This grimly humorous video comes from Mike Sosebee. A small percentage of us just can’t drink the kool-aid and prefer cold, hard reality over the myth telling and Madison Avenue song-and-dance of capitalist industrial civilization. The entire American hologram is dependent on the masses buying the illusion that all is well. Don’t look behind the curtain. There’s a mountain of corpses and ecological horrors hiding behind that thin veneer of our self-reassuring stories… stories about our corporatocracy democracy, our corporate scripted independent news media, our resource-plundering ‘freedom fighting’ military, our exploitive and destructive wealth-building economy, our move towards a “green-washed” sustainable lifestyle, etc. As commenter Dopamine says, we’re on “a dopamine drip line, a natural morphine intravenous of belief that obscures the less rewarding reality of your existence. That humans are going to turn things around is another belief assuaging the fact that our families have to spend the next hundred years walking through a minefield from which many will not emerge, and for those that do make it, there awaits a planet wasted… And we are completely unable to avoid this perilous journey because our brains quickly substitute a “feel good” fantasy whenever we venture too far into the darkness of our reality. We will walk into the darkness surrounded by pink unicorns, omnipotent Gods, visions of unspoiled paradises, the overflowing font of fusion and so on…”
Although colonizing and enslaving foreign lands and people have always been the modus operandi of this country, I’m sure the elites who founded America never could have imagined that their 1% successors would be able to manipulate the social discourse and behavior of nearly 400 million with consumer goods called TV’s and computers, nor could they have imagined the future Malthusian conditions that would eventually end not only the brief experiment of America, but the entire human experience on planet Earth. When Easter Island became uninhabitable, the rest of the planet never noticed, but now the human footprint will be felt in every nook and cranny of Earth for millennium. Paleontologist Louise Leakey, granddaughter of famed archeologist and naturalist Louis Leakey, uses the analogy of a roll of toilet paper to effectively illustrate the brief but devastatingly influential reign of mankind over the planet.
…To put the history of life on planet earth into a time perspective, imagine unrolling a toilet roll down a hillside. If there are 400 sheets of tissue paper in the roll, then the very first life in the oceans is seen at sheet 240. The age of the dinosaurs begins at sheet 19. Dinosaurs in their many forms and great diversity are around for 14 and a half sheets. Dinosaurs are extinct by the end of the Cretaceous, 5 squares from the end, making way for the mammals. Our story and place on the timeline as upright walking apes begins only in the last half of the very last sheet. The human story as Homo sapiens, is represented by less than 2 millimeters of this, some 200,000 years.
Our own individual lifetimes cannot be depicted on this final sheet of the toilet roll as it would be too thin a line, yet we have been witness to more change to the planet, to the diversity of life, global climate and natural habitats in this same time period. We are undoubtedly the cause of the sixth mass extinction event that the planet has seen in its history…
“Doomer”, as in someone concerned with apocalyptic scenarios of global collapse, is definitely a term of modern usage reflecting the growing unease of the population. People who eschew the word “collapse” in favor of “decline” seem to be hoping that the road ahead will be gentle, predictable and somewhat manageable rather than violent, erratic, and uncontrollable. With homo economicus locked into the infinite growth mantra, there appears to be no other outcome other than a sudden crashing into the fast-approaching wall of environmental limits. The aftermath will be as unrecognizable as the mangled metal of a 100 MPH car crash rather than the slow deterioration and failure of a heavily driven automobile. Oh but that’s too horrible of a thought for the masses to entertain, especially since it threatens our tranquil dreams of white picket-fenced homes with well manicured lawns. Things will be as they always have been, with only minor changes or uncertainties. The dopamine drip line is not in danger of running dry any time soon, and as things deteriorate more and more, the dosage of self-delusional drugs will be increased, lest the population starts to wake up from their stupor. The religious fanatic and mass murderer Jim Jones doesn’t hold a candle to the psychos at the helm of capitalist industrial civilization.
I’ve heard that 70% of American workers are “disengaged” or “checked out” at their job; in other words, they hate their work. This statistic is as good as any in illustrating the moribund nature of life in 21st century industrial civilization. No wonder zombie movies are so popular these days. In America’s 9 to 5, cog-in-the-corporate-wheel life, a majority of the population feels like the living dead, thoughtlessly going through the motions of slave-wage work in order to race home and crash in front of the boob tube with a microwaved dinner. Not much energy left in the day to do anything but drift to sleep while flipping through endless channels of Hollywood sitcoms, infomercials, and consumer-friendly corporate news. For the vast majority, the best hours of one’s life are spent performing this lifeless routine day in and day out. The banal and deadening existence of industrial civilization appears to be wearing on the masses, and a vague awareness of its unraveling seems to be understood on at least a subliminal level — another 100 species drops off the face of the Earth today, ice sheets and glaciers disappear at a rapid clip, weather patterns become erratic and unstable, street protests erupt in various countries, talk of pulling the plug on the money presses roils “the market”, etc.
Amongst the human chatter, some people rationalize such unusual events as acts of God, others as an illuminati conspiracy, while many believe it’s just the natural variability of the world and nothing to worry about. Forming a consensus on anything, let alone climate change, from such a divergent array of thinking in a global population of billions with different languages, governments, and cultures would be a feat of biblical proportions indeed. The hope of any significant portion of the population unplugging from industrial civilization and its carnival-like atmosphere can safely be called a pipe dream. Empire and the allure of industrial civilization entraps nearly all who enter.
Like puppets on a marionette string, the legions of indoctrinated consumers pursue the latest material object to fill a void left by everything industrial civilization destroyed. Those who step foot on this out-of-control treadmill find themselves on a trip to oblivion in which, quite literally, everything will be forgotten, as in ‘NTE’. Although jumping off this treadmill certainly has its benefits, in the bigger picture everyone gets carried over the cliff by the catatonic actions of the majority. There’s no escaping what has been called the greatest “bioevent” in geological history, from which a distinct record of our rampage through the fossil fuel carbon deposits will follow us into the Earth’s strata.
