Tag Archives: Overpopulation

Future Hunger Games

16 Tuesday Oct 2012

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

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The following excerpt is from a recent U.N. assessment on the state of the world and food production. It’s not a pretty picture, but despite alarm bells ringing, our trajectory of ecological collapse is still firmly on track…

Click to go to full letter:

The human rights of people and well-being of the planet first? Don’t make me laugh. There’s that oxymoron again – sustainable development. Given the track record of the U.N. on solving problems, rest assured there won’t be any radical ideas coming out of that institution that might threaten capitalism’s death grip on the planet. If there’s no money to be made, resource to be exploited, or economic growth to be had, then it won’t get done. Period.

…From the UK Guardian article discussing the above U.N. assessment:

UN warns of looming worldwide food crisis in 2013 … – The Guardian

…Failing harvests in the US, Ukraine and other countries this year have eroded reserves to their lowest level since 1974. The US, which has experienced record heatwaves and droughts in 2012, now holds in reserve a historically low 6.5% of the maize that it expects to consume in the next year, says the UN.

“We’ve not been producing as much as we are consuming. That is why stocks are being run down. Supplies are now very tight across the world and reserves are at a very low level, leaving no room for unexpected events next year,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist with the UNFood and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). With foodconsumption exceeding the amount grown for six of the past 11 years, countries have run down reserves from an average of 107 days of consumption 10 years ago to under 74 days recently…

…In a shocking new assessment of the prospects of meeting food needs, Lester Brown, president of the Earth policy research centre in Washington, says that the climate is no longer reliable and the demands for food are growing so fast that a breakdown is inevitable, unless urgent action is taken.

“Food shortages undermined earlier civilisations. We are on the same path. Each country is now fending for itself. The world is living one year to the next,” he writes in a new book.

According to Brown, we are seeing the start of a food supply breakdown with a dash by speculators to “grab” millions of square miles of cheap farmland, the doubling of international food prices in a decade, and the dramatic rundown of countries’ food reserves.

This year, for the sixth time in 11 years, the world will consume more food than it produces, largely because of extreme weather in the US and other major food-exporting countries. Oxfam last week said that the price of key staples, including wheat and rice, may double in the next 20 years, threatening disastrous consequences for poor people who spend a large proportion of their income on food…

…“The geopolitics of food is fast overshadowing the geopolitics of oil.”

…“The situation we are in is not temporary. These things will happen all the time. Climate is in a state of flux and there is no normal any more.

“We are beginning a new chapter. We will see food unrest in many more places.

“Armed aggression is no longer the principal threat to our future. The overriding threats to this century are climate change, population growth, spreading water shortages and rising food prices,” Brown says.

Further reading…

Food prices from 1990 to the present…

And an open letter(10-12-2012) by Professor Christopher Rhodes on our looming problem of Peak Phosphorus…

Our politicians should be running on a platform of issues concerning basic survival at this point.

Kill the Messenger

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will man go extinct? He certainly seems to be doing everything in his power to make sure it happens:

…the worship of an economic system that reduces everything to a financial object.

…the continued exploitation and burning of an increasingly more expensive and environmentally damaging energy source which is causing the climate to swing out of control with various feedback loops.

…the dismantling and perversion of regulations and the rule of law to satisfy greed and a grossly unjust social hierarchy.

…the indoctrination of the population into a materialist society detached from the appreciation of nature’s fundamental role in our survival.

…the degeneration of public debate into infomercial sound bites by way of mass media manipulation.

…the wholesale destruction of the natural world and the latest attempts of a so-called green economy to monetize every bit of nature in order to save capitalism.

…and the spread of the above described culture through globalization.

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

Climate Chaos: The Monkey Wrench that Unravels Everything

11 Saturday Aug 2012

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

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“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The water-energy-food nexus is an interlocking problem. For example, biofuel production takes land and water away from food production. Besides the contamination to water reservoirs, the process of hydrofracking and tar sands utilizes massive amounts of water which could otherwise be saved for farming:

Oil sands extraction uses significant amounts of water (2-4.5 barrels per barrel of oil produced), which ends up in toxic tailings lagoons that have never been successfully reclaimed. An analysis using industry data estimated that these lagoons already leak over a billion gallons of contaminated water into the environment each year.
– source

Hydrofracking injects large volumes of water (up to six million gallons of water per gas well) mixed with sand and toxic chemical additives at high pressures to release the gas. Most of the water is then returned to the surface as polluted wastewater – that must be treated by wastewater treatment plants already overburdened and not necessarily designed to remove these chemicals. Industry analysts predict it will cost $3 billion to treat the industrial wastewater associated with Marcellus shale development…
Groundwater supplies may become contaminated with these chemicals as they already have in parts of Pennsylvania and other states. Currently, oil and gas companies that use hydraulic fracturing are exempt from regulations under the Safe Drinking Water Act that would require them to disclose the cocktail of chemicals they use.
– source

Scaling back on the production of these unconventional energy sources in order to conserve land and water for food will increase the cost of conventional oil, and thus food prices, since industrial agriculture is dependent on fossil fuels:

Due to the vast size of these [industrial] farms, the farms are operated in a similar manner to that of large industrial factories. And these “factories” require large quantities of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and fuel all derived from fossil fuels, which is a limited natural resource on our planet (Hidden Costs of Industrial Agriculture, 2008). “After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent.” This high dependence on fossil fuels makes industrial agriculture heavily unsustainable. “Twentieth-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food” (Pollan, 2008).

