves working in the same police station.”

Perhaps the most significant instance of ama-agari was the Liberal Democratic Party’s appointment in 1998 of Tokio Kano, a longtime Tepco executive, as chairman of the parliamentary committee that oversees METI and as the parliamentary secretary of science and technology. Both are posts crucial to the nuclear energy industry, and Kano used them to advance legislation enabling plutonium-based fuel to be burned in some standard reactors — not just breeders. He also pushed through a law requiring that all spent nuclear fuel be sent to Rokkasho or similar Japanese plants.

Corporate Fascism in Japan

Embarrassed by the constant revelations of regulatory and governmental capture by industry, the Japanese government recently passed a state secrets law meant to intimidate and jail those who cast a prying eye into Japan’s corrupt corporatocracy. After the Japanese government restarted its idled nuclear plants last year, those antagonistic towards the nuclear industry were secretly put on a watch list. The ominous experiences of independent investigative reporter Mako Oshidori with Japan’s nuclear industrial complex are reminiscent of the movie Silkwood. She discovered that she was on the government’s watch list and has now noticed an individual closely tracking her every move:

…The list included people with power in the opposition parties, such as the former prime minister Naoto Kan and the politician Ishiro Ozawa, and I was told that my name, Mako Oshidori, was listed alongside these names. A researcher who was given the list and told not to approach anybody on it was friendly with me and told me the list included my name. Soon after that a mysterious man began to follow me. This man appeared to be a member of Public Security Intelligence Agency in the Cabinet Office, which investigates various things. One of my hobbies is taking a candid shot, and I will show you the successful candid shot of this man.

Just as you see here, there was a time period when someone would always be near me, trying to eavesdrop on my conversation with people. As I am a professional entertainer, whoever I am talking to would ask me if the person was my manager. I would say that the person must be one of my groupies, as I have never met the person. Sometimes I would go to Fukushima Prefecture to interview different mothers. We would have meals together and talk somewhere, and when the mothers are leaving the premise to go home, an agent from the Public Security Intelligence Agency would take a photo of each mother and make a note of the license plate number of each car. Afraid of having their photos taken or the license plate numbers recorded, some Fukushima mothers would refused to be interviewed, or they would even refuse to have their stories published. An ex-agent who is knowledgeable about the work of the Public Security Intelligence Agency said that when you are visibly followed, that was meant to intimidate you. If there was one person visible, then there would be ten more. I think that is analogous to cockroaches. So, when you do a little serious investigation about the nuclear accident, you are under various pressure and it makes it more difficult to interview people. There are actually other journalists from major newspapers and television stations, other than me, who have done a lot of investigation about the nuclear accident, but the information doesn’t readily come out. That’s because the pressure is placed on them not to release the information. What I am going to tell you now might surprise you, but the Japanese people are just as surprised when I tell them the same information as it’s something they have never heard of, read in the newspaper, or seen on TV…

Despite the great tragedies with nuclear weaponry and technology that Japan has experienced with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and now Fukushima, these instruments of mayhem and death are ironically becoming a key centerpiece in the Japanese economy with the current right-wing government banking on it as an export cash cow:

Exports of nuclear components and technology, as well as conventional arms, are potentially key elements of “Abenomics” and much is riding on the outcome. In 2013, Abe concluded Japan’s first nuclear reactor export agreement with Turkey for $22 billion and others are pending with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, while the prime minister has also lobbied governments in Central Europe, Vietnam and Indonesia. This is a remarkable turnaround from 2011 when the prospects for post-Fukushima Japan relying on nuclear energy, let alone exporting it, looked unlikely.

The seeds for Japan’s nuclear hara-kiri were planted back in the early 1950’s when the American government hatched a propaganda campaign of developing an “atoms for peace” mission in Japan to foster pro-nuclear sentiment and help rebuild their economy using such technology.

The Center for Public Integrity reports that Japan is leading the charge for a new nuclear industry of plutonium-based nuclear fuel with grave implications for spreading this technology and material all over the world. By October of this year, Japan will have finished a $22-billion plutonium factory in Rokkasho which will be able to produce enough plutonium per year to make 2,600 bombs. It appears Japan is lurching towards militarism in an age of end-stage capitalism:

The US-Japan Security Treaty of 1960 stipulates that an attack on Japan will be regarded as an attack on the United States. Prime Minister Abe is seeking to transform Japan’s constitution to permit engagement of the Japanese armed forces in aggressive wars. But it is difficult to imagine a resurgent military posture by Japan without tacit encouragement from Washington.

The highest stage of monopoly capitalism is fascism. The 2008 global economic crisis of capitalism, still unresolved, is forcing ill-advised and counterproductive “austerity measures” on decaying capitalist societies throughout Europe and in Japan, where Prime Minister Abe is restructuring the economy into the very pro-market system which is producing riots throughout Western Europe, as living standards deteriorate drastically, and the income inequality gap becomes an abyss.

A Nuclear Bomb Explosion Versus A Nuclear Meltdown

Some ask why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt and repopulated so soon after a nuclear bomb blast, yet Fukushima and Chernobyl remain unsafe to inhabit into the indefinite future. The answer lies in the vast difference of irradiating potential between a nuclear bomb and a nuclear reactor.

Nuclear bombs are designed to cause maximum concussive damage within the shortest amount of time by creating as much energy as possible from a runaway nuclear fission reaction. Nuclear reactors on the other hand are designed to create a low-level of energy from a very controlled and sustained nuclear fission reaction. The radioactive isotopes from the fission product mixture of a nuclear bomb are relatively short-lived (<50 years) whereas those from the meltdown of a nuclear reactor are long-lived and must be stored away safely for tens of thousands of years (essentially forever). Approximate half-lives of some of the isotopes in the spent nuclear fuel are:

The nuclear bombs used in World War II were detonated roughly 2,000 feet above ground and their radioisotopes were carried by the wind and dispersed over a very large area. The nuclear bomb called “Little Boy” used over Hiroshima contained only 140 pounds of fissionable material (Uranium-235) and “Fat Man” used over Nagasaki contained just 14 pounds of Plutonium-239. These are minute amounts of radioisotopes when compared to the 180 tons of nuclear fuel at Chernobyl and the staggering 1,600 tons at Fukushima. Explosions and meltdowns at nuclear reactors occur at ground level, creating more radioactive isotopes due to neutron activation with the soils while spreading their radiation across the planet, year after year after year. Today the background radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is said to be the same as the global average anywhere on Earth. Ground zero at Chernobyl and Fukushima won’t be habitable for 20,000 years or longer. Nuclear bombs kill hundreds of thousands of people instantly while a nuclear reactor meltdown kills people over years, decades, and generations.

