Billion‑Dollar Bets on a Dying World

07 Saturday Mar 2026

Posted by xraymike79 in Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Mental Health

Tags

Civilizational Collapse, End Of The American Empire, Fertilizer Supply Shock, Food Insecurity, Fossil Fuel Civilization, Global Energy Crisis, Global Supply Chains, Gulf Geopolitics, Imperial Overreach, LNG Disruption, Managed Decline, Military Industrial Complex, Multipolar Disorder, Security State Expansion, Stagflation Risk, Strait Of Hormuz, Trillion Dollar Wars, Unauthorized War, US Iran War, US Israeli Alliance

The war in Iran is already built to break things. It is grinding through munitions at nearly a billion dollars a day, rerouting ships around two continents, and quietly starving the fertilizer arteries that make modern harvests possible—all as Washington places yet another unvoted, multi-billion‑dollar bet on the idea that the system can take one more hit. The question beneath all of this is brutally simple: how many more of these bets can a fraying, fossil‑fueled civilization place before it finally hits a limit it cannot bluff or bomb its way past?

Eight days into the US–Israeli campaign, Hormuz has become less a shipping lane than a test of how much risk a fossil‑fueled civilization can absorb. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard claims “complete control” over the strait and has vowed to set on fire any vessel that dares to cross. Tanker traffic has collapsed, maritime insurers have doubled or withdrawn war coverage, and the waterway that once carried roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas flows is effectively closed. Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura refinery—the beating heart of its export system—has been shut down twice by Iranian drones. Qatar declared force majeure—legal shorthand for saying an unforeseen, uncontrollable event made it impossible to deliver on its export contracts. Analysts now estimate that roughly a fifth of the planet’s crude and gas supply is suspended, either because fields and refineries have had to shut or because there is simply nowhere safe to send the barrels.

Energy prices have reacted immediately. Global oil benchmarks have surged by more than 25 percent since the first strikes, pushing Brent into the low 80s and driving up gasoline and diesel prices from Tokyo to Toledo. European gas prices spiked by more than 50 percent in a single day on news of Ras Laffan’s closure. But these moves, dramatic as they feel to consumers, are only the opening chords. On their own, oil in the 80s and a few weeks of high LNG prices are survivable. What threatens to become truly dangerous is the possibility that the war locks the system into structurally higher prices and chronic uncertainty, at the same time that it quietly sabotages the inputs that grow food.

To understand how far this can go, it helps to mark the thresholds. History suggests that oil at 90–110 dollars for a few months can slow growth and aggravate inflation without collapsing the architecture; the 1970s crises only arrived when prices quadrupled and stayed high for years. Today, analysts at Goldman Sachs reckon that each sustained 10‑dollar jump in oil adds roughly 0.3 percentage points to US inflation and knocks 0.1 points off growth. That is annoying, not apocalyptic. But the war is already flirting with the next band. Hormuz’s near‑shutdown forces Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and the UAE to curb production as storage fills and tankers stay in port. Qatar’s loss deprives Europe and Asia of a key gas supplier at precisely the wrong time. Oilfields that are shut in cannot simply be flipped back on; depending on age and geology, it can take weeks or months to restore previous flows once the pipelines and loading arms are safe again.

If this continues—if Hormuz remains unsafe, if Ras Tanura and Ras Laffan and other Gulf facilities limp along or stay dark—the world drifts toward a scenario where Brent hovers in the 120–150 dollar range, not for days but for seasons. At that point, energy costs stop being a bad quarter and start becoming the air a recession breathes. High‑income countries can tap strategic reserves and lean on their own production. Import‑dependent states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America cannot. They face soaring import bills, weaker currencies, and the kind of fiscal squeeze that makes debt crises and IMF “rescues” feel inevitable.

Yet oil is only the most visible part of the story. The deeper fuse runs through fertilizer. The same Gulf that exports crude and LNG also exports the nitrogen and sulfur that underpin modern yields. According to recent trade data reported in The Economic Times and Bloomberg, the Strait of Hormuz handles roughly a third of global fertilizer trade, including about 35 percent of global urea and 45 percent of sulfur exports. Iran is the world’s third‑largest producer of ammonia, and Qatar and its neighbors ship vast quantities of urea, ammonia, and sulfur‑based products worldwide. Those flows are now snarled. Granular urea prices in the Middle East have surged; European ammonia futures have climbed into the 700‑dollar‑per‑tonne range; Indian urea producers are already cutting output as LNG cargoes from Qatar disappear. Russia, despite being the single largest fertilizer exporter, cannot fully backstop these losses because of production bottlenecks, its own export limits, and domestic obligations.

The timing could hardly be worse. Northern Hemisphere farmers are heading into spring application season now. Fertilizer is not like oil; you cannot simply “catch up” by applying it later. If supplies are tight and prices elevated during planting and early growth, farmers either pay through the nose, cut back on application, switch to lower‑input crops, or leave land fallow. The full effect only shows up months later, when harvests are weighed and markets discover that there is less wheat, corn, soy, and rice than planned. Analysts quoted in the Financial Times and Reuters warn that if this disruption runs through the current planting window, the world could see a food price shock equal to or worse than the one triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

This is the shape of genuine systemic risk: not a single commodity going vertical, but multiple interlocked flows—oil, gas, fertilizer, container shipping—staying kinked for long enough that the fabric starts to tear. Hormuz’s closure forces producers to shut in fields and storage; Iranian drones and missiles hit refineries and LNG trains; ships avoid the Red Sea as Houthis again menace Bab el‑Mandeb, driving container lines like Maersk back around the Cape of Good Hope and adding weeks and cost to global trade. Qatar’s energy minister, not known for alarmism, has already warned that if the war continues “for a few weeks,” it will “bring down the economies of the world,” by which he means push them into a combination of chronic inflation, weak growth, and cascading shortages.

Even the financial plumbing that has long underpinned the American order is starting to flinch. The wealthiest Gulf monarchies—Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait—are now reviewing tens of billions of dollars in planned and existing investments in the United States and other Western markets as war damage, lost exports, and higher defense spending squeeze their budgets. Sovereign wealth funds built as “rainy day” vehicles are being tapped to plug fiscal holes at home, and officials are quietly signaling that future capital will be redirected toward domestic projects and non‑Western partners rather than automatically recycled into Wall Street. For an empire that has long relied on Gulf petrodollars to finance its deficits and asset bubbles, a war that simultaneously threatens those states’ export arteries and erodes their appetite for US exposure is not just a regional miscalculation; it is another way of sawing at the floorboards beneath its own financial house.

In Washington, this unauthorized adventure is burning money at a rate that would make even a Pentagon comptroller blink. Because Congress never debated, let alone passed, a new authorization for war with Iran, the administration is operating entirely on the fumes of old Authorizations for Use of Military Force and a creative reading of the president’s Article II powers. There has been no declaration of war and no specific statutory authorization for bombing a sovereign state on this scale; constitutional scholars from the ACLU to former government lawyers have been blunt in calling it illegal. Yet every day, the United States pours roughly 900 million to 1 billion dollars into Operation Epic Fury. Estimates from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, echoed by ABC News and CNN, suggest the first 100 hours cost about 3.7 billion dollars—some 891.4 million per day—in munitions and operations alone. A congressional source has relayed a preliminary Pentagon estimate of roughly 1 billion dollars a day going forward, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hinting the tempo will increase as more bomber missions and missile defenses come online.

Almost none of this is budgeted. CSIS’s breakdown notes that only a sliver of the first week’s spending fit inside existing appropriations; the rest will require supplemental requests to replace thousands of precision munitions—Tomahawks, Patriots, THAAD interceptors—and cover the burn rate of advanced aircraft and naval groups. Pentagon planners are reportedly working on a 50 billion dollar supplemental just to refill missile stocks, and that assumes the war does not expand or drag on beyond the eight‑week horizon some officials are whispering to reporters. That is money Congress has not authorized for this purpose, spent on a war Congress has not formally approved, at a time when lawmakers already profess alarm at deficits and interest costs. It is hard to think of a clearer illustration of what “managed collapse” looks like in fiscal form: unlegislated commitments made on the assumption that someone, somewhere, will be forced to pick up the bill.

The bill is not just monetary. The same unauthorized war powers logic that allows a president to launch a massive air campaign without a vote also normalizes the idea that fundamental decisions about national and planetary risk can be made by a small executive circle and a handful of think‑tank lawyers. The Office of Legal Counsel has, over decades, evolved a test under which presidents are permitted to wage significant military operations without Congress so long as they serve “sufficiently important national interests” and are not expected to rise to the level of “war” in the constitutional sense. In practice, that amounts to: if the president says it is important and thinks he can keep casualties manageable, he can do it. Iran blows that premise apart. The risks of escalation, regional spillover, and major American losses are obvious. That they were ignored tells you a great deal about how degraded the checks on imperial power have become.

All of this reads like a close‑up of the operating system I have been describing. A war sold as decisive and contained is rapidly turning into an open‑ended drain: on munitions stockpiles, on fiscal space, on shipping routes, on the fertilizers and fuels that keep shelves stocked. Oil in the low 80s is a warning shot; oil sustained north of 120 dollars for six to twelve months, with LNG tight and fertilizer scarce, would be something closer to a slow‑motion heart attack. It would not “destroy” the global economy in the sense of flicking a switch to off. But it would likely drive multiple major economies into synchronized recession, tip heavily indebted, energy‑importing states into default and IMF tutelage, inflate food prices in ways that hit the poor hardest and stoke unrest, and justify further securitization—more border walls, more riot gear, more surveillance—in the name of stability.

And all of it would be framed as unfortunate but necessary side effects of a war that, constitutionally speaking, was never actually authorized. The president spends a billion dollars a day on an illegal war; the war sends oil, gas, and fertilizer prices into the red; the resulting inflation and shortages are used to argue that there is no money for climate transition, no room for expanded social protections, no alternative to tightening belts and tightening controls. That is managed collapse in miniature: the system does not fall by accident, it is steered down a staircase of “tough choices” that somehow always protect the same people.

There is, of course, nothing inevitable about this trajectory. Congress could still claw back its war powers, refuse supplemental requests, and force a halt. Diplomats could, in theory, broker a ceasefire that reopens Hormuz before planting seasons are fully lost. The US could decide that it is not, in fact, worth risking stagflation and food crises in exchange for another symbolic display of air supremacy. But none of those outcomes are consistent with how the American empire has behaved in recent decades. It is far more consistent with its habits to keep bombing, keep spending, keep insisting that victory is around the corner, while supply chains fray and households watch prices climb.

The war in Iran is not yet the event that shuts down the global economy for good. But it is a real‑time demonstration of how little slack remains in the system, and how casually that slack can be burned by leaders unbound by law and insulated from consequence. Oil does not have to stay at 150 dollars forever to break things; fertilizer does not have to vanish completely to starve people. It is enough that prices and shortages cross certain thresholds and stay there long enough to erode what remains of social and ecological resilience.

In that sense, the daily billion dollars Washington is quietly spending on unauthorized war is not just a line item; it is a wager that the machine can take yet another shock without coming apart. Each new strike, each new supplemental, assumes there will always be enough slack in the system—enough credit, enough patience, enough ecological cushion—to absorb the blow. At some point, a civilization this frayed and this fossil‑fueled will place one bet too many—and realize, with perfect clarity and no way back, that the system it kept gambling on has already come apart.

The Coin In The Sky: Notes On The American Empire

01 Sunday Mar 2026

Posted by xraymike79 in Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Mental Health

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

American Empire, Climate Catastrophe, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate Fascism, Cultural Imperialism, Democratic Erosion, Economic Inequality, Environmental Externalities, Global Supply Chains, Imperial Decline, Late Capitalism, Mass Consumerism, Media Saturation, Military Industrial Complex, Moral Bankruptcy, Neoliberal Globalization, Oligarchic Democracy, Soft Power Hegemony, Spectacle And Propaganda, Spiritual Alienation

America’s greatest export has never been freedom, nor democracy, nor even the vague, sugary, carbonated myth called “hope.” It has been the combo meal: a steaming, shrink‑wrapped bundle of war, debt, spectacle, and distraction. The empire’s genius has been to make that bundle look like salvation and then convince the rest of the planet to pay for the privilege of drowning in it.

The Coin in the Sky

Imagine the American century as a single image: a weathered coin the size of a god’s head hovering over a smog‑black city, its portrait worn smooth by the greasy fingers of markets and wars. The face is technically a “Founding Father,” but at this point it could be anyone: a senator from Delaware, a Silicon Valley disruptor, a defense‑industry lobbyist—all interchangeable silhouettes in the great engraving of capital. The inscription reads “In Markets We Trust,” and below that, in smaller print, “Some Restrictions Apply.”

This is not a republic so much as a vending machine guarded by aircraft carriers. Put your ballot in the slot, listen to the rattling of Super PAC coins down the steel chute, and out pops another custodian of the sacred GDP. Americans were told this machine was the final form of history, a device so perfect that even criticizing it sounds like heresy or—worse—“class warfare.”

The War Machine as Jobs Program and Secular Church

President Eisenhower, who actually knew something about war beyond the PowerPoint slides, warned of a “military‑industrial complex” whose “unwarranted influence” would endanger democracy and drain the wealth and spirit of the nation. He might as well have been lecturing a casino about the dangers of slot machines. The United States listened respectfully, named a few highways after him, and then proceeded to build a planetary war machine so large that it now functions as the default industrial policy, employment scheme, tech incubator, and foreign‑policy side hustle rolled into one.