The monkey wrench of climate change is now thrown into the picture…

What happens to the stability of the world when fertile lands become dust bowls, when rainfall no longer follows its traditional seasonal pattern, when crop yield forecasts become less and less reliable as climate change begins to bite? We don’t have to look very far back to see the upheaval caused in countries whose majority population lives on the razor-edge of starvation:

2007–2008 – Food riots in India, Peru, Morocco, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia, 
Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Yemen, Guinea, Cameroon, 
Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Senegal. [64][65][66][67][68][69]

And again in 2010-2011: 

 
For those who think that adaption to climate change is feasible, please consider what Kurt Cobb articulates in a recent post:

…costly existing agricultural infrastructure won’t be easily moved or replaced. …soil quality is not uniform from place to place. [Do you] think that as temperatures warm and devastate the American grain belt with recurrent drought, we can simply transfer the growing of much of the world’s export grain crop north to the Canadian Shield which has soil so thin it has never supported agriculture?

The ‘Catch-22’ kicker is that the continued use of fossil fuels, the indispensable elixir of industrial civilization’s existence, is exactly what is causing climate chaos in the first place. And as I showed with one simple chart in a previous post, we are using more of this deadly ingredient than ever before. In his latest article ‘The hunger wars in our future’, Michael Klare warns us about the social disruptions that lie in the future as a result of the insidious water-energy-food nexus that grips our modern-day way of life:

…When we think about climate change (if we think about it at all), we envision rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, freakish storms, hellish wildfires, and rising sea levels. Among other things, this will result in damaged infrastructure and diminished food supplies. These are, of course, manifestations of warming in the physical world, not the social world we all inhabit and rely on for so many aspects of our daily well-being and survival. The purely physical effects of climate change will, no doubt, prove catastrophic. But the social effects including, somewhere down the line, food riots, mass starvation, state collapse, mass migrations, and conflicts of every sort, up to and including full-scale war, could prove even more disruptive and deadly…

At this point, the focus is understandably on the immediate consequences of the still ongoing Great Drought: dying crops, shrunken harvests, and rising food prices. But keep an eye out for the social and political effects that undoubtedly won’t begin to show up here or globally until later this year or 2013. Better than any academic study, these will offer us a hint of what we can expect in the coming decades from a hunger-games world of rising temperatures, persistent droughts, recurring food shortages, and billions of famished, desperate people.

Remember when both Bush, Cheney and Obama famously quipped that “the American way of life was non-negotiable.” Mother Nature and the Grim Reaper have rephrased that self-righteous slogan to read:

“The American way of life is unsustainable, non-redeemable, and a limited-time-only.”

Rio+20 Summit: the Denial of Reality in the Name of the Free Market

22 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Neo-Colonialism, Pollution

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The following article is perhaps the most important one I have posted thus far on ‘Collapse of Industrial Civilization’ because it gets at the root cause from which all the global crises have emerged, threatening not only the mass extinction of all flora and fauna, but also mankind’s own annihilation. This is the final act in the tragedy of the commons and it’s capitalism’s last gasp to commodify the rest of the planet for GDP growth, profits and the externalization of costs onto communities and the environment. There can be no price tag put on ecosystems because they are a finite entity priceless to the existence of life as we know it. But this is what is being created by the profit-at-any-cost transnational corporations in a so-called ‘green economy’ and its ‘sustainable development’. We can see this in the global land grab that was discussed in my post Hydro-Colonialism.

The Church of the Almighty Free Market is sending out its missionaries to ensure that neoliberal capitalism extracts the last bit of life from a ravaged planet teetering on the verge of ecological bankruptcy. If you want the unvarnished, non-commercialized report of the Rio Earth Summit, go here.

Big business goes to Rio – Climate and Capitalism

The upcoming Rio Earth Summit gives us a window into a fierce battle for the future of global environmental action. Danny Chivers explains what it’s all about.

 
Many people don’t even know it’s happening. But from 20-22 June more than a hundred heads of state, along with an estimated 50,000 representatives from businesses, NGOs, trades unions, local government and others will gather in Rio de Janeiro for the 2012 UN Earth Summit.

The conference’s official website makes it look like a friendly gathering of world leaders and other ‘stakeholders’ from business and civil society. However, underneath the surface layer of polite discussion documents and optimistic press releases, a battle is raging.

Harmless-sounding phrases like ‘green economy’ and ‘sustainable development’ have become grounds for bitter dispute, as different governments and business interests attempt to redefine these terms to meet their own agenda.

