Sunday, March 31, 2019
Saturday, March 30, 2019
Nick Humphrey: The Conversation No One Knows How to Have
The Conversation No One Knows How To Have. Nick Humphrey. March 26, 2019.
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Interesting to see how abrupt climate change is entering the common discussion without being called what it is.
Today, my fiance and one of my son's teachers were discussing the flooding disaster here in Nebraska. One of them were talking about how bad it was and that people outside of Nebraska and Iowa just do not understand the significance of the damage to food and agriculture that had occurred from the flooding.
This seems to be true. And it may be even non-farmers living in this region do not fully appreciate how bad it is (although it's easier to pay attention and know someone who does). But this sh*t is bad. From the mass destruction of infrastructure and private equipment to the losses of grains both stored from last year sitting out and spoiling in polluted water and more rain. And parts of the region may see more snow and rain Friday-Saturday. But the inability to plant this year as well...eroded soils, polluted soils, soil covered in sand from rivers. In many cases, because of melting of the previously frozen soil with the mass melting and runoff, has now turned to muddy mush. And this is literally one part of the world. Let's not forget all the recent and current disastersimpacting our world.
People who say that "this has happened before" because water happened to rise over the bank of a river which flooded before anger me. "The climate is always changing" others say. "We don't know whether this is climate change".
There's denial...blaming our increasingly energetic, steroid-juiced destabilizing climate with more and more explosive extremes on "poor infrastructure" or "building in the wrong places" or "variability"...and then there's simply the equivalent of looking at a terminally ill patient straight in the eye and telling them to get over it, take some meds and walk it off. It's to the point of like..."what??" When we call the variability of a cataclysmic sh*tshow right before our very eyes killing our fellow peoples and species normal, we've gone from denial and bargaining to plain absurdity in the face of the climate and ecological destruction monsters we have released.
I'm literally watching the Arctic "roast" itself in temperatures more than 20 C/36 F above normal across vast areas, bringing sea ice to the brink of "extinction" within years (not decades) and no one cares. A destroyed Arctic air mass and sea ice will mean basically unstoppable rapid global warming on timescales meaningful for humans and other species on this planet. Killer heat waves, hurricanes with intensities that shake your bones, rain "bombs" which destroy livelihoods. Freely available info on public government sites. Anyone care?
Perhaps such things shouldn't bother me as I cannot control other feelings and beliefs. Controlling and trying to convince everyone is not my "thing". I'm a scientist and presenter of info, it's your job to be open to accepting it and studying it for yourself. But when we actually get to the point where so-called "fake news" becomes part of the psyche simply terrified of the news...that a civilization and biosphere are facing catastrophic to existential dangers..."everything's fine", "this is hardly new", "this has happened before"...then I know that we as a species are on the brink of implosion from our inability to deal with the extreme changes underway. Not that we could deal with them anyways. Physical laws on the books for 14 billion years are commanding authority over us and our planet. But, being a sentient species who know these laws exist, we could choose to deal with our likely downfall in ways humane to each other and compassionate to other species. But we simply aren't.
We live in an ocean of air, with dependence upon an ocean of water. Scientists say, we are forcing the climate system to retain the equivalent of 4 Hiroshima bombs worth of energy every second. But why use Hiroshima, and not the biggest bomb ever detonated by humanity, the Tsar Bomba. Tsar Bomba, tested by the USSR, released 50 megatons of energy. The Earth is forced to retain 104 Tsar Bombas worth of solar heat energy every day. Equivalent to 5200 megatons of TNT or nearly 22 exajoules of heat (22 followed by 18 zeros).
However, instead of 104 actual titanic bombs going off, the extra heat retained from our thermonuclear furnace 93 million miles away is distributed across our planet. 93% in the oceans. So we have instead...the accelerating destruction of 1) ice across the planet, 2) the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets, 3) the Arctic air mass keeping this planet cool, 3) permafrost from land, shallow Arctic seas and alpine zones which will release far far more methane and carbon dioxide to retain more heat, 4) collapsing jet stream and ocean overturning circulations, 5) extreme precipitation events turning agricultural lands into inland seas, 6) blizzards followed by abrupt melting of snow, 6) more violent cyclones, 7) greater heat waves causing wildlife to fall out of trees and the sky or roast coral in the oceans, 8) forests burning to the ground with apocalyptical ferocity or just standing dead, gutted by beetles, ready to burn and release more carbon.
Oh and there's the 6th mass extinction underway, including of insects.
We are slowly "nuking" our world and we cannot even talk about it amongst ourselves in a realistic manner.
What I know is that things have reached the point on this planet where denial by a rational mind is impossible. Transport someone directly from 1950 to 2018 with no opportunity to normalize what's happening around them and the world will seem alien to them already, beyond the technology. And frightening. We scientists look at these numbers, these temperature graphs, these ice losses, the "superstorms", and the resulting fires, extinctions, etc with an almost grotesque sense of amazement, curiosity and shock. But these events actually mean something. They mean the destruction of the things civilization and human life depend on; we forget how much we've demanded of the natural world to have our industrialized food, cities and fancy tech, including what I'm using to write this article; resources we have abused insanely, with sacrifices only to be forgotten or thrown away (literally) as an afterthought; the death of species we've abused and whom had no part in their own demise; the reshaping and scarring of the landscape...and of course, the weather juiced up on the steroids of so much...heat.
When one raging cyclone can ravage entire islands, leaving them uninhabitable...others which can turn land into a deep "brown ocean", another can devastate the agricultural activity of a superpower...we know we are facing something...while ignited and exacerbated by humanity...is now well beyond the power of humanity to control. Heat and water...once the thing humans were in search for in a world of widespread continental glaciation, are now becoming our terrifying enemies toward our existence on this planet.
I do not write this to give hope or give solutions or some magic pill which will make it all better. I write so that maybe a few more people on this planet will realistically digest the realities, grieve over them, show better respect for Earth and fellow humans in any way they feel is possible for them. Be compassionate, show humility and understand just how small and powerless we really are. And there's nothing wrong with that. We are only one puzzle piece in a grand Universe that will continue long after we are gone.
---Meteorologist Nick Humphrey
--------------
Interesting to see how abrupt climate change is entering the common discussion without being called what it is.
Today, my fiance and one of my son's teachers were discussing the flooding disaster here in Nebraska. One of them were talking about how bad it was and that people outside of Nebraska and Iowa just do not understand the significance of the damage to food and agriculture that had occurred from the flooding.
This seems to be true. And it may be even non-farmers living in this region do not fully appreciate how bad it is (although it's easier to pay attention and know someone who does). But this sh*t is bad. From the mass destruction of infrastructure and private equipment to the losses of grains both stored from last year sitting out and spoiling in polluted water and more rain. And parts of the region may see more snow and rain Friday-Saturday. But the inability to plant this year as well...eroded soils, polluted soils, soil covered in sand from rivers. In many cases, because of melting of the previously frozen soil with the mass melting and runoff, has now turned to muddy mush. And this is literally one part of the world. Let's not forget all the recent and current disastersimpacting our world.
People who say that "this has happened before" because water happened to rise over the bank of a river which flooded before anger me. "The climate is always changing" others say. "We don't know whether this is climate change".
There's denial...blaming our increasingly energetic, steroid-juiced destabilizing climate with more and more explosive extremes on "poor infrastructure" or "building in the wrong places" or "variability"...and then there's simply the equivalent of looking at a terminally ill patient straight in the eye and telling them to get over it, take some meds and walk it off. It's to the point of like..."what??" When we call the variability of a cataclysmic sh*tshow right before our very eyes killing our fellow peoples and species normal, we've gone from denial and bargaining to plain absurdity in the face of the climate and ecological destruction monsters we have released.
I'm literally watching the Arctic "roast" itself in temperatures more than 20 C/36 F above normal across vast areas, bringing sea ice to the brink of "extinction" within years (not decades) and no one cares. A destroyed Arctic air mass and sea ice will mean basically unstoppable rapid global warming on timescales meaningful for humans and other species on this planet. Killer heat waves, hurricanes with intensities that shake your bones, rain "bombs" which destroy livelihoods. Freely available info on public government sites. Anyone care?
Perhaps such things shouldn't bother me as I cannot control other feelings and beliefs. Controlling and trying to convince everyone is not my "thing". I'm a scientist and presenter of info, it's your job to be open to accepting it and studying it for yourself. But when we actually get to the point where so-called "fake news" becomes part of the psyche simply terrified of the news...that a civilization and biosphere are facing catastrophic to existential dangers..."everything's fine", "this is hardly new", "this has happened before"...then I know that we as a species are on the brink of implosion from our inability to deal with the extreme changes underway. Not that we could deal with them anyways. Physical laws on the books for 14 billion years are commanding authority over us and our planet. But, being a sentient species who know these laws exist, we could choose to deal with our likely downfall in ways humane to each other and compassionate to other species. But we simply aren't.
We live in an ocean of air, with dependence upon an ocean of water. Scientists say, we are forcing the climate system to retain the equivalent of 4 Hiroshima bombs worth of energy every second. But why use Hiroshima, and not the biggest bomb ever detonated by humanity, the Tsar Bomba. Tsar Bomba, tested by the USSR, released 50 megatons of energy. The Earth is forced to retain 104 Tsar Bombas worth of solar heat energy every day. Equivalent to 5200 megatons of TNT or nearly 22 exajoules of heat (22 followed by 18 zeros).
However, instead of 104 actual titanic bombs going off, the extra heat retained from our thermonuclear furnace 93 million miles away is distributed across our planet. 93% in the oceans. So we have instead...the accelerating destruction of 1) ice across the planet, 2) the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets, 3) the Arctic air mass keeping this planet cool, 3) permafrost from land, shallow Arctic seas and alpine zones which will release far far more methane and carbon dioxide to retain more heat, 4) collapsing jet stream and ocean overturning circulations, 5) extreme precipitation events turning agricultural lands into inland seas, 6) blizzards followed by abrupt melting of snow, 6) more violent cyclones, 7) greater heat waves causing wildlife to fall out of trees and the sky or roast coral in the oceans, 8) forests burning to the ground with apocalyptical ferocity or just standing dead, gutted by beetles, ready to burn and release more carbon.
Oh and there's the 6th mass extinction underway, including of insects.
We are slowly "nuking" our world and we cannot even talk about it amongst ourselves in a realistic manner.
What I know is that things have reached the point on this planet where denial by a rational mind is impossible. Transport someone directly from 1950 to 2018 with no opportunity to normalize what's happening around them and the world will seem alien to them already, beyond the technology. And frightening. We scientists look at these numbers, these temperature graphs, these ice losses, the "superstorms", and the resulting fires, extinctions, etc with an almost grotesque sense of amazement, curiosity and shock. But these events actually mean something. They mean the destruction of the things civilization and human life depend on; we forget how much we've demanded of the natural world to have our industrialized food, cities and fancy tech, including what I'm using to write this article; resources we have abused insanely, with sacrifices only to be forgotten or thrown away (literally) as an afterthought; the death of species we've abused and whom had no part in their own demise; the reshaping and scarring of the landscape...and of course, the weather juiced up on the steroids of so much...heat.
When one raging cyclone can ravage entire islands, leaving them uninhabitable...others which can turn land into a deep "brown ocean", another can devastate the agricultural activity of a superpower...we know we are facing something...while ignited and exacerbated by humanity...is now well beyond the power of humanity to control. Heat and water...once the thing humans were in search for in a world of widespread continental glaciation, are now becoming our terrifying enemies toward our existence on this planet.
I do not write this to give hope or give solutions or some magic pill which will make it all better. I write so that maybe a few more people on this planet will realistically digest the realities, grieve over them, show better respect for Earth and fellow humans in any way they feel is possible for them. Be compassionate, show humility and understand just how small and powerless we really are. And there's nothing wrong with that. We are only one puzzle piece in a grand Universe that will continue long after we are gone.
---Meteorologist Nick Humphrey
Friday, March 29, 2019
Climate Links March 2019 #2
State of Ontario's climate policy is 'frightening,' watchdog says. CTV News. March 27, 2019.
Your plans for revolution don't work. Nothing we've tried works. Caitlin Johnstone. Mar 28, 2019.
Here's a running list of all the ways climate change has altered Earth in 2019. Mark Kaufman, mashable. Mar. 16, 2019.
Study shows IPCC is underselling climate change. University of Adelaide, phys.org. Mar. 19, 2019.
3-5°C temperature rise is now ‘locked-in’ for the Arctic. UN Environment. March 13, 2019.
Arctic Warming Locked In. Survival Acres. March 15, 2019.
Proposal for U.N. to study climate-cooling technologies rejected. Laurie Goering, Reuters, Mar. 14, 2019.
New Climate Change Visualization Presents Two Stark Choices For Our Future. Brian Kahn, Earther. Mar. 20, 2019.
Diane Saxe: "If the world can't hold together on the Paris Agreement we are toasted, roasted and grilled."
We are well on our way to extinction via climate collapse or nuclear holocaust, and even if we miss those by some miracle we are headed toward an artificial intelligence-led tech dystopia in which our consciousness is permanently enslaved by a propaganda network that is far too advanced for there to be any hope of escaping into truth.