The Pentagon is not just a building; it is the closest thing America has to a national church. It absorbs tithes in the form of tax dollars, offers sacraments in the form of new fighter jets, and dispenses salvation as “security” against a rotating cast of demons: communists, terrorists, rogue states, great‑power rivals. At every budget cycle, lobbyists, retired generals, and contractors gather in Washington’s inner sanctums to chant the liturgy of “readiness” and “jobs,” their PowerPoints studded with maps of danger that miraculously correspond to congressional districts in need of employment.

This is war as Keynesian stimulus, but with worse infrastructure and better branding. Missile systems that do not work are funded because they create jobs that do not pay enough, in towns that have no other reason to exist except to build the hardware that will someday turn someone else’s town into rubble. Every gun, as Eisenhower put it, “signifies, in the final sense, a theft” from the hungry; it is also a cleverly disguised transfer of wealth from public need to the corporate balance sheet.

Meanwhile, the empire’s forward operating bases form a steel necklace around the planet: hundreds of installations from Germany to Guam, Diego Garcia to Djibouti, a cartography of “interests” so sprawling that everything, everywhere has become a potential battlefield. The empire calls this “deterrence”; others might recognize it as what Chalmers Johnson described as “blowback on layaway”—installments of resentment accruing interest in distant deserts and megacities.

Oligarchy in a Democracy Costume

Officially, this is all done by a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” In practice, it increasingly resembles a corporate boardroom with a flag at the front. Wealth concentration in the United States has reached levels rivaled only by late‑tsarist Russia: the richest 130,000 families own nearly as much as the bottom 90 percent; three individuals possess as much as the bottom half of the population. Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page went looking for democracy in this landscape and found that the policy preferences of the average citizen have “near‑zero and statistically non‑significant” impact on what the government actually does.

This is not a glitch; it is a design feature. Campaigns are financed by those who benefit from the military‑industrial complex, deregulated finance, and globalized supply chains, so policy obligingly reflects their desires: low taxes on capital, endless war contracts, minimal labor protections, maximum latitude for monopolies and mergers. The Supreme Court helpfully declared that money is speech, which means some citizens now own megaphones the size of small galaxies while others are reduced to mouthing opinions in a dark utility closet.

When inequality becomes this grotesque, the old myths of equal opportunity and meritocracy strain to the breaking point. At that point, ruling elites have a choice: share power and wealth, or double down on control. The American oligarchy has chosen the second path, lubricated with the language of culture war and the politics of resentment.

Thus, demagogues are elevated to rant on screens about immigrants, “wokeness,” and the gender of cartoon characters while the donors quietly finalize the next tax cut and defense appropriation. Fascistic aesthetics—chants, flags, paramilitary cosplay—bubble up around a politics whose real content is astonishingly banal: lower corporate taxes, weaker unions, more fossil fuels, more weapons sales. The spectacle is the camouflage.

Consumerism: Bread and Endless Circuses

What keeps this whole contraption from collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity is not faith in democracy, but faith in shopping. American consumerism is less an economic pattern than a civilizational mood: an anxious, neon hunger that confuses accumulation with meaning. Status is measured not by civic virtue or wisdom, but by square footage, brand logos, and the price tags of things bought to impress people one secretly despises.

The postwar boom turned consumption into national duty: to purchase was to support growth, to support growth was to defeat communism, to defeat communism was to vindicate the American Way. Malls replaced town squares; advertising replaced public discourse; citizens were redefined as consumers whose primary political act happens at a checkout counter or, later, in an online cart.

The psychological engine of this system is insecurity. As analysts of American consumer culture note, people in the “sole superpower” are haunted by the fear of falling behind, not having enough, not being enough. The solution is always more: more clothes, more gadgets, more experiences, more “content.” Overconsumption becomes both symptom and cure, a treadmill powered by anxiety and lubricated with credit.

And because America seldom keeps its pathologies to itself, this way of life is exported everywhere. Malls rise in former colonies, stocked with the same Western brands; streaming platforms beam the same narratives of glamorous excess into slums and villages; fast‑food chains become more recognizable than local governments. Consumerism becomes a lingua franca of aspiration, teaching billions that happiness lives somewhere between the unboxing video and the landfill.

The Empire as Global Influencer

If Rome exported law and roads, America exports lifestyle and logistics. Its mass culture—Hollywood, pop music, video games—has become the ambient soundtrack of global modernity. On the surface, this looks like soft power, a benign diffusion of creativity and fun. Yet beneath the surface, it carries a deeper message: that life is properly organized around brands, flickering screens, and perpetual novelty; that identity is something purchased and assembled from corporate offerings; that freedom means the absence of limits, especially ecological ones.

Globalization, we are told, is an inevitable tide, but the currents run in a very specific direction. Supply chains move raw materials and cheap labor from South to North; cultural chains move desires from North to South. Both are anchored by the dollar, the global reserve currency backed, not coincidentally, by the same navy that patrols the shipping lanes. The smiling corporate mascot and the menacing aircraft carrier are two faces of the same coin.

Those who resist this order are sanctioned, bombed, or lectured about human rights, sometimes all three. Their crime is not tyranny—plenty of compliant tyrannies are tolerated—but disobedience to the empire’s preferred blend of open markets and closed political horizons. Freedom, in this lexicon, means the freedom of capital to move, not the freedom of people to shape their own economies.

Environmental Apocalypse as Externality

Industrial civilization now resembles a horizon of smokestacks vomiting clouds into a sky already crowded with explosions and missiles. It is tempting to see this simply as metaphor, but it is also reportage. The American way of life—vast suburban sprawl, car dependence, hyperconsumption—has been one of the great engines of planetary destabilization. The United States has historically contributed a disproportionate share of greenhouse‑gas emissions while preaching “growth” as universal destiny.

The same corporate and political interests that feed at the trough of the military‑industrial complex also bankroll the fossil‑fuel complex, lobbying to delay climate action, sow doubt about science, and frame any serious response as an assault on jobs and freedom. Climate catastrophe is treated as a public‑relations problem to be managed with greenwashed branding and carbon‑offset schemes, while the empire quietly prepares for the security implications: more border fortifications, more resource wars, more internal repression when disaster hits home.

In this sense, the apocalypse is not a sudden event; it is a business model. Droughts, floods, and fires create new markets—for private security, disaster reconstruction, geoengineering—as the same system that caused the crisis offers to sell us survival at a premium.

The Spiritual Vacancy at the Heart of the Mall

Underneath the noise of jets and advertisements lies a quieter crisis: the erosion of meaning. A society that defines human beings primarily as workers and consumers cannot help but generate a kind of spiritual malnutrition. The old languages of solidarity, sacrifice, and the common good sound archaic against the algorithmic imperative to maximize engagement and shareholder value.

People reach for religion, nationalism, conspiracy theories—anything that promises a story larger than their credit score. The oligarchy is happy to indulge these cravings so long as they do not threaten the flow of profits. Thus, we get a peculiar arrangement: a culture saturated with apocalyptic fantasies—zombie plagues, superhero battles, end‑of‑the‑world blockbusters—while the actual slow apocalypse of climate breakdown and democratic decay unfolds in the background like a discarded studio backdrop.

In this theater, satire becomes almost redundant. How do you parody a system in which billionaires literally fly into space on rockets shaped like phallic jokes while their workers urinate in bottles to meet productivity targets? Where is the exaggeration in pointing out that the same government that claims it cannot afford universal healthcare somehow finds endless trillions for wars whose objectives even the generals cannot articulate?

Exporting the Void

The tragic part is not merely that America built this edifice for itself; it is that it sold it to the world as aspiration. Nations once dreaming of liberation now dream of shopping malls; revolutions once fought in the name of land and bread are rebranded as opportunities for foreign investment. Local cultures are mined for “content,” repackaged, and sold back to their originators with a subscription fee.

The American empire does not need to colonize territory in the old way; it colonizes imagination. When every child on earth grows up wanting the same shoes, the same franchise movies, the same miracle diet of sugar and spectacle, the empire has achieved something unmatched in history: a near‑total synchronization of desire to the rhythms of its own profit cycles.

But synchronization is not the same as satisfaction. The more the empire spreads its gospel of individualism and accumulation, the more it quietly generates loneliness, anxiety, and ecological ruin. Disillusioned citizens in the core and the periphery alike find themselves trapped between authoritarian nostalgia and algorithmic nihilism, with little sense of how to build an alternative.

Toward an Honest Reckoning

None of this is destiny. Empires fall; systems change; values shift. The omnipotence of American capitalism and militarism is as contingent as the British Raj or the Roman legions once seemed. Yet an honest reckoning would require something the empire currently lacks: a capacity for self‑limitation, a willingness to redirect resources from weapons to welfare, from profit to planetary survival, from mindless consumption to collective flourishing.

Such a shift would mean breaking the power of oligarchs who have no interest in transformation; rebuilding public institutions capable of serving majorities rather than donors; and cultivating a culture that measures success not by the size of one’s arsenal or one’s shopping cart but by the health of communities and ecosystems. It would mean treating the rest of the world not as a market or battlefield but as a community of equals, each with the right to define prosperity on their own terms.

For now, the coin in the sky still glows, backlit by burning forests and devastated cities, its surface smudged with the fingerprints of corporations and generals. Down below, beneath the billboards and drone trails, people continue to live, love, and resist in ways that rarely trend but quietly persist. The American empire is powerful, but it is not immortal, and its collapse—whether gradual or sudden—will open space for other stories to breathe and be told.

Echoes of the Chamber

04 Monday Aug 2025

Posted by xraymike79 in Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Mental Health, Military Industrial Complex, Oligarchy

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Collective Memory, Cry For Justice, Cycle Of Violence, Historical Atrocities, Human Suffering, Irony Of Progress, Lessons Unlearned, Mechanisms Of Killings, Military Industrial Complex, Political Hypocrisy, State Violence, War for Profit

They built the chamber from tile and steel,
And whispered lies of cleansing showers,
Where innocence was made to kneel,
Devotion to the Reich’s dark powers.

The chamber’s walls were blizzard and snow,
In Stalin’s gulags, hope misled,
Where Marx’s dream died in woe
For orders scrawled, lives were shed.

The chamber became Tiananmen Square,
Where freedom’s anthem dared to run,
A storm of bullets split the air,
And dreams fell silent, every one.

The chamber’s roof was a mushroom cloud,
A physics riddle coldly solved,
Where the rising sun lay in its shroud,
As human flesh and life dissolved.

The chamber rose, twin towers of pride,
Where traders’ dreams and fortunes flew,
With burning jet fuel trapped inside,
While choking dust erased the view.

The chamber lay in Singur’s field,
Where progress came with gun and fire.
At Nandigram, the steadfast kneeled
To feed a corporate funeral pyre.

The chamber now is sand and stone,
Where drones sing out a deadly tune,
A crowded strip where bombs are thrown
Beneath an unforgiving Gazan moon.

Gas chambers may fall as bombs from the sky,
Or bullets, or edicts in boardrooms pristine,
Yet the chamber endures—where the helpless still die,
As we polish the brass on our killing machine.

We call ourselves enlightened, just, humane—
Yet chambers are born anew with each war.
So long as men draw profit from pain,
The promise of peace will linger at the door.

So pray, when next we speak of peace or war,
Recall how all our poisons taste the same;
For each new chamber, dressed in reasons, lore—
Is just another mask for murder’s name.

The Count

24 Saturday May 2025

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Military Industrial Complex

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

American Empire, Arms Dealers, Capitalism, Collapse of Civilizations, Corporatocracy, Global Arms Industry, Mental Health, Military Industrial Complex, War for Profit

He counted the dead by their boots, not their names.
Their mothers would never pronounce them the same.
Forty-three soldiers. A child with no shoes.
He smoked while perfecting the art of bad news.

He walked until the road forgot his feet.
A column passed him, shuffling through the heat.
One looked at him. He looked back, cold and gray.
He signed their death like any other day.

His wife stopped asking where he went at night.
His daughter flinched whenever he held her tight.
His hands smelled of metal. No one would say.
Home learned to be quiet in a careful way.

The war ended with singing and lights in the square.
He watched from a window like he wasn’t there.
His daughter ran outside to join the crowd.
She didn’t wave to him. He was almost proud.

A boy lay flat beside the garden wall.
He played at dying, waiting for the call.
He saw the soldier watching. Grinned and stood.
“I got three enemies—killed them like you would.”

He didn’t answer. Turned and walked inside.
The boy kept playing: shoot, kill, hide.
He closed the shutters. Poured himself a drink.
He sat until the room began to sink.

His hands began to shake around the glass.
The room was still. The shaking wouldn’t pass.
He gripped the table. Steadied. Breathed. And then
His men shuffled through the room again.

His wife came down and stood without a word.
She’d lived with this for years. She’d seen and heard.
She didn’t touch him. Threw his drink away.
They didn’t speak. What was there left to say?

He stood at last. The chair scraped on the floor.
He walked past her and through the open door.
The street was pale. The last lamp flickered out.
His shadow vanished down an unknown route.

The column shuffled on. He joined the count.
No one said his name or looked about.
Forty-four soldiers. A child with no shoes.
The dead don’t speak. The dead don’t get to choose.

The Wars Came Home

21 Wednesday May 2025

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

American Empire, Arms Dealers, Capitalism, Collapse of Civilizations, Corporatocracy, Global Arms Industry, Mental Health, Military Industrial Complex, War for Profit

He wore his ribbons, bore their praise,
Smiled through the crowd’s empty gaze.
But sand still grinds behind his eyes—
A child’s shoe burning where she lies.

Some nights he leaves his body and soul,
Floats where the dead consume him whole.
Their silent faces never part—
A spectator to his own dark heart.

He came back home to his wife’s stare,
She kissed a stranger standing there.
The kids asked why he screamed at night—
He learned to say he was alright.