Not Enough Thumbs to Plug the Nuclear Dyke

The too-big-to-fail TEPCO is now building the Great Ice Wall of Japan to stem the flow of tons of contaminated water that they have been hastily storing in hundreds of haphazardly constructed containers.

“I must say our tank assembly was slipshod work.” ~ TEPCO worker

The “experts” estimate that it will take 40 years to clean up the Fukushima mess. That would put us at the year 2054, a date that many estimate humans may well be extinct or nearly extinct. By then, ocean acidification will have doubled and the global average temperature will have risen by at least 4 to 6.5°C. The world’s oceans will have swelled 2 feet higher. I’m glad to know that the “experts” are taking into account our radically changing planet:

Nuclear plants were originally given a license to operate for 40 years, and in the late 1990s, the NRC began accepting applications to extend those licenses for an additional 20 years. While it’s not clear how many current plants will still be operating in 2100, most facilities store their nuclear waste on-site, where it can continue to emit radiation for thousands of years. There is currently no long-term national storage site for spent nuclear fuel in the U.S., as Congress cut the funding to build such a facility at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain in 2011. While there are no near-term plans to remove nuclear waste from the coastal plants threatened by rising seas, “the expectation is that [waste] won’t remain on-site,” said NRC Senior Public Affairs Officer Roger Hannah.

Despite the increased risk of flooding due to rising sea levels, some plant operators have not factored this into their long-term plans. In 2010, when Florida Power and Light Company applied for a license to build two additional reactors at the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station in Homestead, Florida, the NRC asked the plant’s owners to explain “how potential sea-level rise due to potential future climate change is accounted for” in their plans, NRC documents show. The company declined to discuss climate change in its analysis, and used a projection that assumed a constant sea level rise of just 1 foot per century, which is 5.6 feet lower than NOAA’s worst-case projection for 2100.

Boy, I hope that ice wall works…

The risks to the ocean, in particular, are unprecedented because there is good reason to believe that melted fuel residing in, or below, the reactor basements is in direct contact with an underground river running through the site (Nagata, 2013).

A German study modelling the effects of an uncontained core meltdown suggests the Pacific Ocean is imperiled. The “German Risk Study, Phase B” found that a core meltdown accident could result in complete failures of all structural containment, causing melted fuel to exit the reactor foundation within five days (cited in Bayer, Tromm, & Al-Omari 1989). Moreover, the study found that even in the event of an intact building foundation, passing groundwater would be in direct contact with fuel, causing leaching of fission products. Strontium leaches slower than cesium. A follow-up German study, “Dispersion of Radionuclides and Radiation Exposure after Leaching by Groundwater of a Solidified Core-Concrete Melt,” predicted that strontium contamination levels would rise exponentially years after a full melt-through located adjacent to a river (Bayer, Tromm, & Al-Omari, 1989).

The study predicted concentrations of Strontium-90 in river water would spike relatively suddenly, but maintain extraordinarily high levels of contamination for years. Strontium bio-accumulates in the human body, including the brain, and is a known genotoxin. The study’s experimental conditions are roughly similar to Daiichi’s site conditions and strontium levels have been spiking there since the summer of 2013. TEPCO just reported that strontium levels in reactor basement water ranged from 40 million to 500 million becquerels per liter (“TEPCO to Improve,” 2014).

Endlessly Apologizing for a Self-Destructive System

24 Saturday May 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 57 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate $tate, Corporatocracy, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, James Howard Kunstler, Joel Magnuson, Mass Media Manipulation, Mindful Economics: How the U.S. Economy Works - Why it Matters - and How it Could Be Different, Monopoly Capitalism, Monopsony, Noam Chomsky, Poverty, Regulatory Capture, Richard Wolff, Systemic Disorder, Systemic Fraud in Politics, The Invisible Hand of the Free Market, The Myth of Laissez Faire Capitalism, The Profit Motive

Although I agree with much of what J. H. Kunstler has to say, particularly on his analysis of energy and his critiques of American suburbia, when it comes to his views on the human-made system that is driving this entire train wreck, he gets it dead wrong. Here is a quote from his last blog post:

Now I am, going to reveal to you why it is so difficult to get a live human being on the telephone at these important places: because the more of a racketeering matrix medicine becomes, the more it seeks to evade responsibility for the consequences. That is, the more medicine becomes a criminal enterprise, the less it wants to hear from its client/victims. The same ethos is at work in just about every other realm of corporate enterprise in the USA. Our problem in the USA is not “capitalism,” it’s racketeering. Why we fail to comprehend it is one of the abiding mysteries of contemporary life.

…It ought to be self-evident that this could only happen in a profoundly corrupt, dishonest, and degenerate society, because it took the form of a social compact that accepted this sort of behavior as okay…

Kunstler is perpetuating a deep-seated myth about capitalism that many in American society repeat. Laying the blame on those victimized by an economic system, which by design exploits, disenfranchises, and discards its subjects, overlooks the fact that the problem is the system itself. Capitalism is not an ethical system, and its overriding force of motivation is always the bottom line. Inequality, conflict, and regulatory corruption are all part and parcel of capitalism. History has borne this out numerous times. Unless someone steps in to break them up, monopolies are the natural result of unbridled capitalism (Mindful Economics, Joel Magnuson):

Corporate money greases the wheels of the political system which then passes regulations discouraging competition and favoring large corporations. Regulatory capture is inevitably what happens when successful capitalists amass wealth and buy off the political class whose lifeblood is, after all, money. Under the present system, we will never see a candidate elected to office without a substantial war chest of funds stuffed with corporate ‘donations‘. Government does the bidding of capitalists, not vise versa. We saw this in spades with the election of Obama when all his campaign promises of “hope and change” evaporated into thin air as he filled his cabinet with Wall Street and Goldman Sachs cronies. Who wrote the legislation for Obama’s healthcare reform? — lobbyists for the healthcare industrial complex where, not surprisingly, “the big bucks are currently earned not through the delivery of care, but from overseeing the business of medicine.” The corruption that Kunstler decries is not an aberration of capitalism, but a natural feature of it:

…What chiefly drives this sort of political corruption today is capitalism’s structure. For many capitalist enterprises, competitive and other pressures exist to increase profits, growth rates, and/or market share. Their boards and top managers seek to find cheaper produced inputs and cheaper labor power, to extract more output from their workers, to sell their outputs at the highest possible prices and to find more profitable technologies. The structure provides them with every incentive of financial gain and/or career security and advancement to behave in those ways. Thus, boards and top managers seek the maximum obtainable assistance of government officials in all these areas and also try to pay the least possible portion of their net revenues as taxes. Boards of directors tap their corporations’ profits to corrupt mostly the top echelons of the government bureaucracy, those needed to make advantageous official decisions.