We are witnessing a mass extinction the likes of which we haven’t seen since the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, with some 200 species going extinct forever every single day. The very ecosystemic context in which we evolved is vanishing underneath us. More than half the world’s wildlife has vanished in forty years, and the worldwide insect population has plummeted by as much as 90 percent. Fertile soil is vanishing, and so are forests. The oceans are choking to death, 90 percent of global fish stocks are either fully fished or overfished, the seas are full of microplastics, and phytoplankton, an indispensable foundation of earth’s food chain, have been killed off by 40 percent since 1950. Science keeps pouring in showing that global warming is occurring faster than previously predicted, and there are self-reinforcing warming effects called “feedback loops” which, once set off, can continue warming the atmosphere further and further regardless of human behavior, causing more feedback loops.
Our ecosystem is very fragile and rapidly fading, and the difference between the ability to survive without it and our current scientific capability is the difference between flying and jumping. Which won’t matter if one of the many small, unpredictable moving parts in the steadily escalating new cold war with Russia results in a nuclear weapon being deployed as a result of misunderstanding or miscommunication and sparking off the annihilation of every organism on earth, as nearly happened during the last cold war on more than one occasion.
This is where the status quo has gotten us. All attempts to overthrow it have failed. The time is up, and the results are in.
The political process doesn’t work.
...
The reality is that as long as powerful people control the dominant public narratives, no ground will be gained in steering our species away from the status quo trajectory that’s killing us, because you won’t be able to awaken mainstream consciousness to what’s going on. The only thing that has any hope of prying the oligarchic hands off the steering wheel is the mainstream public seeing what they’re doing and using the power of their numbers to force drastic change in a wildly different direction. If we can’t make that happen, we’re all just banging on locked doors while the curtain closes on humanity.
Here's a running list of all the ways climate change has altered Earth in 2019. Mark Kaufman, mashable. Mar. 16, 2019.
Study shows IPCC is underselling climate change. University of Adelaide, phys.org. Mar. 19, 2019.
A new study has revealed that the language used by the global climate change watchdog, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is overly conservative – and therefore the threats are much greater than the Panel's reports suggest.
3-5°C temperature rise is now ‘locked-in’ for the Arctic. UN Environment. March 13, 2019.
- Even if Paris Agreement goals met, Arctic winter temperatures will increase 3-5°C by 2050 compared to 1986-2005 levels.
- Thawing permafrost
couldwake ‘sleeping giant’ of more greenhouse gases, potentially derailing global climate goals. - Ocean acidification and pollution also posing major threats to Arctic
Arctic Warming Locked In. Survival Acres. March 15, 2019.
here’s what the article DOESN’T tell you:
This is the death of the planetary biosphere, i.e., “extinction of most life forms, including humans”.Warming of this magnitude in the Arctic means MORE then this warming in the rest of the world where nearly everyone else actually lives. As I’ve often explained, we starve first as food crops fail. There will be no escaping this fact. And this level of warming means a massive “carbon bomb” is released into the atmosphere and will be virtually unstoppable.
Greenland and Antarctica will also contribute to massive sea level rise, inundating the coastlines worldwide, triggering a widespread refugee crisis. The article plays this down, but it’s a fact. Moreover, the article pretends to portray the “possibility” of meeting the Paris Agreements (a fabricated lie), and that “the impacts globally would also be huge”. No – they will be absolutely catastrophic, a extinction level event.
This is yet another example of totally failing to report the actual facts (impacts) on what it’s going to mean for the world environment and human survival to lose the Arctic. This “soft approach” may appease editors and publications, but it’s definitely worse then disingenuous now, it’s downright genocidal.
Predictably, they’re not going to bother and try to tell people what to do, because they have no idea.
Proposal for U.N. to study climate-cooling technologies rejected. Laurie Goering, Reuters, Mar. 14, 2019.
A push to launch a high-level study of potentially risky technological fixes to curb climate change was abandoned on Thursday at a U.N. environmental conference in Nairobi, as countries including the United States raised objections.
New Climate Change Visualization Presents Two Stark Choices For Our Future. Brian Kahn, Earther. Mar. 20, 2019.
Saturday, March 16, 2019
Kevin Anderson
Delivering on 2C. Kevin Anderson.
The Gordon Goodman Memorial Lecture.
Edinburgh. Oct 2018.
Beyond dangerous climate change. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Jan. 2011.
This paper demonstrates how meeting the international community’s commitment to “hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius” demands emission reductions far beyond those suggested in the plethora of politically-palatable analysis informing governments. Relying on real rather than naïve modelled data the paper demonstrates how even a 50:50 chance of not exceeding 2°C requires emission reductions of over 7% p.a. – a conclusion made all the more demanding once equity-issues are considered. Put simply, if even a small emission space is assumed for the poorer (non-Annex 1) nations, there is virtually no space available for the wealthier (Annex 1) nations. The paper concludes that “dangerous climate change can only be avoided if economic growth is exchanged for a period of planned austerity within Annex 1 nations at the same time as there is a rapid transition away from fossil-fuelled development within non-Annex 1 nations.” Unfortunately, in 2011, and despite the evidence, such a conclusion is still beyond anything we are yet prepared to countenance.
Duality in climate science. Nature Geoscience. Oct. 2015.
Brief Abstract:
The commentary demonstrates the endemic bias prevalent amongst many of those developing emission scenarios to severely underplay the scale of the 2°C mitigation challenge. In several important respects the modelling community is self-censoring its research to conform to the dominant political and economic paradigm. Moreover, there is a widespread reluctance of many within the climate change community to speak out against unsupported assertions that an evolution of ‘business as usual’ is compatible with the IPCC’s 2°C carbon budgets.
With specific reference to energy, this analysis concludes that even a slim chance of “keeping below” a 2°C rise, now demands a revolution in how we both consume and produce energy. Such a rapid and deep transition will have profound implications for the framing of contemporary society and is far removed from the rhetoric of green growth that increasingly dominates the climate change agenda.
On the duality of climate scientists:
… how integrated assessment models are hard-wired to deliver politically palatable outcomes
The value of science is undermined when we adopt questionable assumptions and fine-tune our analysis to conform to dominant political and economic sensibilities. The pervasive inclusion of speculative negative emission technologies to deliver politically palatable 2°C mitigation is but one such example. Society needs scientists to make transparent and reasoned assumptions, however uncomfortable the subsequent conclusions may be for the politics of the day.
What if ‘negative emission technologies’ (NETs) fail at scale: Implications of the Paris Agreement for big emitting nations. Alice Larkin, Jaise Kuriakose, Maria Sharmina, and Kevin Anderson. Climate Policy. Aug. 2017.
Abstract
A cumulative emissions approach is increasingly used to inform mitigation policy. However, there are different interpretations of what ‘2°C’ implies. Here it is argued that cost-optimisation models, commonly used to inform policy, typically underplay the urgency of 2°C mitigation. The alignment within many scenarios of optimistic assumptions on negative emissions technologies (NETs), with implausibly early peak emission dates and incremental short-term mitigation, delivers outcomes commensurate with 2°C commitments. In contrast, considering equity and socio-technical barriers to change, suggests a more challenging short-term agenda. To understand these different interpretations, short-term CO2 trends of the largest CO2 emitters, are assessed in relation to a constrained CO2 budget, coupled with a ‘what if’ assumption that negative emissions technologies fail at scale. The outcomes raise profound questions around high-level framings of mitigation policy. The paper concludes that applying even weak equity criteria, challenges the feasibility of maintaining a 50% chance of avoiding 2°C without urgent mitigation efforts in the short-term. This highlights a need for greater engagement with: (1) the equity dimension of the Paris Agreement, (2) the sensitivity of constrained carbon budgets to short-term trends and (3) the climate risks for society posed by an almost ubiquitous inclusion of NETs within 2°C scenarios.
Friday, March 15, 2019
David Holmgren: a baby boomer's apology
An apology. David Holmgren.
It is time for us baby boomers to honestly acknowledge what we did and didn’t do with the gifts given to us by our forebears and be clear about our legacy with which we have saddled the next and succeeding generations.
By ‘baby boomers’ I mean those of us born in the affluent nations of the western world between 1945 and 1965. In these countries, the majority of the population became middle class beneficiaries of mass affluence. I think of the high birth rate of those times as a product of collective optimism about the future, and the abundant and cheap resources to support growing families.
By many measures, the benefits of global industrial civilisation peaked in our youth, but for most middle class baby boomers of the affluent countries, the continuing experience of those benefits has tended to blind us to the constriction of opportunities faced by the next generations: unaffordable housing and land access, ecological overshoot and climate chaos amongst a host of other challenges.
I am a white middle class man born in 1955 in Australia, one of the richest nations of the ‘western world’ in the middle of the baby boom, so I consider myself well placed to articulate an apology on behalf of my generation.
In the life of a baby boomer born in 1950 and dying in 2025 (a premature death according to the expectations of our generation), the best half the world’s endowment of oil – the potent resource that made industrial civilisation possible – will have been burnt. This is tens of millions of years of stored sunlight from a special geological epoch of extraordinary biological productivity. Beyond our basic needs, we have been the recipients of manufactured wants and desires. To varying degrees, we have also suffered the innumerable downsides, addictions and alienations that have come with fossil-fuelled consumer capitalism.
It is also true that our generation has used the genie of fossil fuels to create wonders of technology, organisation and art, and a diversity of lifestyles and ideas. Some of the unintended consequences of our way of life, ranging from antibiotic resistance to bubble economics, should have been obvious, while others, such as the depression epidemic in rich countries, were harder to foresee. Our travel around the world has broadened our minds, but global tourism has contaminated the amazing diversity of nature and traditional cultures at an accelerating pace. We have the excuse that innovations always have pluses and minuses, but it seems we have got a larger share of the pluses and handballed more of the minuses to the world’s poorest countries and to our children and grandchildren.
We were the first generation to have the clear scientific evidence that emergent global civilisation was on an unsustainable path that would precipitate an unravelling of both nature and society through the 21st century. Although climate chaos was a less obvious outcome than the no-brainer of resource depletion, international recognition of the reality of climate change came way back in 1988, just as we were beginning to get our hands on the levers of power, and we have presided over decades of policies that have accelerated the problem.
Over the years since, the adverse outcomes have shifted from distant risks to lived realities. These impact hardest on the most vulnerable peoples of the world who have yet to taste the benefits of the carbon bonanza that has driven the accelerating climate catastrophe. For the failure to share those benefits globally and curb our own consumption we must be truly sorry.
In the 1960s and 70s, during our coming of age, a significant proportion of us were critical of what was being passed down to us by our parent’s generation who were also the beneficiaries of the western world system, which some of us baby boomers recognised as a global empire. But our grandparents and parents had been shaped by the rigours and grief of the first global depression of the 1890s, the First World War, The Great Depression of the 1930s and, of course, the Second World War. Aside from those who served in Vietnam, we have cruised through life avoiding the worst threats of nuclear annihilation and economic depression, even as people in other countries suffered the consequences of superpower proxy wars, coups, and economic and environmental catastrophes.
While some of us were burnt by personal and global events, we have mostly led a charmed existence and had the privilege to question our upbringing and culture. We were the first generation in history to experience an extended adolescence of experimentation and privilege with little concern or responsibility for our future, our kin or our country.
Most baby boomers were raised in families where commuting was the norm for our fathers but a home-based lifestyle was still a role model we got from our mothers. In our enthusiasm for women to have equal access to productive work in the monetary economy, few of us noticed that without work to keep the household economy humming we lost much of our household autonomy to market forces. By our daily commutes, mostly alone in our cars, we entrenched this massively wasteful and destructive action as normal and inevitable.
As we came into our power in middle age, the new technology of the internet, workshop tool miniaturisation and other innovations provided more options to participate in the monetary economy without the need to commute, but our generation continued with this insane collective addiction. In Australia, we faithfully followed the American model of not investing in public transport, which moderated the adverse impacts of commuting in European and other countries not so structurally addicted to road transport. By failing to build decent public transport and the opportunities for home-based work, and wasting wealth in a frenzy of freeway building that has choked our cities, our generation has consumed our grandchildren’s inheritance of high quality transport fuels and accelerated the onset of climate chaos. For this we are truly sorry.
In pioneering the double income family, some of us set the pattern for the next generation’s habit of outsourcing the care of children at a young age, making commuting five days a week an early childhood experience. This has left the next generation unable to imagine a life that doesn’t involve leaving home each day.
These patterns are part of a larger crisis created by the double income, debt-laden households with close to 100% dependence on the monetary economy. Without robust and productive household economies, our children and grandchildren’s generations will become the victims of savage disruptions and downturns in the monetary economy. For failing to maintain and strengthen the threads of self-provision, frugality and self-reliance most of us inherited from our parents, we should be truly sorry.
Some of us felt in our hearts that we needed to create a different and better world. Some of us saw the writing on the walls of the world calling for global justice. Some of us read the evidence (mostly clearly in the 1972 Limits To Growth) that attempting to run continuous material growth on finite planet would end in more than tears.
Some of us even rejected the legacy of previous generations of radicals’ direct action against the problems of the world, and instead decided we would boldly create the world we wanted by living it each day. In doing so, we experienced hard-won lessons and even created some hopeful models for succeeding generations to improve on in more difficult conditions. That our efforts at novel solutions often created more sound than substance, or that we flitted from one issue to another rather than doing the hard yards necessary to pass on truly robust design solutions for a world of less, leaves some of us with regrets for which we might also feel the need to apologise.