One night he made a list of names.
The men in suits who lit the flames.
He traced their addresses in red—
He had new orders in his head.

He found them in their gated homes,
Behind their walls of glass and chrome.
One by one he carved their life—
The wars came home. He was the knife.

But in the silence after death,
He heard a question on his breath:
“Does vengeance cleanse, or sow the seed—
The monster you swore to never feed?”

They found the knife but not the man.
He vanished like the war began—
No grave, no name, no final stand,
Just grains of rumor in the sand.

Capitalism’s Death Cult: How Corporations Weaponize Hope to Sell Extinction

13 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Albert Camus, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporatocracy, Deep Adaptation, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecocide, Franco Berardi, Greenwashing, Guy McPherson, Hans Jonas, Iroquois, Jem Bendell, John Gray, Martin Heidegger, Military Industrial Complex, Necropolitics, Timothy Morton, Yanomami

The Corporate Leviathan Unbound

In the shadow of melting glaciers and burning forests, a new aristocracy reigns supreme, unbound by borders or morality. Transnational corporations, the hydra-headed architects of our unraveling future, operate with an impunity that would make medieval warlords blush. These entities are not mere participants in the global economy; they are its overlords, wielding wealth and influence that eclipse the majority of the world’s nations. They are not mere players in the game of collapse; they are the game, the rulebook, and the rigged dice. Transnational corporations exist in a stateless void, owing allegiance only to profit. Their wealth and legal firepower make nations into vassals. They float above borders like spectral giants, shifting headquarters to dodge taxes, while their supply chains strangle ecosystems from the Amazon to the Niger Delta. Their power is both diffuse and absolute, a paradox that mirrors the hyperobjects philosopher Timothy Morton warns of—forces so vast they evade comprehension yet permeate every facet of existence. From the oil-slicked mangroves of Nigeria to the tax havens of the Caribbean, corporations have engineered a system where wealth extraction eclipses planetary survival, and accountability dissolves like smoke.

Their power isn’t just economic; it’s ontological. Corporations write the laws meant to bind them. Fossil fuel lobbyists in the U.S. outnumber Congress 3-to-1, spending $400 million annually to weaken climate legislation and sustain subsidies (OpenSecrets 2023; IMF 2023). When a corporation’s annual revenue (Amazon, Apple, BP, ExxonMobil, Shell, Toyota, UnitedHealth Group, Volkswagen Group, Walmart) surpasses the GDP of 80% of the world’s nations, “regulation” becomes theater. The 2010 Citizens United ruling, which unleashed unlimited corporate spending in politics, turned democracy into an auction house. ExxonMobil didn’t just lobby to “grease the slope” for Sisyphus’ boulder—they funded climate denialism for 40 years, sewing doubt like arsenic into the well of public discourse (Supran, Rahmstorf, and Oreskes 2023). Meanwhile, Amazon’s PACs pump millions into campaigns to crush unionization (Logan 2025), ensuring warehouse workers piss in bottles while Bezos launches phallic rockets into space. Multinational corporations systematically defraud countries by shifting $1.42 trillion in profits to tax havens annually, exploiting loopholes to underpay taxes and costing governments 347.6 billion in lost revenue—a surge linked to corporate tax rate cuts that emboldened evasion rather than compliance (Tax Justice Network 2024).

The Art of Corporate Gaslighting: Weaponizing Hope Through Green Illusions

Corporate PR campaigns have mastered the alchemy of transforming ecological destruction into a narrative of progress, leveraging hope as a smokescreen to obscure their role in perpetuating collapse. This psychological manipulation relies on sowing doubt, not just about their actions, but about the very nature of the crisis itself. This sophisticated form of gaslighting—where companies manipulate public perception to deny reality—is epitomized by campaigns like BP’s 2001 rebrand to “Beyond Petroleum.” With a vibrant sunflower logo and pledges to invest in renewables, BP positioned itself as a climate savior. Yet, behind the green facade, the company has doubled down on fossil fuels: by 2025, less than 17% of BP’s total annual investment is with renewables while over 83% of spending is allocated to oil and gas (Kumar 2025), including ecologically catastrophic tar sands in Canada and deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, which culminated in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, one of history’s worst environmental disasters. The sunflower, once a symbol of renewal, became a bitter emblem of corporate deceit.

Chevron’s “We Agree” campaign, a masterclass in cognitive dissonance, is another prime example. While the company aired ads proclaiming support for renewable energy and community well-being, it quietly funneled billions into expanding oil extraction in ecologically sensitive regions like the Amazon. Simultaneously, Chevron fought tooth and nail against lawsuits tied to its catastrophic oil spills in Ecuador, which poisoned waterways, decimated Indigenous livelihoods, and caused a surge in cancer rates (Surma 2022). The campaign’s tagline—“We agree. It’s time oil companies get behind renewable energy”—was less a pledge than a sleight of hand, diverting attention from its relentless pursuit of fossil fuels (Franta 2022, p. 247). By aligning its branding with public aspirations for sustainability, Chevron weaponized hope, gaslighting audiences into believing the company was part of the solution while its operations deepened the crisis.

Volkswagen’s “Clean Diesel” scandal escalated this deception to Orwellian levels. For years, the automaker marketed its diesel vehicles as eco-friendly, boasting low emissions and environmental responsibility. In reality, Volkswagen had installed “defeat devices” in 11 million cars—software designed to cheat emissions tests. These vehicles spewed up to 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides (Gates et al. 2015), pollutants linked to respiratory diseases and climate collapse. The campaign wasn’t merely dishonest; it was a calculated betrayal, leveraging the public’s growing environmental consciousness to sell a lie. Consumers who thought they were making a green choice unwittingly became accomplices in pollution, their trust weaponized against them.

Coca-Cola, the world’s largest plastic polluter, deploys similar tactics. While sponsoring beach cleanups and touting “World Without Waste” initiatives, the company was reported in 2019 to have been producing over 3 million metric tons of single-use plastic annually—a figure equivalent to 200,000 bottles per minute (Laville 2019). A new report projects Coca-Cola’s plastic use will exceed 4.1 million metric tons per year by 2030, a 40% increase from 2018 (Oceana 2025). In the Global South, where waste infrastructure is scarce, Coca-Cola floods markets with disposable bottles, knowing full well that less than 10% will be recycled. The cleanup campaigns, nothing more than photo ops, address less than 1% of the plastic waste they generate, a performative gesture shifting blame to consumers while corporations lobby against bottle deposit laws and regulations. This is not mere hypocrisy; it is a calculated strategy to conflate marketing with morality, turning pollution into a PR opportunity.

Nestlé, the Swiss corporate behemoth, operates as a 21st-century water baron, wielding its global influence to drain the lifeblood from the planet’s most vulnerable communities. In drought-ravaged regions like California’s San Bernardino National Forest (Singh 2021) and Pakistan’s Punjab (Ahmad 2024), Nestlé extracts millions of liters of water daily, often paying mere pennies—or nothing at all—for the privilege, while locals ration dwindling supplies to survive. This brazen resource colonization is masked by a meticulously crafted façade of corporate responsibility. Nestlé rebrands itself as “the world’s leading nutrition company,” even as it lobbies aggressively against bans on child labor in cocoa farms (Beeman 2021) and churns out 3.4 million metric tons of plastic waste annually (Oluwatobi 2024), its hollow “sustainability” pledges drowned out by the roar of bottling plants. The corporation’s multi-billion dollar profit margin fuels a sprawling empire of 2,000 brands across 187 countries, granting it more wealth and power than most United Nations member states. Nestlé’s operations epitomize a grotesque paradox: a company that markets itself as a purveyor of health and wellness while siphoning water from parched villages, exploiting child labor, and choking ecosystems with plastic.

These tactics prey on a fundamental human desire to believe in corporate benevolence. When companies cloak themselves in the rhetoric of sustainability, they exploit societal trust, creating a chasm between perception and reality. The cognitive dissonance is jarring: if a corporation declares it “cares,” how can its actions tell a different story? This dissonance breeds complacency, lulling the public into a false sense of progress. People assume that if companies are publicly committing to green goals, systemic change must be underway—even as oil rigs drill deeper, plastics proliferate, and emissions soar.

The psychological toll is profound. By fragmenting reality, greenwashing erodes collective agency. It shifts the burden of responsibility onto individuals—“Recycle more!” “Buy eco-friendly!”—while corporations deflect scrutiny, evading accountability. The result is a perverse irony: the more loudly a company trumpets its sustainability, the more likely it is to be investing in destruction. Fashion brands, for instance, launch “conscious collections” made from recycled materials, yet produce billions of fast-fashion garments in sweatshops, fueling waste and exploitation. Oil giants tout carbon capture pilots while allocating 90% of their budgets to fossil fuels.

This manipulation erodes public agency. When BP airs ads featuring smiling engineers harnessing wind and solar, it implies the climate crisis can be solved within the capitalist status quo—no systemic change required. Coca-Cola’s cleanup partnerships suggest plastic waste is a littering problem, not a production problem. These narratives foster complacency, convincing individuals that recycling or buying “green” products is sufficient, deflecting scrutiny from corporate accountability.

This gaslighting is amplified by a media ecosystem that rewards sensationalism over substance. Corporations pour millions into PR campaigns that spotlight token green initiatives—a solar panel here, a tree-planting pledge there—while obscuring their larger, unchecked harm. Shell’s social media feeds gleam with videos of wind farms and smiling engineers, yet less than 2% of its investments go to renewables (Singh 2023). Plastic polluters like Coca-Cola sponsor beach cleanups, turning volunteers into unpaid ambassadors for a crisis they did not create. The burden of sustainability shifts to consumers, while corporations evade regulation and continue extraction unabated.

Consequences: Delaying the Inevitable

The consequences are dire. Greenwashing doesn’t just delay action—it legitimizes inertia. By framing incremental, cosmetic changes as “progress,” corporations stall regulatory reforms and undermine public demand for systemic change. BP’s rebrand, for instance, delayed action for decades, locking in fossil fuel dependence. Coca-Cola’s plastic pledges have done nothing to curb production, ensuring oceans will contain more plastic than fish by 2050 (Guterres 2024). Meanwhile, lobbyists for these corporations gut environmental regulations and have spent billions of dollars to protect their business interests by influencing policy, delaying climate action, and maintaining the status quo. Big Oil spent nearly half a billion on the 2024 U.S. elections alone (Boussalis 2025), with Trump promising to gut any climate policies and environmental regulations (Lefebvre 2024). These companies weaponize the language of sustainability, framing marginal gestures—a carbon offset here, a bamboo fabric line there—as heroic strides, all while accelerating extraction, exploitation, and emissions. By co-opting the rhetoric of urgency, they paralyze public outrage, convincing consumers and policymakers that incrementalism is enough.

Social media turbocharges greenwashing, enabling corporations to target eco-conscious demographics with precision (Davis 2024). Shell’s TikTok videos touting carbon capture technology—a fledgling, unproven fix—rack up millions of views among Gen Z (Khan and Dembicki 2024). Fast fashion giants like H&M promote “conscious collections” while burning unsold garments and exploiting garment workers (Center for Biological Diversity 2023). Algorithms reward sensationalized green claims, creating echo chambers where corporate lies drown out scientific consensus. The result? A dangerous illusion of progress that shields business-as-usual, turning the very concept of “sustainability” into a Trojan horse for ecological collapse.

Can a law against ecocide help avert catastrophe? Surely, you jest! A recent study (Ciocchini and Khoury 2025) critically examines the proposed Law of Ecocide, arguing that its focus on criminalizing severe environmental harm as an individual crime fails to address the systemic drivers of ecological destruction embedded in global capitalism. The authors highlight how international investment law and arbitration (IILA), particularly through Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms, enable and protect corporations engaged in legally sanctioned but ecocidal activities. By analyzing cases like Rockhopper v. Italy and Chevron v. Ecuador, they demonstrate how arbitration tribunals prioritize corporate profits over environmental regulations, penalizing states for enacting climate policies and creating a “regulatory chill” that stifles meaningful ecological protections. These legal frameworks, rooted in neo-colonial power dynamics and “regimes of permission,” shield industries responsible for the majority of environmental degradation—such as fossil fuels, mining, and agribusiness—from accountability. The study warns that the Law of Ecocide, by targeting isolated “moments of rupture” rather than dismantling the legal and economic systems enabling daily environmental harm, risks legitimizing the status quo. This systemic failure to confront IILA and corporate power directly exacerbates the biosphere’s collapse, as it perpetuates the unchecked extraction, pollution, and carbon emissions driving climate tipping points, biodiversity loss, and irreversible ecological breakdown. Without radical reforms to abolish IILA and challenge capitalist structures, efforts to criminalize ecocide will remain insufficient to halt the accelerating crisis.

The Military-Industrial Complex: Enforcer and Architect of Corporate Overlordship

The military-industrial complex (MIC) operates as both a catalyst and enforcer of corporate overlordship, entrenching a system where profit and power are perpetuated through violence, fear, and the erosion of sovereignty. In the ecosystem of corporate rule, the MIC is not a peripheral player but a central pillar—a symbiotic fusion of defense contractors, government agencies, and policymakers that transforms warfare into a commodity and democracy into a client state.

1. Profit Through Perpetual War

The MIC thrives on manufactured necessity, engineering endless demand for conflict. Defense giants like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman lobby governments to prioritize militarization over diplomacy, securing trillion-dollar contracts for weapons systems, surveillance tech, and AI-driven warfare. Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen—sold as “national security” imperatives—have funneled public wealth into private coffers while destabilizing regions to create markets for “rebuilding” (Halliburton) and resource extraction (Chevron). The MIC ensures war is not an aberration but a business model, with profit margins tied to body counts.