Like a door that swings unexpectedly open to reveal a family squabble, the 2012 Rio Summit gives us a glimpse of an argument that’s been rumbling away largely out of the public eye – an argument about the future direction of intergovernmental environmental action.

This year’s event is commonly referred to as Rio+20 as it falls exactly two decades after the famous 1992 Earth Summit in the same city. That earlier UN conference is often cited as a key moment in the history of environmental politics: it established the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21.

The price of everything

While these measures contained many fine words and good ideas, they didn’t have much regulatory force behind them and relied on voluntary actions by governments, business and civil society.

This row of well-meaning policy sandcastles have spent the past 20 years being eaten away by a rising tide of fundamentalist free-market economics, unfettered financial speculation, and consolidated corporate power.

As a result, any environmental and social gains from the first Rio summit look small next to the destruction wrought by a voracious corporate sector and by governments obsessed with growth in GDP before all else.

Global inequality has increased, natural habitats have been degraded and climate talks have been stalled by a mix of corporate lobbying and self-interested political horse-trading.

Much of this has been done by companies and politicians under the banner of ‘sustainable development’ – sustainable in this case meaning ‘able to keep making money into the future’.

A shift to a genuinely sustainable society will require us to challenge these negative forces, rein in the excesses of corporations and markets, and build an entirely different economy based on wellbeing for the many rather than profits for the few.

But Rio+20 shows little sign of achieving this. It could make things worse. The preparatory Green Economy Report launched by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2011 provoked outrage among NGOs by focusing on market-based and technological responses to the environmental crisis, rather than the underlying economic and political causes.

Silvia Ribeiro from the campaign group ETC Mexico points out: ‘Collapsing financial markets in Northern countries mean that banks and other investors are now looking desperately for new areas of expansion and speculation. We can see these desires leaving their mark on the Rio+20 process. The “Green Economy” now under discussion would unleash a wave of risky but lucrative new technologies such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology and climate technofixes. This isn’t about finding the best environmental solutions: it’s about creating profitable new investments.’

Another key theme of the 2011 UNEP report – which had investment banker Pavan Sukdhev as a lead author – was that placing a financial value on natural systems, cycles and habitats would allow markets to price them properly, and thus prevent them from being degraded.

Large polluting industries… like mafia bosses invited to a meeting on reducing gang violence

This approach has broad support from many Northern governments and institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, but has set off alarm bells elsewhere.

Thomas Barlow from the World Development Movement says: ‘The global market is a fundamental part of the problem. Through its quest for never-ending growth, it helps to drive our insatiable appetite for the things – like clean air, water, biodiversity – that nature provides.

‘Protection of these cannot be left in the hands of this market – we cannot afford to live in a world where ecosystems are protected if, and only if, there is more profit to be made by protecting them than by trashing them.

‘Protection of natural systems will only happen through bringing the market under control, not by giving it yet more power over nature.’

Unacknowledged power

What price a gliding treefrog in the costing of ‘eco-system services’ that the Rio+20 process seems to be heading towards?

How has this controversial vision of the green economy crept into the Rio+20 process? Part of the problem is that the UN is attempting to figure out a global governance system that would prevent environmental destruction, but is allowing those most responsible for that destruction to claim a disproportionate voice within the process. Large polluting industries, business lobby groups and financial institutions are welcomed in as well-meaning ‘stakeholders’ – like mafia bosses invited to a meeting on reducing gang violence.

While the UN’s stated commitment to dialogue and consensus is laudable, the process fails to acknowledge the imbalances of power that allow the wealthiest governments to wield greater influence within the negotiations, while small farmers, indigenous groups, and other representatives of affected communities are given token representation but largely ignored.

The businesses with the most wealth and power are those that have flourished in an economy based on the unrestricted use of natural resources and the exploitation of many of the world’s people. Those with the most to lose from a shift to true sustainability are therefore those with the most power to block that change. Some, like South African petrochemical giant Sasol, influence the UN process through cosy relationships with national governments. Some, like Brazilian miner Vale, muscle in on civil society networks and influence their input in the Rio process. Still others work via lobbying organizations such as the International Emissions Trading Association. Meanwhile, industry groups, like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, have had an organizing role within the various Rio+20 pre-meetings.

this kind of research accepts and reinforces the terms laid down for us by the existing system – the idea that nothing can be valued unless it has a price tag

The scientific community has also been getting increasingly vocal. A major conference called Planet Under Pressure brought together almost 3,000 scientists in London in March, with the aim of giving some stark warnings and policy advice to politicians in the run-up to Rio. The ‘State of the Planet’ declaration issued from the conference didn’t mince its words: ‘Research now demonstrates that the continued functioning of the Earth system as it has supported the wellbeing of human civilization in recent centuries is at risk… creating the potential for a humanitarian emergency on a global scale.’

The accompanying policy papers recognized the need for social change and better environmental governance, not just more technology. Useful concepts like planetary boundaries and the ‘Inclusive Wealth Index’ (an alternative to GDP) were presented, and speakers from the stage spoke repeatedly for the need for a ‘paradigm shift’ in society.