These experiences are shared to some degree by a minority in all generations but there is significant evidence that the 1960s and 70s was a time when awareness of the need for change was stronger. Unfortunately, a sequence of titanic geopolitical struggles that few of us understand even today, a debt-fuelled version of consumer capitalism, and propaganda against both the Limits to Growth and the values of the counterculture, saw most of us following the neoliberal agenda like sheep into the 1980s and beyond.
After having played with the privilege of free tertiary education, most of us fell for the propaganda and sent our children off to accumulate debts and doubtful benefits in the corporatised businesses that universities became. We convinced our children they needed more specialised knowledge poured down their throats rather than using their best years to build the skills and resilience for the challenges our generation was bequeathing to them. For this we must be truly sorry.
Many of us have been the beneficiaries of buying real estate before the credit-fuelled final stages of casino capitalism made that option a recipe for debt slavery for our children. Without understanding its mechanics we have contributed to – and fuelled with our faith – a bubble economy on a vast scale that can only end in pain and suffering for the majority. While some of us are members of the bank of Mum and Dad, when the property bubble bursts we could find ourselves following the bank chiefs apologising for the debt burden we encouraged our children to take on. Some of us will also have to apologise for losing the family home when we went guarantor on their mortgages. For not heeding the warnings we got with the GFC, we will be truly sorry.
Some of us have used our windfall wealth from real estate and the stock market to do good works, including creating small models of more creative and lower footprint futures that have inspired the minority of the next generations who can also see the writing on the wall. But most of us used our houses as ATMs for new forms of consumption that were unimaginable to our parents, from holidays around the world to endless renovations and a constant flow of updated digital gadgets and virtual diversions. For this frivolous squandering of our windfall wealth we must be truly sorry.
While our parents’ generation experienced the risks of youth through adversity and war we used our privilege to tackle challenges of our own choosing. Although some of us had to struggle to free ourselves from the cloying cocoon of middle class upbringing, we were the generation that flew like the birds and hitchhiked around the country and the world. How strange that on becoming parents (many of us in middle age) we believed the propaganda that the world was too dangerous for our children to do the same around the local neighbourhood. Instead we coddled them, got into the chauffeuring business, and in doing so encouraged their disconnection from both nature and community. As we see our grandchildren’s generation raised in a way that makes them an even more handicapped generation, we must be truly sorry for the path we took and the dis-ease we created.
After so many of us experimented with mind-expanding plants and chemicals, some of us were taken down in chemical addictions, but it was dysfunctional and corrupt legal prohibitions more than the substances themselves that were to blame for the worst of the damage. So how strange that when in middle age we got our hands on the levers of power, most of our generation decided to continue to support the madness of prohibition. For this we must be truly sorry: to have seen the light but then continued to inflict this burden on our children and grandchildren. For having acquiesced in the global ‘war on drugs’ that spread pain and suffering to some of the poorest peoples of the world we should be ashamed.
When the ‘war on drugs’ (a war against substances!) became the model for the ‘war on terror’ (war against a concept!) some of us reawakened the anti-war activism of the Vietnam years but in the end we mostly acquiesced to an agenda of trashing international law, regime change, shock and awe, chaos, and the death of millions; all justified by the 9/11 demolition fireworks that killed a small fraction of the number of citizens that die each year as a result of our ongoing addiction to personal motorised mobility.
While the shadow cast by climate change darkens our grandchilden’s future, the shadow of potential nuclear winter that hung over our childhood as not gone away. Many of us were at the forefront of the international movement to rid the world of nuclear weapons and thought the collapse of the Soviet Union had saved us from that threat. Coming into our power after the end of the cold war, our greatest crime on this geopolitical front has perhaps been the tacit support of our generation for first, the economic rape of Russia in the 1990s, and then its progressive encirclement by the relentless expansion of NATO. In Australia we have meekly added our resources and youth to more or less endless wars in the Middle East and central Asia justified by the fake ‘war on terror’. For this weakness as accessories to global crimes wasting wealth and lives to consolidate the western powers’ control of the first truly global empire, we should hang our collective heads in shame.
While some of our generation’s intellectuals continued to critique the ‘war on terror’ as fake, the vast majority of the public intellectuals of our generation, including those on the left, have supported the rapid rise of Cold War 2.0 to contain Russia, China and any other country that doesn’t accept what we now call ‘the rules based international order’ (code for ‘our empire’). This is truly astonishing when looked at in the context of our lived history. Let us hope that sanity can prevail as our empire fades and future generations don’t brand us as the most insane, war-mongering generation of all time. For our complicity in this grand failure of resistance we should be truly sorry.
On another equally titanic front, the mistake of giving legal personhood to corporations was not one that our generation made. However most of us have contributed our work, consumption and capital to assist these self-organising, profit-maximising, cost-minimising machines of capitalism morphing into emergent new life forms that threaten to consume both nature and humanity in an algorithmic drive for growth. At a time of our seniority and numbers, we failed to use the Global Financial Crisis as an opportunity to bring these emergent monsters to heel. Do our children have the capacity to tame the monsters that we nurtured from fragile infants to commanding masters?
And if they do find the will to withdraw their work, consumption and capital enough to contain the corporations, will the economy that currently provides for both needs and wants unravel completely? This is a burden so great most of us continue to believe we have no responsibility or agency in such a dark reality. We trust that history will not place the burden of responsibility on our generation alone. But for our part in this failure of agency over human affairs we apologise. Further, we should accept with grace the consequences for our own wellbeing.
Most of us feel impotent when thinking of these failures to control the excesses of our era, but on a more modest scale we have mindlessly participated in taking the goods and passing on the debt to future generations. No more so than in our habitual acceptance of antibiotics from doctors to fix the most mundane of illnesses. For our parents’ generation, antibiotics represented the peak of medical science’s ability to control what killed so many of their parents and earlier generations.
For us, they became routine tools to keep us on the job and our children not missing precious days at school. Through this banal practice we have unwittingly conspired with our doctors to rapidly breed resistance to the most effective and low-cost antibiotics. We took for granted that future generations would always be able to work out ways to keep ahead of diseases with an endless string of new antibiotics. For having squandered this gift we are truly sorry.
Further, despite the fact that some of us have became vegetarian or even vegan, our generation’s demand for cheap chicken and bacon has driven the industrial dosing of animals with antibiotics on a scale that has accelerated the development of antibiotic resistance far faster than would have been the case from us dosing ourselves and our children. For supporting this and other such obscene systems of animal husbandry we apologise to our grandchildren and succeeding generations and hope that somehow an accommodation between humanity, animals and microbes is still possible.
We experienced and benefited from the emergent culture of rights and recognition for women, minorities and the people of varied abilities, and many of us who fought to extend and deepen those rights have pride in what we did. However some of us are beginning to fear that in doing so we contributed to creating new demands, disabilities, and fractious subcultures of fear and angst unimagined in previous generations. While we might not be in the driving seat of identity politics and culture wars, we raised our children to demand their rights in a world that is unravelling due to its multiple contradictions.
In this emerging context, strident demands for rights are likely to be a waste of valuable energy that younger people might better focus on becoming useful to themselves and others. For overemphasising the demand for rights and underplaying the need for responsible self- and collective-reliance, perhaps we should also be sorry.
And is this escalating demand for rights by younger people itself connected, even peripherally, to the increasing callous disregard for the rights of others? Especially in the case of refugees, this careless disregard has allowed political elites to use tough treatment of the less fortunate to distract from the gradual loss of shared privilege that once characterised the ‘lucky country’. To the shame of those in power over the last two decades (mostly baby boomers) those policies are now being adopted on a larger scale in Europe and the US.
In our lifetimes religious faith has declined. For many of our generation, this change represents a measure of humanity’s progress from a benighted past to a promising future. But the collective belief in science and evidence-based decision making has now become a new faith, “Scientism”, which seeks to drive out all other ways of thinking and being from the public space. At the same time, religious fundamentalism is now resurgent. Is this too something that our generation unleashed by preaching tolerance while enforcing an ideology we didn’t even recognise as such?
A significant sign of the good intentions of our generation has been our recognition that the ancient war against nature, which has plagued human life since the beginnings of agriculture, and indeed civilisation, must end. One powerful expression of our efforts has been the valuing of the biodiversity of life, especially local indigenous biodiversity. In the ‘New Europes’ of North America and the Antipodes, seeking to save indigenous biodiversity has grown into an institutionalised form of atonement for the sins of the forefathers.
While this seems like one of our achievements, even this we have bastardised with a new war against naturalised biodiversity. Perhaps the worst aspect of this renewed war against novel ecologies is that we have accepted the helping hand of Monsanto in using Roundup as the main weapon in our urban and rural habitats. The mounting evidence that Roundup may be worse than DDT will be part of our legacy. While history may excuse our parent’s generation for naïve optimism in relation to DDT, our generation’s version of the war on nature will not save us from harsh judgement. For this we should be truly sorry.
Of course any public apology in this country invites comparisons to the apology by governments to the stolen generation of Australian indigenous peoples for the wrongs of the past. This unfinished sorry business is beyond the scope of this apology, but it is an opportunity to reflect critically on our common self-perception of supporting indigenous peoples’ rights in contrast to the normalised racism of previous generations.
Our generation’s invitation to, and enabling of, Australians of indigenous descent to more fully participate in mainstream Australian society may have been a necessary step towards reconciliation; or could it have been a poison chalice drawing them even deeper into the dysfunctions of industrial modernity that I have already outlined. We can only hope that people with such a history of resilience and understanding in the face dispossession will take these additional burdens in their stride.
In any case, this apology is not one that comes from a position of invulnerable privilege, giving succour to those who are no threat to that privilege. For many baby boomers, now caring for parents and dealing with their deaths, we are more inwardly focused. For some of us, especially those estranged from parents, through this both painful and tender processes we are finally growing up. But a comic tragedy could play out in our declining years if a combination of novel disabilities, the culture of rights and amplified fears lead to our children and grandchildren’s generations mostly experiencing harder times as far worse than they might really be, and deciding we are the cause of their troubles.
We baby boomers will increasingly find that in our growing dependence on young people we will be subject to their perspectives, whims and prejudices. Hopefully we can take what we are given on the chin and along with our children and our grandchildren’s generations we can all grow up and work together to face the future with whatever capacities we have.
We might hope this apology is itself a wake-up call to the younger generations that are still mostly sleepwalking into the oncoming maelstroms. In raising the alarm we might hope our humble apology will galvanise the potential in young people who are grasping the nettle of opportunities to turn problems into solutions.
We hope that this apology might lead to understanding rather than resentment of our frailty in the face of the self-organising forces of powerful change that have driven the climaxing of global industrial civilisation. Finally, the task ahead for our generation is to learn how to downsize and disown before we prepare to die, with grace, at a time of our choosing, and in a way that inspires and frees the next generations to chart a prosperous way down.
It is time for us baby boomers to honestly acknowledge what we did and didn’t do with the gifts given to us by our forebears and be clear about our legacy with which we have saddled the next and succeeding generations.
By ‘baby boomers’ I mean those of us born in the affluent nations of the western world between 1945 and 1965. In these countries, the majority of the population became middle class beneficiaries of mass affluence. I think of the high birth rate of those times as a product of collective optimism about the future, and the abundant and cheap resources to support growing families.
By many measures, the benefits of global industrial civilisation peaked in our youth, but for most middle class baby boomers of the affluent countries, the continuing experience of those benefits has tended to blind us to the constriction of opportunities faced by the next generations: unaffordable housing and land access, ecological overshoot and climate chaos amongst a host of other challenges.
I am a white middle class man born in 1955 in Australia, one of the richest nations of the ‘western world’ in the middle of the baby boom, so I consider myself well placed to articulate an apology on behalf of my generation.
In the life of a baby boomer born in 1950 and dying in 2025 (a premature death according to the expectations of our generation), the best half the world’s endowment of oil – the potent resource that made industrial civilisation possible – will have been burnt. This is tens of millions of years of stored sunlight from a special geological epoch of extraordinary biological productivity. Beyond our basic needs, we have been the recipients of manufactured wants and desires. To varying degrees, we have also suffered the innumerable downsides, addictions and alienations that have come with fossil-fuelled consumer capitalism.
It is also true that our generation has used the genie of fossil fuels to create wonders of technology, organisation and art, and a diversity of lifestyles and ideas. Some of the unintended consequences of our way of life, ranging from antibiotic resistance to bubble economics, should have been obvious, while others, such as the depression epidemic in rich countries, were harder to foresee. Our travel around the world has broadened our minds, but global tourism has contaminated the amazing diversity of nature and traditional cultures at an accelerating pace. We have the excuse that innovations always have pluses and minuses, but it seems we have got a larger share of the pluses and handballed more of the minuses to the world’s poorest countries and to our children and grandchildren.
We were the first generation to have the clear scientific evidence that emergent global civilisation was on an unsustainable path that would precipitate an unravelling of both nature and society through the 21st century. Although climate chaos was a less obvious outcome than the no-brainer of resource depletion, international recognition of the reality of climate change came way back in 1988, just as we were beginning to get our hands on the levers of power, and we have presided over decades of policies that have accelerated the problem.
Over the years since, the adverse outcomes have shifted from distant risks to lived realities. These impact hardest on the most vulnerable peoples of the world who have yet to taste the benefits of the carbon bonanza that has driven the accelerating climate catastrophe. For the failure to share those benefits globally and curb our own consumption we must be truly sorry.
