If news is true and denied we call it fake.
If news is untrue and believed we call it real.
Truth does not influence us.
Only belief influences us.
Soon reality will crush many beliefs.
Those destroyed beliefs will be replaced with different beliefs.
Like the Russians or God are to blame.
Truth won’t even be a candidate.
This essay by Ilargi will break your heart, if you have the courage to read it.
He calls it insanity. I call it evolved denial. Same thing.
https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2016/12/mass-extinction-and-mass-insanity/
We killed 58% of all vertebrate wildlife just between 1970 and 2012, and at a rate of 2% per year we will have massacred close to 70% of it by 2020, just 4 years from now. So what does it matter who’s president of just one of the many countries we invented on this planet? Why don’t we address what’s really crucial to our very survival instead?
Two thirds of our world is gone, and it’s we who have murdered it, and what’s worse – judging from our lifestyles- we seem to have hardly noticed at all. If we don’t stop what we’ve been doing, this can lead to one outcome only: we will murder ourselves too. Our perhaps biggest problem (even if we have quite a few) in this regard is our ability and propensity to deny this, as we deny any and all -serious, consequential- wrongdoing.
We treat this entire extinction episode as if it’s something we’re watching from the outside in, as if it’s something we’re not really a part of. I’ve seen various undoubtedly very well-intentioned ‘green people’, ‘sustainable people’, react to the WWF report by pointing to signs that there is still hope, pointing to projects that reverse some of the decline, chinook salmon on the North American Pacific coast, Malawi farmers that no longer use chemical fertilizers, a giant sanctuary in the Antarctic etc.
That, too, is a form of insanity. Because it serves to lull people into a state of complacency that is entirely unwarranted. And that can therefore only serve to make things worse. There is no reversal, there is no turnaround. It’s like saying if a body doesn’t fall straight down in a continuous line, it doesn’t fall down at all.
The role that green, sustainability, conservationist groups play in our societies has shifted dramatically, and we have failed completely to see this change (as have they). These groups have become integral parts of our societies, instead of a force on the outside warning about what happens within.
Conservationist groups today serve as apologists for the havoc mankind unleashes on its world: all people have to do is donate money at Christmas, and conservation will be taken care of. Recycle a few bottles and plastic wrappings and you’re doing your part to save the planet. It is utterly insane. It’s as insane as the destruction itself. It’s denial writ large, and in the flesh.
Every species that finds a large amount of free energy reacts the same way: proliferation. The unconscious drive is to use up the energy as fast as possible. If only we could understand that. But understanding it would get in the way of the principle itself. The only thing we can do to stop the extinction is for all of us to use a lot less energy. But because energy consumption provides wealth and -more importantly- political power, we will not do that. We instead tell ourselves all we need to do is use different forms of energy.
Our inbuilt talent for denying and lying (to ourselves and others) makes it impossible for us to see that we have an inbuilt talent for denying and lying in the first place. Or, put another way, seeing that we haven’t been able to stop ourselves from putting the planet into the dismal shape it is in now, why should we keep on believing that we will be able to stop ourselves in the future?
After all, if destroying 70% of wildlife is not enough for a call to action, what would be? 80%? 90? 99%? I bet you that would be too late. And no, relying on conservationist groups to take care of it for us is not a viable route. Because that same 70% number spells out loud and clear what miserable failures these groups have turned out to be.
We ‘assume’ we’re intelligent, because that makes us feel good. Well, it doesn’t make the planet feel good. What drives us is not reason. What drives us is the part of our brains that we share in common with amoeba and bacteria and all other more ‘primitive forms of life, that gobbles up excess energy as fast as possible, in order to restore a balance. Our ‘rational’, human, brain serves one function, and one only: to find ‘rational’ excuses for what our primitive brain has just made us do.
Climate scientists have been adding bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) to their models as a means for addressing climate change that allows us to do something in the future rather than today, and that may not require us to change our lifestyles.
BECCS is crazy wrong on many levels.
There is no evidence that BECCS can scale up, nor that we can afford the astronomical construction cost, or higher operating cost from the reduced power plant efficiency required to capture the carbon, or the energy to transport and process the biomass, or that we have somewhere safe to store gigantic quantities of CO2, or that any of this can be implemented on a time scale that matters, or that enough net energy will be left at the end of the process to run a hamster wheel let alone an advanced civilization.