2. Privatizing Violence, Eroding Accountability

Modern warfare has been outsourced to corporate mercenaries like Blackwater (now Academi) and Wagner Group, blurring the lines between state and corporate violence. These entities operate in legal gray zones, committing atrocities with impunity while shielding governments (and shareholders) from culpability. The MIC normalizes war as a service industry, where even “peacekeeping” becomes a revenue stream.

3. Securing Corporate Colonialism

The MIC is the iron fist of resource capitalism. Military interventions often align with corporate interests: securing oil fields, mineral deposits, or trade routes. The U.S. invasion of Iraq, for instance, was followed by ExxonMobil and Shell securing lucrative oil contracts (Al Jazeera 2012). Similarly, AFRICOM’s “counterterrorism” operations in Africa coincide with Western mining corporations’ expansion into cobalt and lithium reserves (Blumenthal and Norton 2021). The MIC doesn’t just protect corporate assets—it conquers them.

4. Domestic Control and the Surveillance State

The MIC’s reach extends inward, militarizing police forces with surplus gear (via the Pentagon’s 1033 Program) and partnering with tech firms like Palantir to build mass surveillance networks (Poulsen and Gallagher 2017). Facial recognition, predictive policing, and drone surveillance are marketed as “public safety” but serve to suppress dissent, criminalize marginalized communities, and protect corporate property. Protesters at Standing Rock or anti-pipeline activists are branded “eco-terrorists,” met with militarized force subsidized by MIC stakeholders.

5. The Revolving Door of Power

The MIC entrenches corporate rule through a revolving door between Pentagon officials, Congress, and defense contractors. Retired generals lobby for arms deals, lawmakers secure defense contracts for their districts, and think tanks funded by Raytheon shape foreign policy. This collusion ensures that budgets balloon, wars persist, and alternatives (diplomacy, climate action) are starved of funding.

6. Fueling the Climate-Apocalypse Feedback Loop

The MIC is a climate arsonist. The U.S. military alone is the world’s largest institutional fossil fuel consumer, emitting more CO₂ than 140 nations combined (Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger 2019). Wars ravage ecosystems, burn forests, and poison water, while defense contractors lobby against climate treaties to protect oil-dependent weapons systems. The MIC profits from both causing collapse and selling “security” against its consequences—flooded borders, resource wars, climate refugees.

Heidegger’s “Being-Toward-Death” and the Corporate Privatization of Apocalypse

Heidegger’s notion of “being-toward-death”—the idea that confronting mortality shapes authentic existence—twists into grotesque irony under corporate capitalism. Today, corporations have outsourced mortality to the masses, privatizing the apocalypse itself. Like medieval priests peddling indulgences, they sell carbon offsets and “net-zero” pledges to absolve guilt while bankrolling extinction through oil drilling, deforestation, and plastic production. Shell funds reforestation projects in Indonesia, yet drills deeper into the Amazon, framing destruction and repair as two sides of the same profit ledger. BP advertises wind farms while lobbying to expand offshore drilling, its “green” branding a sleight of hand that masks the arithmetic of annihilation. In this perverse inversion, individuals bear the existential weight of collapse—recycling, minimizing, grieving—while corporations evade the very finitude they accelerate. To “live authentically,” in Heidegger’s terms, is to reject this death cult: to see carbon credits not as redemption but as ransom notes, to recognize that survival demands dismantling the systems trading futures for quarterly dividends. It means refusing the lie that personal virtue can offset systemic ruin, and instead confronting the raw truth—that corporations, like Sisyphus’ boulder, will never halt their roll toward profit. Authenticity here is rebellion: unplugging from their narratives, divesting from their illusions, and reclaiming mortality as a collective call to arms, not a commodity.

Hans Jonas’ Response: The Ethical Bankruptcy of Corporate Necropolitics

Hans Jonas, architect of the “imperative of responsibility,” would condemn the corporate outsourcing of a mass die-off as a profound betrayal of intergenerational ethics. For Jonas, the moral measure of any action lies in its capacity to “act so that the effects of your actions are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life.” Corporations that peddle carbon offsets while drilling deeper into the Amazon, or tout “net-zero” pledges while lobbying against climate legislation, violate this imperative with surgical precision. Their calculus—profiting from ecocide while offloading the consequences onto future generations—is not just greed; it is ethical necropolitics, a systemic abdication of stewardship that treats Earth’s habitability as a disposable commodity. Jonas would argue that Shell’s reforestation theater and BP’s wind farm charades are not mere greenwashing, but crimes against continuity, severing humanity’s covenant with the unborn. To Jonas, the corporation’s refusal to internalize the costs of collapse—forcing individuals to bear the psychic and ecological toll—exposes a nihilism far darker than Heidegger’s existential void: a deliberate unraveling of the future itself. The answer, for Jonas, is not rebellion but radical accountability—legal, economic, and moral frameworks that force corporations to answer not to shareholders, but to the unborn whose breath they are stealing. Anything less, he’d warn, is complicity in “the irrevocable,” a future where the very concept of responsibility is fossilized alongside our bones.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s Response: How Corporations Weaponize Words to Kill the Future

Franco “Bifo” Berardi would argue that corporations like Shell and BP have mastered a sinister trick: using words and symbols to numb us into accepting ecological collapse as inevitable. In our era of symbol-driven capitalism, profit isn’t just about money—it’s about controlling narratives. Terms like “net-zero” and “sustainability” are twisted into empty slogans, stripping language of meaning to paralyze action. These corporations aren’t just polluting the planet; they’re poisoning our ability to imagine a better future.

Their carbon offset schemes and greenwashed wind farms aren’t mere lies—they’re toxic stories designed to shatter collective hope. By framing destruction (drilling the Amazon) and repair (planting trees) as equally valid, they trap us in a loop where nothing truly changes. Berardi calls this the slow death of the future: a world where corporate propaganda, amplified by algorithms, drowns out alternatives, leaving us stuck in a bleak, endless present. We’re told to fix the crisis by buying “ethical” products, turning guilt into a commodity while real solutions vanish.

But Berardi insists there’s a way out: creative rebellion. Instead of playing their word games, we must hijack their language. Imagine replacing corporate greenwashing with art, protest, and new stories that reignite our collective imagination. The fight isn’t against climate collapse itself (the “boulder”) but the systems that make collapse feel inevitable (the “algorithm”). Survival starts when we stop parroting their lies—and start shouting ours.

Timothy Morton’s Response: Climate Collapse and the Illusion of Corporate Fixes

Timothy Morton argues that corporations like Shell and BP aren’t just part of the climate crisis—they’re woven into its very DNA, exploiting its mind-bending complexity to dodge blame. Climate change, in Morton’s view, is what he calls a “hyperobject”: a crisis so huge, interconnected, and long-lasting that our brains can’t fully grasp it. Think of it like trying to picture the entire internet at once—it’s everywhere, invisible, and overwhelming. Corporations don’t just exist in this chaos; they use it. Their carbon offset programs and “net-zero” pledges aren’t fixes—they’re self-defeating scams, breaking the crisis into bite-sized lies they can sell us, all while making the problem worse. When Shell drills the Amazon and plants trees elsewhere, it’s not hypocrisy—it’s a twisted corporate tango, turning destruction and repair into profit-driven twins. BP’s wind farms and oil rigs aren’t opposites; they’re partners in a dance Morton calls “sustainable destruction,” where saving the planet and killing it become the same move.

The anxiety we feel—guilt over plastic straws, obsessing over recycling—isn’t an accident. Corporations want us to carry this weight so they can keep profiting. Philosopher Heidegger’s idea of facing death head-on falls apart here, because corporations have shattered doom into invisible, everyday threats: microplastics in our water, wildfire ash in our lungs, cancer-causing chemicals in our food. For Morton, living authentically isn’t about personal eco-heroics but waking up to the truth: we’re all trapped in this corporate-shaped nightmare. There’s no “green” versus “evil” choice—that’s a distraction. Survival means admitting there’s no escape, just all of us screaming into the storm together. The goal isn’t to stop the crisis (we can’t), but to steer it. We’re not Sisyphus pushing the boulder—we are the boulder. And it’s time to roll toward something new.

Albert Camus’ Response: Absurdist Revolt and the Necropolitics of Corporate Capitalism

Albert Camus would diagnose the corporate outsourcing of a mass die-off as a zenith of the absurd—a metaphysical farce wherein humanity’s search for meaning collides with institutionalized indifference. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus posits that the absurd arises from the tension between our hunger for purpose and a universe that offers none. Corporations weaponize this tension, constructing a perverse theater where individuals bear the existential burden of ecological collapse—recycling, grieving, and minimizing—while corporate entities evade the abyss they engineer. Shell’s reforestation pantomimes and BP’s wind farm charades are not mere hypocrisy; they are performative absurdities, demanding acquiescence to a logic where destruction and repair are rendered equally meaningless, mere entries on a profit ledger.

For Camus, the corporate commodification of apocalypse—carbon offsets as “indulgences,” net-zero pledges as secular salvation—echoes the Sisyphean condition: humanity is condemned to push the boulder of crisis uphill, only to watch corporations roll it back down. Yet Camus’ existential rebellion lies not in overcoming the absurd but in defying its mastery. In The Rebel, he argues that revolt emerges from recognizing systemic falsehoods and refusing complicity. The modern rebel must reject the corporate mythos that conflates “sustainability” with shareholder returns, seeing through the greenwashed veneer to the necropolitics beneath—where life is subordinated to capital’s death drive.

Camusian authenticity demands a revolt that is both individual and collective. It is the worker unionizing in Amazon’s warehouses, the activist blockading pipelines, the artist satirizing ExxonMobil’s climate denial. These acts are not naive bids to “save the world” (a Sisyphean delusion) but assertions of dignity in the face of institutionalized nihilism. The corporate boulder, forever rolling, cannot be stopped—but Camus’ rebel finds transcendence in the act of resistance itself, in the solidarity of shared struggle and the refusal to let corporate logics dictate the terms of existence.

The path forward, per Camus, is not utopianism but lucidity: acknowledging that the boulder’s trajectory is shaped by profit, not fate. Survival lies in collective reimagining—not of the future, but of the present. To dance atop the boulder as it plummets, laughing at the absurdity, is to reclaim agency in a world bent on its erosion. Corporate necropolitics may dictate the cliff’s edge, but Camus’ rebel writes their own meaning into the fall.

John Gray’s Response: The Futility of Human Hubris and the Inevitability of Corporate Necropolitics

John Gray would dismiss Heidegger’s notion of “authenticity” in the face of corporate-driven collapse as yet another human delusion, a futile attempt to impose meaning on a species inherently driven by primal, self-destructive instincts. For Gray, corporations outsourcing a mass die-off is not a perversion of human nature but its logical endpoint. The privatization of apocalypse—carbon offsets as modern indulgences, greenwashing as secular salvation—is not an aberration but a reflection of humanity’s eternal dance with hubris and self-deception.

Gray would argue that corporations like Shell and BP are not rogue actors but manifestations of a deeper truth: humans, like all animals, are wired to exploit resources and dominate ecosystems. The idea that we might “rebel” against corporate necropolitics is, to Gray, a romantic fantasy. Just as Sisyphus’ boulder rolls eternally, so too does human folly. The notion of dismantling systems built on quarterly dividends ignores the evolutionary reality that hierarchies, greed, and shortsightedness are coded into our species. BP’s wind farms and Amazonian drills are not contradictions but complementary expressions of humanity’s Faustian bargain—a species forever chasing progress while accelerating its own demise.

For Gray, the existential burden placed on individuals—recycling, guilt, grief—is a distraction, but not one orchestrated solely by corporations. It is a symptom of humanity’s refusal to confront its own limitations. Heidegger’s “being-toward-death” becomes a tragic farce under Gray’s lens: corporations do not “outsource” mortality but reveal humanity’s incapacity to reckon with finitude. The crisis is not a corporate invention but an inevitability, given our species’ inability to transcend its biological and psychological constraints.

Gray’s response would reject calls for collective rebellion or systemic overhaul as naive. He might cite history’s endless cycles of collapse and renewal, where new regimes simply replicate old pathologies. Even if corporations vanished, the same drives would reemerge in different forms—a new priesthood of tech barons or bureaucrats peddling their own myths of salvation. The idea of “reclaiming mortality” as a collective call to arms is, to Gray, another anthropocentric fairy tale, a refusal to accept that humans are not protagonists in a meaningful narrative but transient organisms in an indifferent universe.

In Gray’s bleak vision, survival lies not in revolt but in resignation—a cold-eyed acknowledgment of our species’ limits. The corporate boulder will keep rolling, not because of malice, but because we are the boulder. To imagine steering it elsewhere is to indulge in the same hubris that created the crisis. The only authentic response, for Gray, is to abandon the delusion of control and confront the raw truth: we are not architects of our fate, but passengers on a ship we never learned to sail.

Jem Bendell’s Response: Deep Adaptation and the Corporate Necrosis of Our Future

Jem Bendell, architect of the Deep Adaptation framework, would argue that Heidegger’s “being-toward-death” is not merely twisted under corporate capitalism—it is obliterated by systems that profit from our collective dissociation from collapse. For Bendell, corporations like Shell and BP exemplify the “arrested development” of a species in denial, outsourcing mortality to the masses while peddling greenwashed fantasies of salvation. Carbon offsets and “net-zero” pledges are not just modern indulgences; they are weapons of deferral, delaying the reckoning required to confront civilizational unraveling.

