Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap

Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap. James Dyke, Robert Watson, Wolfgang Knorr.  April 22,2021.

Sometimes realisation comes in a blinding flash. Blurred outlines snap into shape and suddenly it all makes sense. Underneath such revelations is typically a much slower-dawning process. Doubts at the back of the mind grow. The sense of confusion that things cannot be made to fit together increases until something clicks. Or perhaps snaps.

Collectively we three authors of this article must have spent more than 80 years thinking about climate change. Why has it taken us so long to speak out about the obvious dangers of the concept of net zero? In our defence, the premise of net zero is deceptively simple – and we admit that it deceived us.

The threats of climate change are the direct result of there being too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So it follows that we must stop emitting more and even remove some of it. This idea is central to the world’s current plan to avoid catastrophe. In fact, there are many suggestions as to how to actually do this, from mass tree planting, to high tech direct air capture devices that suck out carbon dioxide from the air.


Read more: There aren’t enough trees in the world to offset society’s carbon emissions – and there never will be

The current consensus is that if we deploy these and other so-called “carbon dioxide removal” techniques at the same time as reducing our burning of fossil fuels, we can more rapidly halt global warming. Hopefully around the middle of this century we will achieve “net zero”. This is the point at which any residual emissions of greenhouse gases are balanced by technologies removing them from the atmosphere.

This is a great idea, in principle. Unfortunately, in practice it helps perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now.

We have arrived at the painful realisation that the idea of net zero has licensed a recklessly cavalier “burn now, pay later” approach which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar. It has also hastened the destruction of the natural world by increasing deforestation today, and greatly increases the risk of further devastation in the future.

To understand how this has happened, how humanity has gambled its civilisation on no more than promises of future solutions, we must return to the late 1980s, when climate change broke out onto the international stage.

Steps towards net zero

On June 22 1988, James Hansen was the administrator of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a prestigious appointment but someone largely unknown outside of academia.

By the afternoon of the 23rd he was well on the way to becoming the world’s most famous climate scientist. This was as a direct result of his testimony to the US congress, when he forensically presented the evidence that the Earth’s climate was warming and that humans were the primary cause: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

If we had acted on Hanson’s testimony at the time, we would have been able to decarbonise our societies at a rate of around 2% a year in order to give us about a two-in-three chance of limiting warming to no more than 1.5°C. It would have been a huge challenge, but the main task at that time would have been to simply stop the accelerating use of fossil fuels while fairly sharing out future emissions.

Graph demonstrating how fast mitigation has to happen to keep to 1.5℃. © Robbie Andrew,


Four years later, there were glimmers of hope that this would be possible. During the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, all nations agreed to stabilise concentrations of greenhouse gases to ensure that they did not produce dangerous interference with the climate. The 1997 Kyoto Summit attempted to start to put that goal into practice. But as the years passed, the initial task of keeping us safe became increasingly harder given the continual increase in fossil fuel use.

It was around that time that the first computer models linking greenhouse gas emissions to impacts on different sectors of the economy were developed. These hybrid climate-economic models are known as Integrated Assessment Models. They allowed modellers to link economic activity to the climate by, for example, exploring how changes in investments and technology could lead to changes in greenhouse gas emissions.

They seemed like a miracle: you could try out policies on a computer screen before implementing them, saving humanity costly experimentation. They rapidly emerged to become key guidance for climate policy. A primacy they maintain to this day.

Unfortunately, they also removed the need for deep critical thinking. Such models represent society as a web of idealised, emotionless buyers and sellers and thus ignore complex social and political realities, or even the impacts of climate change itself. Their implicit promise is that market-based approaches will always work. This meant that discussions about policies were limited to those most convenient to politicians: incremental changes to legislation and taxes.

Around the time they were first developed, efforts were being made to secure US action on the climate by allowing it to count carbon sinks of the country’s forests. The US argued that if it managed its forests well, it would be able to store a large amount of carbon in trees and soil which should be subtracted from its obligations to limit the burning of coal, oil and gas. In the end, the US largely got its way. Ironically, the concessions were all in vain, since the US senate never ratified the agreement. 

Postulating a future with more trees could in effect offset the burning of coal, oil and gas now. As models could easily churn out numbers that saw atmospheric carbon dioxide go as low as one wanted, ever more sophisticated scenarios could be explored which reduced the perceived urgency to reduce fossil fuel use. By including carbon sinks in climate-economic models, a Pandora’s box had been opened.

It’s here we find the genesis of today’s net zero policies.

That said, most attention in the mid-1990s was focused on increasing energy efficiency and energy switching (such as the UK’s move from coal to gas) and the potential of nuclear energy to deliver large amounts of carbon-free electricity. The hope was that such innovations would quickly reverse increases in fossil fuel emissions.

But by around the turn of the new millennium it was clear that such hopes were unfounded. Given their core assumption of incremental change, it was becoming more and more difficult for economic-climate models to find viable pathways to avoid dangerous climate change. In response, the models began to include more and more examples of carbon capture and storage, a technology that could remove the carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations and then store the captured carbon deep underground indefinitely.

This had been shown to be possible in principle: compressed carbon dioxide had been separated from fossil gas and then injected underground in a number of projects since the 1970s. These Enhanced Oil Recovery schemes were designed to force gases into oil wells in order to push oil towards drilling rigs and so allow more to be recovered – oil that would later be burnt, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Carbon capture and storage offered the twist that instead of using the carbon dioxide to extract more oil, the gas would instead be left underground and removed from the atmosphere. This promised breakthrough technology would allow climate friendly coal and so the continued use of this fossil fuel. But long before the world would witness any such schemes, the hypothetical process had been included in climate-economic models. In the end, the mere prospect of carbon capture and storage gave policy makers a way out of making the much needed cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

The rise of net zero

When the international climate change community convened in Copenhagen in 2009 it was clear that carbon capture and storage was not going to be sufficient for two reasons.

First, it still did not exist. There were no carbon capture and storage facilities in operation on any coal fired power station and no prospect the technology was going to have any impact on rising emissions from increased coal use in the foreseeable future.

The biggest barrier to implementation was essentially cost. The motivation to burn vast amounts of coal is to generate relatively cheap electricity. Retrofitting carbon scrubbers on existing power stations, building the infrastructure to pipe captured carbon, and developing suitable geological storage sites required huge sums of money. Consequently the only application of carbon capture in actual operation then – and now – is to use the trapped gas in enhanced oil recovery schemes. Beyond a single demonstrator, there has never been any capture of carbon dioxide from a coal fired power station chimney with that captured carbon then being stored underground.