Individual capitalists act to corrupt government officials to serve their enterprise’s needs. Grouped into associations, they do likewise for their industries. When organized as a whole (in “chambers of commerce” or “manufacturers alliances,” etc.), they corrupt to secure their class interests. When such corruption is not secret, capitalists articulate their demands to corrupted officials as “good for the economy or society as a whole.” Such phrases constitute the “appropriate language” that enables officials publicly to disguise and hopefully to legitimate their corrupt acts.

Strict moral codes, regulations and laws have been imposed to prevent individual or grouped capitalists from corrupting government officials. Evidence suggests, however, that neither civic-minded ethics, nor regulations nor laws have come close to ending capitalists’ corruption. Countless government courts, commissions, etc., have hardly ended official complicities in that corruption. Mainstream economics mostly proceeds in its analyses and policy prescriptions as if rampant corruption did not exist. Mass media tend to treat capitalist corruption (at least in their home countries) as exceptional and government efforts to stop it as serious. These, too, are further examples of that “appropriate language” with which modern capitalist societies mask systemic corruption.
~ Richard D Wolff

Noam Chomsky uses the acronym RECD (Really Existing Capitalist Democracy, pronounced ‘wrecked‘) to describe the capitalism that exists in the real world, and he doesn’t hold out much hope for civilization surviving it. Any sort of idyllic form of capitalism only exists in people’s heads and is kept alive by the myth of laissez-faire capitalism (Mindful Economics, Joel Magnuson):

A democracy cannot exist without an informed and intelligent electorate, and when corporations and monied interests intentionally spin the news, the populous are reduced to conspiracy mongers and what Gore Vidal scoffingly called ‘consumer-depositors’ in thrall to the financial elite. Alas, the institution intended to educate the public, aka the Fourth Estate, on matters of vital importance has been thoroughly dismantled and perverted by capitalism. The internet, the last bastion of independent and alternative news, is soon to follow suite (Mindful Economics, Joel Magnuson):

If the masses are unable to see through the spin and distortion propagated by a class of greedy parasites, there is one entity that will not suffer the fate of the dispossessed, dying quietly in some dark corner. The Earth is not so forgiving to such continued capitalist assaults, and it’s not fooled by propaganda such as ‘sustainable development’, ‘green growth’, or ‘corporate social responsibility’. Since pre-industrial times, the global temperature has ‘only’ risen 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit), and we can already see the havoc to civilization’s infrastructure that climate chaos is wreaking. With forecasts of average global temperature to be many fold greater by mid century, it would seem that only a miracle will save us.

Systemic Disorder published an important essay yesterday on the systematic destruction of labor rights throughout the world. How long will these myths about capitalism persist until the exploited finally wake up and realize their blood, sweat, and sacrifice are what fills the coffers of the über rich? Many at the bottom of the economic hierarchy bend over backwards to apologize for our current system, calling it everything but capitalism. No matter how often capitalism fails, no matter how many people it kills, it is religiously touted as the only and the best economic system available despite its flaws. Will humans continue to amuse themselves to death, defending a systemically self-destructive system?

…

We watched the tragedy unfold
We did as we were told
We bought and sold
It was the greatest show on earth
But then it was over
We ohhed and aahed
We drove our racing cars
We ate our last few jars of caviar
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed look-out
Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah

And when they found our shadows
Grouped ’round the TV sets
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data on their lists
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death . . .

…

Destroy the World

21 Tuesday Jan 2014

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

≈ 130 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment), Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Climate Tipping Points, CO2 Emissions, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Extinction of Man, Fossil-Fuel Based Economy, Global Famine, Kathleen White (Distinguished Senior Fellow-in-Residence & Director), Mass Die Off, Mass Media Manipulation, Michael Ruppert, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, unwashed public

As mankind spirals towards its own self-manufactured demise, I look with a jaundiced eye at daily events in the news and at the bread-and-circus infotainment that fills the American hologram. The mass media is replete with misinformation on the state of the world, so I wasn’t too surprised by the recent words of wisdom(sarcasm) from Kathleen White (Distinguished Senior Fellow-in-Residence & Director, Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment); nevertheless, I felt compelled to set aside a partially completed essay on capitalism and technology in order to express some of my thoughts about White’s essay on the benefits of fossil fuels to humanity:

“…Fossils fuels also augment food supply. Fertilizer derived from natural gas has increased agricultural productivity by 40-60 percent. According to economist Indur Goklany, without fossil fuels, an area equivalent to U.S., Canada, and India combined would have to be converted into crop land to meet global food demand. Fossil fuel-based fertilizer, pesticides, and mechanized substitutes for animal power have saved vast natural ecosystems from conversion to cropland. And the increased atmospheric concentration of man-made CO2 has enhanced plant growth.”

[You fail to consider that without fossil fuels, mankind would not have been enabled to overpopulate the planet to such a degree as to require so much farmland. You also fail to say that the negatives of climate change swamp (no pun intended) any supposed benefits of a warming planet. As we are already seeing, the effects of epic droughts and floods are wreaking havoc on farmers. Good luck trying to move the agricultural industry northward where the soils are extremely poor. Famine and mass extinction are the inevitable outcome of industrial civilization’s destabilizing activities on the planet.]

“Although combustion of fossil fuels releases pollutants, that environmental damage can, and is, undergoing dramatic reversal far quicker than could the conversion of natural ecosystems to croplands. The prosperity supported by fossil fuel energy allows investment in effective technologies to reduce and eliminate harmful pollution.”

[CO2 and other GHG levels are increasing every year, having gone parabolic in the last 100 years. This reality paints a bleak picture for the future of humanity. Far from being mitigated, environmental damage is accelerating everywhere one looks from the acidification of the oceans to the die-off of forests and jungles. The simple fact is that renewable energy cannot replace fossil fuel based energy at the rate the world is consuming, as European actions have recently indicated. Only a wholesale reconfiguration of the economy and our way of life will enable solutions to the environmental crisis. Rather than taking this courageous and self-reflective approach, society is putting its proverbial head in the sand concerning climate change. The public already finds the subject of climate change difficult enough to understand without having to wade through a constant onslaught of misleading articles such as yours.]