Bendell’s Four R’s—Resilience, Relinquishment, Restoration, Reconciliation—offer a roadmap for navigating this crisis. Resilience demands we prioritize what truly sustains life: community networks, local food systems, and mutual aid, not corporate ESG reports. Relinquishment requires abandoning the illusion that fossil fuel giants can reform—Shell’s Amazon drilling and BP’s offshore lobbying are not anomalies but proof that these entities must be dismantled, not negotiated with. Restoration involves healing ecosystems and relationships fractured by extraction, but Bendell cautions against mistaking corporate reforestation PR for genuine repair. Finally, Reconciliation means facing the grief of loss—not just ecological, but the death of the myth that capitalism can self-correct.

Where Heidegger’s authenticity is rebellion, Bendell’s is radical pragmatism. The corporate boulder will keep rolling, but Bendell urges us to stop pushing and start building lifeboats. This isn’t passive surrender but strategic defiance: divesting from growth-obsessed systems, creating parallel economies, and nurturing “post-corporate” communities that operate outside the necrotic logic of profit. Authenticity here is rejecting the lie that individual virtue (recycling, carbon tracking) can absolve systemic crimes. Instead, it’s about collective triage—channeling energy into what can be salvaged, not what can be sold.

Bendell’s response to corporate necropolitics is stark: Collapse is inevitable, but extinction is not. The task is not to halt Sisyphus’ boulder but to relearn how to live as it crushes the old world. Corporations, he’d argue, are relics of a dying paradigm—zombie institutions feeding on the carcass of a finite planet. Our power lies not in overthrowing them, but in rendering them obsolete through radical interdependence. Survival begins when we stop buying their indulgences and start burying their myths.

Guy McPherson’s Response: Embracing Inevitability in the Shadow of Corporate-Driven Collapse

Guy McPherson would respond to Heidegger’s “being-toward-death” with a stark, unflinching acknowledgment of near-term human extinction, framing corporate capitalism’s outsourcing of mortality not as a perversion of existence but as a tragic accelerant of an already unstoppable trajectory. For McPherson, Shell’s reforestation charades and BP’s greenwashed wind farms are not mere hypocrisies but symptoms of a civilization hurtling toward collapse, driven by irreversible climate feedback loops—Arctic methane releases, albedo loss, and oceanic acidification—that humanity can no longer halt. Where Heidegger’s authenticity involves rebellion against corporate necropolitics, McPherson would argue that such efforts, while noble, are ultimately futile: the boulder of ecological collapse has already reached terminal velocity.

McPherson’s grim pragmatism rejects the illusion that dismantling corporations or divesting from their systems could reverse our course. Instead, he posits that corporate capitalism’s exploitation of the planet has already triggered cascading tipping points, rendering collapse inevitable. Authenticity, in this context, shifts from rebellion to radical acceptance—not passivity, but a conscious embrace of our shared fate. It demands relinquishing the false hope of techno-salvation or reform and focusing on what he terms “deep adaptation”: fostering resilient, compassionate communities to navigate the unraveling.

For McPherson, living authentically means confronting the raw truth that Sisyphus’ boulder will crush us all, yet choosing to live with integrity in its shadow. This entails rejecting corporate greenwashing not out of faith in systemic change, but to reclaim fleeting moments of meaning. It is in growing gardens, nurturing relationships, and practicing mutual aid that we defy the nihilism of endless growth. Corporations, in McPherson’s view, are already obsolete—zombie institutions propped up by a dying system. Their final act is to distract us from the urgent work of preparing for the inevitable: not to survive, but to meet the end with eyes open, hearts connected, and hands unshackled from their illusions.

In the end, McPherson’s response is a call to mourn and mobilize—to grieve the future we’ve lost while cultivating grace in the time that remains. The corporate apocalypse is not a metaphor but a lived reality, and our task is to face it not as cogs in their machine, but as beings who chose solidarity over surrender, even as the horizon darkens.

A Buddhist Response: Interbeing, Impermanence, and the Liberation from Corporate Samsara

For Buddhists, Heidegger’s “being-toward-death” would be reframed not as an existential confrontation, but as an invitation to awaken to pratītyasamutpāda—the interdependence of all life. Corporations outsourcing a mass die-off embody the delusion of separateness, mistaking profit for purpose and exploitation for progress. Shell’s Amazonian drilling and BP’s greenwashed wind farms are not mere hypocrisies but manifestations of the three poisons—greed (raga), aversion (dvesha), and delusion (moha)—that perpetuate samsara, the cycle of suffering. Carbon offsets and “net-zero” pledges are modern-day asavas (taints), obscuring the truth of impermanence (anicca) and the inevitability of karmic consequences.

The Buddhist critique would center on the corporate illusion of control. By privatizing the apocalypse, corporations deepen humanity’s attachment to maya (illusion), convincing us that ecological collapse can be commodified, postponed, or absolved through transactional gestures. This is the antithesis of Right Livelihood, one of the Noble Eightfold Path’s pillars, which demands work that honors interdependence rather than severing it. Authenticity, in Buddhist terms, is not rebellion but mindful disengagement from systems rooted in greed. It means seeing through the lie that personal virtue (recycling, carbon austerity) can cleanse collective harm, and instead cultivating metta (loving-kindness) and karuna (compassion) as acts of radical resistance.

The existential burden placed on individuals—guilt, grief, hypervigilance—mirrors the suffering of clinging to a self that is, ultimately, empty (anatta). Buddhists would urge releasing this burden, not through resignation, but through collective awakening: recognizing that corporations, like all phenomena, are impermanent and dependent on our participation. The Sisyphus myth dissolves here—there is no boulder to push, only a web of causes and conditions to untangle.

To “live authentically” is to build sanghas (communities) grounded in ahimsa (non-harm) and dana(generosity). It is to boycott not just plastic but the mindset of scarcity and separation that fuels corporate necropolitics. Shell and BP thrive because we mistake their stories for reality—Buddhism dissolves those stories, revealing the emptiness of their claims.

The corporate apocalypse is not a future event but a present-moment truth—a mirror reflecting our shared karma. Liberation lies not in fighting the boulder but in dissolving the mountain. As Thich Nhat Hanh taught, “We are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.” The climate crisis, then, becomes a collective koan: How do we live fully, knowing the world is burning? The answer: Tend the fire together, with compassion as the water that cools, connects, and transcends.

An Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Response: The Seventh Generation Principle and the Sacred Duty of Stewardship

For the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Heidegger’s “being-toward-death” would be inseparable from the sacred responsibility of “Seven Generations” thinking—the imperative to act today in ways that honor ancestors and safeguard descendants seven generations into the future. Corporate capitalism’s outsourcing of mortality is not just a moral failure but a profound violation of this covenant, reducing the web of life to a ledger of profit and loss. Shell’s Amazonian drilling and BP’s greenwashed wind farms are not merely hypocritical; they are desecrations of the original instructions to live in reciprocity with the Earth.

The Haudenosaunee would reject the corporate commodification of apocalypse—carbon offsets as “indulgences,” net-zero pledges as absolution—as a grotesque inversion of natural law. In their worldview, land is not property but a living relative, entrusted to humanity’s care. Corporations, by privatizing destruction and peddling false repair, commit a double betrayal: severing the relationship between humans and the Earth while eroding the intergenerational bonds that define communal survival. Authenticity, in this context, is not rebellion but reclamation—reviving the original agreements of stewardship that corporations have trampled.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s Great Law of Peace enshrines a governance model where decisions are weighed against their impact on the unborn. This stands in stark contrast to corporate capitalism’s quarterly dividends, which mortgage the future for present gain. For the Iroquois, BP’s wind farms and Shell’s reforestation schemes would be seen as fragmented gestures, incapable of restoring balance because they ignore the holistic truth of interdependence. To “live authentically” is to reject the corporate boulder entirely, not by pushing against it, but by rebuilding the relational world it has shattered: restoring soil, rivers, and forests as kin, not resources.

The Haudenosaunee would frame corporate-driven collapse as a spiritual crisis, rooted in humanity’s alienation from its role as a custodian, not a conqueror. Their resistance would embody “Onkwehonweh”—the original ways—prioritizing ceremonies that renew gratitude for the Earth and legal frameworks that recognize nature’s inherent rights. Modern movements like the Rights of Nature laws, inspired by Indigenous philosophies, echo this: granting rivers, forests, and ecosystems legal personhood to challenge corporate exploitation in courts.

For the Iroquois, survival is not about dismantling corporations but reweaving the sacred hoop they have fractured. This means reviving seed-saving traditions, blocking pipelines through nonviolent direct action (as seen at Standing Rock), and teaching children the language of the land. Authenticity is measured by how deeply one honors the covenant with life itself—planting trees whose shade they will never sit under, fighting for waters their great-grandchildren will drink.

Corporate capitalism’s apocalypse is not inevitable but a choice—one the Haudenosaunee refuse to legitimize. Their answer to Heidegger’s “being-toward-death” is “being-toward-life”: a daily practice of gratitude, responsibility, and repair. The Sisyphus myth holds no power here—there is no boulder to push, only a garden to tend, a fire to keep burning for those yet to come.

As Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan, once said: “We are the ancestors of the future. What we do now, they will live with.” The corporate death cult thrives on forgetting; the Haudenosaunee survive by remembering—and fighting to ensure the seventh generation inherits more than ashes.

The Yanomami Response: The Forest as Kin and the Sacred Imperative of Reciprocity

For the Yanomami of the Amazon, Heidegger’s “being-toward-death” is not an existential abstraction but a lived truth woven into the fabric of Urihi—the forest, a living, breathing entity they regard as kin. Corporate capitalism’s outsourcing of a mass die-off is not merely a moral failing but a cosmic violation, a rupture in the reciprocity that binds humans to the Earth. Shell’s drills in the Amazon and BP’s greenwashed wind farms are not hypocrisies but acts of xawara (epidemic destruction), a term the Yanomami use for the sickness brought by outsiders who sever the forest’s veins for profit. Carbon offsets and “net-zero” pledges are not indulgences but false curses, attempts to commodify a crisis that cannot be bought or sold, only mourned and healed.

The Yanomami understand the forest as a body—its rivers as blood, its trees as lungs, its soil as flesh. To mine, drill, or clear-cut is to dismember a relative. Corporate “repair” projects, like Shell’s reforestation, are seen as wounds dressed with poison, illusions that mask the hemorrhage of biodiversity and the silencing of ancestral spirits. For the Yanomami, authenticity is not rebellion but relentless reciprocity: hunting only what is needed, planting in harmony with seasons, and defending the forest with their lives. They reject the corporate ledger of destruction and repair, because in their cosmology, harm cannot be “offset”—it can only be atoned through ritual, restraint, and regeneration.

The existential burden placed on individuals—recycling, guilt, grief—is alien to the Yanomami, who view collapse not as a personal failing but a collective theft. Corporations, in their eyes, are nape (non-Yanomami) entities devoid of yãkoana (spiritual wisdom), agents of a death cult that mistakes profit for life. BP’s wind farms and Shell’s drills are not opposites but twin blades of the same machete, hacking at the roots of the world-tree that sustains all beings.

The Yanomami’s resistance is rooted in shamanic vigilance and territorial defiance. Leaders like Davi Kopenawa denounce mining and deforestation as “the smoke of the white man’s greed,” a toxic fog that suffocates spirits and poisons rivers. Their fight is not just for land but for the right to exist in relation—to maintain the dialogue between humans, animals, and ancestral forces that corporate extraction silences.

To “live authentically,” for the Yanomami, is to honor the covenant of yãkwa—the eternal exchange between humans and the forest. It means rejecting the corporate boulder not through individual revolt but through collective remembrance: passing down stories, protecting sacred sites, and teaching children to listen to the whispers of the wind and the cries of the jaguar. The Sisyphus myth holds no meaning here—there is no boulder to push, only a forest to rejoin, a web to reweave.

The Yanomami do not grieve the apocalypse; they ritualize it. In ceremonies, they summon hekura spirits to heal the forest’s wounds and confront the xapiri (ancestral beings) who govern balance. Their answer to corporate necropolitics is not despair but sacred rage—a refusal to let the forest’s song be drowned out by bulldozers and bank ledgers.

The Yanomami know what corporations forget: the Earth outlives all empires. Their resistance is not a call to arms but a reminder that the forest itself is the ultimate warrior. As Kopenawa warns, “The white man thinks he can buy the sky. But when the last tree falls, his money will be as worthless as ashes.” To live authentically is to stand with the Yanomami—not as saviors, but as students learning to hear the forest’s heartbeat again. The apocalypse is not inevitable; it is a choice. And the Yanomami choose life.

