Author: Rob Mielcarski

By Richard Smith: China’s Communist-Capitalist Ecological Apocalypse

This is the best article I’ve read on China and is a must read for anyone seeking to understand the difficulty of us voluntarily doing anything to make climate change less bad.

This article seeks to explain why China’s environmental crisis is so horrific, so much worse than “normal” capitalism most everywhere else, and why the government is incapable of suppressing pollution even from its own industries. I begin with an overview of the current state of China’s environment: its polluted air, waters, farmland and the proximate causes, including overproduction, overdevelopment, profligate resource consumption, uncontrolled dumping and venting of pollutants. I then discuss the political-economic drivers and enablers of this destruction, the dynamics and contradictions of China’s hybrid economy, noting how market reforms have compounded the irrationalities of the old bureaucratic collectivist system with the irrationalities of capitalism resulting in a diabolically ruinous “miracle” economy. I conclude with a précis of the emergency steps the country will have to take to take to brake the drive to socio-ecological collapse, with dire implications for us all.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31478-china-s-communist-capitalist-ecological-apocalypse

My Certainties and Uncertainties

I’m certain peak debt will result in a financial crisis soon.

I’m certain peak oil will send us back to at best a medieval life style.

I’m certain we’ll experience 2 degrees of warming no matter what we do.

I’m certain 2 degrees of warming will be really really bad.

I’m certain we cannot make climate change less bad without shrinking the economy.

I’m certain we won’t voluntarily shrink the economy.

I’m not certain that dramatically reducing CO2 emissions, regardless if voluntary or forced, will stabilize things at a new survivable level and avoid extinction.

A lot of smart people that I respect think we have already triggered irreversible self-reinforcing feedback loops and it’s too late to stop catastrophic climate change.

It sure would be nice to see more people acting to prove these people wrong.

Popes and Words

Since CO2 emitted is proportional to dollars earned and spent I am very interested to see if the Catholic church withdraws capital from investments and dramatically reduces their expenditures.

If they don’t then the Pope is just spouting ineffective words like almost everyone else that wants to do something about climate change.

We must shrink the economy.

There is no other way to make the future less bad.

Refugees Coming or Going?

I was beginning to worry that refugee Californians would be moving to our already over-populated Comox Valley but now that we are drying out too we have other things to worry about.

It’s time for our local governments to freeze all new business and residential development in the valley.

Hopefully that might encourage some people to leave.

Century of Water Shortage Ahead?

Renewables

People that claim we can maintain our standard of living while switching from carbon to renewable energy do not know what they are talking about. There is no evidence or science to support their claim.

Renewable energy is not growing exponentially and is not replacing carbon energy. The industrialized countries growing solar energy the fastest (Greece, Japan, Italy) are the countries most likely to crash first into depression because they have no fossil carbon resources, cannot afford current energy prices, and have compensated with too much debt.

We can choose to voluntarily and peacefully reduce our standard of living now, or we can wait for nature to do it violently for us.

A voluntary economic contraction will also make climate change less bad.

Is there a solar revolution? Time for data, not adjectives

Efficiency

Tim Garrett shows that efficiency is an accelerator of economic growth rather than a means of conservation. It’s not hard to understand.

If a company increases its efficiency it will produce more profits which can be reinvested to grow the business.

Or if you insulate your home and spend the savings on an annual trip to Hawaii you will stimulate the economy and emit more CO2 than had you not insulated your home.

Efficiency can mitigate overshoot if you capture the dollar savings from the efficiency and prevent them from being spent. For example, tax all the efficiency gains and then bury the tax revenue. You could use the taxes to retire public debt but then you’d have to find a way to prevent the government from borrowing more money to replace the retired debt.

In addition, an efficient economy tends to be brittle and less resilient. For example, most businesses to increase efficiency have reduced inventories and their associated carrying costs by relying on just in time deliveries from all over the globe. If something were to disrupt global shipping and/or the credit system it depends on, most businesses would grind to a halt, including your grocery store, in a few days. Efficiency is not always a good idea. Sometimes it is wise to have some fat in the system.

Efficiency can and should be used to lessen the impact on our standard of living as the economy contracts. However people should realize that all of the low hanging fruit for efficiency has already been harvested.

I wrote more about efficiency here.

The biggest opportunities for reduced consumption are now lifestyle changes.

Denial Is An Amazing Thing

Take Paul Beckwith for example. He has done a superb job of bringing to our attention that the reality of climate change is much much worse than that reported by the IPCC and others.

At the same time he thinks we can stop further climate change if we only decided to spend enough money including, among other things, replacing fossil with renewable energy, and imposing a carbon tax. All of which won’t help and will in fact make things worse.

How can we explain this dichotomy?

My theory is that without denial he would be too depressed to continue to research and report on the reality of the crisis.

Much like Tim Garrett now seems to think that fracking will save us for a long time.