“Renewable energy still provides a sliver of global demand. Despite the billions of dollars in subsidies, retail prices are still 2-3 times higher than fossil fuels. Renewable energy from wind and solar remain diffuse, intermittent and parasitic on fossil fuels for back-up. Nuclear fission provides energy comparable or superior to fossil fuels, but the public remains resistant to broad use.”

[Yes, capitalist industrial civilization cannot be run on renewables so that is why we need to be talking about powering down and living within the carrying capacity of the planet rather than maintaining the status quo. Nuclear has the little problem of making vast swaths of the planet uninhabitable from radiation contamination, as evidenced by such catastrophes as Chernobyl and Fukushima. Nuclear energy also leaves behind tons of radioactive waste that must be stored away for thousands of years. These sort of factors tend to scare the public. With global sea levels rising and storms becoming more destructive, the world’s nuclear plants, which are mostly situated along waterways and oceans for coolant purposes, are in jeopardy. Get it?]

“Energy-dense, abundant, imperishable, versatile, reliable, portable and affordable, fossil fuels provide 85 percent of the world’s energy because they are superior to the current alternatives. And hundreds of millions still await the benefits of affordable energy. Until energy sources comparable or superior to fossil fuels are fully available, policies to reduce emissions of CO2 should proceed with caution lest they prematurely jettison the well-springs of mankind’s greatest advance — the blessings of which literally light up the holiday season.”

[The “well-springs of mankind’s greatest advance” are soon to be jettisoned into the dustbin of history and extinction as we have already tripped multiple tipping points in the earth’s biosphere such as the Polar ice melt and many others. Hundreds of millions will never experience the energy-intensive lifestyles of developed countries since climate chaos will put a halt to human expansion within this century. Fossil fuels have allowed industrial civilization to far overshoot the environment; for the rest of the world to live like Americans, we would need more than 4 Earths.]

Questions for Abby Martin Interview

21 Saturday Dec 2013

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

≈ 133 Comments

Tags

Abby Martin, Abrupt Climate Change, Climate Change, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate Espionage, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Guy McPherson, Inverted Totalitarianism, Investigative Journalism, Mass Media Manipulation, Mass Media Propaganda, Media Roots, Near-Term Extinction, Russia Today, Security and Surveillance State

“…when denial threatens society, the Earth’s ecosystems, and a sustainable future, it has become not only a delusion, but a dangerous pathology… Possibly some Romans did the same as Attila the Hun marched into Rome, or some Chinese may have sipped tea as Genghis Khan marched his Mongol hordes into their cities…” ~ Haydn Washington

After discovering the website Media Roots a few years ago, I worked with its owner Abby Martin on a small project connected with my ‘Graffiti Philosophy’ video. If I remember correctly, I believe Abby worked for a short time as a newscaster for mainstream media in southern California, but became disenchanted and quit. From my brief experience, she struck me as nothing but sincere and dedicated to the cause of social change. Besides her TV work with RT, she is no different from you or I. I’m aware that RT serves as a “soft-power tool to improve Russia’s image abroad,” but it has also been extremely effective in providing alternative viewpoints to American corporate hegemony. Some of the more discerning readers of this blog have expressed exasperation at the incompleteness of Guy McPherson’s recent interview with investigative journalist Abby Martin. I thought it was rather short and could have been expounded upon if sufficient time were allowed.

No one in my immediate social circle really believes that humans will be extinct by 2030, but if I say circa 2100, then that seems to be sufficiently far enough off in the future for most to safely agree with me. With amplifying positive feedbacks loops just starting to kick into gear, the climate could spiral completely out of control within a short time span as expressed recently by the concern of a number of scientists over catastrophic and abrupt climate change. After all, we humans are doing things to the planet that have never been done before at such a rapid pace, so the ‘unknown unknowns’ are sure to surprise us.

We all know what our response should be — should have been — in response to climate change, resource depletion, and environmental destruction, but all the evidence points to the system perpetuating itself until it crashes like a speeding train with its conductor sound asleep. I personally think we need an entirely new socio-economic system that is completely counter to the current ecocidal paradigm. We know that corporate espionage against activists is insidiously preventing any sort of large-scale grassroots movement from forming and that the power of mass manipulation by corporate media is unprecedented in the history of civilization, so what are we, the few awake amongst us, to do. Some still feel it is worthwhile to invest time in the current political carnival with the ‘hopes’ of effecting incremental change while others feel that any meaningful decisions should have taken place decades ago. Still others feel our fate could never have been altered to any great degree due to biological imperatives and human psychology, and some humanely ask for mankind to save what biological diversity it can in these last days of the Anthropocene Age. In any event, our descendants will have quite a mess to deal with, that is if they are lucky enough to have been left with a planet that accommodates any sort of human population.

So we get to the purpose of this post. Suspend your jaded cynicism for a moment. Abby Martin, a dedicated activist, artist, and investigative journalist, has agreed to an internet interview for this site concerning the previously described state of the world. Abby has interviewed quite a few intelligent people including many we quote here, so this has the potential to be interesting. I’ve been told Brutus has an essay in the draft format and have asked him to hold off until next week. Help me formulate some intelligent questions for Abby. What questions should she have asked Guy? Does she believe in the possibility of humans going extinct? What does she envision the future to be? Has she ever been censored on RT? Hopefully, Guy McPherson and others will join in once the final interview is published. If you don’t want to post your questions here, send them to me at collapsitarians@gmail.com.

Living Double Lives

25 Monday Nov 2013

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

≈ 35 Comments

Tags

Amazon Deforestation, Claude Combes, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, Infinite Growth Paradigm, L’Art d’Être Parasite, Mass Media Manipulation, Overpopulation, Religious Extremism, Resource Wars, Society of Spectacle, Superorganism, The Compulsive Explainer, War for Profit

Amazon deforestation:

“The parasite, as any other living thing, aims to reproduce as much as possible, and therefore, exploiting its environment as much as possible. This does not mean that the further exploitation of the host will help to achieve reproductive success of the parasite.”
~ Claude Combes, L’Art d’Être Parasite (loosely translated from french)

The question has been propounded and answered numerous times: “Are we (humans) any smarter than yeast?” The reluctant answer is usually, “No, not really.” Sure, yeast (pl.) possess no consciousness or awareness so far as we can tell, but that may not be a good measure of smarts, it turns out. The salient point of comparison is that yeast consume their environment/habitat/medium until it’s overpopulated and depleted, at which point they die en masse. We’re doing the very same, though it’s taking a long time and we’re not quite done yet. Maybe ionizing radiation from nuclear Armageddon of one sort or another (who’s still watching Fukushima?) will get us before we destroy our own habitat with pollution and anthropogenic climate change (not that nuclear fallout isn’t also destroying our habitat), maybe not. Identical result either way.