Talk of hardening communities to the effects of a destabilized and fast deteriorating climate will make the phrase “quality of life” a cynical joke; therefore, a redefining of “the good life” is essential in a future of climate chaos. The new definition certainly won’t include vacations in Miami, unless you plan on scuba diving. And the standard American dinner of meat and potatoes will likely change to simply having a stomach temporarily free from hunger pains after dining on insects, roasted rodent, and foraged weeds. And as far as a lifetime of gainful employment, everyone will be self-employed in the field of survivalism, i.e. “every man for himself.” Climbing up the “rungs of progress” will go into reverse, becoming a regress into medievalism. Of course remnants of Techno-fundamentalism will still exist, but they’ll mainly be confined to the realm of the world’s only remaining type of government – totalitarian technocracies.
There are quite a few who believe that we can hang on to some semblance of today’s global planet-killing civilization, but with so many vectors of collapse converging upon us we’ll be lucky if humans themselves survive in any significant number greater than zero. Throughout history, Empires have grown by stealing resources and energy from others. Ours is no different except that now the criminal elite have colonized the entire world under the guise of the “free market.” The school of neoclassical economics assumes unending supplies of cheap energy and resources for continued growth while ignoring waste and pollution, externalizing those costs upon the environmental commons. Money printing hasn’t solved or circumvented this false belief. It has only created phantom wealth in stock markets and asset bubbles. Today’s professional psychopaths in suits are no different than those in the past who took millions of lives with them to the grave, but this time it’s a mass extermination on a global scale — 7 billion people and counting, along with all other living things.
At the end of this post is a paper being worked on by Roger Blanchard Ph.D.[rblanchard@LSSU.edu]. He is a chemistry instructor at Lake Superior State University as well as author of several books, among them ‘The Future of Global Oil Production‘. This paper, which I assume is still in progress, is important for several reasons, one of which is the discussion on the lag time of CO2 and methane (CH4) greenhouse effects in the atmosphere as well as thermal inertia which, in this case, refers to the slow rate at which the stored heat in the ocean is transferred to the atmosphere in order to reach thermal equilibrium. The author remarks that “Few people appreciate thermal inertia and its consequences. I expect future generations to suffer the consequences for that lack of appreciation or caring.” The oceans have absorbed about 90% of the additional heat created from greenhouse gases caused by human activity. Thermal equilibrium between the ocean and atmosphere will take decades to occur:
Global warming hasn’t paused, it’s accelerating, especially in the oceans, according to a new study published online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL)…
…The scientists found that over the past decade, while surface air temperatures have not risen very much, there has been a warming of the deep oceans that is unprecedented over the past 50 years. They also found acceleration in the overall warming of the Earth. Consistent with previous research, they concluded, “In the last decade, about 30 percent of the warming has occurred below 700 meters, contributing significantly to an acceleration of the warming trend.” [Surprising Depth to Global Warming’s Effects]…
…The authors suggest that more heat is being transferred to the deep ocean layers, due to changes in wind patterns associated with an ocean cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. However, as Kevin Trenberth explained, this process is only temporary. Sooner or later the warming at the surface will accelerate once again, he said, adding, “…it contributes to the overall warming of the deep ocean that has to occur for the system to equilibrate. It speeds that process up. It means less short-term warming at the surface, but at the expense of a greater, earlier, long-term warming, and faster sea-level rise.”…
When the ocean cycles change state again, these models tell us that we can expect to see a rapid warming of temperatures at the surface. Another study published just this month in the journal Nature Climate Change has concluded that accelerated ocean warming can explain the slowed surface-air warming in recent years. Lead author Virginie Guemas noted, “If it is only related to natural variability then the rate of warming will increase soon.”
Contrary to claims that global warming has paused, the overall warming of the Earth has accelerated over the past decade. While we have experienced a respite in warming at the surface, it is a temporary one which will eventually be replaced by a rapid warming of surface air temperatures…
When we combine the temperature increase of a future loss in global dimming or the aerosol effect as well as the thermal equilibrium being eventually reached between the oceans and atmosphere, a large amount of global warming is in the pipeline to further strengthen current positive feedback loops and deepen the environmental collapse. Blanchard’s paper goes on to discusses the reasons behind the U.S. natural gas bubble which also apply to fracked oil wells.
– financial problems related to the recent glut in drilling which will affect future gas extraction projects
– the most productive shale gas deposits are peaking already
– the most productive shale gas deposits are being exploited first, leaving lower quality reservoirs as the remaining untapped places (low EROEI or EROI)
In 2007,roughly 9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) was spent to purchase the energy used by the U.S. economy to produce the goods and services that comprised the GDP. Over recent decades that ratio has varied between 5 and 14 percent. The abrupt rise and subsequent decline in the proportion of the GDP spent for energy was seen during the “oil shocks” of the 1970s, in mid-2008, and again in 2011. Each of these increases in the price of oil relative to GDP had large impacts on discretionary spending—that is, on the amount of income that people can spend on what they want versus what they need. An increase in energy cost from 5 to 10 or even 14 percent of GDP would come mainly out of the 25 percent or so of the economy that usually goes to discretionary spending. Thus changes in the amount we spend on energy (much of which goes overseas) have very large impacts on the U.S. economy since most discretionary spending is domestic. This is why each significant increase in the price of oil (and of energy generally) has been associated with an economic recession, and it suggests that declining EROI will take an increasing economic toll in the future. – source
So I’m wondering what energy and finance resources our children and grandchildren will have left to fix the ecological wasteland we are leaving behind, if such a clean-up were even possible. There will be no clean-up, let alone mining of asteroids. The Skagit Riverbridge collapse, one of 69,000 structurally deficient bridges which haven’t been updated in decades, is just the latest sign of America’s neglected and crumbling infrastructure. Money printing cannot go on forever in a world of depleting energy.
Modern economic growth is based on systematically carrying out all three of the following:
Using up renewable resources faster than they can be replenished.