On top of all that, humans are already using far more than their reasonable share of the planet’s primary net productivity. From which of the few wild species left are we going to take the biomass to run BECCS?
BECCS will cause us to waste precious time and money before some engineer assigned to implement it stands up and says it won’t work and should never have been considered in the first place.
Despite being crazy beyond belief it is promoted by intelligent people with PhD’s and good intentions.
And it’s our best option on the table to avoid disaster.
Wow! Where are the adults?
There must be something REALLY big and powerful, like evolved denial, in play to explain our collective crazy insanity.
Most scientists consider 2 degrees of warming to be dangerous. Common sense says 1 degree is unsafe because the recent extreme weather and loss of Arctic ice and glaciers have been caused by 1 degree of actual warming.
A new paper in the journal of Science Advances says 7 degrees is likely this century because the climate becomes more sensitive to greenhouse gases as the temperature warms.
Independent newspaper overview.
To be clear on the implications, 7 degrees will kill your children.
Much time and effort has been wasted establishing climate change agreements that will not work because the relationship between wealth, consumption, and CO2 has not been acknowledged or addressed.
We have not to date met any of our (ineffective) commitments because we do not understand the nature of our predicament. We cannot reduce climate change with a different type of economic growth. We must stop growing and contract.
Assuming feedback loops have not already taken over (meaning there is nothing we can do to avoid runaway climate change), here are the only 2 policies that would positively impact climate change and every other overshoot threat we face:
1) Increase the interest rate until the economy begins to contract on a sustained basis. An economic crash may or may not be avoidable but we have no choice.
2) Establish a one child policy with a penalty tax of say 25% of total income for every extra child. No exceptions. Countries with cultures that value males more than females should provide a subsidy to families with a daughter to keep the male/female ratio at about 50/50.
Wise countries will implement one additional optional policy:
3) Tax excess wealth and use the funds to pay down public debt.
As the economy and population contracts there will be a natural tendency for the wealth gap to widen which usually leads to social unrest, despots, and war. Wise countries will anticipate this and implement policies to prevent the wealth gap from widening. Collected taxes should be used to pay down public debt because this will help to stabilize our debt backed currency as the economy shrinks.
These policies will cause pain but doing anything else (or nothing) will cause a lot more pain.
Let’s pretend an alien came to earth to study the evolution and behavior of humans. What would it observe and conclude?
The alien observed that every human group, in every location of the planet, throughout all of human history, has had some form of religion. The alien logically concluded that religions must be associated with a reproductive fitness advantage.
The alien observed that the human species succeeds in large part due to social cooperation, and that religions serve to define, unite, govern, motivate, and entertain groups, and (especially in times of scarcity) define outside groups as enemies. The alien then understood that the reproductive fitness advantage of religions is to increase the probability of survival through enhanced social cooperation.
The alien observed that there are thousands of different religions, each with a unique story, and that each religion thinks it is the only (or most) true religion. The alien logically concluded that all religions are human imagined stories.
The alien then noticed something very odd.
The one and only thing common to the thousands of religions is that they each have some form of life after death story. Religions can and do tell every conceivable story, but religions do not need a life after death story to define, unite, govern, motivate, and entertain a group. It might be reasonable for a few random religions to include life after death in their stories, but it is not reasonable that every religion has a life after death story.
Unless, observed the wise alien, the need for a life after death story has an important genetic foundation.
The archaeological record suggests that religions with their life after death stories emerged at the same time that humans with enhanced intelligence and an extended theory of mind emerged. The alien concluded that the two must be linked. The alien reconfirmed this conclusion by observing that no other species has comparable intelligence or an extended theory mind, and no other species has a religion.
The alien was stumped to explain the link but knew that there were a few good human scientists so it went to the library and found a book on human evolution by Ajit Varki and Danny Brower. The alien learned that a mutation for an extended theory of mind, which enables an individual to understand the mind of another, would be advantageous to a social species, and would have enabled an individual through normal daily observations to understand her own mortality. All mammals have a useful inherited fear of injury and therefore mortality awareness would have caused the individual to become depressed and less likely to take the risks necessary for survival and reproduction. The mutation for an extended theory of mind would therefore not fix in the gene pool.
Varki went on to explain that if a mutation for an extended theory of mind occurred simultaneously with a mutation for denial of death, then what was a reproductive fitness disadvantage would become a powerful fitness advantage, and the two mutations would fix in the gene pool.