However, there was little acknowledgement of what this would mean in practice, that there are powerful interests working against such a shift and that they will need to be challenged. Instead, the general plan seemed to be just to keep on telling people about the problem and hoping that good folks from across society will agree to work together to fix it – including the big corporations.

The waters were particularly muddy in the discussions around ‘valuing ecosystem services’. Researchers have been assessing the monetary value of crucial environmental services such as the water-filtering properties of wetlands, in order to explain to policymakers just how much would be lost by damaging or destroying them. For example, the Stockholm Environment Institute calculated that the economic value of the oceans could be reduced by up to $2 trillion per year if climate change is left unchecked.

These studies are doubtless carried out with the best of intentions and may help to protect some ecosystems in the short term. However, they could also represent a dangerous first step towards the ‘costing’ of ecosystem services for trade on the open market. Rather than seeking that much-vaunted paradigm shift, this kind of research accepts and reinforces the terms laid down for us by the existing system – the idea that nothing can be valued unless it has a price tag.

Timid monstrosity

Of course, scientists aren’t a lab-coated homogeneous mass. Nor are activists all of one mind. Some NGOs and civil society groups have fully engaged with the Rio+20 process, sending submissions into the draft document and delegates to the meetings; others have preferred to spend their time mobilizing people elsewhere, including at a parallel People’s Summit which will take place in Rio during the UN talks. Many are pursuing a dual strategy, both inside and outside the talks.

However, most are united in their criticism of the draft declaration that’s been put together so far – the ‘outcome document’ that governments will sign up to at the end of Rio+20. An initial 19-page ‘zero draft’ document was launched in January as a starting point for discussion. It contained no binding resolutions of any kind, just a wish-list of voluntary actions that business and government would be ‘encouraged’ to take, and lots of mentions of a poorly defined ‘green economy’.

In response, civil society and industry groups put forward their own suggested amendments. Environmental campaigners, indigenous peoples and Southern farmers’ groups called for major changes; meanwhile, the business lobby were generally happy with the document, asking for adjustments like the removal of references to technology transfer and the role of small farmers.

Governments – often grouped into ‘blocs’ – then submitted formal amendments to the draft, with suggested additions and removals. These suggestions swelled the document from 19 to over 150 pages, reflecting the level of disagreement involved. Derek Osborn of the Stakeholder Forum has described the new draft as a ‘monstrosity’ full of ‘timidity, caution, suspicion, protection of vested interests, and even attempts to undermine and go backward on rights, actions and issues already agreed.’

Groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and La Via Campesina are calling for a very different Rio+20 agreement based on respect for people’s rights to land, food and clean water. Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of IEN, said: ‘Systems such as “payment for ecological services” and using forests in carbon offset markets do nothing but make Mother Earth into the World Trade Organization of nature.’ He stated that Indigenous Peoples from around the world would be coming together at Rio to ‘oppose an agenda based on the privatization and commodification of nature’. Campaigners like theETC Group are calling for proper technology assessment measures to be built in to any agreement, before untested geo-engineering and synthetic biology techniques are unleashed in the name of the green economy.

Quite how all of this will be boiled down into any kind of coherent final statement remains to be seen. However it emerges, the new Rio declaration will give us a snapshot of where we’re at with these crucial debates, and how far we still need to go.

Moving forwards

On a more positive note, Rio+20 has been a good opportunity to raise the profile of some interesting and potentially useful sustainability ideas. It’s also helped to bring together disparate groups and build important new alliances. For example, an international pre-Rio+20 conference organized by the Central Workers of Argentina reinforced alliances between trades unions and environmental movements. According to Lucia Ortiz of Friends of the Earth Brazil: ‘Trades Unions are getting very concerned about the “green economy” agenda, because it represents a deepening of neoliberal policies, and threatens to undermine the social rights already secured by past struggles. They are working in solidarity with environmentalists, indigenous peoples, farmers and women’s rights activists, calling instead for a transition to a sustainable and just society free from the exploitation of workers and of nature.’

The best thing to come out of Rio+20 could be the strengthening of social movements in opposition to one of its core ideas. The false green economy’s grand Brazilian showcase might just be the event that helps to trigger its downfall.

Danny Chivers is the author of The No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change: The Science, the solutions, the way forward (New Internationalist, 2010)

See also: Danny’s Radio NI interview on Rio+20 and greenwashing

In our latest podcast Danny Chivers talks about how environmental criminals are attempting to hijack Rio+20, and what we as citizens and activists can do to stop them.

Note: The People Summit held dialogues outside of the UN participation structure and published ‘Another Future is Possible’ in direct opposition to the orientations the UN negociators have been taking in the past few months. Their position: the green economy as defined in the negociations deepens “the commodification, privatization, and financialization of nature and its functions. It is a reaffirmation of full control of the entire biosphere by the economy” and is to be rejected.