Generating wastes faster than the environment can absorb them.
Exhausting non-renewable resources.
Any system predicated on these actions will not survive indefinitely.
The short term profit-seeking, Darwinian paradigm of capitalism will abdicate to nature the responsibility of dealing with pollution and ecocide and resource depletion; nature will exact its revenge by culling the human population through wars, famine, disease, and eco-collapse. According to the tenants of capitalism, only the fittest will survive. This fear in the unwashed masses of a coming societal collapse and nature’s retribution is based on reality and is a primary source for the obsession with future dystopian societies and post-apocalyptic stories in American pop culture.
We’re approaching the one year anniversary of this website and I really have not explicitly stated my core beliefs and ideas. So let me begin by stating ten essential positions of this website:
1.) Anti-Capitalist. Capitalism has several fatal flaws which we’ve discussed here in numerous posts. It is at the root of our social and environmental ills. A system which atomizes society, turning each against the other as competitors and targeting all members of society with a nonstop stream of marketing and advertising propaganda, is the antithesis of a community-building ethos.
…cast your eyes on capitalism as a meme that effectively mutates the thinking of people, turning them into over consumers and profiteers. It is the relentless drive to grow profits that pushes us to do what we do. And that meme has metastasized globally. That is the real disease.
The original capitalism arose as a means to aggregate enough excess harvest so as to re-invest in capital equipment (before formal depreciation entered the scene) for the farm or village. It quickly led to investment in growing the capacity of a community to support more people and have more stuff and that led us, eventually, to what we have today — unbridled avarice and waste… ~ George Mobus
2.) Anti-Imperialist. Imperialism is the economic dominance and exploitation of a country, often underwritten by military force.
3.) Anti-Militarist (not the same as Pacifist). This stance goes along with 1 and 2. The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) has become a branch of government unto itself. ‘War for profit’ is big business with retiring generals becoming consultants to the weapons manufacturers. A large percentage of congressmen and senators are personally invested in the American war machine. With the War on Terror, the tail is wagging the dog.
4.) Man is part of nature, not separate from it. All life forms on Earth have intrinsic worth which cannot be accurately monetized or commodified. Economic activity by humans incurs environmental costs, but these costs are externalized. An economy which internalizes these costs is the only sustainable system able to support human societies long-term. What is the final cost of CO2 emissions, but likely the extinction of the human species along with everything else (6th Mass Extinction).
5.) Technology is not corrupt, the system is. I am not anti-technology. How a society applies a particular technology determines that technology’s social worth. Do we use it to keep vegitative patients alive at great cost? Do we use it to produce energy whose byproduct is toxic waste lingering for eons? Do we use it to annihilate each other under a mushroom cloud?
Many citizens of industrial capitalism have become technophiliacs, developing an unhealthy and unrealistic faith in the ability of technology to solve any and all problems. That’s a failure of a social system which deifies technology, promoting it as a cure-all while also using it to reproduce inequality and injustice.
Speaking on the Arab Spring and the Egyptian Revolution, Professor David Correia says:
…In the end, the particular objects and artifacts of everyday “technology” are the tools of corporations and authoritarian governments. And by now it should be clear that democracy and capitalism do not cohere and the revolution cannot be carried out via “technology.” Rather the struggle must become a struggle over the social, political and economic conditions that have made the everyday objects of technology—our digital campfires—nothing more than the tools of authoritarian despotism and capital accumulation.
6.) We live under a form of growing tyranny called inverted totalitarianism. I first read about the term inverted totalitarianism from journalist Chris Hedges who quotes from political philosopher Sheldon Wolin. Hedges has done a great job of documenting and explaining the rise of the corporate state in this country and around the world. From the Fourth Estate to higher education to all other social institutions and venues, we have literally been ‘occupied’ by corporations.
7.) Climate Change, or more aptly ‘climate disruption’, is human-caused.
Our use of fossil fuels since the beginning of the industrial revolution has disrupted the natural carbon cycle of the planet. I have numerous links on this site to scientific findings proving that climate change is happening and is caused by human activity. The evidence is overwhelming and supported by near unanimity amongst the scientific community. The fossil fuel lobby is extremely powerful and has financed a ‘public deception’ campaign to cast doubt on the root cause of climate change.
8.) Peak Oil is real and happening. It’s all about Energy Return on Investment (EROEI), and it’s a liquid fuel crisis. Despite the rampant self-deception of carbon man and the ‘public deception’ campaign by the fossil fuel industry, America is not and will not become energy self-sufficient in its current configuration of ‘urban sprawl to nowhere’ and its capitalist cornerstone of the automobile industry (individualized transportation).
Despite increased efforts to get more drivers to adopt fuel-efficient vehicles, U.S. households spent the highest percentage of their income on gasoline in 2012 than they did in any other year in nearly three decades except for 2008, according to new estimates.
The Energy Information Administration reported that the average household spent $2,912 on gasoline in 2012, or nearly four percent of their pre-tax income. – source
9.) Peak everything is happening. From industrial minerals which serve as the building blocks for modern civilization to the seafood that we eat, humans are eating the planet out of house and home. The energy bonanza of fossil fuels enabled the human population to spread far and wide, becoming a force of nature which now has the dubious distinction of having a geologic era named after it – The Anthropocene – and which has spurred one Professor to start a campaign in order to rename Homo sapiens to something other than ‘wise’. The Four Horsemen of Industrial Civilization (Climate Change, Peak Net Energy, Ocean Acidification, and Peak Water) are converging to bring Homo sapiens reign to an end.
10.) With business-as-usual, humans will likely become extinct by the end of this century or shortly thereafter. Multiple tipping points have already been triggered which will have non-linear and self-reinforcing feedback effects. We have covered many of these feedback loops on this site. Suffice it to say, only the timing of the final consequences is debatable at this point. Massive and radical changes to our society could always be started to lessen the final impacts, but such a proposal is like telling a nicotine addict, who smokes through their tracheostomy, that “it’s never too late to quit.” Ugghh!