The probably of two rare mutations occurring simultaneously is small and the alien now understood why other social species like dolphins, elephants, crows, and chimpanzees, which would also benefit from an extended theory of mind, had not evolved one.
The alien saw that inherited denial of mortality would have caused each human group to believe a life after death story, which over time through elaboration and transmission errors, became a unique religion.
The alien observed that denial of mortality is a very strong inherited behavior. Groups frequently devote all of their surplus wealth to constructing structures to please and communicate with gods in the after life. Pyramids and cathedrals being two of many examples. The alien observed that the behavior remains strong in modern times because new religions, like Scientology, continue to have life after death stories. And atheists are often spiritual with a belief in some form of life after death.
Varki went on to explain that the mechanism within the brain for denying mortality would be relatively simple to create by mutating the fear suppression module used by mammals when they need to fight, but by necessity of how it works, is quite broad in scope. This means that humans not only deny their own mortality, but also tend to deny anything they find unpleasant which creates an optimism bias that is useful when not facing limits to growth, but harmful with limits to growth, and harmful with lifestyle choices like insufficient exercise and nicotine.
Ah, said the alien, now I understand why almost no humans acknowledge or discuss or act on their severe state of overshoot. And why climate scientists frequently fly long distances to conferences where they criticize fossil energy use, promote green growth, and never mention population reduction.
The human brain, the God it believes in, and the overshoot it enabled and denies, all resulted from the same improbable genetic mutation that occurred about 100,000 years ago.
The alien was finally able to tie up the loose ends that had been troubling it.
The alien saw, on the one hand, an intelligent species capable of impressive intellectual feats such discovering a theory to explain the origin of the universe and technologies for visiting the moon, and on the other hand, a species in a severe state of overshoot dependent on rapidly depleting non-renewable resources and destroying the habitat it needed for survival.
The alien had been perplexed at how such an intelligent species could be in such peril without acknowledging, discussing, or acting on its predicament.
The alien now understood and concluded its report with “Denial created humans, and denial will destroy humans.”
As it boarded its ship for home, the alien reflected on how lucky it was to have come from a planet where life had evolved without the need for death and therefore was able to evolve intelligence without denial.
Denial not only makes us believe in god, it is god, because denial created us, and denial may destroy us.
Non-deniers are in many ways worse than deniers because while accepting the fact of climate change they deny what it would take to actually do something about it. Many people are saying the climate will be screwed by Trump. The fact is no leader anywhere in the world is implementing the policies needed to improve the situation, namely population reduction and contracting the economy. At least Trump and his like don’t pretend to give a fuck.
https://srsroccoreport.com/end-of-the-u-s-major-oil-industry-era-big-trouble-at-exxonmobil/
The era of the mighty U.S. major oil industry is coming to an end as the country’s largest petroleum company is in big trouble. While ExxonMobil has been the most profitable U.S. oil company in the past, it suffered its worst year on record.
ExxonMobil’s free cash flow declined from $24.4 billion in 2011 to $1 billion for the first nine months of 2016. The reason for the rapidly falling free cash flow is due to skyrocketing capital expenditures and falling oil prices. But, this is only part of the picture.
… in 1997, Exxon spent $11.8 billion on capital expenditures while producing 2.5 million barrels per day (mbd) of oil. However, their capital expenditures nearly tripled to $34 billion in 2012 as total liquid production fell to 2.2 mbd. Basically, Exxon spent three times more money in 2012 to produce 300,000 barrels per day less than it did in 1997.
It seems as if Exxon realized early on that peak oil had finally arrived (privately, of course), so it decided to not waste too much money on future oil projects. Instead, the company spent a massive amount of money on stock repurchases over the past two decades… especially since 2005.
The lion’s share of their stock buybacks were between 2005 and 2014. In that ten-year period, Exxon purchased a staggering $220 billion of its own shares. Now compare that to the company’s total capex spending of $245 billion during the same time period.
As we can see, Exxon’s long-term debt has exploded from $6.9 billion in 2013 to $29.5 billion in the first half of 2016. Basically, the company is now borrowing money to repurchase shares or pay dividends.
Exxon Mobil Corp. (recently) warned that it may be forced to eliminate almost 20% of its future oil and gas prospects, yielding to the sharp decline in global energy prices.
The 100+ year era of the U.S. major oil industry is coming to an end… and fast. Unfortunately, Americans have no clue just how dire the situation has become as many probably still believe in the delusion of “U.S. Energy Independence.”