Mankind’s Greatest Shortcoming: Death by Numbers

19 Tuesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Consumerism, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil

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The tipping point is only recognized and acknowledged after it’s too late. Exponential, or non-linear, growth is sneaky in that one minute things appear manageable, even benign, when in fact we are mere moments away from total saturation and death. That’s the situation we are in now, having reached the limits of growth on a finite planet. Despite all the handwringing about the Euro Crisis and fixing the problem there, the only way out is degrowth and an awareness that we must live within the means that the earth will allow. For self-serving reasons, the social hierarchy that benefits from the current system will not allow this to happen because it would mean a radical restructuring of how the economy works and how the world’s resources are used and distributed. This is the straitjacket we are caught in by those benefiting at the top of the ponzi scheme who want to use austerity in an attempt to preserve the current scheme at the expense of the masses. But under our capitalist economic system, austerity becomes self-defeating:

The reasons given by S&P, the rating agency concerned, is revealing: “we believe that a reform process based on a pillar of fiscal austerity alone risks becoming self-defeating, as domestic demand falls in line with consumers’ rising concerns about job security and disposable incomes, eroding national tax revenues” (www.standardandpoors.com).
Without growth, debt reduction becomes impossible – and yet the only way capitalism has to stimulate growth is by government intervention, thus increasing debt! Capitalism is caught in a vicious pincer movement from which it cannot escape.

The following post explains why we have reached the limits of cheap fossil-fuel driven growth, requiring an out-of-the-box thinking in order to solve our current problems.

The true danger posed by our exploding population is not our absolute numbers but the inability of our environment to cope with so many of us doing what we do.

Population: The Elephant in the Room; Peak Oil Implications on Population Growth; What Level of Human Population is Sustainable?

“In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder.” says Professor Stephen Hawking as reported by Edward Morgan in Looking at the New Demography.

Suffice to say the rate of population growth will not continue, and Morgan makes the case we are already in stage 5 of The Demographic Transition Model

click on chart for sharper image

Peak Oil Implications on Population Growth

Whereas Morgan presents a relatively benign view of things, even wondering if there are ways to reverse stage 5 decline, Paul Chefurka in Population: The Elephant in the Room sees things quite differently, primarily because of oil usage.

Each of the global problems we face today is the result of too many people using too much of our planet’s finite, non-renewable resources and filling its waste repositories of land, water and air to overflowing. The true danger posed by our exploding population is not our absolute numbers but the inability of our environment to cope with so many of us doing what we do.

It is becoming clearer every day, as crises like global warming, water, soil and food depletion, biodiversity loss and the degradation of our oceans constantly worsen, that the human situation is not sustainable. Bringing about a sustainable balance between ourselves and the planet we depend on will require us, in very short order, to reduce our population, our level of activity, or both. One of the questions that comes up repeatedly in discussions of population is, “What level of human population is sustainable?“

Oil first entered general use around 1900 when the global population was about 1.6 billion. Since then the population has quadrupled. When we look at oil production overlaid on the population growth curve we can see a very suggestive correspondence:

A closer look at the two curves from 1900 to the 2005 reinforces the impression of a close correlation:

The first questions everyone one asks when they accept the concept of Peak Oil is, “When is it going to happen?” and “How fast is the decline going to be?”

The steepness of the post-peak decline is open to more debate than the timing of the peak itself. There seems to be general agreement that the decline will start off very slowly, and will increase gradually as more and more oil fields enter decline and fewer replacement fields are brought on line. The decline will eventually flatten out, due both to the difficulty of extracting the last oil from a field as well as the reduction in demand brought about by high prices and economic slowdown.

The post-peak decline rate could be flattened out if we discover new oil to replace the oil we’re using. Unfortunately our consumption is outpacing our new discoveries by a rate of 5 to 1. to make matters worse, it appears that we have probably already discovered about 95% of all the conventional crude oil on the planet.

A full picture of the oil age is given in the graph below. This model incorporates actual production figures up to 2005 and my best estimate of a reasonable shape for the decline curve. It also incorporates my belief that the peak is happening as we speak.

In ecology, overshoot is said to have occurred when a population’s consumption exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment, as illustrated in this graphic:

Overshoot

Populations in serious overshoot always decline. This is seen in wine vats when the yeast cells die after consuming all the sugar from the grapes and bathing themselves in their own poisonous alcoholic wastes. It’s seen in predator-prey relations in the animal world, where the depletion of the prey species results in a die-back of the predators. Actually, it’s a bit worse than that. The population may actually fall to a lower level than was sustainable before the overshoot. The reason is that unsustainable consumption while in overshoot allowed the species to use more non-renewable resources and to further poison their environment with excessive wastes.

In the case of humanity, our use of oil has allowed us to perform prodigious feats of resource extraction and waste production that would simply have been inconceivable before the oil age. If our oil supply declined, the lower available energy might be insufficient to let us extract and use the lower grade resources that remain. A similar case can be made for a lessened ability to deal with wastes in our environment.