In the 1960s and 70s, during our coming of age, a significant proportion of us were critical of what was being passed down to us by our parent’s generation who were also the beneficiaries of the western world system, which some of us baby boomers recognised as a global empire. But our grandparents and parents had been shaped by the rigours and grief of the first global depression of the 1890s, the First World War, The Great Depression of the 1930s and, of course, the Second World War. Aside from those who served in Vietnam, we have cruised through life avoiding the worst threats of nuclear annihilation and economic depression, even as people in other countries suffered the consequences of superpower proxy wars, coups, and economic and environmental catastrophes.
While some of us were burnt by personal and global events, we have mostly led a charmed existence and had the privilege to question our upbringing and culture. We were the first generation in history to experience an extended adolescence of experimentation and privilege with little concern or responsibility for our future, our kin or our country.
Most baby boomers were raised in families where commuting was the norm for our fathers but a home-based lifestyle was still a role model we got from our mothers. In our enthusiasm for women to have equal access to productive work in the monetary economy, few of us noticed that without work to keep the household economy humming we lost much of our household autonomy to market forces. By our daily commutes, mostly alone in our cars, we entrenched this massively wasteful and destructive action as normal and inevitable.
As we came into our power in middle age, the new technology of the internet, workshop tool miniaturisation and other innovations provided more options to participate in the monetary economy without the need to commute, but our generation continued with this insane collective addiction. In Australia, we faithfully followed the American model of not investing in public transport, which moderated the adverse impacts of commuting in European and other countries not so structurally addicted to road transport. By failing to build decent public transport and the opportunities for home-based work, and wasting wealth in a frenzy of freeway building that has choked our cities, our generation has consumed our grandchildren’s inheritance of high quality transport fuels and accelerated the onset of climate chaos. For this we are truly sorry.
In pioneering the double income family, some of us set the pattern for the next generation’s habit of outsourcing the care of children at a young age, making commuting five days a week an early childhood experience. This has left the next generation unable to imagine a life that doesn’t involve leaving home each day.
These patterns are part of a larger crisis created by the double income, debt-laden households with close to 100% dependence on the monetary economy. Without robust and productive household economies, our children and grandchildren’s generations will become the victims of savage disruptions and downturns in the monetary economy. For failing to maintain and strengthen the threads of self-provision, frugality and self-reliance most of us inherited from our parents, we should be truly sorry.
Some of us felt in our hearts that we needed to create a different and better world. Some of us saw the writing on the walls of the world calling for global justice. Some of us read the evidence (mostly clearly in the 1972 Limits To Growth) that attempting to run continuous material growth on finite planet would end in more than tears.
Some of us even rejected the legacy of previous generations of radicals’ direct action against the problems of the world, and instead decided we would boldly create the world we wanted by living it each day. In doing so, we experienced hard-won lessons and even created some hopeful models for succeeding generations to improve on in more difficult conditions. That our efforts at novel solutions often created more sound than substance, or that we flitted from one issue to another rather than doing the hard yards necessary to pass on truly robust design solutions for a world of less, leaves some of us with regrets for which we might also feel the need to apologise.
These experiences are shared to some degree by a minority in all generations but there is significant evidence that the 1960s and 70s was a time when awareness of the need for change was stronger. Unfortunately, a sequence of titanic geopolitical struggles that few of us understand even today, a debt-fuelled version of consumer capitalism, and propaganda against both the Limits to Growth and the values of the counterculture, saw most of us following the neoliberal agenda like sheep into the 1980s and beyond.
After having played with the privilege of free tertiary education, most of us fell for the propaganda and sent our children off to accumulate debts and doubtful benefits in the corporatised businesses that universities became. We convinced our children they needed more specialised knowledge poured down their throats rather than using their best years to build the skills and resilience for the challenges our generation was bequeathing to them. For this we must be truly sorry.
Many of us have been the beneficiaries of buying real estate before the credit-fuelled final stages of casino capitalism made that option a recipe for debt slavery for our children. Without understanding its mechanics we have contributed to – and fuelled with our faith – a bubble economy on a vast scale that can only end in pain and suffering for the majority. While some of us are members of the bank of Mum and Dad, when the property bubble bursts we could find ourselves following the bank chiefs apologising for the debt burden we encouraged our children to take on. Some of us will also have to apologise for losing the family home when we went guarantor on their mortgages. For not heeding the warnings we got with the GFC, we will be truly sorry.
Some of us have used our windfall wealth from real estate and the stock market to do good works, including creating small models of more creative and lower footprint futures that have inspired the minority of the next generations who can also see the writing on the wall. But most of us used our houses as ATMs for new forms of consumption that were unimaginable to our parents, from holidays around the world to endless renovations and a constant flow of updated digital gadgets and virtual diversions. For this frivolous squandering of our windfall wealth we must be truly sorry.
While our parents’ generation experienced the risks of youth through adversity and war we used our privilege to tackle challenges of our own choosing. Although some of us had to struggle to free ourselves from the cloying cocoon of middle class upbringing, we were the generation that flew like the birds and hitchhiked around the country and the world. How strange that on becoming parents (many of us in middle age) we believed the propaganda that the world was too dangerous for our children to do the same around the local neighbourhood. Instead we coddled them, got into the chauffeuring business, and in doing so encouraged their disconnection from both nature and community. As we see our grandchildren’s generation raised in a way that makes them an even more handicapped generation, we must be truly sorry for the path we took and the dis-ease we created.
After so many of us experimented with mind-expanding plants and chemicals, some of us were taken down in chemical addictions, but it was dysfunctional and corrupt legal prohibitions more than the substances themselves that were to blame for the worst of the damage. So how strange that when in middle age we got our hands on the levers of power, most of our generation decided to continue to support the madness of prohibition. For this we must be truly sorry: to have seen the light but then continued to inflict this burden on our children and grandchildren. For having acquiesced in the global ‘war on drugs’ that spread pain and suffering to some of the poorest peoples of the world we should be ashamed.
When the ‘war on drugs’ (a war against substances!) became the model for the ‘war on terror’ (war against a concept!) some of us reawakened the anti-war activism of the Vietnam years but in the end we mostly acquiesced to an agenda of trashing international law, regime change, shock and awe, chaos, and the death of millions; all justified by the 9/11 demolition fireworks that killed a small fraction of the number of citizens that die each year as a result of our ongoing addiction to personal motorised mobility.
While the shadow cast by climate change darkens our grandchilden’s future, the shadow of potential nuclear winter that hung over our childhood as not gone away. Many of us were at the forefront of the international movement to rid the world of nuclear weapons and thought the collapse of the Soviet Union had saved us from that threat. Coming into our power after the end of the cold war, our greatest crime on this geopolitical front has perhaps been the tacit support of our generation for first, the economic rape of Russia in the 1990s, and then its progressive encirclement by the relentless expansion of NATO. In Australia we have meekly added our resources and youth to more or less endless wars in the Middle East and central Asia justified by the fake ‘war on terror’. For this weakness as accessories to global crimes wasting wealth and lives to consolidate the western powers’ control of the first truly global empire, we should hang our collective heads in shame.
While some of our generation’s intellectuals continued to critique the ‘war on terror’ as fake, the vast majority of the public intellectuals of our generation, including those on the left, have supported the rapid rise of Cold War 2.0 to contain Russia, China and any other country that doesn’t accept what we now call ‘the rules based international order’ (code for ‘our empire’). This is truly astonishing when looked at in the context of our lived history. Let us hope that sanity can prevail as our empire fades and future generations don’t brand us as the most insane, war-mongering generation of all time. For our complicity in this grand failure of resistance we should be truly sorry.
On another equally titanic front, the mistake of giving legal personhood to corporations was not one that our generation made. However most of us have contributed our work, consumption and capital to assist these self-organising, profit-maximising, cost-minimising machines of capitalism morphing into emergent new life forms that threaten to consume both nature and humanity in an algorithmic drive for growth. At a time of our seniority and numbers, we failed to use the Global Financial Crisis as an opportunity to bring these emergent monsters to heel. Do our children have the capacity to tame the monsters that we nurtured from fragile infants to commanding masters?
And if they do find the will to withdraw their work, consumption and capital enough to contain the corporations, will the economy that currently provides for both needs and wants unravel completely? This is a burden so great most of us continue to believe we have no responsibility or agency in such a dark reality. We trust that history will not place the burden of responsibility on our generation alone. But for our part in this failure of agency over human affairs we apologise. Further, we should accept with grace the consequences for our own wellbeing.
Most of us feel impotent when thinking of these failures to control the excesses of our era, but on a more modest scale we have mindlessly participated in taking the goods and passing on the debt to future generations. No more so than in our habitual acceptance of antibiotics from doctors to fix the most mundane of illnesses. For our parents’ generation, antibiotics represented the peak of medical science’s ability to control what killed so many of their parents and earlier generations.
For us, they became routine tools to keep us on the job and our children not missing precious days at school. Through this banal practice we have unwittingly conspired with our doctors to rapidly breed resistance to the most effective and low-cost antibiotics. We took for granted that future generations would always be able to work out ways to keep ahead of diseases with an endless string of new antibiotics. For having squandered this gift we are truly sorry.
Further, despite the fact that some of us have became vegetarian or even vegan, our generation’s demand for cheap chicken and bacon has driven the industrial dosing of animals with antibiotics on a scale that has accelerated the development of antibiotic resistance far faster than would have been the case from us dosing ourselves and our children. For supporting this and other such obscene systems of animal husbandry we apologise to our grandchildren and succeeding generations and hope that somehow an accommodation between humanity, animals and microbes is still possible.
We experienced and benefited from the emergent culture of rights and recognition for women, minorities and the people of varied abilities, and many of us who fought to extend and deepen those rights have pride in what we did. However some of us are beginning to fear that in doing so we contributed to creating new demands, disabilities, and fractious subcultures of fear and angst unimagined in previous generations. While we might not be in the driving seat of identity politics and culture wars, we raised our children to demand their rights in a world that is unravelling due to its multiple contradictions.
In this emerging context, strident demands for rights are likely to be a waste of valuable energy that younger people might better focus on becoming useful to themselves and others. For overemphasising the demand for rights and underplaying the need for responsible self- and collective-reliance, perhaps we should also be sorry.
And is this escalating demand for rights by younger people itself connected, even peripherally, to the increasing callous disregard for the rights of others? Especially in the case of refugees, this careless disregard has allowed political elites to use tough treatment of the less fortunate to distract from the gradual loss of shared privilege that once characterised the ‘lucky country’. To the shame of those in power over the last two decades (mostly baby boomers) those policies are now being adopted on a larger scale in Europe and the US.
In our lifetimes religious faith has declined. For many of our generation, this change represents a measure of humanity’s progress from a benighted past to a promising future. But the collective belief in science and evidence-based decision making has now become a new faith, “Scientism”, which seeks to drive out all other ways of thinking and being from the public space. At the same time, religious fundamentalism is now resurgent. Is this too something that our generation unleashed by preaching tolerance while enforcing an ideology we didn’t even recognise as such?
A significant sign of the good intentions of our generation has been our recognition that the ancient war against nature, which has plagued human life since the beginnings of agriculture, and indeed civilisation, must end. One powerful expression of our efforts has been the valuing of the biodiversity of life, especially local indigenous biodiversity. In the ‘New Europes’ of North America and the Antipodes, seeking to save indigenous biodiversity has grown into an institutionalised form of atonement for the sins of the forefathers.
While this seems like one of our achievements, even this we have bastardised with a new war against naturalised biodiversity. Perhaps the worst aspect of this renewed war against novel ecologies is that we have accepted the helping hand of Monsanto in using Roundup as the main weapon in our urban and rural habitats. The mounting evidence that Roundup may be worse than DDT will be part of our legacy. While history may excuse our parent’s generation for naïve optimism in relation to DDT, our generation’s version of the war on nature will not save us from harsh judgement. For this we should be truly sorry.
Of course any public apology in this country invites comparisons to the apology by governments to the stolen generation of Australian indigenous peoples for the wrongs of the past. This unfinished sorry business is beyond the scope of this apology, but it is an opportunity to reflect critically on our common self-perception of supporting indigenous peoples’ rights in contrast to the normalised racism of previous generations.
Our generation’s invitation to, and enabling of, Australians of indigenous descent to more fully participate in mainstream Australian society may have been a necessary step towards reconciliation; or could it have been a poison chalice drawing them even deeper into the dysfunctions of industrial modernity that I have already outlined. We can only hope that people with such a history of resilience and understanding in the face dispossession will take these additional burdens in their stride.
In any case, this apology is not one that comes from a position of invulnerable privilege, giving succour to those who are no threat to that privilege. For many baby boomers, now caring for parents and dealing with their deaths, we are more inwardly focused. For some of us, especially those estranged from parents, through this both painful and tender processes we are finally growing up. But a comic tragedy could play out in our declining years if a combination of novel disabilities, the culture of rights and amplified fears lead to our children and grandchildren’s generations mostly experiencing harder times as far worse than they might really be, and deciding we are the cause of their troubles.
We baby boomers will increasingly find that in our growing dependence on young people we will be subject to their perspectives, whims and prejudices. Hopefully we can take what we are given on the chin and along with our children and our grandchildren’s generations we can all grow up and work together to face the future with whatever capacities we have.
