I frequently criticize Chris Martenson for ignoring and/or denying climate change and over population but I have to say his voice on world affairs is becoming wiser and stronger by the day.
This piece on the truth and consequences of our meddling in the Middle East is very good.
Another bright light shone on the darkness of our denial by Gail Zawacki, this time focused on celebrities.
Jack Alpert released a new video. He’s one of the few not in denial.
The word “sustainable” is overused and misused. This video provides some insight into what true sustainability means.
A sustainable world is a much different world than we live in, and much less abundant than most people imagine.
Notice the low YouTube view count. It seems reality is not popular.
“Anyone knows that if you get into any type of downward spiral, you have to break the cycle. You have to reverse whatever habit or behaviour is causing the problem. That realization comes with maturity and a sense of personal responsibility. We know what happens if we don’t break the cycle – we end up in a cardboard box under a bridge.
Unfortunately, this society exhibits none of that maturity. It’s an ever-more asinine and denialistic Idiocracy making up its own reality and becoming less responsible with every passing moment. Nowhere is this more on exhibit than in the area of Ponzi finance wherein every gimmick conceivable – and a few never before even considered – is used to monetize the future for consumption today.
Today’s “best and brightest” aka. the dumb and dumbest, are merely a free lunch society constantly looking for the secret to effortless wealth – “The new Eldorado”. Like a 50 year old man thinking he’s Peter Pan, while becoming more grotesque and bloated with each passing day. A fucking glazed doughnut pretending to be invincible.
Denialism is abdication of responsibility, and this society is in denial about everything. All predicated upon a hubristic sense of confidence from selling off the accomplishments of prior generations while pretending to be wealthy.
Sad and disgusting on every level.”
http://ponziworld.blogspot.ca/2015/11/peter-pan-society-bad-choices-lead-to.html
A nice article by Dahr Jamail…
“Renowned climate scientist James Hansen and multiple other scientists have already shown that a planetary temperature increase of 1 degree Celsius above preindustrial baseline temperatures is enough to cause runaway climate feedback loops, extreme weather events and a disastrous sea level rise.
Furthermore, the UK meteorological office has shown that this year’s global temperature average has already surpassed that 1 degree Celsius level.
Well in advance of the Paris talks, the UN announced that the amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere has locked in another 2.7 degrees Celsius warming at a minimum, even if countries move forward with the pledges they make to cut emissions. Hence, even the 2 degree Celsius goal is already unattainable. However, similar to the way in which national elections in the United States continue to maintain the illusion that this country is a democracy, and “We the People” truly have legitimate representation in Washington, DC, illusions must be maintained at the COP21.
Thus, the faux goal of 2 degrees Celsius continues to be discussed. Meanwhile, the planet burns.
Japan’s meteorological office announced that this past September was, by far, the warmest September on record, and records now show that October has also become the hottest recorded October. As a whole, 2015 remains easily on course to become the hottest year ever recorded.
As if to place an exclamation point on all of this information, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels hit a new milestone in excess of 400 parts per million in early 2015 – a 45 percent increase over preindustrial levels.”
This latest article by Gail Tverberg is a masterpiece. It’s long but well worth your time because it represents years of deep thought by Gail and distills everything you need to know about the economy into one paper.
It was interesting for me to learn that 1976, the year I graduated, was the year the world’s economy became permanently unsustainable. Now as we approach the bursting of the bubble that has kept our lives comfortable, it is time to take stock and make preparations for a much different world.
I expect this post will upset many in my feed – so let me first clarify I am by no means an apologist for ISIS and abhor any act of violence. But the flood of ‘Pray for Paris’ comments and discourse on the internet is a microcosm of what currently ails our societies and has unexpectedly struck a nerve with me. First, it’s elitist. We don’t pray (or even notice) when bombs go off in Baghdad or Beirut or Bangladesh, but when an attack occurs in a white, rich, Christian country, it’s the most terrible event in the world and we are frozen with horror. There are approaching 7.4 billion hominids on this planet. Billions suffer everyday from not enough to eat or violence in their countries. Millions are displaced by military aggression (ultimately about access to fossil sunlight and other precious resources). To pray for our own comfort and convenience and ignore the suffering going on outside our bubble is such a narrow gesture it’s almost insulting.