References:

Ahmad, Hafsa. 2024. “Nestlé: Pure Life or Impure Lies? Examining the Swiss Company’s Unethical Practices in Pakistan.” The [F]law, September 17, 2024. https://theflaw.org/articles/nestle-pure-life-or-impure-lies/#:~:text=Between%202013%20and%202017%2C%20Nestl%C3%A9,%E2%80%94a%20loss%20of%2043%25.
Al Jazeera. 2012. “Western Oil Firms Remain as US Exits Iraq.” Al Jazeera, January 7, 2012. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2012/1/7/western-oil-firms-remain-as-us-exits-iraq.
Beeman, Allison. “Child Labor in the Global Cocoa Supply Chain: What Nestlé Tells Us About Corporate Harm.” Systemic Justice Journal: Critical Corporate Theory Collection, July 2021. https://systemicjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Beeman_FinalPaper.pdf
Blumenthal, Max, and Ben Norton. 2021. “US Africa Command ‘Policing’ Congo for Corporations as West Blames China for Exploitation.” The Grayzone, November 30, 2021. https://thegrayzone.com/2021/11/30/africom-corporations-dr-congo-climate-china/.
Boussalis, Ben. 2025. “Big Oil Spent $445m Influencing Trump and Congress, Analysis Shows.” The Guardian, January 23, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/23/big-oil-445m-trump-congress.
Center for Biological Diversity. 2023. “Unravelling the Harms of Fast Fashion.” Center for Biological Diversity, February 2023. https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/pdfs/Unravelling-Harms-of-Fast-Fashion-Full-Report-2023-02.pdf
Ciocchini, Pablo, and Stefanie Khoury. “The Law of Ecocide: A Flawed Strategy in the Context of International Investment Law.” Environmental Politics (2025). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644016.2025.2459496
Davis, Madeline B. 2024. “Eco-Illusions: Unveiling Greenwashing Techniques on Corporate Social Media.” Pell Scholars and Senior Theses, Salve Regina University. https://digitalcommons.salve.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1148&context=pell_theses.
Franta, Benjamin Andrew, Big Carbon’s Strategic Response to Global Warming, 1950–2020 (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2022), p. 247. https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:hq437ph9153/Franta%20-%20Big%20Carbon%20strategic%20response%20to%20global%20warming%201950-2020%20-%202022-08-25-augmented.pdf
Gates, Guilbert, Jack Ewing, Karl Russell, and Derek Watkins. “How Volkswagen’s ‘Defeat Devices’ Worked.” The New York Times, September 18, 2015. Updated March 16, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/business/international/vw-diesel-emissions-scandal-explained.html.
Guterres, António. 2024. “‘We Are Choking on Plastic’, Secretary-General Tells Intergovernmental Committee, Calling for Ambitious Agreement to End Plastic Pollution.” United Nations, Press Release SG/SM/22433, April 23, 2024. https://press.un.org/en/2024/sgsm22433.doc.htm.
International Monetary Fund (IMF). 2023. “Fossil Fuel Subsidies.” IMF Climate Issues. Accessed November 19, 2023. https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidies.
Khan, Amy Westervelt and Geoff Dembicki. 2024. “Give Trees a Hand: Ad Agencies Line Up to Sell Sketchy Climate Solutions.” DeSmog, November 13, 2024. https://www.desmog.com/2024/11/13/give-trees-a-hand-ad-agencies-line-up-to-sell-sketchy-climate-solutions/.
Kumar, Arunima. 2025. “BP Cuts Renewable Investment and Boosts Oil and Gas in Strategy Shift.” Reuters, February 27, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/bp-cuts-renewable-investment-boosts-oil-gas-strategy-shift-2025-02-27/.
Laville, Sandra. “Coca-Cola Admits It Produces 3m Tonnes of Plastic Packaging a Year.” The Guardian, March 14, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/mar/14/coca-cola-admits-it-produces-3m-tonnes-of-plastic-packaging-a-year.
Lefebvre, Ben. 2024. “Trump, the Oil Barons and the $1B Question.” Politico, May 10, 2024. https://www.politico.com/newsletters/power-switch/2024/05/10/trump-the-oil-barons-and-the-1b-question-00157373.
Logan, John. 2025. Corporate Union Busting in Plain Sight: How Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s Crushed Dynamic Grassroots Worker Organizing Campaigns. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/295158.
Macalister, Terry. “BP Boss Admits Mistakes on Climate Change as Shareholders Back Strategy.” The Guardian, April 15, 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/apr/15/bp-climate-change-shareholders.
Neimark, Benjamin, Oliver Belcher, and Patrick Bigger. 2019. “US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries – shrinking this war machine is a must.” The Conversation, June 24. https://theconversation.com/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter-than-as-many-as-140-countries-shrinking-this-war-machine-is-a-must-119269
Oceana. “Coca-Cola’s Annual Plastic Footprint Forecasted to Grow to 9.1 Billion Pounds by 2030.” Press release. March 26, 2025. https://oceana.org/press-releases/coca-colas-annual-plastic-footprint-forecasted-to-grow-to-9-1-billion-pounds-by-2030/.
Oluwatobi, O. “In 2023, Nestlé Generated 3.4 Million Tonnes of Packaging Waste.” Impaakt, October 10, 2024. https://app.impaakt.com/analyses/in-2023-nestle-generated-34-million-tonnes-of-packaging-waste-118150.
OpenSecrets. 2023. “Oil & Gas: Lobbying, 2023.” Center for Responsive Politics. Accessed November 19, 2023. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/lobbying.php?cycle=2023&ind=E01.
Poulsen, Henrik Moltke, and Ryan Gallagher. 2017. “How Peter Thiel’s Palantir Helped the NSA Spy on the Whole World.” The Intercept, February 22, 2017. https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palantir-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-the-whole-world/.
Rowell, Andy, and Nina Lakhani. “How Exxon Chases Billions in US Subsidies for a ‘Climate Solution’ That Helps It Drill More Oil.” The Guardian, August 29, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/aug/29/exxon-mobil-carbon-capture-government-subsidies.
Singh, Maanvi. 2021. “Drought-hit California Moves to Halt Nestlé from Taking Millions of Gallons of Water.” The Guardian, April 27, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/27/california-nestle-water-san-bernardino-forest-drought.
Singh, Maanvi. 2023. “Shell Renewable Energy Spending Questioned by SEC Complaint Filed by Global Witness.” The Guardian, February 1, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/01/shell-renwable-energy-spending-sec-global-witness.
Supran, Geoffrey, Stefan Rahmstorf, and Naomi Oreskes. 2023. “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Global Warming Projections.” Science 379 (6625): eabk0063. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abk0063.
Surma, Katie. “Their Lives Were Ruined by Oil Pollution, and a Court Awarded Them $9.5 Billion. But Ecuadorians Have Yet to See a Penny From Chevron.” Inside Climate News, December 18, 2022. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18122022/steven-donziger-chevron-ecuador-oil-pollution/.
Tax Justice Network. 2024. “World Losing Half a Trillion to Tax Abuse Largely Due to 8 Countries Blocking UN Tax Reform, Annual Report Finds.” Accessed November 19, 2024. https://taxjustice.net/press/world-losing-half-a-trillion-to-tax-abuse-largely-due-to-8-countries-blocking-un-tax-reform-annual-report-finds/.

Hollow Promises and Ugly Unspoken Realities

21 Monday Dec 2015

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

≈ 82 Comments

Tags

"Make America Great Again", 6th Mass Extinction, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Capitalism, Celebrity Worship, Climate Refugees, Climate Sensitivity of Earth, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Comedian Tom Simmons, COP21, Corporate State, Deep State, Derrick Jensen, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Global Famine, Idolatry of Money, Interstellar Colonization, Mass Consumption, Mass Die Off, Mass Production, Mass shootings, meteorologist Eric Holthaus, Mike Lofgren, Military Industrial Complex, Neil Postman, Peak Oil, Plasticizing the Planet, Super El Niño, Techno-Fix, Technophelia, The Fossil Fuel Age, The Global Elite, War for Profit, War on Terror

Another climate conference has once again come and gone, echoing hollow promises and ugly unspoken realities. I won’t waste anyone’s time analyzing the verbiage of this so-called agreement which failed to even mention the term fossil fuels, probably at the behest of those who financed the entire farce, i.e. the carbon-extraction companies. Suffice it to say that countries were approving fossil fuel exploration projects before the ink of the global climate agreement had fully dried. As long as corporations are able to push environmental and social costs off their balance sheets and onto the backs of the weak and defenseless, dirty coal will be burnt and the cheapest slave labor will be employed. Questioning root causes like our inherently unsustainable way of life is still very much taboo and will remain so even after our descendants are sifting through the wreckage. Sure, mainstream publications have expanded their coverage of man-made climate change and global warming, but these existential threats to life on Earth remain an enigma to the vast majority, a footnote in some obscure textbook.

Retailers on the East Coast talk about a crisis for winter clothing sales because the weather has been too unseasonably warm to attract buyers, but nary a mention of man’s role in influencing these abnormal events, such as a super El Niño amplified by global warming. As the developed world continues to roll the climate chaos dice, we now face a higher chance of turbo-charged El Niños every 4 to 12 years and all the destruction that they bring —mass coral bleaching events, die-offs of marine mammals, record flooding and drought, crop failure and famine, refugee crises, etc. This year’s El Niño is on track to becoming the strongest on record with meteorologist Eric Holthaus exclaiming, “Our planet’s climate has undergone a step-change this year.”:

This climate “step-change” may also be indicative of a considerable underestimation of the Earth’s climate sensitivity. What should be painfully obvious by now is that the carbon footprint for everyone will have to decrease dramatically and quickly in order to slow emissions. In other words, the world’s richest will have to radically alter their lifestyles. That’s never going to happen in any variant of capitalism, a system so entrenched that it is inconceivable to imagine anything substantially different taking its place. Instead we get things like corporate greenwashing, carbon trading, decades of climate conferences, First World offshoring of manufacturing emissions into the Third World, and out-and-out fraud like the VW auto emissions scandal. The problem has been identified for nearly half a century, yet we continue to deceive ourselves with half-baked solutions and hypocritical indignation. The inertia of the system is simply too great and the dominant culture has a tendency to kill the messenger of bad news, so there is a strong incentive to sugarcoat things, but a deus ex machina is nowhere on the horizon. We’ll only change in response to the hard realities from an increasingly inhospitable planet. Sunken costs and material incentives built into our socio-economic system prevent radical change and fetishize the myth of the easy techno-fix, a yet-to-be-invented technology that will magically sustain modern civilization while at the same time keep the wolves of ecological collapse at bay. Even more delusional, a prominent tech magnate has urged humanity to pursue interstellar colonization before we render the Earth uninhabitable, but as an internet commenter quipped, “A post-nuclear war, global warming-baked and hyper polluted Earth will still be paradise compared to Mars.” Some technophiles admit the future actually looks rather grim:

…But the most worrisome threats are not merely anthropogenic, they’re technogenic. They arise from the fact that advanced technologies are (a) dual-use in nature, meaning that they can be employed for both benevolent and nefarious purposes; (b) becoming more powerful, thereby enabling humans to manipulate and rearrange the physical world in new ways; and (c) in some cases, becoming more accessible to small groups, including, at the limit, single individuals…

Just as technology is not neutral, so too is the economic system driving this technology. The institution of capitalism, which has been copied and exported all over the world since WW II, has established widespread acceptance for the condition of mass production, mass consumption, and waste at an ever accelerating rate, pushing the world deeper and deeper into ecological crisis. For example, the ubiquity of plastics now exhibits itself as microscopic pieces on every beach in the world and in our dinner with trillions more pieces in the oceans than previously thought. Scientists estimate that nearly all sea birds will be ingesting some sort of plastic by 2050. In spite of this growing evidence of a plasticised planet, the production of plastics has only increased while recycling remains an effort in futility:

For more than 50 years, global production of plastic has continued to rise. Some 299 million tons of plastics were produced in 2013, representing a 3.9 percent increase over 2012’s output. With a market driven by consumerism and convenience, along with the comparatively low price of plastic materials, demand for plastic is growing. Recovery and recycling, however, remain insufficient, and millions of tons of plastics end up in landfills and oceans each year – link

There’s no going back from this global complexity trap we’ve built around ourselves. All those bits of plastic will end up in the sedimentary layer of the Anthropocene along with elevated concentrations of CO2, radionuclides from nuclear fallout and waste, as well as novel metals and pollutants never before seen. Once underway, mass extinctions cannot be reversed, especially when driven by over seven billion pleasure-seeking, individualistic “consumers”. Materialism and greed, we are told, are natural human instincts, and they are all too eagerly rewarded by an economic system which reduces everything to a financial object and monetizes every aspect of the natural world. Today’s environmentalism is, as Derrick Jensen pointed out, similar to the palliative care given to prisoners in Nazi Germany death camps. The emaciated ecological ghosts of so many species are right before us, yet nearly everyone is blind to the unfolding catastrophe of the 6th mass extinction:

…we lose a huge chunk of the world’s diversity that will never come back. We lose the potential for communication with other lifeforms, with the only remaining ones eventually whittled down to domesticated animals or weed species that thrive in civilized man’s destructive footsteps. The conversation of life itself is turning into small talk, but the only recognition that seems to be made by this culture is how [biodiversity loss] “reduces carbon storage”. How trees and animals can provide “ecosystem services”, as if they existed for nothing more than to continue the existence of the mad king ape. – pathofraven

Yes, we are pretty far gone when a four minute comedy routine makes more sense than anything broadcasted on the evening news. Corporate mass media-controlled public debates have degenerated into infomercial sound bites. In a society where success is measured by the key metrics of money and profit, it should be no surprise that a wealthy, xenophobic businessman is able to garner mass appeal by hogging publicity and playing on the fears and base desires of the populus. “Make America Great Again” is a catchy slogan for a society ignorant of the collapsing world around them and oblivious to the over-consumptive, profligate way of life that is proving to be their undoing. For a celebrity-obsessed culture whose world is falling apart, the next logical choice for its leader would seem to be a reality TV show star who says he can restore the illusion of the American dream and build a great wall to keep all the riff-raff out.

A fascist right-wing administration might just provide that extra push that takes us all over the edge into collapse. With the Presidency largely serving as a figurehead position for the Deep State, I’m not convinced a different candidate would make a measurable difference in the grand scheme of things anyway. Our “democracy” is, after all, just one more illusion in a bread-and-circus election cycle:

“Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.” – Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

So while terrorism takes center stage in the overstretched Empire of Amnesia, remember this simple fact: 303 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks worldwide in the last decade while 320,523 Americans were killed because of gun violence in that same time period. Random mass shootings, capitalism’s “free market” genocides, the disruption of the Holocene’s stable climate regime by anthropogenic climate disruption, tipping points in the earth’s biosphere, terminal industrial disease, and many other things come to mind that pose a much bigger danger to the average American, but the War on Terror, conceived as open-ended, serves as a conveniently omnipresent boogieman for jerking the chain of the taxpayer and justifying the growth of an intrusive security state. What better way to control the masses as the wheels continue coming off the global economy and the biosphere becomes evermore threadbare. The rich will retreat into their luxury spider holes until the coast is clear.

https://vimeo.com/46623567

The End of the Oil Age.