We might hope this apology is itself a wake-up call to the younger generations that are still mostly sleepwalking into the oncoming maelstroms. In raising the alarm we might hope our humble apology will galvanise the potential in young people who are grasping the nettle of opportunities to turn problems into solutions.
We hope that this apology might lead to understanding rather than resentment of our frailty in the face of the self-organising forces of powerful change that have driven the climaxing of global industrial civilisation. Finally, the task ahead for our generation is to learn how to downsize and disown before we prepare to die, with grace, at a time of our choosing, and in a way that inspires and frees the next generations to chart a prosperous way down.
Saturday, March 9, 2019
Oil, Agriculture and Imperialism
Oil, Agriculture, & Imperialism: Averting The Fast-Track To Armageddon? Colin Todhunter, Off-Guardian.org. Feb. 9, 2019.
US National Security Advisor John Bolton has more or less admitted that the ongoing destabilisation of Venezuela is about grabbing its oil. He recently stated:
The US’s hand-picked supposed leader-in-waiting, Juan Guaido, aims to facilitate the process and usher in a programme of ‘mass privatisation’ and ‘hyper-capitalism’ at the behest of his coup-instigating masters in Washington, thereby destroying the socialist revolution spearheaded by the late Hugo Chavez and returning to a capitalist oligarch-controlled economic system.
One might wonder who is Bolton, or anyone in the US, to dictate and engineer what the future of another sovereign state should be. But this is what the US has been doing across the globe for decades. Its bloody imperialism, destabilisations, coups, assassinations, invasions and military interventions have been extensively documented by William Blum.
Of course, although oil is key to the current analysis of events in Venezuela, there is also the geopolitical subtext of debt, loans and Russian investment and leverage within the country. At the same time, it must be understood that US-led capitalism is experiencing a crisis of over-production: when this occurs capital needs to expand into or create new markets and this entails making countries like Venezuela bow to US hegemony and open up its economy.
For US capitalism, however, oil is certainly king. Its prosperity is maintained by oil with the dollar serving as the world reserve currency. Demand for the greenback is guaranteed as most international trade (especially and significantly oil) is carried out using the dollar. And those who move off it are usually targeted by the US (Venezuela being a case in point).
US global hegemony depends on Washington maintaining the dollar’s leading role. Engaging in petrodollar recycling and treasury-bond ‘super-imperialism’ are joined at the hip and have enabled the US to run up a huge balance of payments deficit (a free ride courtesy of the rest of the world) by using the (oil-backed) paper dollar as security in itself.
More generally, with its control and manipulation of the World Bank, IMF and WTO, the US has been able to lever international trade and financial systems to its advantage by various means (for example, see this analysis of Saudi Arabia’s oil money in relation to African debt). US capitalism will not allow its global dominance and the role of the dollar to be challenged.
Unfortunately for humanity and all life on the planet, the US deems it necessary to attempt to prolong its (declining) hegemony and the age of oil.
OIL, EMPIRE AND AGRICULTURE
In the article ‘And you thought Greece had a problem’, Norman Pagett notes that the ascendance of modern industrialised humans, thanks to oil, has been a short flash of light that has briefly lifted us out of the mire of the middle ages. What we call modern civilisation in the age of oil is fragile and it is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to extract remaining oil reserves. The age of oil is a driver of climate change, that much is clear. But what is equally disturbing is that the modern global food regime is oil-dependent, not least in terms of the unnecessary transportation of commodities and produce across the planet and the increasing reliance on proprietary seeds designed to be used with agrochemicals derived from petroleum or which rely on fossil fuel during their manufacture.
Virtually all of the processes in the modern food system are now dependent upon this finite resource:
Pagett notes that the trappings of civilisation have not altered the one rule of existence: if you don’t produce food from the earth on a personal basis, your life depends on someone converting sunlight into food on your behalf. Consider that Arabia’s gleaming cities in the desert are built on its oil. It sells oil for food. Then there is the UK, which has to import 40 per cent of its food, and much of the rest depends on oil to produce it, which also has to be imported. Pagett notes that while some talk about the end of the oil age, few link this to or describe it as being the end of the food age.
Without oil, we could survive – but not by continuing to pursue the ‘growth’ model China or India are pursuing, or which the West has pursued. Without sustainable, healthy agriculture, however, we will not survive. Destroy agriculture, or more precisely the resources to produce food sustainably (the climate, access to fresh water and indigenous seeds, traditional know-how, learning and practices passed on down the generations, soil fertility, etc.), which is what we are doing, and we will be in trouble.
The prevailing oil-based global food regime goes hand in hand with the wrong-headed oil-based model of ‘development’ we see in places like India. Such development is based on an outmoded ‘growth’ paradigm:
How can we try to avoid potential catastrophic consequences of such an approach, including what appears to be an increasingly likely nuclear conflict between competing imperial powers?
We must move away from militarism and resource-grabbing conflicts by reorganising economies so that nations live within their environmental means. We must maximise human well-being while actively shrinking out consumption levels and our ecological footprint.
Some might at this point be perplexed by the emphasis on agriculture. But what many overlook is that central to this argument is recognising not only the key role that agriculture has played in facilitating US geopolitical aims but also its potential for transforming our values and how we live. We need a major shift away from the current model of industrialised agriculture and food production. Aside from it being a major emitter of greenhouse gases, it has led to bad food, poor health and environmental degradation and has been underpinned by a resource-grabbing, food-deficit producing US foreign policy agenda for many decades, assisted by the WTO, World Bank, IMF and ‘aid’ strategies. For instance, see Sowing the Seeds of Famine in Ethiopia by Michel Chossudovsky and Destroying African Agriculture by Walden Bello.
The control of global agriculture has been a tentacle of US capitalism’s geopolitical strategy. The Green Revolution was exported courtesy of oil-rich interests and poorer nations adopted agricapital’s chemical-dependent model of agriculture that required loans for inputs and related infrastructure development. It entailed trapping nations into a globalised system of debt bondage, rigged trade relations and the hollowing out and capture of national and local economies. In effect, we have seen the transnational corporate commercialisation and displacement of localised productive systems.
Western agricapital’s markets are opened or propped up by militarism (Ukraine and Iraq), ‘structural adjustment’ and strings-attached loans (Africa) and slanted trade deals (India). Agricapital drives a globalised agenda to suit its interests and eradicate impediments to profit. And it doesn’t matter how much devastation ensues or how unsustainable its food regime is, ‘crisis management’ and ‘innovation’ fuel the corporate-controlled treadmill it seeks to impose.
But as Norman J Church argues, the globalisation and corporate control that seriously threaten society and the stability of our environment are only possible because cheap energy is used to replace labour and allows the distance between producer and consumer to be extended.
We need to place greater emphasis on producing food rooted in the principles of localisation, self-reliance, (carbon sequestrating) regenerative agriculture and (political) agroecology and to acknowledge the need to regard the commons (soil, water, seeds, land, forests, other natural resources, etc) as genuine democratically controlled common wealth. This approach would offerconcrete, practical solutions (mitigating climate change, job creation in the West and elsewhere, regenerating agriculture and economies in the Global South, etc) to many of the world’s problems that move beyond (but which are linked to) agriculture.
This would present a major challenge to the existing global food regime and the prevailing moribund doctrinaire economics that serves the interests of Western oil companies and financial institutions, global agribusiness and the major arms companies. These interlocking, self-serving interests have managed to institute a globalised system of war, poverty and food insecurity.
The deregulation of international capital flows (financial liberalisation) effectively turned the world into a free-for-all for global capital. The further ramping up of US militarism comes at the back end of a deregulating/pro-privatising neoliberal agenda that has sacked public budgets, depressed wages, expanded credit to consumers and to governments (to sustain spending and consumption) and unbridled financial speculation. This relentless militarism has now become a major driver of the US economy.
Millions are dead in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan as the US and its allies play out a continuation of what they regard as a modern-day ‘Great Game’. And now, in what it arrogantly considers its own back yard, the US is instigating yet another coup and possible military attack.
We have Western politicians and the media parroting unfounded claims about President Maduro, like they did with Assad, Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi and like they do about ‘Russian aggression’. All for what? Resources, pipelines, oil and gas. And these wars and conflicts and the lies to justify them will only get worse as demand across the world for resources grows against a backdrop of depletion.
We require a different low-energy, low-carbon economic system based on a different set of values. As the US ratchets up tensions in Venezuela, we again witness a continuation of the same imperialist mindset that led to two devastating world wars.
Farm Rot is Eating America Alive. Evaggelos Vallianatos, CounterPunch. Aug. 12, 2019.
The environment is the immense natural world that nourishes life and keep us alive. But instead of protecting and loving it, our corrupt Trump government signals to the business and billionaire classes the environment is theirs to exploit and destroy.
The same confused mentality has been keeping the politicians mumbling about social problems, all but neglecting environmental policies that undermine the very ground under their feet.
Petrochemical agriculture
A look at that ground demolishes the bible of agribusiness: that our food is the safest in the world: that our agriculture is science-based.
In the place of this fiction, farm rot is eating the country alive. It’s a repeat of the early twentieth century when Upton Sinclair wrote about the mafia-like culture of food and agriculture: the complete absence of government regulation, the loathsome slaughterhouses of Chicago, the adulteration and poisoning of food.
Scientists often publish dense articles about farming that, reading between the lines, you grasp the dreadful effects of our irresponsible decisions of allowing farmers to do as they please.
These farmers have been addicted to huge petroleum-fueled machines, mountains of petroleum-based fertilizers, and rivers of petrochemical poisons. These “inputs” undermine the fertility and life of the land. Petrochemicals fight nature, primarily by killing beneficial microorganisms in the soil and poisoning beneficial insects and other wildlife.
The vision of the petrochemical farmers is not diversity in crops, much less diversity in the natural world where they are producing food. No, their nightmare of “scientific” agriculture takes flesh in the cultivation of one crop at a time, covering a vast acreage.
In this futile struggle against nature, farmers keep adding more of old sprays, and often replace old chemicals with newer more acutely deleterious materials.
Petrochemical companies, and the land grant universities that have been inventing many of the toxic weapons of the farmers, keep the farmers hooked on ever newer hazardous substances.
This farm chemical warfare has been going on for several decades. Farmers, academic and business experts and environmentalists know about it, though rarely any one of them calls farm sprays chemical warfare agents. They hope against hope this process can last forever.
But it won’t. It annot. Nature does not work that way. It does not hide its secrets like men do. Employ reason and science and the truth and beauty of nature is all over you. But pretend you are the king and knows best, that you have the right to dominate the natural world, and you face the abyss of destruction.
Allow farmers spraying insecticides and, unavoidably, you starve birds and other wildlife. You keep poisoning honeybees and you impoverish wildflowers and reduce the varieties and amounts of pollinated plants and crops.
Moreover, poisons sprayed over the land don’t fade into nothingness. They remain in the land, sometimes for a very long time, never ceasing their killing of life. They move to groundwater and the water of creeks, lakes and rivers. They even become gases, lifting themselves off the land, entering into the atmosphere and moving with the winds around the globe.
The effects of the lives of pesticides in the environment are awesome and terrible.
The toxification of the land
A peer-reviewed studypublished August 6, 2019, revealed that American agriculture is now about 50 times more deleterious to insects than it was 25 years ago. The second terrible truth is that neonicotinoid insect-killing chemicals account for 92 percent of the growing toxic wrath of land and farming.
These neonicotinoids were invented in Germany and introduced to farming in this country in the early 1990s. They are neurotoxins that confuse and kill honeybees and other insects in droves.
The dramatic decline of honeybees is probably and primarily because of the widespread use of these German nerve poisons. They are used all over America primarily in millions of acres of corn and soybeans. This is happening at a time when there’s an unprecedented in scope global decline and extinction of insects.
The authors of the study are warning that, given the toxification of the land and the near insect apocalypse it is bringing about, it’s not out of the question we could bring about a catastrophic ecosystem collapse.
...
Time has come for an end of American enclosures and a return to family farms. Equally important, we must replace pesticides by agroecology, allowing the beneficial insects to take care of crop pests. This means a reconciliation with beneficial insects and Mother Earth.
The looming global warming emergency demands the end of poisonous farming and the end of animal farms, which make a large contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. The latest (August 2019) UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report summarized the evidence of the impact of agriculture on climate change. Agriculture and forestry are responsible for 21 to 37 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.
US National Security Advisor John Bolton has more or less admitted that the ongoing destabilisation of Venezuela is about grabbing its oil. He recently stated:
"We’re looking at the oil assets… We’re in conversation with major American companies now… It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”
The US’s hand-picked supposed leader-in-waiting, Juan Guaido, aims to facilitate the process and usher in a programme of ‘mass privatisation’ and ‘hyper-capitalism’ at the behest of his coup-instigating masters in Washington, thereby destroying the socialist revolution spearheaded by the late Hugo Chavez and returning to a capitalist oligarch-controlled economic system.
One might wonder who is Bolton, or anyone in the US, to dictate and engineer what the future of another sovereign state should be. But this is what the US has been doing across the globe for decades. Its bloody imperialism, destabilisations, coups, assassinations, invasions and military interventions have been extensively documented by William Blum.
Of course, although oil is key to the current analysis of events in Venezuela, there is also the geopolitical subtext of debt, loans and Russian investment and leverage within the country. At the same time, it must be understood that US-led capitalism is experiencing a crisis of over-production: when this occurs capital needs to expand into or create new markets and this entails making countries like Venezuela bow to US hegemony and open up its economy.