And btw, the loss of the natural world continues apace. 90% of pellagic fishes gone. 50% of wild animals gone since Ive been alive. 40% of insects gone. These tragedies are accelerating and no one prays one whit. We are eating the earth. Who is praying about that!!!!? Despite talks about climate change etc, nobody is really campaigning for the earth yet. We’re southern belles being fanned by (fossil) slaves and saying “land sakes” as we fret about our dresses.
The basis of prayer (biblical contrition and a loving God and all that), is by definition non-elitist (or it should be). If you pray, pray that our species finds its moral compass and changes our aspirations away from novelty and profits to something of more lasting meaning. What happened in Paris was awful, and unprecedented, but can’t be all that surprising to those paying attention to the end of growth and alienation of large swaths of population. We best get ready for lots more of this as our current system not only doesn’t work for most, but can’t even continue in its present arrangement for more than a few more years. We are so tribal. The evolutionary origins of our ingroup/outgroup algorithms suggest the default response to climate change, energy depletion and the end of growth is going to be a series of big fat wars against ‘others’. It’s already begun. Pray for Paris to be sure, but with a view to the wider backdrop and a challenging future. We need society to be more ecologically literate, more tolerant of others and more awake to our time in history, from which all futures begin. Perhaps Im insensitive, but were I to pray for anything, Id pray for that. It’s not all about us, humans, alive today, in rich countries.
https://www.facebook.com/nathan.j.hagens/posts/10154296857148496?fref=nf&pnref=story
“We are witnessing a manic blow-off in complacency and asinine risk taking. Desperate gamblers throwing it all away to “get it all back”. The brutal reversal of this hallucination is going to make 1929 seem like a fucking picnic…”
I’ve had an uneasy feeling for a long time that a carbon fee and dividend policy proposed by many bright minds such as James Hansen will not work. My feeling was based on the fact that wealth is proportional to energy consumption and most of our energy is fossil carbon so unless you are reducing wealth you are not reducing CO2.
Proponents of carbon fee and dividend policies believe that it will drive consumption towards renewable energy but do not understand that renewable energy cannot generate the same level of wealth as fossil carbon. So the policy will cause an economic decline and risks a public backlash when it becomes clear that the policy was falsely advertised.
The following comments from the Google discussion group America 2.0 by energy/economy analyst Nate Hagens were made in response to Robert Marston Fanney’s post titled Climate Change Changes Everything — Massive Capital Flight From Fossil Fuels Now Under Way.
Nate makes a strong case against a carbon fee and dividend and makes some important points that I missed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/3f1oaq/nate_hagens_on_why_growing_the_economy_while/
I suspect you’ll agree this post is horribly naive. Scribbler gets the [climate] science right, but the systems analysis/economics wrong. The reason Arch coal and other energy firms have enterprise values heading south isn’t because of divestment but because of global deflationary depression – started by a continual money machine that creates principal out of thin air but not interest – and the interest (and eventually principal) has to be serviced and paid back with growth based on energy and non-renewable resources flows, which (still) cheap fossil co-workers account for 90%+ of the planetary labor force.
“investors by the droves are now engaged in removing their assets from fossil fuel based companies.”
Unless they also change their lifestyles ‘by the droves’ it won’ matter one bit.
I gave a talk locally last week to the Citizen Climate Lobby, following James Hansen. Hansen is championing a ‘fee and dividend’, where carbon is taxed and the revenue is then given to the poor (or other areas of society – not the government). I paste below what I wrote to some friends after my talk:
Though debating Fee and Dividend was a small % of the total event, I thought I’d lay out the logic I presented to see what I missed, or if you all disagree or agree or other.