02 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by xraymike79 in Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil

≈ 224 Comments

Tags

Adolf Hitler, consum, Consumer Culture, Cornucopianism, Demagogue, Euro Crisis, Food Insecurity, Fossil Fuel Dependency, Industrial Revolution, Infinite Growth Paradigm, Joseph Tainter, Military Industrial Complex, Native American Genocide, Norman Pagett, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Religious Fanaticism, Resource Wars, Scottish Secession, Slavery, Sykes and Picot, Techno-Optimists, Tensions in the South China Sea, The Age of Oil, The End of More, The Resource Curse, The Third Reich, Vladimir Putin, War for Profit, World War I, World War II

Author: Norman Pagett (The End of More)

But how can we define an oil age? It has been about 150 years since the first deep oilwells were sunk, and just over 200 years since the viable steam engine was developed. The two are linked, because the steam engine made deep drilling of oilwells possible and gave us access to a hundred million years worth of fossilized sunlight. Perhaps we have not strictly had an oil age, but rather the first and only age where we enjoy vast amounts of surplus energy that we have extracted from hydrocarbon fuels, of which oil is the most energy dense. It has brought us material wealth, and the means to indulge in wholesale killing of each other and all other species. It gave excesses of food and a population that consumed that food and grew to five or six times the sustainable level of the planet. In the timespan of human existence, the ascendance of modern industrialised man has been a short flash of light and heat that has briefly lifted us out of the mire of the middle ages, but at a considerable cost to the environment.

Our mistake has been to think of that elevation as both divine and permanent. That certainty of permanence explains the mad scramble to come up with ‘alternatives’ and ‘renewables’ in the last decade or two. Something to keep current politicians in office and the masses pacified. It is important that we accept the seductive indoctrination that prayers will be answered and technology will continue to deliver all that can be imagined. The majority have come to believe in the economics of cornucopianism, where wishing for something will make it happen, while ignoring the reality that everything we have is derived from finite hydrocarbon fuels. If we spend enough money, alternatives will always be found to sustain our lifestyle. They won’t of course, and the conflicts that have been fought over oil are proof that they won’t. The pivot of world oil economy is Saudi Arabia, (the concept of ‘Saudi America’ is too ludicrous for discussion here), but that fantasy land of sand dunes and tall towers is being encircled by fanatics who know that when the jugular of global oil is cut, the industrial complexity of the developed west will die.

When (not if) that happens, we might be lucky to hold onto an existence akin to that of the 14th century, which is what the religious zealots want to inflict on all of us. If we’re unlucky, then we must expect something that will be much darker and as yet inadmissible to modern minds that do not have the scope to deal with its implications. That infers an unpleasant imagery of pre-history that we prefer to ignore. Understandably, most think the same way; this is why we cling to the comforting promise of ‘infinite growth’. The alternative is just too awful. Instead we have been encouraged to believe that we can do without oil and not only still run around on wheels, but have a purpose for doing so. And by some means yet to be invented, keep our wings as well.

Our oil age will not end through lack of it, but by fighting over what’s left. So choose your luck‐factor and take that thought where you will, you are on your own with it. Many reasons are given for starting wars, but ultimately there is only one: the pursuit of (energy) resources. Human greed drove improvements in weaponry, and the means of destruction and acquisition became more deadly over thousands of years even though there was more than enough for everyone. The input of oil was the game changer of warfare; history over the last century has shown that conflict was not diminished, but amplified, by the prosperity and technology created by oil. Since the 1860s when black gold gushed from the earth, the economic and political thinking of the pre‐oil era was seamlessly grafted onto the industrial potential of the 19th century, thereby enabling Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Vanderbilt and many others to accumulate fabulous wealth. Their business acumen was undeniable, but none of it could have been brought into existence without energy-rich oil. The use of fossil fuels in our military machines industrialised our methods of killing while at the same time becoming synonymous with progress and commerce. War became a business, the purpose of which was the acquisition of more energy in the pursuit of profit. Battlefield deaths on an industrial scale were an unlisted debit on balance sheets.

WWI started with the muscle power of horses and ended with tanks, demonstrating the murderous scope of mechanized warfare. Recognizing the critical value of oil and its sources, leaders carved up the Middle East to ensure its supply. An exercise in map making in the 1920s by the English and French civil servants Sykes and Picot set the scene for carnage that has raged throughout the Middle East ever since. Arbitrary lines in the sand were drawn, artificial oil states in the Persian Gulf region were created without regard to tribal affiliations, and a quarrelsome orphan Israel was dumped into the lap of unwilling Bedouins. As the quantity of oil there became apparent, all the major nations were drawn into the race for it because those who controlled this key resource were certain to subjugate those who did not.

The critical nature of oil made WWII inevitable. To sustain their empires, the Germans and Japanese slaughtered their way across Europe and Asia in a grab for resources, primarily oil. They promised infinite prosperity and their peoples cheered them on while deaths elsewhere were being counted in millions. With most of the world’s known oil supplies in the hands of his enemies, Adolf Hitler knew he had to have the oilfields of southern Russia and the Middle East to sustain his war machine. He failed, and his dream of a ‘Greater Germany’ collapsed not because of inferior soldiers but because there was insufficient energy input to sustain his plan for world domination. Hitler’s perception of infinite growth in his ‘thousand year Reich’ mirrors our present-day view of ‘permanent affluence’: vast quantities of oil had to be burned to sustain his fantasy. In our desperate scramble for ever-diminishing energy resources, we are in the same mad race to perpetuate the delusion of infinite economic growth. The oil pendulum has swung the other way with roughly 85% of world oil now outside the borders of the USA and Canada in countries not always of a friendly disposition. And just like the Fuhrer, political leaders of today are promising that which is beyond their means to provide. To mask this reality, they have invaded oil-producing nations in the name of ‘freedom’, claiming ‘victories’ which have left only wreckage and simmering animosity behind. So too did Hitler spread a similar line of propaganda that he was liberating other nations from the threat of communism. The second world war that left Europe and Japan flattened in 1945 might be seen as history, but it was just the first of many oil wars, and the politics of it were a side issue. WWII serves as a grim reminder of how violent and destructive humans can be in their ruthless pursuit of energy resources. Hitler’s own ‘oil age’ lasted just twelve years, and it set the pattern for the world oil age that is now in terminal decline.

Don’t be deceived by the democratic righteousness that defeated Hitler’s fascism. 150 years earlier the American empire was created with the same kind of energy grab. The European immigrant peoples who forced their way across America from the 1700s onwards needed resources on which to survive and to sustain the prosperity of an expanding nation just as the Germans and the Japanese did in 1940. The native inhabitants of the American continent were in the way of civilization and progress; their subjugation was a precursor to what happened later in Europe and Asia. Expansive prairies had to be cleared to convert the energy locked in grain and meat to feed the invaders and provide negotiable currency. This self-perpetuating process went into overdrive with the discovery of oil, and the ultimate conversion of that oil into more food resources and hardware added to the wealth of the growing nation. An expanding population needed employment, and the raw energy from oil, coal, and gas supplied it. America and the rest of the industrialised world had the means to build bigger, better, faster machines in endless succession, and created the most powerful country on earth. Everybody was going to be rich, forever. The universal law of consumption was relentless: more demanded more.

Meat and grain grew with relatively little human intervention, but other crops needed to be worked with human muscle. So the slave trade came into being. Slavery might be given many unpleasant names, but essentially it is the acquisition of one energy form to convert it into another for profit. Buy and feed the slave, use slave labour to do work, sell the product of that work. By the time the slave is worn out, several more will have been produced. This was simple economics by 18th century standards but the human consequences were again horrific, costing more millions of lives. It also brought on the American civil war where the slave‐muscled South was overwhelmed by the industrialised muscle that drove the armies of the North.

All the European empires forged out of so-called ‘empty lands’ across the world followed a similar pattern of resource acquisition and an absolute disregard for weaker peoples. It is an unpleasantness that we choose to ignore, but it confirms the killing force that drives us to acquire and convert energy to our own use. The seemingly limitless amount of oil and its energy density appeared to be the answer to all our labour problems. Oil became our ultimate slave. Or so we thought.

We now have maybe 20 years worth of usable oil left. There are certainly no more than 30, perhaps as little as 10. If one of the crazy sects running loose in the Middle East managed to get hold of a nuclear device, setting it off on the Gharwar oilfield of Saudi Arabia, it would be endgame overnight. That is perhaps too bleak a prospect, but we should not discount that notion entirely.

Before our oil to food arrangement, the planet supported something over one billion people. We now have over seven billion, and the mothers of the next two billion are alive now and approaching the age of reproduction. Preachers, scientists and politicians will not stop the basic human function of eating and procreation, so if unchecked nine billion people will be here by 2040/50, and set to go on rising after that. Every new arrival expects to be fed, watered, clothed and housed, but by no stretch of the imagination will the global food system be able to feed that number let alone sustain them with what would be expected by way of the most basic material comfort. No one dares to stand up and make the rather obvious point that we are not going to reach 9 billion. Something has to give, and that giving is going to be very unpleasant.

In the first decade of the 21st century, numerous wars have been fought over oil, and are being fought now. Wars are fought over resources because on nature’s terms, gentle contentedness is not a good strategy for survival; we are collectively powerless against genetic forces that dictate our lives no matter how much we protest otherwise. Downsized to whatever level, nature will ultimately force the choice of survival or death, and the outcome will be of no consequence other than to you and yours. To expect humankind to change within a single generation is stretching credibility beyond breaking point. Those who look forward to a life of bucolic bliss in a downsized oil‐less world might do well to think about that. Whether killing and butchering an animal to eat it, or invading another nation to secure oil supplies, we must appropriate energy sources to facilitate survival. You may think there’s a choice about doing that, but there isn’t, other than in the matter of scale. Whether paying a butcher to cut and wrap your steak, or paying soldiers to invade Iraq, securing sufficient energy to live is what we have to do to survive.

For the moment, nature keeps us supplied with oil, and we’ve pulled off the neat trick of converting it directly into food. Not knowing when our oil is finished and our food supply will run out is the little teaser for the early 21st century. Right now, most people think that food comes from supermarket shelves and freezers, which is just as well. The food trucks moving around the country are basically mobile warehouses, delivering food just in time for it to be consumed. When the realization dawns that the food trucks have stopped, the food held in stock by retailers will be stripped bare in hours. The oil age for everyone will have come to an end.

But oil carries man’s destiny in far more subtle ways than food supplies. It holds nations together. The USA is a vast territory of disparate peoples and ideas, held together by a common bond of prosperity and a basic consensus that government and law generally works for the good of all. And the inhabitants of empires are always convinced that theirs is permanent and protected by gods. That definition would apply to many large nations to a greater or lesser degree. But the bonds that hold it together, godly or otherwise, are entirely subject to availability of affordable oil. Empires (and the USA is an empire) remain whole so long as the means exists to maintain them. Oil has become that means.

Without oil, the nation will begin its decline into disparate regions. Without interconnecting transport, the United States of America cannot remain united. The force necessary to prevent a breakup will not be there, so within a decade (probably far less) of oil supply failure, the USA will cease to exist. The cracks are already there along linguistic, economic, racial, political and geographic lines. Even now it would be possible to take a pretty good guess at where those regions will split off.

This will be denied and resisted of course, but armies and police forces have power only as long as their fuel lasts. They will be unable to prevent secession in whatever form it takes. It might just be that Washington will come to govern not much more than the original colonies. Given a suitably deranged political leader and prayers to the right god, fully armed groups are ready to believe that the ‘American Dream’ can be restored. Such demagoguery sets the stage for years of regional violence over the basics of life, particularly food and water. The horror of it will be justified by warped views of right and wrong, clinging to a denial mentality magnified beyond any imagining by the privation that an oil-less society will bring.

This scenario is not exclusive to the USA. The British Empire was built on coal. When the coal was gone the empire faded away. Then in the 80s and 90s the UK became awash with cheap oil from the North Sea, and everyone was reasonably prosperous, particularly Scotland. Now the oil surplus has gone, and the UK is in decline again as a net importer. The ‘oil prosperity’ is fading away. Scotland is losing its main source of income and wants to secede from the United Kingdom, convinced that independence will somehow restore their wealth. Things will get very unpleasant when they realize that an independent Scotland will eventually be reduced to the economic level of Greece. The link between oil and the ability to eat is clear. The UK has to import 40% of its food, and much of the rest depends on oil to produce it, which also has to be imported. It is the end of the UK’s oil age, but few admit to it being the end of a food age as well. The same problem is being revealed in the current fiasco of the European union, but a little more advanced than the USA and UK. Oil-fueled prosperity is falling dramatically in the poorer southern countries. Greece, Spain and Portugal and a swathe of smaller nations have to import all their oil which only worked when oil was cheap. Now it’s expensive, and they are facing bankruptcy. 50 years of ‘unity’ is dissolving like a mirage in the face of the difficulties that smaller states are suffering. Without cheap oil, their economies cannot function, and so are disintegrating. United Europe needs oil to stay united just as the USA does. Russia’s oil dependent economy is crumbling, and Putin is having to make threatening postures to divert attention from his problems. His oil age is ending in a different way and yet we cannot tell if his posturing is just that, but a shortage of resources in the past has invariably brought conflict.