For US capitalism, however, oil is certainly king. Its prosperity is maintained by oil with the dollar serving as the world reserve currency. Demand for the greenback is guaranteed as most international trade (especially and significantly oil) is carried out using the dollar. And those who move off it are usually targeted by the US (Venezuela being a case in point).
US global hegemony depends on Washington maintaining the dollar’s leading role. Engaging in petrodollar recycling and treasury-bond ‘super-imperialism’ are joined at the hip and have enabled the US to run up a huge balance of payments deficit (a free ride courtesy of the rest of the world) by using the (oil-backed) paper dollar as security in itself.
More generally, with its control and manipulation of the World Bank, IMF and WTO, the US has been able to lever international trade and financial systems to its advantage by various means (for example, see this analysis of Saudi Arabia’s oil money in relation to African debt). US capitalism will not allow its global dominance and the role of the dollar to be challenged.
Unfortunately for humanity and all life on the planet, the US deems it necessary to attempt to prolong its (declining) hegemony and the age of oil.
OIL, EMPIRE AND AGRICULTURE
In the article ‘And you thought Greece had a problem’, Norman Pagett notes that the ascendance of modern industrialised humans, thanks to oil, has been a short flash of light that has briefly lifted us out of the mire of the middle ages. What we call modern civilisation in the age of oil is fragile and it is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to extract remaining oil reserves. The age of oil is a driver of climate change, that much is clear. But what is equally disturbing is that the modern global food regime is oil-dependent, not least in terms of the unnecessary transportation of commodities and produce across the planet and the increasing reliance on proprietary seeds designed to be used with agrochemicals derived from petroleum or which rely on fossil fuel during their manufacture.
Virtually all of the processes in the modern food system are now dependent upon this finite resource:
Vast amounts of oil and gas are used as raw materials and energy in the manufacture of fertilisers and pesticides, and as cheap and readily available energy at all stages of food production: from planting, irrigation, feeding and harvesting, through to processing, distribution and packaging. In addition, fossil fuels are essential in the construction and the repair of equipment and infrastructure needed to facilitate this industry, including farm machinery, processing facilities, storage, ships, trucks and roads. The industrial food supply system is one of the biggest consumers of fossil fuels and one of the greatest producers of greenhouse gases.”
Norman J Church (2005)
Pagett notes that the trappings of civilisation have not altered the one rule of existence: if you don’t produce food from the earth on a personal basis, your life depends on someone converting sunlight into food on your behalf. Consider that Arabia’s gleaming cities in the desert are built on its oil. It sells oil for food. Then there is the UK, which has to import 40 per cent of its food, and much of the rest depends on oil to produce it, which also has to be imported. Pagett notes that while some talk about the end of the oil age, few link this to or describe it as being the end of the food age.
Without oil, we could survive – but not by continuing to pursue the ‘growth’ model China or India are pursuing, or which the West has pursued. Without sustainable, healthy agriculture, however, we will not survive. Destroy agriculture, or more precisely the resources to produce food sustainably (the climate, access to fresh water and indigenous seeds, traditional know-how, learning and practices passed on down the generations, soil fertility, etc.), which is what we are doing, and we will be in trouble.
The prevailing oil-based global food regime goes hand in hand with the wrong-headed oil-based model of ‘development’ we see in places like India. Such development is based on an outmoded ‘growth’ paradigm:
"Our politicians tell us that we need to keep the global economy growing at more than 3% each year – the minimum necessary for large firms to make aggregate profits. That means every 20 years we need to double the size of the global economy – double the cars, double the fishing, double the mining, double the McFlurries and double the iPads. And then double them again over the next 20 years from their already doubled state.”
Jason Hickel (2016)
How can we try to avoid potential catastrophic consequences of such an approach, including what appears to be an increasingly likely nuclear conflict between competing imperial powers?
We must move away from militarism and resource-grabbing conflicts by reorganising economies so that nations live within their environmental means. We must maximise human well-being while actively shrinking out consumption levels and our ecological footprint.
Some might at this point be perplexed by the emphasis on agriculture. But what many overlook is that central to this argument is recognising not only the key role that agriculture has played in facilitating US geopolitical aims but also its potential for transforming our values and how we live. We need a major shift away from the current model of industrialised agriculture and food production. Aside from it being a major emitter of greenhouse gases, it has led to bad food, poor health and environmental degradation and has been underpinned by a resource-grabbing, food-deficit producing US foreign policy agenda for many decades, assisted by the WTO, World Bank, IMF and ‘aid’ strategies. For instance, see Sowing the Seeds of Famine in Ethiopia by Michel Chossudovsky and Destroying African Agriculture by Walden Bello.
The control of global agriculture has been a tentacle of US capitalism’s geopolitical strategy. The Green Revolution was exported courtesy of oil-rich interests and poorer nations adopted agricapital’s chemical-dependent model of agriculture that required loans for inputs and related infrastructure development. It entailed trapping nations into a globalised system of debt bondage, rigged trade relations and the hollowing out and capture of national and local economies. In effect, we have seen the transnational corporate commercialisation and displacement of localised productive systems.
Western agricapital’s markets are opened or propped up by militarism (Ukraine and Iraq), ‘structural adjustment’ and strings-attached loans (Africa) and slanted trade deals (India). Agricapital drives a globalised agenda to suit its interests and eradicate impediments to profit. And it doesn’t matter how much devastation ensues or how unsustainable its food regime is, ‘crisis management’ and ‘innovation’ fuel the corporate-controlled treadmill it seeks to impose.
But as Norman J Church argues, the globalisation and corporate control that seriously threaten society and the stability of our environment are only possible because cheap energy is used to replace labour and allows the distance between producer and consumer to be extended.
We need to place greater emphasis on producing food rooted in the principles of localisation, self-reliance, (carbon sequestrating) regenerative agriculture and (political) agroecology and to acknowledge the need to regard the commons (soil, water, seeds, land, forests, other natural resources, etc) as genuine democratically controlled common wealth. This approach would offerconcrete, practical solutions (mitigating climate change, job creation in the West and elsewhere, regenerating agriculture and economies in the Global South, etc) to many of the world’s problems that move beyond (but which are linked to) agriculture.
This would present a major challenge to the existing global food regime and the prevailing moribund doctrinaire economics that serves the interests of Western oil companies and financial institutions, global agribusiness and the major arms companies. These interlocking, self-serving interests have managed to institute a globalised system of war, poverty and food insecurity.
The deregulation of international capital flows (financial liberalisation) effectively turned the world into a free-for-all for global capital. The further ramping up of US militarism comes at the back end of a deregulating/pro-privatising neoliberal agenda that has sacked public budgets, depressed wages, expanded credit to consumers and to governments (to sustain spending and consumption) and unbridled financial speculation. This relentless militarism has now become a major driver of the US economy.
Millions are dead in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan as the US and its allies play out a continuation of what they regard as a modern-day ‘Great Game’. And now, in what it arrogantly considers its own back yard, the US is instigating yet another coup and possible military attack.
We have Western politicians and the media parroting unfounded claims about President Maduro, like they did with Assad, Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi and like they do about ‘Russian aggression’. All for what? Resources, pipelines, oil and gas. And these wars and conflicts and the lies to justify them will only get worse as demand across the world for resources grows against a backdrop of depletion.
We require a different low-energy, low-carbon economic system based on a different set of values. As the US ratchets up tensions in Venezuela, we again witness a continuation of the same imperialist mindset that led to two devastating world wars.
Farm Rot is Eating America Alive. Evaggelos Vallianatos, CounterPunch. Aug. 12, 2019.
The environment is the immense natural world that nourishes life and keep us alive. But instead of protecting and loving it, our corrupt Trump government signals to the business and billionaire classes the environment is theirs to exploit and destroy.
The same confused mentality has been keeping the politicians mumbling about social problems, all but neglecting environmental policies that undermine the very ground under their feet.
Petrochemical agriculture
A look at that ground demolishes the bible of agribusiness: that our food is the safest in the world: that our agriculture is science-based.
In the place of this fiction, farm rot is eating the country alive. It’s a repeat of the early twentieth century when Upton Sinclair wrote about the mafia-like culture of food and agriculture: the complete absence of government regulation, the loathsome slaughterhouses of Chicago, the adulteration and poisoning of food.
Scientists often publish dense articles about farming that, reading between the lines, you grasp the dreadful effects of our irresponsible decisions of allowing farmers to do as they please.
These farmers have been addicted to huge petroleum-fueled machines, mountains of petroleum-based fertilizers, and rivers of petrochemical poisons. These “inputs” undermine the fertility and life of the land. Petrochemicals fight nature, primarily by killing beneficial microorganisms in the soil and poisoning beneficial insects and other wildlife.
The vision of the petrochemical farmers is not diversity in crops, much less diversity in the natural world where they are producing food. No, their nightmare of “scientific” agriculture takes flesh in the cultivation of one crop at a time, covering a vast acreage.
In this futile struggle against nature, farmers keep adding more of old sprays, and often replace old chemicals with newer more acutely deleterious materials.
Petrochemical companies, and the land grant universities that have been inventing many of the toxic weapons of the farmers, keep the farmers hooked on ever newer hazardous substances.
This farm chemical warfare has been going on for several decades. Farmers, academic and business experts and environmentalists know about it, though rarely any one of them calls farm sprays chemical warfare agents. They hope against hope this process can last forever.
But it won’t. It annot. Nature does not work that way. It does not hide its secrets like men do. Employ reason and science and the truth and beauty of nature is all over you. But pretend you are the king and knows best, that you have the right to dominate the natural world, and you face the abyss of destruction.
Allow farmers spraying insecticides and, unavoidably, you starve birds and other wildlife. You keep poisoning honeybees and you impoverish wildflowers and reduce the varieties and amounts of pollinated plants and crops.
Moreover, poisons sprayed over the land don’t fade into nothingness. They remain in the land, sometimes for a very long time, never ceasing their killing of life. They move to groundwater and the water of creeks, lakes and rivers. They even become gases, lifting themselves off the land, entering into the atmosphere and moving with the winds around the globe.
The effects of the lives of pesticides in the environment are awesome and terrible.
The toxification of the land
A peer-reviewed studypublished August 6, 2019, revealed that American agriculture is now about 50 times more deleterious to insects than it was 25 years ago. The second terrible truth is that neonicotinoid insect-killing chemicals account for 92 percent of the growing toxic wrath of land and farming.
These neonicotinoids were invented in Germany and introduced to farming in this country in the early 1990s. They are neurotoxins that confuse and kill honeybees and other insects in droves.
The dramatic decline of honeybees is probably and primarily because of the widespread use of these German nerve poisons. They are used all over America primarily in millions of acres of corn and soybeans. This is happening at a time when there’s an unprecedented in scope global decline and extinction of insects.
The authors of the study are warning that, given the toxification of the land and the near insect apocalypse it is bringing about, it’s not out of the question we could bring about a catastrophic ecosystem collapse.
...
Time has come for an end of American enclosures and a return to family farms. Equally important, we must replace pesticides by agroecology, allowing the beneficial insects to take care of crop pests. This means a reconciliation with beneficial insects and Mother Earth.
The looming global warming emergency demands the end of poisonous farming and the end of animal farms, which make a large contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. The latest (August 2019) UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report summarized the evidence of the impact of agriculture on climate change. Agriculture and forestry are responsible for 21 to 37 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.
Topic: Collapse
Preparing for the end of capitalism. Survival Acres. Mar. 8, 2019.
This is how UN scientists are preparing for the end of capitalism
The research paper is more interesting (to me) – GOVERNANCE OF ECONOMIC TRANSITION
Essentially, the realization that the world is running out of resources, consuming too much energy, and polluting the planet has finally come to the attention of some of the folks at the United Nations. A group of scientist were commissioned by the United Nations to present some ideas on these issues.
One of the things they identified is how capitalism isn’t going to be compatible with the world environment going forward. Well, it’s about time that somebody admitted to that. Energy and material abundance are fast declining and capitalism was the cause (along with triggering climate change).
The scientist admit that “that no widely applicable economic models have been developed specifically for the upcoming era.” That’s because capitalism has a death-grip on the lives over everyone, including scientists and researchers, and where funding for these studies come from, but I digress.
Massive changes in energy, transportation, food production, housing, and government responsibilities were identified – but alas, they have not gone anywhere near far enough in this study.
This is interesting, but another “let’s kick the can down the road a bit farther” effort. It’s not sweeping enough and despite making the attempt, it won’t be the solution needed.
Yes, we do need to eventually prepare for the end of capitalism, but I suspect that we will have this vampire on our necks for many more years as we struggle to survive in a declining world (that will still demand to be profitable even as we’re all dying). The truly radical changes that society and civilization urgently requires won’t be forthcoming with this “transition” or the nascent Green New Deal movement.
Neither policy makers nor scientists are yet truly serious about saving humanity. Not in my estimation, not even close. I am still convinced that we are firmly on the pathway to failure.
If they or anyone else was truly “serious”, they’d include some of the ideas like what was listed in this post – Science Refused.
I don’t believe for one second that the “transition” to a supposedly different way of life is going to be easy, pleasant or properly planned (by anyone). I don’t get the sense that we have any real idea what to do or how to handle this at any level of science or government.