Just as important, by 2009 it was becoming increasingly clear that it would not be possible to make even the gradual reductions that policy makers demanded. That was the case even if carbon capture and storage was up and running. The amount of carbon dioxide that was being pumped into the air each year meant humanity was rapidly running out of time.

With hopes for a solution to the climate crisis fading again, another magic bullet was required. A technology was needed not only to slow down the increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but actually reverse it. In response, the climate-economic modelling community – already able to include plant-based carbon sinks and geological carbon storage in their models – increasingly adopted the “solution” of combining the two.

So it was that Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage, or BECCS, rapidly emerged as the new saviour technology. By burning “replaceable” biomass such as wood, crops, and agricultural waste instead of coal in power stations, and then capturing the carbon dioxide from the power station chimney and storing it underground, BECCS could produce electricity at the same time as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s because as biomass such as trees grow, they suck in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. By planting trees and other bioenergy crops and storing carbon dioxide released when they are burnt, more carbon could be removed from the atmosphere.

With this new solution in hand the international community regrouped from repeated failures to mount another attempt at reining in our dangerous interference with the climate. The scene was set for the crucial 2015 climate conference in Paris.

A Parisian false dawn

As its general secretary brought the 21st United Nations conference on climate change to an end, a great roar issued from the crowd. People leaped to their feet, strangers embraced, tears welled up in eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep.

The emotions on display on December 13, 2015 were not just for the cameras. After weeks of gruelling high-level negotiations in Paris a breakthrough had finally been achieved. Against all expectations, after decades of false starts and failures, the international community had finally agreed to do what it took to limit global warming to well below 2°C, preferably to 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels.

The Paris Agreement was a stunning victory for those most at risk from climate change. Rich industrialised nations will be increasingly impacted as global temperatures rise. But it’s the low lying island states such as the Maldives and the Marshall Islands that are at imminent existential risk. As a later UN special report made clear, if the Paris Agreement was unable to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the number of lives lost to more intense storms, fires, heatwaves, famines and floods would significantly increase.

But dig a little deeper and you could find another emotion lurking within delegates on December 13. Doubt. We struggle to name any climate scientist who at that time thought the Paris Agreement was feasible. We have since been told by some scientists that the Paris Agreement was “of course important for climate justice but unworkable” and “a complete shock, no one thought limiting to 1.5°C was possible”. Rather than being able to limit warming to 1.5°C, a senior academic involved in the IPCC concluded we were heading beyond 3°C by the end of this century.

Instead of confront our doubts, we scientists decided to construct ever more elaborate fantasy worlds in which we would be safe. The price to pay for our cowardice: having to keep our mouths shut about the ever growing absurdity of the required planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal.

Taking centre stage was BECCS because at the time this was the only way climate-economic models could find scenarios that would be consistent with the Paris Agreement. Rather than stabilise, global emissions of carbon dioxide had increased some 60% since 1992.

Alas, BECCS, just like all the previous solutions, was too good to be true.

Across the scenarios produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with a 66% or better chance of limiting temperature increase to 1.5°C, BECCS would need to remove 12 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. BECCS at this scale would require massive planting schemes for trees and bioenergy crops.

The Earth certainly needs more trees. Humanity has cut down some three trillion since we first started farming some 13,000 years ago. But rather than allow ecosystems to recover from human impacts and forests to regrow, BECCS generally refers to dedicated industrial-scale plantations regularly harvested for bioenergy rather than carbon stored away in forest trunks, roots and soils.

Currently, the two most efficient biofuels are sugarcane for bioethanol and palm oil for biodiesel – both grown in the tropics. Endless rows of such fast growing monoculture trees or other bioenergy crops harvested at frequent intervals devastate biodiversity.

It has been estimated that BECCS would demand between 0.4 and 1.2 billion hectares of land. That’s 25% to 80% of all the land currently under cultivation. How will that be achieved at the same time as feeding 8-10 billion people around the middle of the century or without destroying native vegetation and biodiversity?


Read more: Carbon capture on power stations burning woodchips is not the green gamechanger many think it is


Growing billions of trees would consume vast amounts of water – in some places where people are already thirsty. Increasing forest cover in higher latitudes can have an overall warming effect because replacing grassland or fields with forests means the land surface becomes darker. This darker land absorbs more energy from the Sun and so temperatures rise. Focusing on developing vast plantations in poorer tropical nations comes with real risks of people being driven off their lands.

And it is often forgotten that trees and the land in general already soak up and store away vast amounts of carbon through what is called the natural terrestrial carbon sink. Interfering with it could both disrupt the sink and lead to double accounting.

As these impacts are becoming better understood, the sense of optimism around BECCS has diminished.

Pipe dreams

Given the dawning realisation of how difficult Paris would be in the light of ever rising emissions and limited potential of BECCS, a new buzzword emerged in policy circles: the “overshoot scenario”. Temperatures would be allowed to go beyond 1.5°C in the near term, but then be brought down with a range of carbon dioxide removal by the end of the century. This means that net zero actually means carbon negative. Within a few decades, we will need to transform our civilisation from one that currently pumps out 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, to one that produces a net removal of tens of billions.

Mass tree planting, for bioenergy or as an attempt at offsetting, had been the latest attempt to stall cuts in fossil fuel use. But the ever-increasing need for carbon removal was calling for more. This is why the idea of direct air capture, now being touted by some as the most promising technology out there, has taken hold. It is generally more benign to ecosystems because it requires significantly less land to operate than BECCS, including the land needed to power them using wind or solar panels.

Unfortunately, it is widely believed that direct air capture, because of its exorbitant costs and energy demand, if it ever becomes feasible to be deployed at scale, will not be able to compete with BECCS with its voracious appetite for prime agricultural land.

It should now be getting clear where the journey is heading. As the mirage of each magical technical solution disappears, another equally unworkable alternative pops up to take its place. The next is already on the horizon – and it’s even more ghastly. Once we realise net zero will not happen in time or even at all, geoengineering – the deliberate and large scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system – will probably be invoked as the solution to limit temperature increases.