I would imagine by 2020, the U.S. will be a much different place. Regrettably, most Americans are not prepared.
I’ve read quite a few good commentaries on the election of Trump but this piece by Chris Martenson is the best as it points to many of the other good articles, and ties them together with a coherent story based on human behavior, economics, and thermodynamics.
I agree with everything that Chris said and have only three points to add.
First, it is true that most cities voted for Clinton and most rural areas voted for Trump. But another more illuminating way to describe this divide is the center vs. the periphery. As the total wealth of a country decreases, the remaining wealth shifts to the centers because that’s where the power is. The result is a widening wealth gap and increasing social unrest.
Second, the total wealth of all countries in the world will decrease a lot over the next decade due to falling net energy. There is nothing that can be done to avoid this. What can be done are policies from enlightened and brave leadership to prevent a widening wealth gap. It remains to be seen if Trump will be enlightened and brave.
Third, in case you haven’t noticed, interest rates are starting to rise. It’s a REALLY big deal if they continue to rise because they will negatively impact just about everything, including Trump’s plan for infrastructure investment. This sets up an interesting natural experiment as central banks know that rising interest rates will implode the system and so will do everything in their power to prevent rates from rising. Many people think central banks have total control of interest rates. I think not. Soon we will know the truth.
https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/103343/get-ready-change-upon-us
The political upheaval of Donald Trump is best understood through the lens of economic erosion suffered by the vast majority of people. If a democracy is measured in how well it serves the interests of the majority, the United States is not a democracy at all.
Of course, nearly everyone already knows this. But it’s been all but unspeakable in polite circles to say so.
Now, it is finally becoming okay to voice.
Here is an excellent new post by xraymike79 in which he provides a big picture summary of the facts that should be at the top of our election priority list and yet we do not acknowledge or discuss them.
https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2016/11/02/some-fun-facts-for-a-dystopic-future/
Denial is amazing.
History has proven considerably worse than the Club of Rome’s projections. The original report made only passing reference to some of the most critical environmental problems of today. In response to this, the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified a set of nine ecological processes regulating land/ocean/atmosphere and their accompanying boundaries within which humans must stay to avoid biospheric collapse. In 2015, researchers found that four of these planetary boundaries had already been breached: biodiversity loss, damage to phosphorous and nitrogen cycles, climate change and land use. None of these critical boundaries were picked up by the original Limits to Growth report. We have destroyed the stability of the Holocene Epoch and continue to wreak havoc with every passing day. In other words, there are many other environmental crises too numerous to list that are coming to a head, and catastrophic sea level rise is just the icing on the burned cake. The last time Earth had such a disruptive species, cyanobacteria altered the atmosphere and killed off all the anaerobic life forms including itself. Ironically, oxygen was the byproduct of the cyanobacteria that proved lethal to those ancient lifeforms and paved the way for the rise of photosynthetic organisms. The cyanobacteria had a 500 million year run, but modern man has only been around for 0.01% of that time. Our large brain has made it possible for us to destroy ourselves in record time.
So you would think that these stark facts laid out before us would be causing panic in the global markets and seats of power around the world because, clearly, no one is safe from this unfolding apocalypse. In what many call the ‘most powerful nation on Earth’, surely a leader must be on the verge of taking the helm of this sinking ship. In any rational world, they would be compelled to battle this planetary emergency with the war-time urgency it demands. In the election year of 2016 there are only two prospects in our corporatocracy, one of whom is so frightening that hundreds of the world’s scientists felt compelled to issue a warning against his possible election. The other candidate seems much more palatable on the surface, but her record and recent emails illustrate just how tortured her positions are on environmental issues. Anyone who has studied the numerous practices that make modern civilization truly unsustainable, the depths of corruption and waste in its global socio-economic system, and how predatory one has to be in order to survive and “succeed’ in it realizes in the end that it wouldn’t matter much who fills that figurehead position. Toeing the line of the dominant culture is a prerequisite for the job. That’s one reason why nations are building walls in response to climate change refugees and putting faith in unproven and unrealistic techno-fixes to save themselves while at the same time drilling for new oil, financing new coal plants, allowing climate goals for corporations to add up to only a quarter of the amount needed to limit warming to 2°C, and giving the shipping industry a pass on curbing its emissions(if shipping was a country it would be the world’s 8th biggest carbon polluter).
un-Denial 