A master narrative to explain everything eludes us. True believers are probably content with the idea that god’s will reigns supreme and that, in all his benevolence, he will ~~continue to~~ provide. That’s a comforting fable many have chased into their graves. Those of us bent toward a system of belief based more on evidence see a different future, not so much potential as inevitable.

I realized recently that many of us live double lives: (1) the one we present to our families, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, employers, etc. who have not yet countenanced the idea of collapse honestly for a variety of reasons and (2) the one we sense deep down and are compelled out of a mixture of grief, horror, despair, and commiseration to share in venues like this one. But there’s another kind of dual life that interests me: the life of the body vs. the life of the mind.

Living in Our Bodies

I’ve written before about satiety signals, which basically says that, like yeast, we can’t stop the habit of endless, needless, mindless consumption. We’re insatiable. From there, it may be worth noting the five basic life functions (recycling content from this post):

growth — living beings grow and develop
respiration — they breathe and respire
reproduction — they reproduce offspring
nutrition — they eat food
excretion — they eliminate wastes from the body

A more fully elaborated list goes like this:

obtaining and changing materials into forms an organism can use
taking in food from the environment
breakdown of complex food materials into forms the organism can use
elimination of indigestible material
process by which substances are taken into the cells of an organism
process by which materials are distributed (moved) throughout the organism
release of chemical energy from certain nutrients
chemical combination of simple substances to form complex substances
incorporation of materials into the body of an organism
increase in size
process by which cells become specialized for specific functions
removal of metabolic wastes
process by which organisms maintain a stable internal environment
process by which organisms produce new organisms of their own kind
the sum total of all the chemical reactions occurring within the cells of an organism

We live to eat, reproduce, and eventually die — all basic functions of the body. In our current ‘Age of Abundance’, those of use hanging out on computers probably have our life-preserving bodily needs met and aren’t scrambling to stave off dehydration and starvation the way those living at the edges do. We easily forget, then, that our bodies fail rather quickly without continued inputs: in a couple minutes without air, in a few days without water, and in a few weeks without food. Thus, when fed and clothed and housed satisfactorily (not that we stop consuming there), we easily lose touch with the life of the body and believe — mistakenly, comically, tragically, take your pick — that we can live in our heads.

Living in Our Heads

As a social species, humans also have certain psychosocial needs that must be met. Failures tend not to be as immediately obvious as when bodily needs go unmet, but results are no less dramatic: individuals run off the rails (drug- and alcohol-related self-destruction, psychosis, violent rampages, suicide, etc.) and societies (if you recognize human collectives as a superorganism) become embroiled in madness. When exactly society/civilization first went mad is probably a matter of opinion (some might suggest, for instance, the French Terror), but in the modern industrial era, I suggest that World War One is the conflict that broke us psychologically. We’ve never really recovered. Follow-on wars (World War Two, the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Afghanistan and Iraq (undeclared), and the so-called War on Terror) have all consumed the energies and economies of the world’s superpowers without entirely clear benefits, except perhaps for WWII, which at least ended the Holocaust and for a time stopped Fascism.

Wholesomeness is not a term one could use fairly to describe the attributes of modern American culture, not anymore (if indeed ever). We now live in a Society of Spectacle, and electronics in particular enable omnipresent connection to a firehose-style information feed: pure, indiscriminate volume pointed at everyone all the time. And if ever there were an embodiment of a bottomless pit, an insatiable appetite, our consumption of information is it. Seriously, how many broadcast and cable channels are there, all competing at the juvenile game of made-you-look? Even those of us here at Collapse have what might be called a “spectacular” view of the proceedings.

The Compulsive Explainer has an interesting albeit brief post called “Information Overload as an Addiction” suggesting that our preoccupation with entertainment, especially the electronic sorts (radio, cinema, television, Internet), is for the masses equivalent to giving away one’s mind. Information insatiability has become an addiction, and like political junkies, the media-saturated middle mind of the masses cannot perceive reality through what’s projected by the media at the bidding of cultural, corporate, and political leaders who would keep us calmed and buying. Instead, we live (temporarily) within a giant fiction, a phantasmagoria if you will, nearly a virtual reality, from which there is scarcely an escape even for those who can see the bubble (always from the inside, of course — after all, we’re on computers). While the story continues to be spun, our attention is riveted and our compliance coerced. But never fear: the life of the body will triumph eventually, though only in the negative sense.

History Has Gone Vertical

22 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by Brutus in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 36 Comments

Tags

Arctic Ice Melt, Chasing Ice, Chris Hedges, Climate Change, Corporate State, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, IPCC, Mass Media Manipulation, Morris Berman, Mythos and Logos, Nature Bats Last, Oswald Spengler, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Religious Fanaticism

This blog is cross-posted at The Spiral Staircase. Feel free to comment here or there.

To orient oneself in life, a person chooses from among myriad narratives, typically assembling a hodgepodge worldview out of diverse parts. According to Oswald Spengler, cultural artifacts (e.g., the arts, humanities, and sciences) arise “needing the guidance of inspiration and … developing under great conventions of form.” The very same can be said of our origin and orientation stories, ancient or contemporary. Narratives intertwine and need not necessarily be discrete, mutually exclusive, or competing, even though that’s what’s often implied by time-worn tensions underlying science vs. religion, sometimes understood more philosophically as logos vs. mythos. Indeed, they cohere despite conflicts of logic and their being ahistorical. The power of subscription and consensus overcomes all objections.