One of the most researched geoengineering ideas is solar radiation management – the injection of millions of tons of sulphuric acid into the stratosphere that will reflect some of the Sun’s energy away from the Earth. It is a wild idea, but some academics and politicians are deadly serious, despite significant risks. The US National Academies of Sciences, for example, has recommended allocating up to US$200 million over the next five years to explore how geoengineering could be deployed and regulated. Funding and research in this area is sure to significantly increase.

Difficult truths

In principle there is nothing wrong or dangerous about carbon dioxide removal proposals. In fact developing ways of reducing concentrations of carbon dioxide can feel tremendously exciting. You are using science and engineering to save humanity from disaster. What you are doing is important. There is also the realisation that carbon removal will be needed to mop up some of the emissions from sectors such as aviation and cement production. So there will be some small role for a number of different carbon dioxide removal approaches.

The problems come when it is assumed that these can be deployed at vast scale. This effectively serves as a blank cheque for the continued burning of fossil fuels and the acceleration of habitat destruction.

Carbon reduction technologies and geoengineering should be seen as a sort of ejector seat that could propel humanity away from rapid and catastrophic environmental change. Just like an ejector seat in a jet aircraft, it should only be used as the very last resort. However, policymakers and businesses appear to be entirely serious about deploying highly speculative technologies as a way to land our civilisation at a sustainable destination. In fact, these are no more than fairy tales.

The only way to keep humanity safe is the immediate and sustained radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in a socially just way.

Academics typically see themselves as servants to society. Indeed, many are employed as civil servants. Those working at the climate science and policy interface desperately wrestle with an increasingly difficult problem. Similarly, those that champion net zero as a way of breaking through barriers holding back effective action on the climate also work with the very best of intentions.

The tragedy is that their collective efforts were never able to mount an effective challenge to a climate policy process that would only allow a narrow range of scenarios to be explored.

Most academics feel distinctly uncomfortable stepping over the invisible line that separates their day job from wider social and political concerns. There are genuine fears that being seen as advocates for or against particular issues could threaten their perceived independence. Scientists are one of the most trusted professions. Trust is very hard to build and easy to destroy.

But there is another invisible line, the one that separates maintaining academic integrity and self-censorship. As scientists, we are taught to be sceptical, to subject hypotheses to rigorous tests and interrogation. But when it comes to perhaps the greatest challenge humanity faces, we often show a dangerous lack of critical analysis.

In private, scientists express significant scepticism about the Paris Agreement, BECCS, offsetting, geoengineering and net zero. Apart from some notable exceptions, in public we quietly go about our work, apply for funding, publish papers and teach. The path to disastrous climate change is paved with feasibility studies and impact assessments.

Rather than acknowledge the seriousness of our situation, we instead continue to participate in the fantasy of net zero. What will we do when reality bites? What will we say to our friends and loved ones about our failure to speak out now?

The time has come to voice our fears and be honest with wider society. Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5°C because they were never intended to. They were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate. If we want to keep people safe then large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now. That is the very simple acid test that must be applied to all climate policies. The time for wishful thinking is over.

Ed Curtin on the Demonic "leading" us

Denying the Demonic. Edward Curtin. April 16, 2021.

... The theological literature is also full of warnings about the devil’s wiles.  So too the Western classics from Aeschylus to Melville. The demonic has an ancient pedigree and has various names. Rational people tend to dismiss all this as superstitious nonsense.  This is hubris.  The Furies always exact their revenge when their existence is denied.  For they are part of ourselves, not alien beings, as the tragedy of human history has shown us time and again.

Since excremental visions and the fear of death haunt humans – the skull at the banquet as William James put it – the perfect symbol of protection is toilet paper that will keep you safe and clean and free of any reminder of the fear of death running through a panicked world.  It’s a magic trick of course, an unconscious way of thinking you are protecting yourself; a form of self-hypnosis.

One year later, magical thinking has taken a different form and my earlier flippancy has turned darker. You can’t hoard today’s toilet paper but you can get them: RNA inoculations, misnamed vaccines. People are lined up for them now as they are being told incessantly to “get your shot.”  They are worse than toilet paper. At least toilet paper serves a practical function.  Real vaccines, as the word’s etymology – Latin, vaccinus, from cows, the cowpox virus vaccine first used by British physician Edward Jenner in 1800 to prevent smallpox – involve the use of a small amount of a virus.  The RNA inoculations are not vaccines.  To say they are is bullshit and has nothing to do with cows. To call them vaccines is linguistic mind control.

These experimental inoculations do not prevent the vaccinated from getting infected with the “virus” nor do they prevent transmission of the alleged virus. When they were approved recently by the FDA that was made clear.  The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for these inoculations only under the proviso that they may make an infection less severe.  Yet millions have obediently taken a shot that doesn’t do what they think it does.  What does that tell us?

Hundreds of millions of people have taken an injection that allows a bio-reactive “gene-therapy” molecule to be injected into their bodies because of fear, ignorance, and a refusal to consider that the people who are promoting this are evil and have ulterior motives.  Not that they mean well, but that they are evil and have evil intentions.  Does this sound too extreme?  Radically evil?  Come on!

So what drives the refusal to consider that demonic forces are at work with the corona crisis?

Why do the same people who get vaccinated believe that a PCR test that can’t, according to its inventor Kary Mullis, test for this so-called virus, believe in the fake numbers of positive “cases”?

Is it just the fear of death that drives such thinking?

Or is it something deeper than ignorance and propaganda that drives this incredulous belief?

If you want facts, I will not provide them here. Despite the good intentions of people who still think facts matter, I don’t think most people are persuaded by facts anymore. But such facts are readily available from excellent alternative media publications.  Global Research’s Michel Chossudovsky has released, free of charge, his comprehensive E-Book: The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup D’Etat, and the “Great Reset.” It’s a good place to start if facts and analysis are what you are after.  Or go to Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Childrens Health Defense, Off-Guardian, Dissident Voice, Global Research, among numerous others.

Perhaps you think these sites are right-wing propaganda because many articles they publish can also be read or heard at some conservative media. If so, you need to start thinking rather than reacting.  The entire mainstream political spectrum is right-wing, if you wish to use useless terms such as Left/Right.  I have spent my entire life being accused of being a left-wing nut, but now I am being told I am a right-wing nut even though my writing appears in many leftist publications. Perhaps my accusers don’t know which way the screw turns or the nut loosens.  Being uptight and frightened doesn’t help.