Here is their logic/detail on Fee and Dividend… https://citizensclimatelobby.org/remi-report/#Overview
My main points:
1) I’m in favor of energy being more expensive as a transition to a different type of economic system, but taxing carbon by saying it will grow our economies is naive, ignorant and poses systemic risk.
2) Fee and dividend conflate the dollar value of carbon and the work value of carbon. When we tax say gasoline $1 and give that $1 to say, the poor, this is claimed by CCL to be ‘revenue neutral’ and the behaviors shift somehow so that the economies grow. This econometric-based analysis ignores the biophysical aspect of energy inputs. E.g. if we take 1 dollar of energy out of the economy and transfer it, we also are taking 90-100$ worth of ‘work’ done by that gasoline. So the dollars are the same, but the work is (much) less. Economies usually contract using this math, not grow.
3) The economy is a heat engine, requiring 7.1 milliwatts per $ (constant over time) http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Economics/Physics_of_the_economy.html, but we now live in a world where financial claims far outweigh the natural resource and energy ability to service them. Any company or nation that reduces energy use (that can’t print their own currency) will be at severe disadvantage. 90% of global work force is carbon co-workers. We want to grow the economy but fire these workers. It doesn’t make any sense.
4) If we use $1 less of carbon, and give that $1 to someone who didn’t drive or use air conditioning etc., they will go spend that $ at a coffeeshop, at WalMart, at an amusement park, etc. There are extremely few activities in our world that are ‘carbon free’. Carbon free in our modern world is almost an oxymoron.
5) To distribute carbon fees as dividends to the poor as a combinatory climate mitigation and wealth inequality tool, risks a large backfire. The lowest 2 quintiles of our society spend 100% of their income. The top 5% spend 7% of their income. In a world with depleting oil fields (not 1 year view but 10 year view), a carbon fee with the money going to the poor quickly rebounds as a large call on more oil/gas/consumption as we are taking abstract wealth (digits in bank) and having them become an immediate call on natural resources.
6) British Columbia’s carbon tax is an excellent case study on why policy framed around climate action won’t ever work (in my opinion of course). Annual emissions declined from 2005-2013 but are now projected to significantly increase through 2020. This is happening because govt didn’t stick to the cost of accelerating carbon above $35 a ton, plus the carbon neutral projects were a colossal failure because developers just got $$ to develop property they would already destroy but just at a slower rate thanks to the carbon tax. And all this happened without accounting for the increase in carbon exported through BC through coal and shale oil.
7) As long as we optimize dollars (as in a market system), the dissipative structure that is the global economy will just get larger. So fee and dividend is just a feel good mechanism to shift where the heavy lifting is done. Arranging deck chairs without reducing emissions. And definitely without reducing emissions at the levels needed. http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21569039-europes-energy-policy-delivers-worst-all-possible-worlds-unwelcome-renaissance
8) As long as there are one or more countries that don’t tax carbon, (and as long as goods that are made with coal are not subject to a special tax), then adding the carbon tax will tend to move manufacturing toward countries without such a tax. This will increase the advantage that these countries already have because of the use of low-priced coal in manufacturing and home heating. (Wages can be less with coal, too!)
9) The dividend likely increases demand for products from these countries, because of the mix of products poor people buy.
My talk was well received but this aspect of it was very unpopular as I hit a lot of emotional buttons on people who are already fully committed to fee and dividend outreach and activism. I suspect leisure is a great supporter of virtue and when the ‘economy is going south or souther’, there will be some switching of teams. I hope to be wrong about that as I do think the sapient thing is for energy [prices] to be gradually become much more expensive, in an accelerating manner.
Nate
Jay Hanson’s response: Nice summation Nate. Fossil fuels are a dirty word on Scribbler’s site. Try commenting about their importance to the economy and the modern world on his site and you will be censored and banned from further commenting. He believes renewables can replace all fossil fuels without drastically changing our way of life. Many prominent climate scientists believe that we can innovate our way out of this mess as well. This is the major disconnect preventing any substantive discussion on root causes for human overshoot and the inevitable collapse to follow.
un-Denial 