And I definitely do not fall for the hopium and propaganda that surrounds this issue. It’s plain as day that they are not planning for mass deaths, depopulation, degrowth, massive starvation, pandemic, disease vectors, sudden temperature increases or sudden sea level rise, oxygen depletion, civil unrest, riots, economic collapse or runaway inflation. Nobody can actually plan for all of that, but when they don’t actually bother to even mention it, you have to wonder what they’re really thinking and whether or not the understand the scope of how civilization will unravel.
They need to go MUCH further in their assessments in my opinion. That’s why I still think the Life Project will be the kind of idea that will eventually be attempted. However, not planning ahead far enough means (as I’ve often warned) that “everything will be tried” while wasting precious time and resources.
Climbing Everest in High Heels. Tim Watkins, The Consciousness of Sheep. Dec. 11, 2018.
Britain has – apparently – been thrown into crisis overnight. Meanwhile across the channel, French president Macron is desperately trying to extinguish the flames of another weekend of mass protests that have now spread to Belgium and Holland. In Eastern Europe the hard-right are gaining support; even undermining the previously untouchable Angela Merkel’s power base in the former East Germany. Across the Atlantic meanwhile, the lines between deranged Democrats and MAGA nationalists are being drawn in readiness for America’s second civil war. We are surely living through the greatest crisis in modern history.Well, yes indeed we are. But everything set out in the first paragraph is no more than the froth on the beer. These political spasms are merely the outward manifestation of a human catastrophe that has been decades in the making.
Two far greater symptoms of our predicament have gained at least some public traction this year. First was an all too visible plastic pollution crisis that is increasingly difficult to ignore now that China has ceased acting as the West’s rubbish dump. Second is the somewhat less visible insect apocalypse that has seen the near extinction of a raft of pollinating insect species; without which we humans are doomed to starvation. Interestingly, while these two symptoms are only tenuously related to climate change, they have tended to be included under that shorthand heading. Plastic certainly damages the environment, but its build up owes far more to the ongoing power of the petrochemicals industry and the myth of recycling than to changes in climate. The same goes for the insects. While there may have been some climactic impact on migrations and reproduction, the main cause is the vast quantities of chemical insecticides required by an industrialised agriculture tasked with feeding 7.5 billion humans on a planet that could barely feed one seventh of that without fossil fuels and agrochemicals.
In the affected areas, local populations have been stunned by a series of “red tide” events that result in the mass deaths of fish and other marine creatures. Climate change is indirectly involved in these events because of the increased rainfall from warmer storms. But once again it is our industrial agriculture that is the primary cause – the giant oxygen-free zones beneath algae and phytoplankton blooms that form because of artificial fertilisers washed off the land when it rains. When marine creatures stray into these oxygen-free zones (which are pinkish-red in colour due to concentrated hydrogen sulphide) they suffocate before they can swim to safety.
Off most people’s radar is the ongoing sixth mass extinction, as we lose thousands of species every year. Again, while some of this is directly due to the changing climate, the larger part is due to human activities like agriculture, deforestation and strip mining simply chewing up natural habitats to make way for the creation of the various resources – including food – required to sustain a human population that is projected to reach 10 billion by mid-century.
The use of the term “climate change” to describe these catastrophes is deceptive. If we were looking at our predicament in totality, we would include these crises alongside climate change as a series of (often interacting) sub-sets of a much greater problem… let’s call it the “human impact crisis.”
Crucially, by focusing solely on a changing climate, we can exercise a form of psychological denial in which human civilisation is able to continue chasing infinite growth on a finite planet while yet-to-be-invented technologies are deployed to magically heal the damage that our over-consumptive lifestyles are having on the human habitat.
The focus on climate change also permits us to avoid any examination of those human activities that increasingly stand in the way of the bright green technological future we keep promising ourselves. Shortages in a range of key resources, including several rare earths, cobalt, lithium, chromium, zinc, gold and silver are very likely to materialise in the next decade if Western countries get anywhere close to their targets for switching to renewable electricity and electric cars (even though even these are just a fraction of what would be required to decarbonise the global economy).
Energy is an even bigger problem. For the first time since the dark ages, humanity is switching from high-density energy sources (nuclear, coal, gas and oil) to ultra-low density energy sources (tide, wind, wave and solar). We are – allegedly – choosing to do this. However, because we have depleted fossil fuels on a low-hanging fruit basis, it is costing us more in both energy and money to maintain the energy needed to power the global economy. As more of our energy has to be channelled into energy production (e.g. the hugely expensive Canadian bitumen sands and the US fracking industry) ever less energy is available to power the wider economy. This has forced us into a crisis I refer to as “Schrodinger’s renewables,” in which the technologies being deployed supposedly to wean us off fossil fuels end up merely being added in order to maintain sufficient economic growth to prevent the entire civilisation collapsing.
This, of course, brings us back to the increasingly heated debates in the US Congress, the UK Parliament and the streets of 100 French towns and cities. Economic growth is the fantasy that almost everyone is buying into as a solution to our predicament. Sure, some call it “green growth,” but it isn’t. In reality it is, and always was central bank growth. Why? Because every unit of currency in circulation in the West was created with interest attached. In such a system, we either grow the economy or we inflate the value currency back to something more in line with the real economy. The former is impossible and the latter is devastating… which is why central bankers around the world have been quietly panicking for the best part of a decade.
To be clear, since 1980 the western economic system has inflated a series of asset bubbles, each of which has subsumed and outgrown its predecessor. In the 1980s companies bailed out failing companies to save themselves. In the 1990s stock markets bailed out companies to save stock markets. In the 2000s banks bailed out stock markets and then states and central banks bailed out banks. Next time around it will be states and currencies that need bailing out. And in the absence of space aliens, it is not clear who is going to be riding to the rescue. What that means, dear reader, is that everything you depend upon (but didn’t know it) for life support – inter-bank lending systems, letters of credit and freight insurance, international trade arrangements, employment, state pensions, etc. – is going to go away (at least until some kind of debt-write-off (either directly or via “helicopter money”) and a new currency system can be put into place.
The other legacy from this period of debt-based asset inflation is a series of grossly unequal societies; divided, ultimately, between those who get to spend the (uninflated) debt-based currency first and those (the 99 percent) who only get the currency after its value has been inflated away – primarily those who depend upon a wage/salary from employment rather than an income from shares and other investments. Most people accept some inequality. However a lack of economic growth (outside banking and tech) has created deep hostility to those political parties that cling to the pre-2008 neoliberal orthodoxy. The result has been a growth in populist movements claiming to know how to restore the economy to rates of growth last seen in the 1990s. Political economist Mark Blyth summed up the difference between the left and right wing variants of populism thus:
- The right says neoliberalism ruined the economy and immigrants took your jobs
- The left says neoliberalism ruined the economy and capitalists took your jobs.
Nevertheless, even supposedly green parties cling to the promotion of economic growth as an electoral strategy. Rather than admit the impossibility of further growth, however, they reach instead for some mythical “green growth” that will supposedly follow the industrial scale deployment of non-renewable renewable energy harvesting technologies like wind turbines and solar panels that require fossil fuels in their manufacture , and for which the planet lacks sufficient material reserves. Promising de-growth is, however, politically toxic in the current climate.
Most green growth advocates imagine a switch from extraction and manufacturing to (largely digital) services that will somehow decouple resource and energy growth from GDP. That is, we can all continue to prosper even as our use of planetary resources falls back to something like the amounts consumed in the 1750s. Writing in Resilience, Jason Hickel gives the lie to this:
“This sounds reasonable on the face of it. But services have grown dramatically in recent decades, as a proportion of world GDP — and yet global material use has not only continued to rise, but has accelerated, outstripping the rate of GDP growth. In other words, there has been no dematerialization of economic activity, despite a shift to services.
“The same is true of high-income nations as a group — and this despite the increasing contribution that services make to GDP growth in these economies. Indeed, while high-income nations have the highest share of services in terms of contribution to GDP, they also have the highest rates of resource consumption per capita. By far.
“Why is this? Partly because services require resource-intensive inputs (cinemas and gyms are hardly made out of air). And partly also because the income acquired from the service sector is used to purchase resource-intensive consumer goods (you might get your income from working in a cinema, but you use it to buy TVs and cars and beef).”
And, of course, without the income derived from making all of that stuff for service providers to consume, nobody can afford to buy the services and the economy will collapse. Not that anyone has noticed this for now, as we are descend into the politics of blame in which widening inequality and poverty at the bottom is blamed on one or other of a culture’s preferred out groups – Tories, Democrats, socialists, libertarians, migrants, the banks, the European Union, Israel, Angela Merkel, the Rothschild family, Donald Trump… choose your favourite pantomime villain; but don’t expect to be going anywhere but down.
Politics matter, of course. In a future of economic contraction it is far better to be governed consensually by people who understand the predicament and who plan a route to deindustrialisation that has as few casualties as possible on the way down… one reason not to keep voting for parties that dole out corporate welfare at the top while driving those at the bottom to destitution. That road tends to end with guillotines and firing squads.
For all of its passion and drama, however, the role of politics in our current predicament is somewhat akin to the choice of footwear when setting out to climb a mountain. Ideally you want to choose a pair of stout climbing boots; but nobody is offering those. For now the choice is between high heels and flip-flops to climb the highest mountain we have ever faced. If we are lucky, the political equivalent a half decent pair of training shoes might turn up, but while the world is focussed on economic growth; that is the best we can hope for… and we still have to climb the mountain whatever shoes we wear.
Sargon and the Sea Peoples. Albert Bates. June 24, 2018.
Back in 4300 BCE, Sargon of Akkad found the grain farming good in the broad, flat alluvial valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Being an accomplished bully and not fond of toiling in the heat of the sun himself, he assembled a gang of thugs and enslaved weaker people to work for him. They built vast irrigation systems, knocked down forests and opened up much of the fertile Mesopotamian Plain to oxen and wooden plows. With good soil, good seed and adequate rain, his tribe prospered and applied their surplus to erect a number of market cities that were considered quite grand for the period.
You can’t just knock down forests and dig long irrigation ditches and expect Nature to let you off scott-free, however. The plowing opened the soil to the sun and killed the rich microbial life built by those erstwhile forests. Irrigation made the fields salted and addicted. Major lakes silted. Without the trees and their fungal network, the weather changed. It stopped raining.
After a mere 130 years of prosperity, the Akkadian empire collapsed abruptly in 4170 BCE. There was general abandonment of agriculture, dramatic influxes of refugees, and widespread famine. The same calamity befell much of the rest of the region. Poorer tribes flocked to wealthy Akkad seeking help.
Faced with the rising tide of hungry people, Sargon’s successor thought a good solution would be a 112-mile-long wall, roughly the distance by patrol car between Brownsville TX and Rio Grande City, which Akkadians dubbed the “Repeller of the Amorites.” They may even have claimed they were going to get the Amorites to build it, but those clay tablets haven’t been located yet.
Fast forward a few decades and we find Akkadian cities in ruins, the plains desertifying, and smaller sedentary populations farther north around the shores of Lake Van trying to eke out a frugal living eating grasshoppers and frogs. It was a rough come-down from former glory.
Of course, the Akkadians were not entirely to blame. Their changing climate was also influenced by 1 to 2 degree cooler sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic that changed rainfall in the higher elevations. In their haste to develop, they had not left themselves any safety margin.
A few thousand years later another serious drought struck that part of the world — much of it within what is now Syria and Palestine — and by this time the population was much larger than back in Sargon’s day. The first wave of these “Sea Peoples” washed over Egypt in the second year of Ramesses II, 1276 BCE, but rather than build tent cities to house them, the Pharaoh simply trapped and slaughtered some 6000 people arriving in boats with all their goods, and then sent his chariots to drive stragglers back into the sea. A bit of a blowhard, Ramesses claimed a great victory and had the story inscribed in stone and read on ceremonial days.
The Syrian drought continued, however, and Ramesses son, Merenptah, writes how, in the fifth year of his reign (1209 BCE), Libyans allied with the Sea Peoples to invade Egypt and were repulsed with 6000 casualties. Six thousand seems to be a popular number when you are killing Sea Peoples.
Then Merenptah’s son, Ramesses III, in c. 1200 BCE was informed they were coming again. The populations fleeing drought-stricken Syria had already destroyed the Hittite state and Ramesses III wrote, “they were coming forward toward Egypt.” Ramesses also makes the first recorded mention of the Israelites as one of those groups trying to illegally migrate into Egypt.
“If they would just report to processing centers they could apply for asylum,” Ramesses III might have said. But secretly he set ambushes all along the border and made especially effective use of his archers, positioning them along the shoreline to rain down arrows on approaching ships. Once the ships’ passengers were dead or drowning the vessels were set on fire with flaming arrows so that not even children could escape. Then Ramesses III turned his archers toward any survivors who made it to land. Egyptian records again detail a glorious victory in which many of the Sea Peoples were slain and others taken captive or pressed into the Egyptian army and navy or sold as slaves. For hundreds of years, stories of marauding Sea Peoples were told to frightened children.
Ramesses’s border defenses were so expensive they drained the Royal Treasury. This led to the first labor strike in recorded history.