I am interested in asking why so many people can’t accept that radical evil is real.  Is that a right-wing question?  Of course not.  It’s a human question that has been asked down through the ages.

I do think we are today in the grip of radical evil, demonic forces. The refusal to see and accept this is not new.  As the eminent theologian, David Ray Griffin, has argued, the American Empire, with its quest for world domination and its long and ongoing slaughters at home and abroad, is clearly demonic; it is driven by the forces of death symbolized by Satan.

I have spent many years trying to understand why so many good people have refused to see and accept this and have needed to ply a middle course over many decades. The safe path. Believing in the benevolence of their rulers.  When I say radical evil, I mean it in the deepest spiritual sense.  A religious sense, if you prefer.  But by religious I don’t mean institutional religions since so many of the institutional religions are complicit in the evil.

It has long been easy for Americans to accept the demonic nature of foreign leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.  Easy, also, to accept the government’s attribution of such names as the “new Hitler” to any foreign leader it wishes to kill and overthrow.  But to consider their own political leaders as demonic is near impossible.

So let me begin with a few reminders.

The U.S. destruction of Iraq and the mass killings of Iraqis under George W. Bush beginning in 2003.  Many will say it was illegal, unjust, carried out under false pretenses, etc.  But who will say it was pure evil?

Who will say that Barack Obama’s annihilation of Libya was radical evil?

Who will say the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo and so many Japanese cities that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians was radical evil?

Who will say the U.S. war against Syria is demonic evil?

Who will say the killing of millions of Vietnamese was radical evil?

Who will say the insider attacks of September 11, 2001 were demonic evil?

Who will say slavery, the genocide of native people, the secret medical experiments on the vulnerable, the CIA mind control experiments, the coups engineered throughout the world resulting in the mass murder of millions – who will say these are evil in the deepest sense?

Who will say the U.S. security state’s assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Fred Hampton, et al. were radical evil?

Who will say the trillions spent on nuclear weapons and the willingness to use them to annihilate the human race is not the ultimate in radical evil?

This list could extend down the page endlessly.  

[MW: tobacco companies knowingly lying about safety of tobacco; oil companies knowingly lying about GhG impacts of carbon emissions; CfCs; DDT; Pfos/Pfas; phthalates; torture and abuse of animals, and low-paid workers, in industrial animal agriculture; Monsanto seed patents; OxyContin; thalidomide; drug laws; predatory pedophilia by priesthood, and coverups thereof; privatized prison system; privatized military; locking up whistleblowers; torture of Assange; keeping Guantanamo open; the Skripal bullshit; the Navalny bullshit; installing neo-Nazis in color coup in Ukraine to weaponize Ukraine against Russia; OPCW lies; Palestine; bin Laden capture and burial at sea; Boston Marathon bombing scapegoating of Tsarnaev brother patsies; ... the list really is endless and could go on down the page)

Only someone devoid of all historical sense could conclude that the U.S. has not been in the grip of demonic forces for a long time.

If you can do addition, you will find the totals staggering.  They are overwhelming in their implications.

But to accept this history as radically evil in intent and not just in its consequences are two different things.  I think so many find it so hard to admit that their leaders have intentionally done and do demonic deeds for two reasons.  First, to do so implicates those who have supported these people or have not opposed them. It means they have accepted such radical evil and bear responsibility.  It elicits feelings of guilt. Secondly, to believe that one’s own leaders are evil is next to impossible for many to accept because it suggests that the rational façade of society is a cover for sinister forces and that they live in a society of lies so vast they the best option is to make believe it just isn’t so.  Even when one can accept that evil deeds were committed in the past, even some perhaps intentionally, the tendency is to say “that was then, but things are different now.” Grasping the present when you are in it is not only difficult but often disturbing for it involves us.

So if I am correct and most Americans cannot accept that their leaders have intentionally done radically evil things, then it follows that to even consider questioning the intentions of the authorities regarding the current corona crisis needs to be self-censored.  Additionally, as we all know, the authorities have undertaken a vast censorship operation so people cannot hear dissenting voices of those who have now been officially branded as domestic terrorists. The self-censorship and the official work in tandem.

There is so much information available that shows that the authorities at the World Health Organization, the CDC, The World Economic Forum, Big Pharma, governments throughout the world, etc. have gamed this crisis beforehand, have manipulated the numbers, lied, have conducted a massive fear propaganda campaign via their media mouthpieces, have imposed devastating lockdowns that have further enriched the wealthiest and economically and psychologically devasted vast numbers, etc.  Little research is needed to see this, to understand that Big Pharma is, as Dr. Peter Gøtzsche documented eight years ago in Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare, a world-wide criminal enterprise.  It takes but a few minutes to see that the pharmaceutical companies who have been given emergency authorization for these untested experimental non-vaccine “vaccines” have paid out billions of dollars to settle criminal and civil allegations.

It is an open secret that the WHO, the Gates Foundation, the WEF led by Klaus Schwab, and an interlocking international group of conspirators have plans for what they call The Great Reset, a strategy to use  the COVID-19 crisis to push their agenda to create a world of cyborgs living in cyberspace where artificial intelligence replaces people and human biology is wedded to technology under the control of the elites.  They have made it very clear that there are too many people on this planet and billions must die.  Details are readily available of this open conspiracy to create a transhuman world.

Is this not radical evil?  Demonic?

Let me end with an analogy.  There is another organized crime outfit that can only be called demonic – The Central Intelligence Agency.  One of its legendary officers was James Jesus Angleton, chief of Counterintelligence from 1954 until 1975.  He was a close associate of Allen Dulles, the longest serving director of the CIA.  Both men were deeply involved in many evil deeds, including bringing Nazi doctors and scientists into the U.S. to do the CIA’s dirty work, including mind control, bioweapons research, etc.  The stuff they did for Hitler.  As reported by David Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, when the staunch Catholic Angleton was on his deathbed, he gave an interviews to visiting journalists, including Joseph Trento.  He confessed:

He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles.  He had been on a satanic quest….’Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,’ he told Trento in an emotionless voice.  ‘The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted…. Outside this duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power.  I did things that, looking back on my life, I regret.  But I was part of it and loved being in it.’  He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day – Dulles, Helms, Wisner.  These men were ‘the grand masters,’ he said.  ‘If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.’  Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup.  ‘I guess I will see them there soon.’