Excess Deaths

[Chefurka goes through a series of grim charts culminating with with this explanation of what is coming]

The Cost

The human cost of such an involuntary population rebalancing is, of course, horrific. Based on this model we would experience an average excess death rate of 100 million per year every year for the next 75 years to achieve our target population of one billion by 2082. The peak excess death rate would happen in about 20 years, and would be about 200 million that year. To put this in perspective, WWII caused an excess death rate of only 10 million per year for only six years.

Given this, it’s not hard to see why population control is the untouchable elephant in the room – the problem we’re in is simply too big for humane or even rational solutions. It’s also not hard to see why some people are beginning to grasp the inevitability of a human die-off.

UN Population Projections

Let’s put aside the really grim projections and simply ponder the “low population track” in the following charts of population projections from the UN.

I cannot find the article or source for that chart but the image is from a link on Seeking Alpha.

Demographic and Economic Questions

  1. Is that low UN track that unbelievable? If not, what if the starting point is now, not 2040?
  2. Who is going to pay the medical costs of all the retirees in the developed-world if people live longer and the population simply stagnates?
  3. Where are the energy resources going to come from if the population keeps growing instead?
  4. Where are the energy needs of China alone going to come from at the current rate of China’s economic growth regardless of whether the Chinese population grows or not?

Those who think we are going to “grow” our way out the the current global economic mess better have good answers for the questions in points number one and three above.

Problem number two is a huge problem in Japan right now. The US will face the same problem not too far down the road.

Those who suggest immigration and population growth is the solution to problem number two better have an answer to question number three while also explaining how immigration and population growth is nothing more than a can-kicking exercise.

The China problem is right here, right now. Peak oil all but ensures China’s growth rate is going to plunge in the not too distant future, there is going to be a huge global showdown over oil supplies with China the winner, or a cheap easy to produce means of renewable energy is found in the next five years?

Mike “Mish” Shedlock

Exporting China’s Population to Africa

16 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by in Ecological Overshoot

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The environmental disaster that has been unleashed by China’s industrialization over the last several decades has polluted not only its air and water, but also its soil. In fact, the soil has been degraded to such a degree that perhaps as much as 40% of China’s land is unusable for agriculture, as explained in the Guardian:

Scientists told the Guardian that this is likely to prove a bigger long-term problem than air and water pollution, with potentially dire consequences for food production and human health.

Zhou Jianmin, director of the China Soil Association, estimated that one-tenth of China’s farmland was affected. “The country, the government and the public should realise how serious the soil pollution is,” he said. “More areas are being affected, the degree of contamination is intensifying and the range of toxins is increasing.”

Other estimates of soil pollution range as high as 40%, but an official risk assessment is unlikely to be made public for several years….

China’s worst soil contamination is from arsenic, which is released during the mining of copper, gold and other minerals. Roughly 70% of the world’s arsenic is found in China – and it is increasingly coming to the surface with horrendous consequences.

“When pollution spills cause massive die-offs of fish, the media usually blames cadmium, but that’s wrong. Arsenic is responsible. This is the most dangerous chemical,” he said. The country’s 280,000 mines are most responsible, according to Chen.

But the land – and food chain – are also threatened by lead and heavy metals from factories and overuse of pesticides and fertilisers by farmers. The risks are only slowly becoming well known. The Economic Information Daily reported this week that pollution ruins almost 12bn kilograms of food production each year, causing economic losses of 20 billion yuan.

Chen estimated that “no more than 20% of China’s soil is seriously polluted”, but he warned that the problem was likely to grow because 80% of the pollutants in the air and water ended up in the earth….

“If we don’t improve the quality of farmland, but only depend on increasing investment and improving technology, then – regardless of whatever super rice, super wheat and other super quality crops we come up with – it will be difficult to guarantee the sustainable development of our nation’s agriculture.”

Isaac Asimov once said the following:

“Right now most of the world is living under appalling conditions. We can’t possibly improve the conditions of everyone. We can’t raise the entire world to the average standard of living in the United States because we don’t have the resources and the ability to distribute well enough for that. So right now as it is, we have condemned most of the world to a miserable, starvation level of existence. And it will just get worse as the population continues to go up… Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies. The more people there are, the less one individual matters.”


 
If you take all of China’s environmental problems in total, you come to the conclusion that they are fouling their nest to such a degree that they can no longer support a large percentage of their population which is “still growing at an absolute rate of some 10 million additional inhabitants per year, despite its government’s efforts to stabilize it, through its one child per couple policy.” This simple fact would lead one to think that China’s one-child policy would be enforced even more harshly, especially in a cratering world economy. Yesterday I saw a gruesome news story on MSNBC which supports that assertion:

… She was blindfolded, thrown on a bed, and forced to sign a document that she couldn’t read with the blindfold still on her eyes. Then two shots were injected into her belly. Thirty hours later, on the morning June 4, she gave birth to a dead baby girl.

Feng is one of the many Chinese women who have been forced to have abortions under China’s strict one-child-only policy started in late 1970s to contain the country’s fast growing population, which has now topped 1.3 billion people….