If a master narrative exists, it ought to be simply reality obtained, though that is probably visible to only a small percentage of people able to apprehend the world clearly. For the rest, scales not yet having fallen from the eyes, the considerable benefit of hindsight can help clarify the view, but only if one has sufficient nerve to behold it honestly. Instead, our dominant inspirational narratives promulgate a wide variety of incompletely fulfilled hopes and desires. Few such promises bear much resemblance to reality, those of economists, politicians, and clerics demonstrating the most striking discontinuities from the actuality experienced by ordinary folks. A Chris Hedges article at TruthDig.com called “The Folly of Empire” discusses this departure from reality in his characteristically erudite style (apologies for the long nested quote):

… absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, the class of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus like Oprah and religious belief systems that assure followers that God will always protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking. “The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than the original,” Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. “We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories in the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”

I don’t usually lump into the mix entertainers, sports figures, gurus hawking self-help books and programs, or media pundits offering half-baked analyses because only idiots expect truth from them, but perhaps I should include them considering their stranglehold on the public’s wasted attention. Most of today’s media-driven narratives rely on conventions, gestures, and rhetoric that are notoriously predigested and therefore immediately swallowed by the guffawing crowd, disinviting additional analysis or careful consideration. This bears a curious family resemblance with intellectual conditions that sparked the Reformation. Further, because such mediated (or should I say medieval?) content is composed largely of fiction, pageantry, and untethered conjecture, no time is needed for the narrative to actualize. Hope functions in the present tense and requires no closure.

Perhaps the quintessential inspirational narrative was trotted out by the Obama campaign back in 2008, which relied on promises (empty, we later found out) to fulfill everyone’s desire for a better life, calling on hope and change to achieve those promises. Another religious hope narrative promises to enhance one’s afterlife, earned in earthly realms through achievements in social justice and the judgment of posterity. Both adopt time-honored conventions and are part of what is described in Morris Berman’s book Wandering God as the ascent tradition. Significant among those conventions is orientation along a vertical axis as seen, for instance, in easy acceptance of the legitimacy of hierarchy (and therefore egregious power, wealth, and class stratification and imbalance) and a longing for transfiguration, transcendence, and communion with god (or the gods) above.

Looking back across history, evidence of “progress” and growth is legion. However, most of those achievements are demographic, material, and technological, each having their unique and unintended blowback. What’s notably lacking as we sally forth into the 21st century is the ability to transcend our own base nature, which is characterized by corruption, violence, stupidity, short-term gratification, and inability to achieve the utopian dreams that populate the minds of many despots. So that same history is marked by downturns and setbacks. One might even say that the overall upward trend of history is pockmarked by periodic scars. Still, nothing just yet has stalled the hubris of history rising (unless domestic peak oil in the 1970s and global peak oil a few years back prove to have been among the first of a series of turning points). And judging from blog traffic and commentary, the steady stream of negative assessments in scientific literature, and news reports telling of weather and ecological calamities with increasing frequency and severity, awareness is beginning to dawn on even the most congenital optimists (plus some fools and the average ignoramus) that what goes up must eventually come down. Since history has gone vertical, hard limits must eventually assert themselves.

The plethora of charts, tables, graphs, and infographics that evidence not just rising trends but verticality is frankly astonishing. Sometimes a gradually ascending slope is observable within a short timeframe, such as receding glacial ice documented in Chasing Ice. Other times it takes long traces of historical, evolutionary, or even geological time to observe. Even short timeframes often conceal effects that lie handily beyond normal perception, but we luckily have scientists trained to recognize short- and long-term trends. Too bad they’re uniformly ignored and/or pilloried by a public spoon fed the blandishments of corporate marketing and political propaganda. Typically, ascending curves (whether geometric, logarithmic, or exponential) don’t appear to be walls (limits) when viewed from the far left or from within a narrow time band, meaning microscopically close. Zoom out or to the right, however, and the trend pointed into the stratosphere is readily apparent, such as in the following video (animation) of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere:

Similar x-y coordinate graphs showing, for instance, energy use per capita and human population growth demonstrate the same trajectory but at much briefer durations. Trendlines are mathematical abstractions, like fiat currency being printed into existence. At some point, gravity takes hold and drags everything back to earth (reality), though that eventuality can be forestalled for a surprisingly long time. The return trip down various vertical trends is approaching ever more quickly as lift skyward fizzles like an Icarus nightmare. Or in the case of atmospheric carbon, we can’t stop the rising trend we unwittingly initiated from blowing through the roof and rendering the earth uninhabitable.

It’s often said there is no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole. Presented with the likelihood or certainty of battlefield death, holdouts succumb and cash the eternal-life insurance card of a last-minute profession of faith. Same as death-bed conversions. Thousands of years of philosophy and religion might prepare us to face our inevitable demise if we bothered to learn anything worthwhile besides how to make money, and yet in all our frailty, many of us cannot accept that our final departure is merely a fact of life, not a gateway or journey to somewhere else. (Um, opinions vary on this, obviously.) The final departure of Homo sapiens sapiens is even harder to contemplate.

So what foxhole moment awaits us? Here’s one: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released in late September 2013 a publication by Working Group I of the Fifth Assessment Report, which presents the underlying physical science behind climate change (used to be called global warming). The IPCC website states that “The Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) is being released in four parts between September 2013 and November 2014. It will be the most comprehensive assessment of scientific knowledge on climate change since 2007 when Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) was released.” Preparation of these reports has been ongoing for decades already, and the difficulty of their assemblage assures that they’re already out of date at the time they’re released. Being the work of governments, AR5 is also reputed to be remarkably conservative in its conclusions, as contrasted with prophesying near-term human extinction (NTE or NTHE) as those of us unconstrained by geopolitics have begun to do (mostly taking our cues from Guy McPherson of Nature Bats Last). That’s not a gambit for attention, BTW. It’s about a soul-destroying a realization as there is, and no one comes to admit it easily.

The likelihood of anyone plunging into the 2216 pages of this first of four parts of AR5 is, well, dismal. One could easily level the accusation that the IPCC is burying its findings behind pages and pages (and pages) of prefatory material; acknowledgements; missing or incomplete figures, tables, and citations (to be inserted when?); technical and executive summaries; glossaries; references; and dry obfuscation. That’s not really the case, though; the data and discussion are abundant and available for anyone capable of deciphering it. Technical and scientific analysis and discussion is exactly what Working Group I delivers in these chapters:

Introduction
Observations: Atmosphere and Surface
Observations: Ocean
Observations: Cryosphere
Information from Paleoclimate Archives
Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles
Clouds and Aerosols
Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing
Evaluation of Climate Models
Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional
Near-term Climate Change: Projections and Predictability
Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility
Sea Level Change
Climate Phenomena and their Relevance for Future Regional Climate Change

I downloaded the report and sought something succinct to quote, such as an answer to the question “Just how fucked are we, anyway?” but the technical summaries proceed with this sort of dry, useless, blank, uninformative text:

The primary purpose of this Technical Summary is to provide the link between the complete assessment of the multiple lines of independent evidence presented in the 14 chapters of the main report and the highly condensed summary prepared as the WGI Summary for Policymakers. The Technical Summary thus serves as a starting point for those readers who seek the full information on more specific topics covered by this assessment. This purpose is facilitated by including pointers to the chapters and sections where the full assessment can be found. Policy-relevant topics, which cut across many chapters and involve many interlinked processes in the climate system, are presented here as Thematic Focus Elements, allowing rapid access of this information.