Until we recognize the demonic nature of the hell we are now in, we too will be lost.  We are fighting for our lives and the spiritual salvation of the world.  Do not succumb to the siren songs of these fathers of lies.

Resist.

 

from September: 

If it wasn't someone like Ed Curtin writing this, I wouldn't post it

 

 

Brian Czech on Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics

A Doughnut Economy Please—But Hold the Agnostic Frosting. Brian Czech, Center for the Advancement of the Steady. April 15, 2021.

Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth, which I gobbled up last week, was tentatively in my top 5 economics pastries before I bit down on Chapter 7. Now it’s “merely” in the baker’s dozen—top 10 even—along with classics such as Small is Beautiful, the Diseconomics of Growth, and more than one Herman Daly title on the pantry shelf.[i] I know you’re hungry for the answer to what grated my teeth at Chapter 7, so grab a cup and pull up your chair.

Chapter 7 is called “Be Agnostic About Growth,” with a small-lettered subtitle, “from growth addicted to growth agnostic.” What a surprise it was—all this agnosticism—given the warnings about overgrowth baked into the preceding pages! For steady staters who advocate striving for the right-sized economy, Chapter 7 is hard to swallow.

Why, then, would Doughnut Economics still be in the top 10? Let’s start with that, because we definitely don’t want to push the doughnut away with the dirty dishes. (And yes, we can leave the pantry puns with the day-old buns.)

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

People brainstorm and come up with brilliant ideas—some more than others (must I add, in terms of the people and the ideas). Kate Raworth came up with a winner in the doughnut, and I’m not surprised. Interviewing her for a Steady Stater episode, I sometimes felt like a woodchuck running with a blue heeler. Alert as could be, she darted into every nook and cranny of relevance, always on the right track, always finding persuasive answers. As a bonus, she even asked questions back; the sign of an open mind, and great for a podcast.

Unlike many authors who take a while (including forever in some cases) to convince the reader that their reading time will be worth it, Raworth has you realizing from page 1 that Doughnut Economics is a book you’ll be finishing, and gratefully. In the introduction alone, “Who Wants to Be an Economist,” she shows you she’s done her homework aplenty. She’s dug deeper into stories we’ve scratched only the surface of; she’s found other stories we knew not at all. Just as importantly, she’s picked out the key points keenly, and now she relays them to you with the mastery of an Olympic sprinter. You can grab them and run yourself now; if still a woodchuck, a chuck on fresh clover.

Believe me, you’ll benefit from many such passings of the baton, but the highlight of course is the doughnut. It is at once a meaningful model and metaphor (and fit for puns but we’ve eschewed those buns). Before describing the doughnut model, let me list a few adjectives for it:

• Clear
• Cogent
• Resonant
• Friendly (It’s a doughnut, for God’s sake.)
• Scientifically sound, yet…
• Simple (not simplistic)
• Holistic (I know what you’re thinking.)

Now that’s quite a list! Anyone who can develop a model—of an economy no less—with such traits is bound for the bestseller list, and possibly even sainthood. And that’s just the doughnut model; the book at large is all those things plus flowing (exceptionally so), enlightening, and motivating.

As for the doughnut, and as Raworth describes in terms more artful than the old adage, a picture is worth a thousand words. If there’s anyone left out there who doesn’t believe it, they haven’t read Doughnut Economics.

Yet there are the rare folks whose brains work better with words, or at least with words included, so I’ll translate the doughnut thusly: The inner circle is the “social foundation” (Raworth’s term). If you’re stuck in the hole you’re financially poor and, if your community is likewise, chances are you’re not healthy or happy either. You’re not advantaged in many ways at all; you’re hungry, stressed out, politically marginalized, and your opportunities are few. You and your neighbors need economic growth, among other things.

The outer circle is the “ecological ceiling.” Limits to growth in other words.

In the middle, of course, is that sustainable sweet spot.

This would have been enough for a handy model, but Raworth adeptly adopted the timely (for doughnut purposes) and prestigious publication by Rockstrom, Steffen and others on “planetary boundaries.” I believe this made a huge difference for conferencing and policy circles, as it instantly gave the doughnut a nicely baked crust of scientific credibility.

The doughnut economy: model and metaphor. Basic doughnut 

full model

After introducing the doughnut, Raworth moved onto describing the “7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist,” pursuant to the subtitle of the book:

1. Change the Goal: from GDP to the doughnut.
2. See the Big Picture: from self-contained market to embedded economy.
3. Nurture Human Nature: from rational economic man to social adaptable humans.
4. Get Savvy with Systems: from mechanical equilibrium to dynamic complexity.
5. Design to Distribute: from growth will even it up again to distributive by design.
6. Create To Regenerate: from growth will clean it up again to regenerative by design.
7. Be Agnostic About Growth: from growth-addicted to growth-agnostic.

The seven ways comprise the seven chapters of the book. Chapters 1-6 range from outstanding to excellent. Unless you are God, you’ll learn something from at least one of these chapters. If you’re 99.9% of citizens, you’ll learn plenty from all chapters. But, be careful with Chapter 7. It’s not the healthiest part of the doughnut model. If you partake of this mysteriously soggy portion, it’s bound to cause some dizziness. If you’re a steady stater, it might cause high blood pressure and heartburn to boot!

Voilá, a Breadstick!

Inspired by Raworth to think graphically as well as metaphorically, and motivated to atone for any fleeting flirtation with agnosticism, let us roll away the stone! I mean the doughnut. (Please don’t call it the “stoughnut.”)

We don’t need to roll it out of the picture, but rather unto its transfiguration into a breadstick. Instead of two concentric circles denoting the social foundation and ecological ceiling, we now have two parallel lines denoting the same. And what’s in between these crusts? The same, safe, happy space for humanity. Still the sweet spot; perhaps less metaphorically (as doughnuts are sweeter than breadsticks) but just as “figuratively.” (See figures below.)

These horizontal, parallel lines suddenly imposed upon our tabula rasa also beg the question: What’s on the Y axis? Anyone worth their steady-state salt will know almost instantly. It’s got to be GDP! Below the social foundation, the economy is too small. Above the ecological ceiling, too big. In between, sustainable (with an optimal size somewhere toward the middle). For any country, and globally.