The combination of enormous environmental degradation, the one-child policy, and rampant economic growth have all factored into forcing China to export its population to foreign lands, namely Africa, in order to deal with the crisis of environmental overshoot. The following article from the Asia Times is drawn from the report “300,000,000 Million Reasons: What China Really Wants In Africa” by Cedric Muhammad, CEO of Africa PreBrief.  

While a cottage industry of “China-in-Africa” experts has emerged over the past five years, on balance their explanations of why a magnetic like pull exists between the two continents is unsatisfactory. Certainly no one denies an array of state-to-state economic and geopolitical incentives recognized by both sides. After all, the simplified resources-for-infrastructure win-win is rather obvious.

Yet and still neither of those benefits – Africa’s gain of badly needed dams, roads, pipelines and bridges and China’s receipt of desperately needed oil and minerals – is as compelling as the widely rumored and highly plausible determination that China’s mainland can only sustain 700 million persons. Therefore at least 300 million to 500 million of its current 1.2 billion population must go elsewhere. The “elsewhere” is Africa if we are to believe French authors Serge Michel and Michel Beuret, who quote an anonymous Chinese scientist in their book China Safari.

I am among those who accept the only 700 million can stay/300 million must leave hypothesis, but I find the explanation for this sorely inadequate. The reason provided for the necessary exodus of 300 million out of China is environmental degradation and in particular water scarcity – so many rivers have been polluted in China that the resource no longer exists in ample supply to satisfy the needs of a desperate Chinese population.

While lack of water is certainly a major issue (see California; Syria-Turkey; and Darfur disputes for proof) the Earth is still a very large place. Why Africa would be the destination of choice for hundreds of millions of persons fleeing a country plagued by simultaneous drought and flood, is not answered by the environmental degradation theory.

As serious as China’s population pressures and environmental woes are, there must still be a more compelling internal and external force driving individuals out of China. There must exist an irresistible motivation shaped by circumstance that draws and drives an enormous mass of Chinese into Africa.

We believe that force can be found coming from an unsuspecting source – the Chinese “one-child” policy.

Though Mao Zedong did state that “revolution plus production can solve the problem of feeding the population” and thought that China’s large population was more asset than liability, that thinking was replaced by efforts at social engineering that the Chinese government now credits with preventing 400 million births, thus keeping the Chinese population from otherwise reaching a level of 1.7 million today.

But people don’t neatly fit into the cardinal or ordinal nature of numbers, nor does their dynamism accept the rigid confines of static public policy. There have been real and unpredictable consequences on the thinking of generations of Chinese families and children living under these regulations – consequences that are now spilling over into Africa.

The pattern of history shows that people vote with their feet as much as they do by ballot and there are many illustrative examples which shed light on the Chinese “one-child” experience. One of the best available is the analogy painted by McGill University professor and economist Reuven Brenner, who years ago likened the experience of Jews living in Europe with what Chinese endure today, writing in an article “China: A Neurotic Prosperity”:

“What can be the point of reference to predict consequences of China’s current childbearing pattern, adjusted over the last decades to one-kid or you’re-out-of-your-apartment policy? To make any reliable analyses, one needs at least two points, so as to draw a straight line as a first approximation.

Fortunately for observers, though unfortunately for those who had to adjust to such social engineering, there is not much new under the sun. There has been a government in the past who passed similar regulations. The year was 1726. The place, Austria.

The Viennese court, under anti-Semitic pressures, fearing a large increase in Jewish population – a fear that by itself suggests that the Jewish birth rate at the time was relatively high – introduced a regulation. Only the eldest son of a Jewish family could marry. The younger boys could not. This regulation introduced into the Austrian empire, including Bohemia, Moravia, parts of what became later Germany, and Alsace, led to the instant migration of young Jewish generation to Eastern Europe, to Poland, to Rumania. Whereas within the Austrian Empire the Jewish birth rates dropped, in Eastern Europe they did not.

How did Jewish parents, who stayed, adapt to the regulation? As one would expect: they had less children, invested more in their education and health, and probably spoiled them much more than would have been otherwise the case. One can speculate that this regulation was the origins of the myth of the neurotic Jewish mothers, and the by now tradition of driving Jewish kids to excellence – true, occasionally, to neurotic excellence.

Will Chinese mothers and kids react in a similar fashion? At least this point of reference suggests a positive answer. Thus one unintended consequence of the one-child regulation will be prosperity driven by kids who will grow up to be very ambitious entrepreneurs.”

There are two intriguing features in this portion of Brenner’s thesis that resonate with us. The first is a comparison of regulatory 18th-century Europe with family planning policies of 20th-century China. The second is the possibility that entrepreneurship may be a more pronounced tendency of children living under such policies.

The regulations on the Jewish birth rate are not a perfect analogy but useful to our understanding of the Chinese experience under “one-child” policy, because they illustrate an incentive for Chinese to migrate elsewhere in pursuit of a greater quality of life and in order to broaden their personal and professional network which has been confined – in a familial context.