The WGI Summary for Policymakers is not contained within the larger report but both can be found at this link. It’s unclear how much of the report was used in preparation of this story at National Geographic, but the story provides five takeaways from WGI:

On the extreme weather front, the report concludes it is “very likely” that cold days and nights have decreased, while warm days and nights have increased, since 1950 …
The oceans have warmed with “virtual certainty,” the report concludes, at a rate of about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit (0.11 Celsius) per decade since 1970 in the upper 246 feet (75 meters) of surface water …
What about those polar bears? Sea ice (as well as glaciers and ice sheets) has declined overall since 1970 …
Sea level rise has happened, and will happen in the future, as a result of global warming, the report finds …
More than half of the global warming observed since 1950 has a human cause, largely from the greenhouse gas effects of gases such as carbon dioxide emitted from burning fossil fuels ….

The ellipses indicate brief discussion behind each takeaway. The conclusions are hedged, of course, relying on observations of what’s happened so far and omitting extrapolation of trends that go vertical. Even the three levels of confidence communicate not certainty of our fate (exact details TBD) but hope that projections are subject to change or we can do something to reverse things or at least forestall the worst. Like IPCC, National Geographic is yet to have its foxhole moment even though the evidence is staring them ghoulishly in the face. If one is at all engaged in this subject, I suppose it makes sense to stay hunched in the hole chain-smoking cigarettes and making do with what meager rations and sleep are available. My sneaking suspicion is that the go order will come quickly enough to catch lots of shivering, quivering, wavering souls before they get to their last eternal hope. In the meantime, the fat lady is singing, the coal-mine canary has expired, pigs are flying, and hell has frozen over. We’re vertical against the wall, facing the firing squad, and what’s left to do, though no one knows just quite when, is to get horizontal.

Stations of the Crass

05 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by darbikrash in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Peak Oil

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Class Consciousness, Consumerism, Corporate State, Crass, Empire, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, Margaret Thatcher, Marx's 'Capital', Mass Media Manipulation, Meritocracy, Nick Cave, Pemberton Textile Mill Fire, Poison Girls, Poverty, Punk Rock, Rana Plaza Garment Factory, Ronald Reagan, Slave Labor, Sweatshop Factory, Tanzeen Sweater Factory Fire, The Elite 1%, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Vi Subversa, Walmart

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 10^th 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.

My shirts.

No Bailout for Mass Extinction and the Collapse of Industrial Civilization

10 Wednesday Oct 2012

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

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Bill Mckibben, Canfield Ocean, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Edward Bernays, Environmental Collapse, Free Market Ideologues, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Mass Media Manipulation, Paul L. Street, Peter D. Ward, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming - the Mass Extinctions of the Past - and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future

“There’s No Economy on a Dead Planet”: Reflections on a Missing Election Issue

excerpt…

“A Powerful Symbol of the Age of Man”

Climate change is indisputably anthropogenic – human-made. The long deep-pocketed propaganda, public relations, and lobbying arms of the corporate carbon industrial complex have long insisted that global warming is a reflection of unalterable natural forces that operate independently of human control. But the preponderant majority of the climate-sentient world agrees with the overwhelming consensus finding of contemporary earth scientists that global warming is anthropogenic (“human made”) – that it reflects the visible hand of human practice, politics, and policy. It knows that the story of the world’s broken ecology is about the human release of greenhouse gases resulting from the uncontrolled extraction and use of carbon-based fossil fuels.[8]

The harsh reality has to be acknowledged in elite capitalist media. Reflecting its duty to provide its privileged readers with reasonably accurate information, even the neoliberal, arch-capitalist Anglo-American Economist magazine acknowledges the dominant role of human agency in a recent special supplemental report on “The Vanishing North.” According to The Economist last June, “The shrinkage of the sea ice is no less a result of human hands than the ploughing of the prairies. The cause is global pollution, and the risks it carries are likewise global. The Arctic, no longer distant or inviolable, has emerged, almost overnight, as a powerful symbol of the age of man.”[9]

“Accelerating the Catastrophe”

What do the two dominant U.S. business parties offer towards the goal of saving the planet – well, its living species – from the crisis of anthropogenic global warming? Less than nothing. An escalation of the assault, in fact, making the problem worse.

Writing about the drastic melting of “the earth’s air-conditioner,” Gillis notes a chilling lack of urgency in reacting to the problem the part of rich nation governments, whose “main response has been to plan for exploitation of newly accessible minerals in the Arctic, including more oil.”[10]

Instead of acting to limit greenhouse emissions, those governments see the retreat of the great northern ice cover as an opportunity “to accelerate the catastrophe…The reaction,” Noam Chomsky notes, “demonstrates an extraordinary willingness to sacrifice the lives of our children and grandchildren for short-term gain. Or, perhaps, an equally remarkable willingness to shut our eyes so as not to see the impending peril.”[11] …

…The Republicans and the Democrats both decline to take the great time bomb of climate change[18] with anything remotely like the seriousness it deserves since doing so would disrupt “the economy.” They both worship at the altar of growth and the notion that “a rising tide lifts all boats” – capitalism’s longstanding fake, eco-cidal answer to popular pressure for jobs, and end to poverty, and the downward redistribution of income and wealth.[19] They both refuse to let long-term considerations of livable ecology and human survival interfere with the short-term pursuit of material expansion and the bottom line, not to mention the short-term logic of the election cycle.

I often wonder why people, who know that climate change is real, refuse to discuss it. They refuse to discuss it because it will upset their regimen of making money and carrying along with business-as-usual.

Bill Mckibben was on some late night TV show and he mentioned that the executive of some oil company said that if we need to move our food production north, then we will. Here is why that won’t work. Climate change means widespread famine, wars for dwindling resources, the fall of States, and the final extinction of man. There’s no more pretending that economic growth is possible or even a sane path for us to follow. Yet the system continues on through coerced participation.