And how do we measure the economy? With GDP, or population × per capita consumption. And yes, while GDP is technically the market value of final goods and services, it reliably indicates the amount of production and consumption in the aggregate, primary and secondary, from the trophic base up.

If there is one thing economists of all ilks can agree upon—and “we are all economists now” as Raworth exhorts—it’s that GDP is the best estimate we have of the size of the economy. Not of healthiness, not of happiness, but of pure, unadorned size. Envision the planetary economy stepping onto the scale and exclaiming in alarm, “What?! I am now up to $85 trillion—I have got to lose some weight! Well, at least I know what to do now.”

But if we go “agnostic” on GDP, we fail to see the scale. Or we get on the scale, note the unprecedented GDP, and go our agnostic way, still unhappy and looking for remedies such as alternative currencies, minimum incomes, and solar panels. All these are helpful and important, akin to meds for the obese patient. They buy some time and make us feel a little better about things. They’d fit with a program of long-term maintenance, too, but none of these meds get to the root cause of the crisis: obesity.

Food for Policy Thought—Balanced Diet Required

A balanced diet is good, but we don’t have to get ridiculous. We don’t all have to have amaranth, chia seeds, and wheatgrass in our breadsticks. We need not all (although some Spartans will) partake of The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, A Prosperous Way Down, or even The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. But we all need breadsticks as well as doughnuts. If we are to be taken seriously about changing the goal “from GDP [growth] to the doughnut,” we better understand how that doughnut translates to GDP terms. Taking a “growth-agnostic” pill won’t cut it.

If you’re wondering what caused Kate Raworth—brilliant beyond a doubt—to express this most ironic form of agnosticism, you’re not the only one. I’m guessing it’s a common question among steady-staters and degrowthers alike; I’ve certainly heard it broached by some. After reading her book and interviewing her, as well as reflecting upon my own life experience (including gag orders during my civil service career), I can’t help but hone in on Raworth’s resonating words:

Back in 2011, I was tasked by Oxfam to write a policy paper to help the organisation decide whether, in high-income countries, it should promote the concept of ‘green growth’ or side with those advocating ‘degrowth.’ I jumped at the chance because it took me back to the heart of macroeconomic thinking. But my excitement soon turned to paralysis as I dug into the debate and found that while both sides had some strong arguments, both too quickly dismissed the opposition’s case, and neither had a singularly compelling answer. As I attempted to come up with a clear policy position for Oxfam despite my own deepening uncertainty, my stomach tied itself in knots, and my throat became so tight that I could barely breathe. I had been immobilised by one of the most existential economic questions of our age. So I called my project manager and explained the situation. ‘OK,’ she said. What do you need—two more weeks?’ What I needed was to stop trying to answer that question head-on. (page 208)

Does anyone out there enjoy feeling paralyzed, knotted up, or choked for air? Only the most masochistic maniac would want more of that, and Raworth is no maniac. Perhaps that explains the disconnect between Chapters 1-6 and Chapter 7.

Don’t get me wrong or take anything out of context. To me, Kate Raworth is borderline heroic. She’s no wilting wallflower. Aside from the intellectual talent, she is clearly a brave, strong, and highly effective person. But, no one (perhaps aside from a handful of narcissists) is entirely free of fear, angst, and stress. Furthermore, everyone has their psychological limiting factors, many of which are engaged in particular settings and in the context of particular norms. As social psychologist Rui Gaspar put it:

Given the presence of unconscious components in norm activation…people may not be conscious of these processes taking place and influencing their behavior. These in turn are determined by limiting factors (psychological and non-psychological) resulting from both individual and situational variables.[iii]

Clearly Raworth came into a psychological buzzsaw at Oxfam. However, while the debate over “green growth” may have “paralyzed” her, that’s less a weakness of hers and more of a rap on those who refuse to acknowledge limits to growth and stick, as Greta Thunberg put it, to their “fairy tales of eternal economic growth.” The onus is on the intellectually lazy and arrogant neoclassical economists who willfully ignore the ecological sciences. It’s on the environmental organizations that refuse to do their homework in ecological macroeconomics and leave the post-growth heavy lifting to others. It’s especially on those who, already knowing better, muffle others from speaking truth to power. These entities—individuals and organizations and corrupted agency cultures—have been like the bystanders to bullying, letting the pro-growth bullies have their way in the city parks of public policy.

Now, if there had to be avoidance, evasion, or refusal to even acknowledge growth as a variable to manage, then Raworth’s “agnostic” approach would probably be the least damaging way to go about it. With this approach, we start by talking all about the problems caused by overgrowth, and even during the “agnostic” phase we insist upon not pursuing growth any further, even while supposedly ignoring it. Such a vision of agnosticism leaves me agnostic about whether it’s agnosticism at all. If it is, then avowed steady-staters must be the Vatican of non-growth economics.

No matter what you call her brand of “agnosticism,” Kate Raworth is just getting started in doughnut economics and steady-statesmanship. Her paralysis at Oxfam, circa 2010, is way back in the rear-view mirror now. Chapters 1-6 of Doughnut Economics, as well as our conversation on the Steady Stater, make it clear enough to me that she gets it about the importance of addressing—not avoiding—growth as measured with GDP. Yes, there are moments of doubt, but overall the clarity is there. 

Oh yes, and there’s this: In 2017—the same year Doughnut Economics was published—Raworth signed the CASSE position on economic growth, along with most prominent thinkers in post-growth circles. As the author of that position, I’ll take my turn with the baton and translate for current purposes:

• The size of the economy is what pushes us past the upper line of the breadstick, or that outer ring of the doughnut.
• Any hope for staying “in the dough” redounds to a steady state economy with stabilized population and per capita consumption.
• The steady state economy is, all else equal, indicated by stabilized (mildly fluctuating) GDP.

That’s the reality—faith metaphors can’t quite capture it—and Oxfam will learn to live with it. So will the World Bank, Big Green, Dark Money, the USA, EU, and Wall Street. The sooner they read Doughnut Economics, especially chapters 1-6, the sooner they’ll start accepting it.

Pass me a breadstick please. Or a doughnut. Just hold the agnostic frosting.

JMG: Déjà vu

A Sense of Déjà Vu. John Michael Greer, Ecosophia. April 7, 2021.


Déjà vu—the sudden insistent feeling that you’ve encountered the present moment before—can be one of the oddest of human experiences. Sometimes, though, it happens for perfectly prosaic reasons. Right now, as I look at headlines and certain other indicators, I’m having a very strong case of déjà vu for reasons that require only the simplest explanation. Sometimes, after all, you really have been there before.