Africa represents a land of opportunity for the Chinese migrant. And history shows it is often strong kinship-based ethnic groups whose economic opportunities are more limited at “home” who become the “stranger-traders” abroad, for better or worse. This has certainly happened in parts of Africa where the Chinese represent a valuable link to manufactured goods and novel services unavailable in agrarian and peasant-like societies in Africa.

It is a link that the Jewish community played not only when they migrated into Eastern Europe as Brenner describes but also by the thousands who migrated from Alsace into the American South servicing the Mississippi Delta plantation economy as dry goods peddlers.

Far more important than the quality of the state-to-state negotiation between China and African governments covered ad nauseum by the chattering class, is the on the ground navigation of a swarm of Chinese entrepreneurs – running away from an old reality as much as they are chasing a new one. 

The Vicious Price/Demand Cycle of Peak Oil & Blackouts in Greece

06 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Peak Oil

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Various groups will continue to deny Peak Oil because to accept that oil is finite is to completely pull the rug out from under their entire construct of free markets and unlimited economic growth. To accept the reality of Peak Oil would turn their entire life upside down since Capitalism cannot exist in the energy constrained world coming at us full speed. And as you know, the resource constraints of our modern world with 7 billion humans, and 250,000 added every day, is not confined to just energy, but across the board with minerals, soil, fish, fresh water, etc.

So it comes as no surprise that we would have such a denial coming out of The American Enterprise Institute. If you do a quick search on the background of the AEI, then it becomes obvious why they would be using old-world, linear thinking to make sense of our present situation:

Some AEI scholars are considered to be some of the leading architects of the second Bush administration‘s public policy.[7] More than twenty AEI scholars and fellows served either in a Bush administration policy post or on one of the government’s many panels and commissions. …AEI is the most prominent think tank associated with American neoconservatism, in both the domestic and international policy arenas.[13]

Peak oil does not mean peak price. As I explained in an earlier post, Peak Oil: the Yoke on Future Growth, we are now in the world of a vicious cycle where the economy fluctuates with spurts of GDP growth which increase demand for oil and thus a rise in price. The consequent rise in price then dampens the economy which results in a decrease in demand and the price drops. This is the ‘rinse and repeat’ cycle we will see while riding the plateau of peak net energy, as explained by people such as Colin Campbell PhD:

…I’ve reached the conclusion that this industrial age that opened only about 200 years ago — started with coal which provided the energy which changed the world radically; provided the steam engine, the trains and everything that started to stimulate trade and industry and transport grew and that was followed by oil, as you say. And over the last 100 years or so we’ve seen the rapid expansion of oil that has just fueled everything that you can imagine.

But we are now more or less half way through the oil age and the production begins to go down and, as you say, once you reach the barrier of supply, the price goes through the ceiling, it prompts a recession, demand collapses, the price falls again and then the governments, who don’t really seem to understand what we’re talking about, they print more money out of thin air, make more credit available in the hope of stimulating consumerism and restoring past prosperity, but — and they meet a little brief success, but as they do, the demand for oil goes up again; it soon goes through the barrier and the price starts to surge. So the future price of oil is an interesting subject. And I would say myself that we’re talking about something in the range of $100-150 a barrel because if it goes above that, it just kills demand and you have growing recessions.

So I think you’re absolutely right. We have these, sort of, cycles of a little surge of prosperity followed by another recession. And we are entering the second half of the age of oil when this stuff just gradually declines.

Blackouts may occur in Greece this summer due to the acute problems it is facing in its energy flows:

Ekathimerini reported DEPA’s Haris Sachinis has advised the caretaker government that the liquidity crisis is so dire that the issue of a probable blackout should be considered a “special national emergency.”

DEPA[Greek Public Gas Corporation] is owed around €300 million by electrical energy producers, leaving DEPA unable to pay its own Turkish, Italian and Russian suppliers. Meanwhile Greece’s Public Power Corporation, DEI, is struggling to cope with hugely increased costs in its energy purchase bill. Athens News reported prices for natural gas and oil, which it relies on to produce electricity, have increased by 83 percent.

To compound the energy crisis Greece faces, the issue of oil imports is critical. Since the suspension of Iranian oil imports to Greece due to the EU embargo on Iranian oil, the debt-ridden nation is forced to purchase oil at premium prices, Ekathimerini reports.

Prior to the EU ban on Iranian oil Greece was largely dependant on the Persian state to supply crude oil on credit. Greece initially vetoed the ban on Iranian oil imports until it succumbed to pressure from its European partners, the majority of whom were not reliant on Iranian imports.

Now the bulk of oil imports are provided by Glencore and Vitol who charge a premium due to the risk. Ekathimerini reports that neither supplier would say if they would continue to supply oil to Greece in the event of a default and euro exit.

There can be no doubt that with our present way of life, which is extremely energy and resource intensive, we are somewhere over the arc of ecological overshoot. As we push the planetary boundaries past some unknown breaking point, there will be a convulsion of enormous magnitude in our complex and fragile, interconnected global civilization which will take out large chunks of the world population. Corporations have been on a land grab in recent years, securing dwindling resources at the expense of millions of subsistence farmers.