So I think we can all agree on most if not all of the above statements. If there are any questions on my core beliefs or if there are ideas which you think should have been included, then let me know. By the way, none of the above positions makes me a “Doomer”. I hate that title. I’m a realist.
Humans are the premier practitioners of hype.
At this very moment, brave conservationists are risking their lives to protect dwindling groups of existing African forest elephants from heavily armed poachers. And here we are in this safe auditorium talking about bringing back the Woolly Mammoth. Think about it… Hype can come back to bite you.
Paul F. Getty brought to my attention a new essay written by environmentalist Daniel A. Drumright. I featured his writing in a prior post entitled ‘The Day The Whole World Went Away‘. This new one, entitled ‘The irreconcilable acceptance of near-term extinction‘, was a bit long-winded for me, so I have whittled it down to the meat and potatoes and corrected a few typos. It’s worth your time to read it. I cannot find any fault with the machinations of capitalism he describes and his general outline of how things will fall apart, but of course the timing is always up to debate. However, seeing that the disintegration of the Arctic is happening faster than any scientific models had predicted, global famine may come much sooner than most know.
In conjunction with this essay, I would also point you to a recent post by Robert Scribbler – ‘For Central US, Climate Change and a Mangled Jet Stream Means Drought Follows Flood Follows Drought‘ – which should help bring everyone up to speed with some ominous trends in the climate of Earth. Humans are continuing to pump so much CO2 into the atmosphere in such a very short time span, geologically speaking, that a considerable lag time has built up, in terms of human time scales, for the final catastrophic effects to play out over the coming decades and centuries.
As far as how one should live their life from here on out, Daniel says “ethical hedonism” is the choice he has made in the face of NTE[Near Term Extinction]. As for myself, a lot of people are dependant on me, so I cannot take that route.
For anyone else reading this, how will you live henceforth, knowing the end is near?
The horrific bombings which took place recently at the Boston Marathon are the most significant terrorist attack to have occurred on U.S. soil since 9-11. My condolences go out to the innocent victims. Ideologies of any sort can be twisted to justify abhorrent acts. This terrorist act opens up old wounds for an Empire which in the last decade has gone on the offensive, spending vast resources on foreign wars and a security and surveillance state. Even with such Herculean expenditures, the asymmetric nature of terrorism demonstrates there is no foolproof solution for preventing such acts. The perpetrators spent perhaps a few hundred bucks on their homemade bombs, and we spend incalculable multiples of treasure and blood in return. This was really the goal of Osama bin Laden – to draw the Empire into costly wars and expenditures of life and limb. As has been stated by others, the best that can be hoped for from a military standpoint is to keep terrorist groups in a constant degraded and disorganized state. As much as left-leaning individuals as myself like to point out the foreign policy “transgressions”(to put it mildly) of the American Empire, decades of capitalist imperialism will never be put back into the bottle. Such bombings are pretty much daily occurrences in war-ravaged Iraq and Afghanistan as well as other areas of the Middle East. Our incursions into those countries only seem to have fueled the fire.
A law enforcement official had some interesting info on the bombings:
…A preliminary analysis of the bombs, which went off near the race’s finish line on Boylston Street, suggests they are similar to the improvised explosive devices found in war-torn regions like Iraq and Afghanistan, the law enforcement official said.
“The shrapnel, the simplicity of it — it’s something right out of the Iraq War. A basic roadside bomb,” the official said.
That “basic bomb” can be seen in the design of the Boston bombs, the law enforcement official said: pressure cookers stuffed with nails, ball bearings and other projectiles, and hidden in black duffel bags left near the 26.2 mile mark in the race.
What appear to be fragments from a pressure cooker were recovered at the scene, along with BBs, nails and black-nylon fragments possibly from a bag used to house the device, the FBI said.
Black explosive powder and a circuit board believed to have been used to detonate the bombs were also found, the federal official said.
Similar explosives have been used in third-world hot spots from South Asia to the Persian Gulf, and one of the devices used in the botched bombing of Times Square in May 2010 employed a pressure cooker.
The Pakistani Taliban, which claimed blame for the 2010 Times Square attempt, said it had no role in the Boston attack, according to The Associated Press.
A 2010 bulletin issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI warned pressure-cooker bombs are as easy to transport as they are to conceal.
“Terrorists can exploit the innocuous appearance of easily transportable items such as pressure cookers to conceal IED components,” the alert said. “Placed carefully, such devices provide little or no indication of an impending attack.”
That some victims lost limbs in the blast puts the device “into a powerful class,” said John Goodpaster, head of the forensic science program at Indiana University–Purdue University, and former chemist with the federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Goodpaster said the blasts appeared to be from a “high explosive of some kind, military explosive, commercial explosive or improvised explosive.”
…
The sooner the world can get off MENA oil, thereby pulling the plug on the financial network of terrorist groups, the better off we’ll all be, not to mention our indispensable biosphere.
According to Wikipedia resources:
…Saudi Arabia is said to be the world’s largest source of funds for Salafi jihadist terrorist militant groups, such as al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba in South Asia, and donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide, according to Hillary Clinton.[1] According to a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state, “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups.”[2]
The violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan is partly bankrolled by wealthy, conservative donors across the Arabian Sea whose governments do little to stop them.[1] Three other Arab countries which are listed as sources of militant money are Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, all neighbors of Saudi Arabia…
…Actually 70 percent isn’t unheard of for Portugal. For a few hours in 2011, Portugal was entirely run on renewable power. Yet this was the first time so much was sustained for a quarter.
Portugal’s investment in modernizing its electricity grid in 2000 has come in handy. Like in many countries, power companies owned their own transmission lines. What the government did in 2000 was to buy all the lines, creating a publicly owned and traded company to operate them. This was used to create a smart grid that renewable energy producers could connect to (encouraged by government-organized auctions to build new wind and hydro plants)…
Of course planet Earth has an avalanche of environmental problems coming to a head in the near future (all caused by humans, mind you), but it’s good to see some accomplishments in at least one area of human impact – reduction of fossil fuels – even if it may be too little, too late.