Century-long droughts can be found at many points in the historic record. California experienced a 240-year-long drought that started in 850 CE and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years. Mexico experienced an abrupt climate shift between 800 to 1000 CE that brought dry conditions to the central Yucatan for 200 years, curtailing the era of monumental Mayan architecture. Lowland population densities plunged from 200 persons/km2 at the peak of the Late Classic period to less than half that by 900 CE. City complexes of more than 50,000 people, like Tikal, were abandoned to the rats and weeds.
Houston and Miami take heed.
Challenged by unprecedented environmental stresses, cultures can shift to lower subsistence levels by reducing social complexity, abandoning urban centers, and reorganizing systems of supply and production, as the Maya, Akkadians, Romans, Tiwanaku, Mochica, Athenians and many others have done, but more often — and even in those cases — they failed to recognize what was happening until it was too late to escape unscathed. They waved their arms, followed militant leaders, found convenient scapegoats, increased debt, took to the streets in protest, overtaxed their most vital resources, and kept trying to grow their way out as if growth was the only solution they could imagine.
It never works. Sometimes civilizations go the way of the Easter Islanders. Other times they are conquered and destroyed by an even more desperate and militant neighbor they foolishly made into an enemy.
George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but he was peddling his Harvard theory of cyclic history and really could have done a better job of thinking that through. His actual theory was that both those who do not learn history and those who do learn history are doomed to repeat it.
Samuel Clemens added greater depth to Santayana’s theory, fifty years earlier, when he said “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
Last week, speaking at Wells College, I concluded by saying, “As a global culture, we can create social norms that would permit us to sustain healthy economies and ecologies into the turbulent climate future we cannot now avoid. There are neither technological nor resource barriers to prevent that outcome.” There are, however, biological limits, including the psychology of sunk investments.
Sad to say, even if the 45th President of the United States had not cheated and bullied his way through his education and actually studied history, it would not have made any difference. We are just in that part of the cycle now where stupidity trumps the obvious. The queues of refugees may not be quite the same as the Sea Peoples, but they rhyme.
How Resource Depletion Leads to Collapse. The Story of a Lost Kingdom. Ugo Bardi, The Seneca Effect. April 9, 2021.
The idea that a civilization may collapse because of resource depletion is often hard to believe for historians. They seem to believe that society is such a complex entity that it is impossible to find a single reason for it to collapse. And, yet, it is typical of complex systems that an external perturbation generates a cascade of feedback effects that may mask their origin and make it appear as a series of events had somehow cooperated to bring down the whole structure. But it is all the effect of that initial perturbation unbalancing the whole system: it is the straw that brought down the overloaded camel. This is the basic idea of what I call the "Seneca Collapse."
The Garamantes were a classic case of a civilization that collapsed because they ran out of an unreplaceable resource: in this case, water.
A Requiem for the Beautiful Earth. Tad Patzer, Life Itself. Dec. 10, 2018.
First, let me remind you that a pessimist is an optimist who shed his delusions and denial, and educated himself. Please keep this in mind, if you continue reading. If you don’t, that’s fine too. You will remain in your blissful bubble of denial and ignorance, which are the dominant genetic traits of most denizens of the fossil superorganism. Please understand that many democratically elected governments know very well about your truth aversion and are making best use of it.
Imagine now that your favorite airline offers a vacation package to a world-class city like the one shown below. That city is Beijing. China is the rising economic superpower that will collapse rather immediately, because there is not enough of the environment left to protect her 1.4 billion people from disease and death. But before China collapses, she will suck dry most of the world that remains. The brutal global competition for resources may precipitate a war between China and US.
By the way, a famous photographer, who captured China's multitudinous industrial achievements just went missing. And rightly so, why need we talk about the small side-effects of an economic miracle that lifted most from poverty? But what is poverty when a rich environment allows families to subsist with little cash? Conversely, what is affluence, when air, water and soil are toxic, and bees are dead?
By the way, a famous photographer, who captured China's multitudinous industrial achievements just went missing. And rightly so, why need we talk about the small side-effects of an economic miracle that lifted most from poverty? But what is poverty when a rich environment allows families to subsist with little cash? Conversely, what is affluence, when air, water and soil are toxic, and bees are dead?
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Welcome to your vacation travel destination. As you can see, this is a giant beautiful city, but can you see at all? And how about getting a suite in a beach hotel with a view like this?  Here is your hotel suite on the beach. We hope you don't mind some messiness. Rest assured that you will enjoy your stay in our resort and our hospitality. The local fish are to die for; literally, because we stuffed them with lethal sewage. I hope that you get my point. The vacation package above probably would not be your idea of having the best time of your life, but this environment just might be:  You'd rather vacation in this place, where nature still can protect you from human invasion and environmental destruction. But there is a catch, all these places are about to succumb to global climate change, overpopulation and pollution. Even this peaceful scene is deceiving. Every morning, workers must remove sea-borne plastic trash so that you are not disgusted when you wake up. Instead of telling you the dirty truth, your fossil amoeba airline will try to woo you like this. In the ad you just saw, this airline has relied on your life-long self deception and improbable lies you weave to remain "hopeful," that is inoculated from the cold facts staring into your eyes wide shut. They already know that you are a brainwashed fossil superorganism monkey. Snap out of it, will you? Recapture you atrophied power of human thinking. All right, I might have woken you up from that hopeful stupor, punctuated by resentments from the perceived lack of privilege the fossil amoeba should have bestowed upon you, but didn't because she lied. But if you remain in denial, you are in good company. The gangster from New York and a suspected Russian agent, our President, has just rejected the science in the latest UN report published in Katowice, 25 km from Gliwice, where I was born. He also claimed that the current "yellow vest" upheaval in France was linked directly to the Paris climate agreement. Not! The French riots are directly related to the depletion of many resources, but specifically to the intermediate distillates (abbreviated here as the naphtha fraction) that are disappearing from the refinery feedstock crudes worldwide. The ultralight condensates produced from the US shale plays have none. Naphtha is the petroleum fraction from which diesel fuel is produced. Since almost all trucks run on diesel fuel, which one would you rather have: food and other goods in stores or an unrestricted supply of fuel to private diesel cars? The fossil amoeba will never admit that she is limited by anything. She cannot violate her own principle of indiscriminate, eternal growth that will pay for the ginormous debt the rich took everywhere to bail themselves out. This debt is now sloshing around the world killing what remains of the healthy environment and speeding up the collapse of our civilization. The detached Macron was manipulated into an environmentally friendly explanation: less emissions. Of course, this explanation is nonsensical, and it came on the heels of many real and perceived social injustices in France that span two decades or more. To make things worse, air quality has become so bad in most places that ships will have to use low-sulfur fuel, which will further increase demand on the heavy naphtha fraction. Aviation too is growing everywhere to move people and goods across the global economy (soon to be discontinued). Jet fuel, which is essentially diesel fuel, also competes with your poor little diesel car. Finally, please do not forget that heating oil you use to avoid freezing in winter, is diesel fuel that is a little heavier. Not to be outdone, President of Poland, Andrzej Duda (Windpipe in Polish), seconded Trump's ravings, and proclaimed that he supports actions against climate change as long as Poland continues using coal to satisfy 80% of her energetic needs for the next two centuries. Two centuries?! People, if we have 10 more years without a major war that will wipe out most of us, I will feel really lucky. In fact, when there is a major war, the habitually clueless, self-absorbed Poles will evaporate first. Obviously, Duda was blowing hot air, which is his job description by any other name. Here is what my friend, Rex Weyler, an American-Canadian author, historian, journalist and ecologist, wrote yesterday in an email exchange on the very subject of this blog: "Like you, your colleague, and our colleagues on this list, I’ve been monitoring the ecological trends all of my adult life, for some fifty years. As far as I can see, all the trend lines converge on collapse, including “technology.” Nate is correct that economic growth is running on fumes, mostly on plunder and debt. When people talk about ingenuity, “new technology,” and “advancing technology,” I am reminded that human technology has been advancing for two million years. Advancing technology is not new. It is our story. At every step of that long, advancing technology story - stone scrapers, axes, fire ignition, bows & arrows, steam engines, computers, super-sonic stealth bombers, and XBox games - humans gained some measure of power, ease, comfort, or entertainment. Meanwhile, at every step, humanity has become more destructive to Earth’s ecosystems. I see no trend that we are solving more problems than we are creating. When the techno-optimists hail future “solutions,” I’m reminded that all the problems we face today are the results of earlier “solutions,” and all the solutions of today are creating new problems. I know you know all this, but it’s worth saying: There are no significant ecological trend lines that are getting better for the ecosystems: Human population is growing, getting worse Human livestock population is growing, getting worse Human consumption is increasing, getting worse for all but the consumers Human ecological and war-victim refugees are increasing, getting worse Toxin load in biological systems is growing, getting worse Wild flora / fauna diversity is shrinking, getting worse Aquifers, and all freshwater resources are shrinking, getting worse CO2 content in atmosphere is increasing, getting worse for existing biodiversity Acid content of oceans is increasing, getting worse Human economic unpayable debt load (fake energy, fake “growth”) is increasing, getting worse Quality and availability of every critical resource are shrinking, making these resources more expensive and more destructive to recover Net energy from energy resources is shrinking Habitats and food for wild fauna are shrinking Carbon and nutrient content of arable soils are shrinking Nitrogen and Phosphorus cycles are disrupted and concentrated, creating dead lakes and dead ocean zones Coral bed sea-life nurseries are shrinking Tropical forest terrestrial nurseries are shrinking Estuaries are shrinking Ponzi schemes, stock swindles, and scams are increasing in frequency and monetary value Forest fires and violent storms are increasing with CO2 and heating War budgets are increasing, etc. And what, pray-tell, is offsetting this Earth balance sheet asset collapse? Windmills? Solar panels? Carbon capture? Artificial intelligence? A few rich humans getting richer? Computer chip processing speeds increasing? Video conferences? “Smart” bombs? No, whenever I doubt we are right about collapse, I take stock of this large-scale Earth balance sheet and must conclude again that human enterprise itself is a giant Ponzi scheme, plundering the mother that gave birth to us, high-grading every resource, squandering the riches for idle pleasures, and leaving behind a smoldering, toxic trail. " [With minor edits and additions by TWP.] So you get the point? If you don't, please go and treat yourself to Faux (meaning fake in French) News or read "Mein Kampf." Or, better yet, read Trump's tweets. I end with a sample of the images sent to me by the Greenpeace friends, when I was getting ready to battle the liberal EU ministers of environment. In 2007, I participated in an OECD ministerial meeting on the potentially destructive environmental effects of the clean biofuels. This also was the year when the Renewable Biofuel Standards were pushed through in the US by an unusual coalition of the darkest forces of humanity, Monsanto, Cargill, Archer-Daniels Midland, Syngenta, Bayer, etc., and the greedy, vain, arrogant and uneducated "liberals," like Nancy Pelosi and several Berkeley professors, Dan Kammen and Steven Chu (Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) founders), Chris Somerville (hired from Stanford as EBI director), Jay Keasling, and so many others. One assistant professor, Alex Farrell in Kammen's group, was pushed to commit suicide. Oh, what a year it was! By the way, Rex Weyler was one of the original founders of Greenpeace International in 1979. In 2007, I got nowhere in Paris with the well meaning, do-nothing ministers. They could not fathom using satellite images to verify the environmental carnage committed in the name of our clean biofuels. Today, we have COP 2018 in Katowice with identical results. The global fossil amoeba will never let anyone challenge her. Until she shrivels, that is, and most of us die. In closing, here is my son, Lucas, interviewing a Scottish priest (please click on this beautiful conversation), Father Tiago, who risked his life helping poor people working the giant sugarcane plantations in Brazil. We, in turn, helped to save his life, threatened by thugs hired by the sugarcane barons to terrorize or kill these poor people. Please listen, weep for all of us, and understand my decades-old rage. Father Tiago also speaks about us, a small band of Berkeley faculty, who in 2007 tried to challenge the clean biofuels, that creeping Gaia-cide committed against our beautiful Earth.  The Brazilian tropical rainforest is being cut for soybean plantations dedicated to clean biofuels. This single Brazilian nut tree was protected by law and left behind. This was in 2006 and 2007. Today no one bothers about protecting any trees. A neo Nazi government is in charge in Brazil. We, the US, helped in installing it. Image source: the Greenpeace volunteers risking their lives to overfly in a small plane this illegal forest cutting operation full of armed men. At that time, parts of Amazonia were outside of control of Brazilian government and Cargill operated an illegal port on the Amazon river.  Another Brazilian nut tree to show you the scale of destruction. This tractor sprayer is applying a herbicide. The iron-rich oxidized paleosol is no good and will fail in a few years. The rainforest cutters will then move on and cut more forest until nothing but a hot dry desert is left. When enough of the rainforest is gone, its captive rain system will stop. The hot dry desert in Amazonia will then migrate north, all the way to Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, etc., where new sand deserts will emerge. Do you get this?! Image source Greenpeace, 2007, personal communication.  Hundreds of square kilometers of the tropical rainforest in Brazil are being cut for soybean plantations. There go the associated cloud system and rain. Image source: Greenpeace, 2007, personal communication. P.S. (12/16/2018) Now it is official. If you photograph the environmental devastation in Inner Mongolia, the home of rare earth metal mining and processing, you get "reeducated." These rare earth metals are used in batteries, motors, etc. in electric cars. The sustainable, clean electric cars will solve all humanity's problems with transportation. Have we heard this before? In 2007, perhaps? |