Twenty years ago, for example, I could look back at the energy crises of the 1970s and see a certain pattern unfolding with great clarity. I’ll summarize the pattern for those of my readers who weren’t born yet at that time. All through the 1950s and 1960s, a handful of people had been warning that petroleum is a finite resource and that the breakneck extraction of petroleum at ever-rising rates was sooner or later going to slam face first into hard limits. They were of course dismissed as cranks by all right-thinking people. They were also correct.

A stark reality.

In 1973, declining production from US oilfields combined with political instability in the Middle East to slap the United States with a sudden shortfall in petroleum. The government and the Fed responded clumsily, expanding the money supply, which drove up prices, not only for petroleum products but for everything that was made and shipped using petroleum—that is to say, pretty much everything bought and sold in the country. The result was stagflation. Meanwhile renewable-energy advocates convinced themselves that their time had come, and rushed a great many poorly conceived products to market, while the apocalypse lobby—those people who are constantly on the lookout for reasons to insist that everything is about to crash to ruin and we’re all going to die in the next few years—embraced the oil crisis as their cause du jour.

What happened, though, was neither apocalypse nor Ecotopia, but a return to stability with a high price tag. The higher price of oil covered the cost of projects that couldn’t have broken even before 1970. Oil fields in Alaska’s North Slope, the Gulf of Mexico, and the North Sea came online and drove the price of oil back down, and though it never went quite down to the price it had been before the crisis, it was close enough that people assumed the problem was over. Most of the renewable energy products launched during the crisis vanished from the market, though a few managed to hang on, and the apocalypse lobby found new things to emote about.

A slight oversimplification.

By 2001, the energy market had returned to a fair simulacrum of the conditions of the 1960s. The petroleum economy seemed to be chugging ahead, and only a handful of people were warning that petroleum is a finite resource and that the crisis had just been postponed. Once again, they were dismissed as cranks by all right-thinking people, and once again, they were correct. The first decade of the twenty-first century thus saw a repeat of the 1970s, except that the government and the Fed responded clumsily in the other direction, causing a bitter recession instead of stagflation. Once again, a great many poorly conceived renewable energy products were rushed to market, and the apocalypse lobby embraced peak oil as their latest reason to proclaim the imminent doom of everybody and everything.

Again, what happened instead was another return to stability, at a price. The sky-high price of oil made it economical to pursue projects that hadn’t been profitable before, and the Obama and Trump administrations doubled down on this by flooding the fracking industry with federal dollars under a variety of gimmicks. That drove the price of oil back down, and in the usual way, most of the renewable energy schemes collapsed of their own weight or lingered as zombies propped up by government subsidies, while the apocalypse lobby once again found something else to brandish as proof that we really will all be dead in a few years.

And now? Once again, only a handful of people are warning that petroleum is a finite resource and that fracking was a temporary fix at best, and all right-thinking people dismiss them as cranks. Meanwhile, over the last few years, the price of oil has been moving raggedly upwards, and even the price crash caused by the coronavirus shutdowns didn’t stop that movement for long. Déjà vu? It’s thick enough to cut with a knife.

Still pumping away.

The state of the fracking industry bears close examination here, not least because—as I’ve discussed in these essays rather more than once already—it’s one of the places where my predictions, like those of most other peak oil writers, turned out to be wrong. What misled us is easy enough to explain. There are very good reasons why extracting liquid fuels from shales by hydrofracturing is not an economically viable solution to the depletion of conventional petroleum reserves; that remains as true as it has ever been. What everyone in the peak oil scene missed was that this didn’t matter, because politics trumps economics.

Of all people, I should have caught onto this, because I was busy making the same argument in a different context. Longtime readers will recall the flurry of predictions that came out during the oil crisis of 2008-2009, insisting that the global economy was about to grind to a halt, leaving seven billion people to starve. I pointed out then that those predictions all assumed that the only response governments would have to a catastrophic market crisis was to sit on their hands saying in plaintive tones, “Whatever shall we do?” If the global economy had ground to a halt—as of course it never did—the political authorities could have intervened in dozens of effective ways, as they had done in plenty of economic crises over the previous century.

And of course that’s exactly the logic that drove the fracking boom. It’s quite true that extracting liquid fuels from shales by hydrofracturing is a miserably poor option in economic terms, and also in terms of net energy—that’s the equivalent in energy terms of profit, how much energy you have left after you subtract all the energy you had to consume to get it. From the standpoint of short term politics, which is the only kind of politics that matters in America today, those points were entirely irrelevant. All that mattered was that fracking could boost liquid fuel production for a few years and stave off a financial and political crisis, and so gimmicks were found to provide effectively unlimited credit to the fracking industry. If you can borrow as much money as you want and can just keep on rolling over the debts, anything is affordable.

The resemblance to Mordor has been noted.

So does that mean that the problem is solved, and no oil crisis will ever again rise up like the Shadow in Tolkien’s fantasies? Of course not. Just as the North Slope and North Sea oilfields depleted steadily once extraction began in earnest, US oil shale reserves are being depleted steadily. Oil is a finite resource, and the faster you pump it, the sooner it runs out. Gandalf had it right: “Always, after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again”—and the ragged upward movements in the price of oil over the last few years is one of the warning signs that the current respite is drawing to a close.

Once again, anyone who points this out is dismissed as a crank by all right-thinking people. It’s become an element of the conventional wisdom, in fact, that what we face is not peak oil supply but peak oil demand. As more and more renewable energy sources come on line, the theory claims, demand for petroleum will drop until eventually production shuts down because no one wants crude oil any more. That would be a plausible theory, except for three things.

First of all, petroleum consumption has been increasing far more quickly than renewable energy sources have been coming online. This is one of the reasons why I remain distinctly suspicious of claims currently being flung around by green-energy advocates that solar and wind power have become the cheapest source of grid electricity. If they really were that cheap, utility companies—which are after all in business to make a profit—would be piling into them on their own nickel, replacing expensive natural gas plants right and left with solar and wind plants. Now in fact utility companies are expanding their solar and wind plants in a much more cautious way, and by and large seem to be doing so only to the extent that government mandates or subsidies push them into doing so, so it’s pretty clear that the rosy figures being brandished by green-energy advocates have about as much in common with reality as does any other kind of glossy advertising.