…a second Dark Age had fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on “free” markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy. Moreover, the scientists who best understood the problem were hamstrung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind–even those involving imminent threats. Here, our future historian, living in the Second People’s Republic of China, recounts the events of the Period of the Penumbra (1988–2073) that led to the Great Collapse and Mass Migration (2074)…
The paper starts off with a brief history of industrial civilization’s chemical and material pollutions overloading the Earth’s environmental sinks. The sheer volume of mankind’s activities, from the Ozone Hole created by CFC’s to the resource-depleting diet of industrial cattle-farming, became a force of nature unto itself threatening the very habitability of the planet. The scientific community began to recognize that man’s industrial activities were upending the earth’s life support systems; various organizations and institutions were created to try to ‘protect the environment’, but the interests of free market capitalism with its high-consumption lifestyle created a backlash against any restriction and attempts to recognize the limits of the human economy’s unending growth. The party had to continue no matter how dire the consequences. 1988 is said to have marked the beginning of the “Penumbral Period”, perhaps meaning a time of partial illumination where the threat was seen, but no effective action was taken. Indeed, we dug our grave faster with the building of evermore coal-fired plants and the destruction of the remaining ecosystems in the face of a series of extreme and ominous weather events which had the earmarks of manmade climate change.
By the early 2000s, dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system was under way. Fires, floods, hurricanes, and heat waves began to intensify, but these effects were discounted. Those in what we might call active denial insisted that the extreme weather events reflected natural variability, despite a lack of evidence to support that claim. Those in passive denial continued life as they had been living it, unconvinced that a compelling justification existed for broad changes in industry and infrastructure. Scientists became entangled in arcane arguments about the “attribution” of singular events; however, the threat to civilization inhered not in any individual flood, heat wave, or hurricane, but in the overall shifting climate pattern, its impact on the cryosphere, and the increasing acidification of the world ocean…
…what was anomalous in 2021 soon became the new normal. Even then, political, business, and religious leaders refused to accept that the primary cause was the burning of fossil fuels. A shadow of ignorance and denial had fallen over people who considered themselves children of the Enlightenment. For this reason, we now know this era as the Period of the Penumbra.
If you don’t like reality, then withdraw into fantasy and rewrite history; “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” said Karl Rove.
In the early Penumbral Period, scientists were accused of being “alarmist” in order to increase financial support for their enterprise, gain attention, or improve their social standing. At first, the accusations took the form of public denunciations; later they included threats, thefts, and the subpoena of private correspondence. Then legislation was passed (particularly in the United States) that placed limits on what scientists could study and how they could study it, beginning with the notorious “Sea Level Rise Denial Bill,” passed in 2012 by the government of what was then the U.S. state of North Carolina (now part of the Atlantic Continental Shelf ) and the Government Spending Accountability Act of 2012, which restricted the ability of government scientists to attend conferences to share and analyze the results of their research.
Though ridiculed when first introduced, the Sea Level Rise Denial Bill would become the model for the U.S. National Stability Protection Act of 2022, which led to the conviction and imprisonment of more than three hundred scientists for “endangering the safety and well-being of the general public with unduly alarming threats.” By exaggerating the threat, it was argued, scientists were preventing the economic development essential for coping with climate change. When the scientists appealed, their convictions were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court under the Clear and Present Danger doctrine, which permitted the government to limit speech deemed to represent an imminent threat.
…robust evidence shows that people systematically overestimate the probability of positive future contingencies, and underestimate the probability of negative ones — only those who are depressed or dysphoric come to accurate assessments…
Diogenes of Sinope must have practiced a sort of philosophical dysphoria.
Another cause for modern man’s downfall was the adoption of an excessively stringent standard for accepting causal links between climate change and human industrial activities:
…Historians have long argued about why this standard was accepted, given that it had no substantive mathematical basis. We have come to understand the 95 percent confidence limit as a social convention rooted in scientists’ desire to demonstrate their disciplinary severity. Just as religious orders of prior centuries had demonstrated moral rigor through extreme practices of asceticism in dress, lodging, behavior, and food–in essence, practices of physical self-denial–so, too, did natural scientists of the twentieth century attempt to demonstrate their intellectual rigor through intellectual self-denial. This practice led scientists to demand an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind, even those involving imminent threats…
CO2 emissions continued to rise not only in developing countries, but also developed countries as fossil fuel production accelerated with shale gas extraction and Canadian oil-sand processing. The world was firmly in the grasp of the fossil fuel energy trap.
…How did these wealthy nations–rich in the resources that would have enabled an orderly transition to a zero net-carbon infrastructure–justify the deadly expansion of fossil fuel production? Certainly, they fostered the shadow of denial that obscured the link between climate change and fossil fuel production and consumption. They also entertained a second delusion: that natural gas from shale could offer a “bridge to renewables.” Believing that conventional oil and gas resources were running out (which they were, but at a rate insufficient to avoid disruptive climate change), and stressing that natural gas, when combusted, produced only half as much CO2 as coal, political and economic leaders persuaded themselves and their constituents that promoting shale gas was an environmentally and ethically sound approach.
This line of reasoning, however, neglected three crucial factors. First, fugitive methane emissions–CH4 that escaped unburned into the atmosphere–greatly accelerated warming. (Again, scientists had foreseen this phenomenon, but their predictions were buried in specialized journals.) Second, the argument presupposed that net CO2 emissions would fall, which would have required strict restrictions on coal and petroleum use. Third, and most important, the sustained low prices of fossil fuels, supported by continued subsidies and a lack of external cost accounting, undercut efficiency efforts and weakened emerging markets for solar, wind, and biofuels (including crucial liquid biofuels for aviation). Thus, the bridge to a zero-carbon future collapsed before the world had crossed it. The bridge to the future became a bridge to nowhere.