Move to the Far East and the nations around the South China Sea are all threatening one another, again the focus of the argument being the oil and gas fields of the region. They all know that without oil they cannot survive, and are prepared to fight for every last drop of the stuff, no matter what the cost. As a measure of what the dispute is about, the volume of oil in question is 11 billion barrels. One billion barrels is less than a month of world consumption. They are preparing to fight over the last dregs in confirmation of man’s desperation over oil shortages. Eventually, this problem will hit every nation and individual on earth as our oil‐crutch is kicked away. And with the oil age fading into history for us all, there will be no shortage of violent resistance to this inconvenient truth.

Will technological innovation save us?…

Living in Bizzaro World

22 Sunday Feb 2015

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

≈ 171 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Amazon Deforestation, American Empire, Blowback, Capitalism, Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Climate Sensitivity of Earth, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporatocracy, Desertification, Duped! Delusion Denial and the End of the American Dream, Extremist Ideologies, Global Coal Consumption, Infectious Diseases in a Warming World, Inverted Totalitarianism, ISIS, Military Industrial Complex, Myth of the 2ºC Climate Goal, Nafeez Ahmed, Peak Antibiotics, Planetary Tipping Points, Professor Jerry Kroth, Psychological Displacement, Resource Wars, São Paulo Water Crisis, Snuff Films

“Bizzaro Code: Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!”

For the past few days I’ve been nursing a bacterial infection on the dorsal aspect of my left hand with topical cream and oral antibiotics, and my hand appears to be healing quickly. I’m relatively healthy and this is the first time I’ve ever had this sort of thing happen to me. Left untreated, such an infection could fester for months, perhaps developing into an abscess and becoming life threatening. In a world of post-antibiotics, a tiny break in your skin could spell death for you. Despite a recent discovery of a new class of antibiotics, we’re still headed for a post-antibiotic age and unless we reform our system of profit-incentivized healthcare, infectious diseases will have plenty of poverty-stricken hosts within which to flourish and spread throughout the world. The wealthy are not hermetically sealed off from such human disease vectors. Anthropogenic climate disruption is already increasing the expansion of such pathogens and as with everything else connected to this grand climate experiment we’re conducting on ourselves, preparing for the consequences is an afterthought:

“We have to admit we’re not winning the war against emerging diseases,” Brooks says. “We’re not anticipating them. We’re not paying attention to their basic biology, where they might come from and the potential for new pathogens to be introduced.” – Link

Leading UK climate scientist Kevin Anderson has a new lecture out in which he explains how the world can have a 50% chance of staying below a 2ºC world (40% emissions cuts by 2018 from the wealthy, 70% by 2024, and over 90% by 2030.) The global wealthy are those defined as earning $30,000 a year. I posted Kevin Anderson’s video on a thread at Peakoil.com , and vox_mundi replied:

I’ve been following Kevin Anderson since his presentation at the 4 Degrees and Beyond International Climate Conference in 2009 at Oxford.

His points are inarguable – and that was before the positive feedback which we are beginning to see. His analysis is covered in the paper, Beyond Dangerous, and other participants assessments are here.

Whether or not Sao Paulo survives this year is immaterial because climate change is not going to be kind to their part of the planet in the coming decades. Unfortunately, this applies to just about everywhere else.

Vox_mundi is the one helping to keep all of us updated on the water crisis in São Paulo with his postings. The evidence tells me we have breached the tipping point for the desertification of Brazil. One thing to always keep in mind about the 2ºC climate goal is that it’s an arbitrary and politically convenient number set by business-as-usual bureaucrats:

…Why was the limit set at 2ºC?
It was pretty much arbitrary, but characterized by policy and political folks as the amount of warming that the scientific community had established would “prevent dangerous” climate impacts. Danger, of course, being a relative concept. Former NASA scientist James Hansen and other researchers have concluded that 2°C of human-made warming would trigger natural feedbacks that could end up doubling that amount of warming. Setting the limit was widely seen, however, as one of the few positive outcomes from the 2009 U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen…
– Link

By all evidence(both scientific and individual observation), climate sensitivity of the Earth is much higher than most know and even a 1ºC rise is too much. The idea that staying at or just below a 2ºC warming can save us from catastrophe is a myth. For those who don’t know, climate sensitivity is:

…defined as how much the average global surface temperature will increase if there is a doubling of greenhouse gases (expressed as carbon dioxide equivalents) in the air, once the planet has had a chance to settle into a new equilibrium after the increase occurs. In other words, it’s a direct measure of how the Earth’s climate will respond to that doubling.

We currently have a CO2e of 484ppm, nearly double that of the pre-industrial levels. As we approach the doubling level of 560ppm, then we can expect an average global increase in temperature of somewhere between “1.5 to 4.5ºC”, according to the latest mainstream research. The argument can therefore be made that we have already triggered the collapse of industrial civilization just by considering only the one global tipping point of climate change out of a total of nine planetary boundaries currently being monitored, four of which we have already crossed.

With the following headlines recurring every year, who are we fooling that these emissions will be reined in within our lifetimes:

To deal with the uncomfortable realities of manmade climate change, the Right practice denial of manmade climate change, while the Left employ the psychological process of displacement. Thus, no real solutions will ever come to fruition due to a great degree by these self-defeating mental traps. It’s also easy to forget or overlook these harsh truths when, as Democracy Later tweeted, “It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.”

Capitalist industrial civilization has created a real bizarro world for itself from all the geopolitical blowback of resource wars and dark politricks, the entrenched vested interests of the military industrial complex and fossil-fuel conglomerates, the financial chicanery of the wealthy elite, and all the hi-tech gadgetry and weapons in the hands of every virulent extremist. ISIS now appears to even have their own TV show interviewing prisoners in cages before they make another snuff film. The world just seems to be getting more screw-balled by the hour. What the fuck is this?:

Nafeez Ahmed has an excellent article on the failed state of Yemen and its slow collapse into a post-oil, post-water Mad Max land. Their primary crop is now qat, a mild narcotic plant whose cultivation sucks up even more of their dwindling water aquifers. As someone on Reddit said:

I know its sexier to focus on the collapse of rich states, such as America and various nations in Europe and Asia, but it will most likely be Yemen and other nations that provide a prediction of a future to come. Largely the modern nation or multicultural state will start to break down, beset by escalating crises in disaster, capital, and factional management until civil war breaks out. From that death spiral, who knows how far it will go…

In addition to a perfect storm of ecological and social problems that include overpopulation, resource depletion and climate change, there is also the baggage of imperialist U.S. foreign policies –arming and aiding corrupt and brutal kings/dictators, funding and arming radical extremists like Osama bin Laden’s jihadists in Afghanistan during the 1980’s, etc. in an effort to control global oil supplies and trade routes. In Bizzaro world, don’t expect any leaders of American Empire to touch those root causes with a 10,000 mile remote-controlled drone.

Spectating at the End of the World

02 Friday Jan 2015

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

≈ 205 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Abrupt Climate Change, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Davi Kopenawa, Eco-Apocalypse, Extinction of Man, Green Washing, Guy McPherson, Inverted Totalitarianism, Military Industrial Complex, Mr. Natural, Neoliberal Capitalism, Robert Crumb, Security and Surveillance State, Social Psychology and Theories of Consumer Culture: A Political Economy

Front Row Seat to the Eco-Apocalypse

“I fear their euphoria of merchandise will have no end and they will entangle themselves to the point of chaos. They do not seem concerned that they are making us all perish with the epidemic of fumes that escape from all these things…” ~ Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami leader and shaman

Another year has turned over on Earth, home to an exothermic, bipedal omnivore known as capitalist carbon man whose expanding numbers and army of fossil-fueled machinery spans the globe. There’s nothing subtle or restrained about his reign of terror. He pokes and prods the climate change beast while taking for granted the stability of the Holocene, a peculiar aberration in the paleoclimate record. Plotted on a graph, the history of Earth’s climate resembles the jagged teeth of a demonic monster, a volatile creature whose abrupt and catastrophic shifts have wiped landscapes clean of most life. The consequences of burning the equivalent of an olympic sized swimming pool of oil (300,000 liters) per second, year after year, into the atmosphere will ultimately prove lethal to the planet’s habitability. Recently, scientists were surprised to discover a “Delaware-sized methane cloud” hovering over the U.S. southwest, the remnant of “years of intentionally released and errantly leaked natural gas during fossil fuel drilling operations.” No less problematic to the Earth’s homeostasis are the many other destructive habits of capitalist carbon man such as moving ten times more dirt than all natural processes, fixing more nitrogen than all terrestrial bacteria, and producing more sulfate than all ocean phytoplankton.

The exponential melting of Earth’s cryospheric regions is a foreboding harbinger of devastating sea level rise, altering oceanic and jet stream circulation, changing hydrologic cycles, and wholesale disruption of the entire planet’s biospheric system. A brief retrospective of our unfolding environmental meltdown by a major news source concludes that “2014 will likely go down as the year that melting polar ice caps graduated from being a geographic abstraction to a symbol of the irreversible ways we’ve warped the planet.” News reports continue to grow more ominous with recent warnings that the oceans are on the verge of belching their decades of stored heat from human industrial activity. CIVILIZATION is in the process of going ‘poof’ as its leaders play monkey politics and the masses are drowned in a sea of consumerist images. As Dr. McPherson recently pointed out, gallows humor is the 6th stage of grief for coping with a civilization that is blind to its own demise.

“Going Green” is a Marketing Slogan and Inverted Totalitarianism is the Most Successful Form of Tyranny

The unsettling truth is that the slogan “going green” has become a marketing ploy to greenwash capitalism and keep business-as-usual going. The speeches of corporate and political leaders are sprinkled with conscious-soothing key words such as “sustainable”, “eco-friendly”, and “2°C climate goal”, but there’s nothing sustainable about globalized techno-capitalism and the target of limiting warming to 2°C is a cruel illusion. So-called “green energy” is severely limited by suitable geography and intermittency of power production. The behemoth Google learned from its own extensive research that “today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us.” The top business firms appear to be having a problem squaring their green rhetoric with reality, and there seems to be no way to make automobiles truly sustainable. Germany, the poster child for a green economy, is now “burning more coal than at any point since 1990.“:

“We already are on the edge of what is possible,” Mr. Löllgen said in an interview at his Düsseldorf office. “Is it worth it if we as a country succeed in reaching our targets in reducing carbon emissions, but sacrifice good jobs and our industrial base?”

Another misleading headline I get tired of reading states that humans may be headed for a 6th mass extinction. Let’s clarify this statement once and for all by admitting emphatically that we are well in the throes of a mass extinction which will likely include ourselves within this century. By all rational evidence, industrial civilization with its billions of inhabitants cannot survive without fossil fuels. The only way capitalist carbon man will ever be sustainable is as fertilizer beneath the crumbled concrete and asphalt ruins of industrial civilization. Don’t expect any mea culpa from a culture which has been programmed to believe converting all of nature into inanimate symbols of wealth is “progress” and “development”. Not even the dire warnings of esteemed scientists and religious leaders can break the spell cast by capitalism and its definition of progress. Our institutions have become intransigent, petrified monoliths to which all will be sacrificed.

“I think the notions of free will and self-determination have the appearance of reality during a civilization’s gestation and expansion phases, when there is more opportunity and social mobility. As things calcify, instruments becoming institutions that serve their own ends, the facade is harder to maintain. Human existence has always been contingent and constrained by circumstances. These ‘free’ notions are illusions, narrow windows of perception with a limited range of influence during times of transient prosperity.” ~ BP

The term inverted totalitarianism, coined a decade ago by philosopher Sheldon Wolin, describes America’s brand of despotism in which “every natural resource and every living being is commodified and exploited to collapse as the citizenry is lulled and manipulated into surrendering their liberties and their participation in government through excess consumerism and sensationalism.” Opposition to this dominant consumer culture is systematically co-opted and suppressed by the marginalization and alienation of alternative thought. Neoliberal capitalism governs not only states and economies, but extends right down to an individual’s behavior and way of living:

One of the goals of neoliberalism is to foster a population of individuals who will play an active role in their own self-governance by interacting with the market and consumption through calculated acts and investments… sets of rules and conditions are established between institutions, economic and social practices, and patterns of behavior. They generally function outside of conscious awareness and they habitually influence social behavior. Examples of dominant consumer culture discourse include the political linking of consumer sovereignty and choice with freedom, the linking of citizenship and national pride with consumption, the work and spend treadmill that many people choose to pursue, the commercialization of childhood and adolescence, and the celebration of consumer values through the mass media and advertising.
– Social Psychology and Theories of Consumer Culture: A Political Economy

Who better to label people as “unpatriotic” if they acknowledge the reality of climate change than the host of TV’s quintessential symbol of capitalism, The Wheel of Fortune? Beneath this digital web of commercials and TV infotainment is the iron fist of militarized local police and the panopticon surveillance state which can quickly stomp out those troublesome malcontents who break free of the American hologram. What better way is there for controlling entire populations than to condition them to enjoy their chains of slavery? America’s form of tyranny, a blend of covert and overt oppression, is the most successful in the history of mankind.

None of This Can Really Be Happening, Can It?

With all the disjointed and delusional thinking out there, I feel compelled to write a blog post periodically to get the facts straight and assure myself that what I see and hear every day is really happening. Yes, we really are terraforming the Earth into a barren wasteland while convincing ourselves that it’s worth it for the sake of a cubicle job and life in cookie-cutter suburbia. Yes, we really are ruled by the Washington-Wall Street-Pentagon complex. No, you will never get the raw truth from mainstream news outlets. Yes, I’m getting older and need to exercise more because a sedentary lifestyle is as bad as smoking. Yes, industrial civilization is still on track to collapse within my lifetime. As Robert Crumb’s mystic guru Mr. Natural exclaimed, “The whole universe is completely insane!”