I wonder if our forebears from 100 years ago would alter their actions if they knew from scientific and observable evidence that their way of life would cause the extinction of their progeny. Do you think they were more sensible back then? At that time, Edward Bernays and the tools of mass media manipulation had not yet entered society. Are not climate change deniers and free market ideologues the flat-earthers or Salem witch hunters of the 21st century? Feel free to give me an answer if you have one.

If you destroy the oceans, the cradle of life, then they will overtake you, returning you from whence you came…

Kill the Messenger

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

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

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Conservation, Conservation Triage, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Guy McPherson, Kill the Messenger, Mass Media Manipulation, Overpopulation, Post-Antibiotic World, Willful Blindness

The process of industrial civilization’s collapse has been happening for some time now. It’s not a sudden overnight occurrence that can be appreciated by the fight-or-flight reflexes and here-and-now sensory stimulation of humankind. As the natural world slowly retreats and disappears under the expansion of humans, subsequent generations are normalized to an increasingly biodiverse-poor environment. What appreciation does a child have for an animal only seen in books? In a recent essay by Guy McPherson entitled ‘Global Madness‘, he writes:

If silence is the perfect music, then we’re about to have the (musically) perfect planet. But I doubt we’ll be pleased with the silence as we slip, one by one, into the abyss of unconsciousness.

As the invading cacophony of industrial civilization fills the air – car traffic, fire alarms, ambulance sirens, jet planes, bulldozers – the animal and insect voices of the natural world are extinguished, never to be heard from again. For the last forty years, Bernie Krause has been recording those now-absent sounds of nature:

…such is the rate of species extinction and the deterioration of pristine habitat that he estimates half these recordings are now archives, impossible to repeat because the habitats no longer exist or because they have been so compromised by human noise. His tapes are possibly the only record of the original diversity of life in these places.

“A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening,” he writes in a new book, The Great Animal Orchestra. “Little by little the vast orchestra of life, the chorus of the natural world, is in the process of being quietened. There has been a massive decrease in the density and diversity of key vocal creatures, both large and small. The sense of desolation extends beyond mere silence.

“If you listen to a damaged soundscape … the community [of life] has been altered, and organisms have been destroyed, lost their habitat or been left to re-establish their places in the spectrum. As a result, some voices are gone entirely, while others aggressively compete to establish a new place in the increasingly disjointed chorus.”

Hawaii, he says, is the extinction capital of the world. “In a couple of centuries since the islands were populated by Europeans, half the 140 bird species have disappeared. In Madagascar, 15 species of lemur, an elephant bird, a pygmy hippo and an estimated half of all the animals have gone extinct.”

Even partially disturbed habitats lose much of their life for many years, says Krause. Recordings of a meadow in the Sierra Nevada mountains east of San Francisco before the surrounding forest was selectively logged in the 1980s sounds very different to when Krause returned a year later…

A recent study helps prove how interwoven ecosystems are and that anything other than a holistic approach to conservation is futile:

…Lead researcher Dr Frank van Veen of the University of Exeter’s Centre for Ecology and Conservation said: “Our experiment provides the first proof of something that biologists have argued for a long time: predators can have indirect effects on each other, to the extent that when one species is lost, the loss of these indirect effects can lead to further extinctions. Although our study focused on insects, the principle would be the same for predators in any ecosystem, ranging from big cats on the African plains to fish in our seas.

“Our research highlights the fact that a ‘single species’ approach to conservation can be ineffective and even counter-productive. For example, protecting cod could lead to increased fishing pressure on other predatory fish which then, by the mechanism we have demonstrated here, could lead to further negative effects on the cod…

The feeble attempts humans make at saving the myriad of flora and fauna that support us is now called “conservation triage“. The web of life is looking more like a moth-eaten doily cloth beneath the morbidly obese feet of humanity:

…Even in our existing system we practice a form of triage by simply not funding recovery efforts for species that we don’t think we can afford to save. Many conservationists are saying, ‘Look, it would be much better if we had a more explicit, more rational system for making these decisions.’…

“Many species are threatened by climate change and there’s a concern that some species may be too far gone in some sense to save, that there may be forces that are too broad, too far along and that species is essentially a lost cause,” she said.

On Facebook, Amy J. Loiselle said there is one crucial element left out of this conversation: the impact of humans on other species.

“In all the conversations about species extinction there is hardly ever any mention of the continued impact of human population growth on the environmental problems we face,” she wrote. “This is driving extinction, climate change, poverty etc. All the other ’causes’ are directly related to increases in human numbers. Without solving this problem there is no foreseeable way to solve any of these other problem.

Choosing to control human population goes against a basic drive found in all species to ensure its survival – the desire to reproduce. Being the apex species with no predators does pose a bit of a problem with nature’s ability to check and balance our numbers. Of course the microscopic world of viruses and bacteria will create a growing threat to us in the post-antibiotic and post fossil fuel world:

Drug-resistant organisms will spread across the country in ever increasing numbers, and we are not going to be bailed out by the pharmaceutical industry,” said Gilbert, a physician at Providence Medical Center in Portland. “There is nothing in the pipeline. It takes up to 15 years to bring a new drug through the approval process.

Additionally, climate change will wreak havoc with the spread of new and exotic diseases and bugs:

…Long before the actual Runaway emerges, we can expect a host of exotic diseases will spread across the world and wreak havoc – and all the fools clamoring for warm temperatures (e.g. for “longer growing seasons”) will wish they were dead. Especially as we’re already losing efficacy of anti-biotics from over-use(See, e.g. Global Climate and Infectious Disease:The Cholera Paradigm, in Science, Vol. 274, 20 December, 1996, p. 2025.)

If people think the current invasion of West Nile fever is bad, wait until they’re faced with dengue fever (which I caught in the West Indies – and which can – after the 3rd successive bite-infection – lead to hemorraghing from all body orifices). Wait until cholera becomes endemic and other hitherto unseen (and unheard of) diseases appear. Then the morons will understand the enormous downsides of their ‘warmer’ world and huge price for their ‘longer growing seasons’.

Mostly understated in all the talk of exotic disease incursions, is the real risk we will be swamped by parasites throughout the country and even the world…

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.

Guy McPherson, being the anti-establishment voice that he is, says he’s even received death threats against himself. This goes to show how much inertia and willful ignorance are built into the current system. ‘Kill the Messenger’ is the modus operandi of industrial civilization and Empire.