The following scenario seems to me to be our most likely future under the current path of business-as-usual:
…The net result? Fossil fuel production escalated, greenhouse gas emissions increased, and climate disruption accelerated. In 2001, the IPCC had predicted that atmospheric CO2 would double by 2050. In fact, that benchmark had been met by 2042. Scientists had expected a mean global warming of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius; the actual figure was 3.9 degrees. Though originally merely a benchmark for discussion with no particular physical meaning, the doubling of CO2 emissions turned out to be significant: once the corresponding temperature rise reached 4 degrees, rapid changes began to ensue.
By 2040, heat waves and droughts were the norm. Control measures such as water and food rationing and Malthusian drills had been widely implemented. In wealthy countries, hurricane- and tornado-prone regions were depopulating, putting increased social pressure on areas less subject to those hazards. In poor nations, conditions were predictably worse: rural portions of Africa and Asia were already experiencing significant depopulation from out-migration, malnutrition-induced disease and infertility, and starvation. Still, sea level had risen only 9 to 15 centimeters around the globe, and coastal populations were mainly intact.
Then, in the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2041, unprecedented heat waves scorched the planet, destroying food crops around the globe. Panic ensued, with food riots in virtually every major city. Mass migration of under-nourished and dehydrated individuals, coupled with explosive increases in insect populations, led to widespread outbreaks of typhus, cholera, dengue fever, yellow fever, and, strangely, AIDS (although a medical explanation for the latter has never been forthcoming). Surging insect populations also destroyed huge swaths of forests in Canada, Indonesia, and Brazil. As social order broke down, governments were overthrown, particularly in Africa, but also in many parts of Asia and Europe, further decreasing social capacity to deal with increasingly desperate populations. The U.S. government declared martial law to prevent food riots and looting, and the United States and Canada announced that the two countries would form the United States of North America in order to begin resource-sharing and northward population relocation. The European Union announced similar plans for voluntary northward relocation of eligible citizens from its southernmost regions to Scandinavia and the United Kingdom…
World leaders convened to hastily put together a climate geoengineering scheme in an effort to halt the collapse, but unforeseen side effects occurred and the project was immediately stopped, resulting in even more dire consequences. Various feedback loops unleashed a “Venusian death” on planet Earth:
…This massive addition of carbon led to what is known as the Sagan effect (sometimes more dramatically called the Venusian death): a strong positive feedback loop between warming and CH4 release. Planetary temperature increased by an additional 6 degrees Celsius over the 5 degree rise that had already occurred…
The rapid melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Greenland Ice Sheet resulted in massive sea level rise and more apocalyptic human and non-human suffering:
…Analysts had predicted that a five-meter sea level rise would dislocate 10 percent of the global population. Alas, their estimates proved low: the reality was closer to 20 percent. Although records for this period are incomplete, it is likely that 1.5 billion people were displaced around the globe, either directly from the impacts of sea level rise or indirectly from other impacts of climate change, including the secondary dislocation of inland peoples whose towns and villages were overrun by eustatic refugees. Dislocation contributed to the Second Black Death, as a new strain of the bacterium Yersinia pestis emerged in Europe and spread to Asia and North America. In the Middle Ages, the Black Death killed as much as half the population of Europe; this second Black Death had similar effects. Disease also spread among stressed nonhuman populations. Although accurate statistics are scant because twentieth-century scientists did not have an inventory of total global species, it is not unrealistic to estimate that 60 to 70 percent of species were driven to extinction…
This doomsday narration then ends with a sort of “happy note” which seems to me to be wishful thinking, an improbable turn of events which saves mankind from total extinction. The last few pages discuss more the pitfalls that mankind fell into leading to such a dire fate: positivism or Baconianism and market fundamentalism.
…power did not reside in the hands of those who understood the climate system, but rather in political, economic, and social institutions that had a strong interest in maintaining the use of fossil fuels. Historians have labeled this system the carbon-combustion complex: a network of powerful industries comprised of primary fossil fuel producers; secondary industries that served fossil fuel companies (drilling and oil held service companies, large construction firms, and manufacturers of plastics and other petrochemicals); tertiary industries whose products relied on inexpensive fossil fuels (especially automobiles and aviation); and financial institutions that serviced their capital demands. Maintaining the carbon-combustion complex was clearly in the self-interest of these groups, so they cloaked this fact behind a network of “think tanks” that issued challenges to scientific knowledge they found threatening…
…When scientists discovered the limits of planetary sinks, they also discovered market failure. The toxic effects of DDT, acid rain, the depletion of the ozone layer, and climate change were serious problems for which markets did not provide a spontaneous remedy. Rather, government intervention was required: to raise the market price of harmful products, to prohibit those products, or to finance the development of their replacements. But because neoliberals were so hostile to centralized government, they had, as Americans used to say, “painted themselves into a corner.” The American people had been persuaded, in the words of President Reagan, that government was “the problem, not the solution.” Thus, citizens slid into passive denial, accepting the contrarian arguments that the science was unsettled. Lacking widespread support, government leaders were unable to shift the world economy to a net carbon-neutral energy base. As the implications for market failure became indisputable, scientists came under attack, blamed for problems they had not caused but merely documented…
Watching the following video, we can see such a future, as describe above, being played out before our very eyes:
Real Time episode with Bill Maher – aired April 5, 2013: Bill Maher led an intense panel discussion on the reliability of science on his show tonight, with Maher, Abby Huntsman, Senator Bernie Sanders, and 19-year-old science education activist Zack Kopplin arguing with Wall Street Journal columnist Steve Moore over scientific consensus on global warming. Moore continually insisted the debate is not over, but Maher repeatedly explained how sound science is not up for debate and that Moore should “have the humility” to defer to actual scientific experts on the issue…
The blood-drenched money interests of U.S. weapons manufacturers and the military industrial complex win again:
While President Obama has forcefully called out Congress for not passing gun control, the United States has been one of the leading countries blocking a global treaty to regulate the $70 billion international arms trade, torpedoing it last summer and dragging its feet on it this week at the United Nations. While Iran, Syria and North Korea are generating headlines for officially blocking the treaty, less attention has been paid to the role of the U.S. — acceding to pressure from outside groups including the National Rifle Association — in stalling its progress.
In an earlier post ‘The Sandy Hook Massacre and the Merchant$ of Death‘, we talked about the control that the U.S. weapons industry and the military industrial complex(MIC) have over ‘our’ government. The MIC dictates American foreign policy in the interests of not only Big Oil and corporate capitalism, but also the U.S. arms industry which sees big profits in war and strife. Some call this corrupt arrangement the military-industrial-congressional complex or military-industrial-banking complex. Perpetual war has become an integral part of our economy and a majority of our wealthy Congress ‘leaders’ are heavily invested in this war-for-profit machine. Chances are that your 401K, if you still have one, is invested in the MIC one way or another. Here is the latest infographic illustrating our war-based economy:
And the costs keep getting bigger and bigger as the Empire bleeds its citizens dry at home, spreads ill will and animosity abroad, and continues to funnel wealth upward to the oligarch class:
This is why I have said that America is ‘The World’s Most Destabilizing Force‘. Do you really think a “pussy-ass” topic of saving the biosphere will ever be taken seriously? Environmental issues will always be relegated to the back pages when you have savages running the show.
If the supposed “most enlightened” and “advanced” nation on Earth profits from death and destruction and uses Orwellian titles, for example Operation [Iraqi] Freedom, to label their military invasions, then how can we judge the behavior and actions of foreign nations when they are often the blowback from America’s own depravity. A nation using high-tech weapons of war to plunder and murder while hiding behind the façade of democratic institutions and kangaroo courts is still a country of savages and barbarians, no different than Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun.
…Emmy-award winning TV journalist, author and media critic, Danny Schechter turns the cameras on the role of the media. His new film, WMD, is an outspoken assessment of how Pentagon propaganda and media complicity misled the American people…
I almost never watch MSM news, but the other day a preview of a show with Dan Rather about the die-off of bees caught my attention. People were horrified that their business would be hurt, profits would be eviscerated, livelihoods would be irreparably damaged. It’s all about the humans and their economy, not the ecological balance of the planet or what humans have done to push all these non-human species into extinction, in turn threatening homo sapiens’ existence.
Everybody’s livelihood is at stake here over a little flying bee.
Mother Nature thinks the same thing of us: “The Earth is being forever defiled by these arrogant, self-centered bastards and all they can think about is their profit margin.”
Guess what. The Earth doesn’t care about human wants or needs. A misused and abused Earth does not consider the inconveniences to the human economy posed by climate chaos and environmental collapse. The other creatures inhabiting this planet are being silently driven off the face of the Earth to make way for humankind’s insatiable appetite for domination and control. A creature which sees itself as a force of nature to be reckoned with, separate and superior to the planet that spawned it, will soon be brought down by such conceit. I hope we can handle being the only thing left on the planet. We can pollinate our own crops like the Chinese, and bring back extinct species at will to be placed in zoos for our amusement. We can geoengineer the Earth ‘s atmosphere to fix what we’ve destroyed in a vain effort to maintain this colossal edifice of industrial civilization. We can genetically modify crops so as to try to adapt to the drastically altered environment we’re handing down to future generations, human and non-human. Better yet, we can genetically modify ourselves to survive within this toxic world we’ve created. There is no fucking end to our God Complex.
Connection with the outside world has been replaced by a virtual world of electronic devices – TV’s, computers, video games, iphones, blackberries, and other assorted digital devices – filling every public and private space with the latest infotainment news and gossip of a throwaway pop culture. The masses watch reality TV shows to escape from their own hollow reality of slave wages, deadend jobs, a collapsing environment, and the faux democracy of corporate rule.
Driven into the military as the only avenue out of poverty, many soldiers commit suicide to escape the clutches of an industrial war machine that chews up foreign countries and cultures in order to extract resources onto the chopping block of the global marketplace. Blood for oil; souls for dollars. The last remaining vestiges of a living planet get pulled into the marketplace to be commodified, priced, and privatized. Damaged soldiers come home to a jobless economy while their leaders who sold them these wars travel the country doing book signings and lauding their war crimes as accomplishments.
How can such a system survive when the only thing it knows how to do is treat everything as inanimate objects whose only real value is to serve the desires of a self-absorbed species? Humans are amusing themselves to death in their fabricated world of alsphalt, concrete, and steel while the real world burns under the slow-motion detonation of climate disruption and mass extinction. The scientists think they can save the world with new technology even while prior technology is ripping the world apart. Rather than add yet another layer of unsustainable complexity, perhaps it’s time to escape this technology trap and simplify our way of life before becoming victims of our own perceived success.
I was researching a bit on the Cyprus meltdown and found the usual exaggerated talk of Russian “black money” and the spendthrift Cypriots, but cutting through the noise are two articles on this subject of the Cyprus debt crisis. The first is by theoretical physicist Mano Singham:
“…Ordinary Cypriots, like ordinary citizens in the Netherlands and Germany and anywhere else, had little or no say in how their governments and banks operate. They just go about their lives, working and putting some money away in savings. But governments and big banks set policies that favor the global financial oligarchy and enable them to send vast amounts of money rapidly around the globe in order to get high returns, by lending to governments through the banks.
But when things go sour and governments cannot repay, what they do is pit ordinary people of the donor countries against the ordinary people of the recipient countries in their efforts to make sure that the oligarchy in untouched. By causing people to think that ‘hardworking’ Dutch and Germans are subsidizing ‘lazy’ Greeks and Spaniards and Cypriots, and throwing in ‘greedy’ Russians into the mix, they manage to obscure the fact that they are all getting exploited because the allegiance of all their governments is to the big banks, and that the global oligarchy is really calling the shots through its puppets in the IMF and the ECB.
One sees this over and over again in other contexts. In the US we see how the oligarchy pits Chinese or Mexican workers against American workers, making them see each other as the enemy and fight with each other, when the real winners, all the time, are the global oligarchy, while the real losers, all the time, are the workers in each country…
As we well know, when you[the Oligarch class] own the media, then you can spin reality anyway you want it and have the plebs fighting amongst themselves. This is why the informed person will never win with brain-washed people quoting Bill O’Reilly and other such talking heads of the corporate-owned media. Just smile and roll your eyes.
The other article is by Yves Smith at naked capitalism which goes more into detail on the American Oligarchy and dispels much of the myths surrounding Cyprus.
…Now notice how much space I’ve devoted to showing that major parts of the conventional narrative about Cyprus are not all that they are cracked up to be. But see another implicit part of the story: that Russia’s oligarchs and “dirty money” are a distinctive national creation. Do you ever hear Carlos Slim or Rupert Murdoch or the Koch Brothers described as oligarchs? To dial the clock back a bit, how about Harold Geneen of ITT, which was widely known to conduct assassinations in Latin America if it couldn’t get its way by less thuggish means? (This is not mere rumor, I’ve had it confirmed by a former ITT executive)…
…there’s been a peculiar sanctimonious reluctance to apply the word oligarch to the members of America’s ruling class. Some of that is that we Americans idolize our rich, and the richer the better. No one looks too hard at the fact many of our billionaires started out with a leg up, parlaying a moderate family fortune (for instance, in the case of Donald Trump) into a bigger one, or having one’s success depend on other forms of family help (Bill Gates’ mother having the connection to an IBM executive that enabled Gates to license MS-DOS to them).
But the fact that some people have advantages and are able to make the most of them, isn’t the reason to pin the “o” word on America’s top wealthy. It’s that, like Simon’s prototypical emerging market magnates, they increasingly dominate our society and are running it strictly for own self interest and devil take the rest of us. And the results on important metrics are worse than in Russia. The Gini coefficient is a widely-used measure of income inequality. The Gini coefficient is worse (higher) for the US than for Russia…
…Top executives have operated in a manner that is less obviously thuggish than the violent ways of some of Russia’s richest, but the hollowing out of labor and shortened job tenures have come with high costs across broad swathes of society. And the oligarchs that Johnson singled out, the elite that control the biggest financial firms, have become singularly, systematically predatory. We discussed long from in ECONNED the scale and nature of the looting that produced the global financial crisis.
And let us not forget that people are dying thanks to bank-related abuses, even though it’s not as direct or obvious as by assassinations. On the mortgage front alone, we’ve discussed for three years how many foreclosures are simply unwarranted, some created by servicers for their own profit, many of the others unjustified because it would have been better for everyone, the borrower, the mortgage investors, the broader community, for the borrower to get a modification, but the servicer put its own bottom line first and foreclosed. There have been cases of suicides on the eve of foreclosures, and even a courtroom death that was attributed to the stress of fighting a dubious foreclosure. But in addition to these clear cases of death by bank, there are many more cases where the financial distress of a foreclosure leads to a later suicide, or the curtailment of spending on health measures that shorten lifespans. The major servicers have blood on their hands as much, likely much more, than the demonized Russian oligarchs, but everyone here is too polite to say so out loud.
Confucius said that the beginning of wisdom was learning to call things by their proper names. The time is long past to kid ourselves about the nature of the ruling class in America and start describing it accurately, as an oligarchy…
The colonization of the language by the corporate media is a large part of the way the masses can be controlled without firing a bullet, as illustrated by a commenter to the above article:
It’s absurd to call the crooks who have robbed or attempted to rob the Russian people of their wealth “oligarchs”, but then to turn around and call the cut-throat corporate vultures of Wall Street elite stewards of capitalism or “philanthropists” or merely “wealthy”.
The Western press has masterfully perpetuated this hypocritical view of the wealth accumulated in the West vs. Russia and vs. China as well. Notice that the press doesn’t dare call the Chinese billionaires in the communist party “oligarchs”.
It’s interesting how these terms get latched on to certain nations and cultures in pop-foreign-affairs discussions. It’s entirely originated by Western journalists pushing a corporate narrative of Americana that excludes the harsh reality of both the inequality and injustice of our modern system.
I’ll add that oligarchy as a term and a topic of political discussion goes back to Aristotle and the Greek philosophers.
You can’t sustain a democracy in an oligarchic state. The writers on Athenian democracy understood that 2000 years ago,”
– Chris Hedges, “The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress
The rich in the US are controlling policy. Since the 80′s they’ve been rigging the tax and regulatory framework to redistribute wealth upward.
The reality is that conservatives have been quite actively using the power of the government to shape market outcomes in ways that redistribute income upward. However, conservatives have been clever enough to not own up to their role in this process, pretending all along that everything is just the natural working of the market. And, progressives have been foolish enough to go along with this view.”
– Dean Baker, “The Conservative Nanny State
It started with Reagan, got worse in Clinton, and was maintained and finalized with the W. Bush tax cuts and benign neglect which Obama has continued (the exception are cases like Enron and Madoff, where rich people got hurt).
Oligarchy in its most basic definition is one where the ruling class protect and grow their wealth in their rule of a nation or society. Is there any doubt that, given the trends since the 80′s in both market deregulation, tax expenditures for the wealthy, and the growth in inequality and destruction of the middle class, that we have been in an oligarchal rule under the bankster corporate overlords and the military industrial complex, which includes all the moguls of Wall Street in energies, insurance, and banking.
It’s worth noting that Simon Johnson, someone who has demonstrated his competence in academia and policy at the IMF, and who has also tirelessly attempted to inform the public of the misdeeds of the powerful money changers, has focused specifically on the American oligarchs in the finance industry, as early as 2009:
In times of crisis, if the government doesn’t stand up for the people and use taxation and spending to fix the gross inequality that comes about from forms of unfettered capitalism, then the result is a massive wealth grab…
I think that sums up the situation quite nicely, and in a world of depleting resources we’ll see more of this greedy scramble for the last few slices of the economic pie as it shrinks. Get ready to pitch a tent in an American shanty town coming near you.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 