Second, if demand for petroleum was approaching a peak, given the ever-increasing supply of petroleum shown in the earlier chart, the price of oil would be dropping as a result of the law of supply and demand. That hasn’t happened. Quite the contrary, even though global production of liquid fuels reached an all-time high in 2019, oil prices moved raggedly upwards to that point, and have begun moving upwards again—raggedly, sure, and with plenty of sudden downside jolts, but still upwards, now that the impact of the coronavirus shutdowns has been priced in by the relevant markets. That shows that demand isn’t declining, and it isn’t even leveling off. It’s still rising—and that, in turn, disproves the theory of peak demand.


William Stanley Jevons

Yet there’s another factor at work here, and it’s the most important of all: Jevons’ Paradox. William Stanley Jevons was a British economist in the nineteenth century, one of the founders of the field of energy economics. In his 1866 book The Coal Question, he set out to make sense of the way that the price and production of fossil fuels are shaped by economic forces. One of the things he tackled was the seemingly plausible claim, widespread in his time, that the best way to make Britain’s huge but finite reserves of coal last as long as possible was to figure out ways to use it more efficiently.

Not so, said Jevons. What happens if consumers of coal use it more efficiently? They use less. What happens when this affects the market? The price of coal goes down. What happens then? People whose ability to use coal was constrained by price use more of it, and new uses are found for the newly cheap coal supply—and so the consumption of coal rises. He showed that using a fuel more efficiently simply guarantees that more of it will be used. What’s more, that’s what happens in the real world, and it’s happening around us right now.

What makes Jevons’ Paradox so deadly in the present situation is that adding new sources of supply to the energy mix has the same effect as making demand more efficient. That’s why it’s inaccurate to claim, as so many badly written histories do, that oil replaced coal. More coal gets burnt each year now than was burnt each year at the peak of the coal era; petroleum, by taking some of the demand that would otherwise drive up the price of coal, kept coal cheap and made it economical to use coal even more freely than before.


Helping to make petroleum more affordable.

In exactly the same way, adding wind and solar to the energy mix doesn’t replace fossil fuels. It takes some of the demand that would otherwise drive up the price of fossil fuels, and thus keeps the price of fossil fuels lower than that would otherwise be. As a result, more fossil fuels get burnt.

(I should probably pause here to deal with the most common response to Jevons’ Paradox, which amounts to an anguished cry of “But that’s not fair!” No, it’s not fair, but it’s true anyway. The universe has never heard of human notions of fairness. If by some bizarre chance it did hear about those notions, it would simply shrug and keep on doing things the way it likes, since the universe cares about the preferences of one species of social primate on the third rock from a nondescript star in the suburbs of an ordinary galaxy about as much as you care about the preferences of the bacteria on the soles of your shoes. Does that makes you very, very upset? Here again, the universe will not notice, much less care. Screaming at the laws of nature may make you feel better temporarily, but it won’t budge them one iota.

And if it seems paradoxical to you that a Druid who prays to pagan deities and practices ceremonial magic should be saying this in response to the behavior of people who by and large consider themselves practical-minded rationalists, trust me, the irony has not escaped my attention either. Thank you, and we now return to this week’s regularly scheduled post.)

So the theory of peak oil demand can be tossed in the same dumpster as phlogiston theory and Lysenkoist genetics. What we are facing instead, at some point in the next few years, is another brush with peak oil supply, and thus another spike in the price of petroleum. If it happens while the Biden administration is in office, to judge by the response of Biden’s handlers to the latest round of economic wobbles, we can probably expect a reprise of the 1970s strategy of expanding the money supply, and thus another round of stagflation followed by sky-high interest rates. If it happens under the next president, that’ll depend on which of the available range of bad options appeals most to Number 47 and his or her inner circle. One way or another, we can certainly expect serious economic and political troubles. We can also expect renewable energy advocates to bring another flurry of poorly conceived energy projects to market, and the apocalypse lobby to rediscover its fondness for petroleum depletion and fill the internet with another round of proclamations of imminent doom.

A few years further down the road, in turn, some new source of liquid fuels will be brought online in response to the higher prices then available, most of the renewable energy products will vanish from the market because they don’t make economic sense, and the apocalypse lobby will forget all about petroleum depletion again in its eagerness to embrace the latest and most fashionable reason why we will all surely be dead by next Thursday—no, seriously, this time for real! Thereafter, only a handful of people will remember that petroleum is a finite resource, and they will of course once again be dismissed as cranks by all right-thinking people—until the next price spike hits.


This is what petroleum depletion looks like.

Does this mean that petroleum depletion doesn’t matter? No, that’s not at all what it means—but petroleum depletion matters in a way that doesn’t fit the narratives that our culture likes to use when talking or thinking about the future. Every round of the cycle we’ve discussed in this post has driven a sharp decline in standards of living for most Americans, and despite a great deal of handwaving and statistical manipulation, those declines have not been made up in the intervals of relative stability that followed each crisis. Most Americans are much poorer today, in terms of the quality and quantity of goods and services they can purchase with the incomes they are able to earn, than their equivalents before 1973, and noticeably poorer in the same terms than their equivalents before 2008. They will be poorer still when the next round of crisis is over.

Furthermore, the built environment and public infrastructure of the US have suffered equally sharp declines in the same stairstep fashion. It’s safe to assume that the aftermath of the next crisis will see another step down of roughly the same type and magnitude. No doubt another round of handwaving and statistical manipulation will be used to insist that the declines didn’t happen, don’t matter, and are the fault of the people who are suffering from them—those have been the usual response to economic contraction from the chattering classes for a good many decades now. Yet the ongoing decline of the American economy and the ongoing disintegration of our built environment and infrastructure can’t be magicked away by such tactics.


The road to the post-petroleum future.

The unlearned lesson of petroleum depletion can be summed up very neatly: sure, you can find another source of liquid fuel to replace the fields that you’ve pumped dry, but it’s going to cost you—and the cost will go up, and up, and up with each hard encounter with the finite nature of fossil fuel resources. So far the price has included driving large parts of the American working class down to Third World levels of impoverishment and immiseration, and the accelerating layoffs and plunging income in many formerly middle class careers suggest that the next step down will see the lower end of the managerial classes cut loose to sink down to the same level.

I therefore expect the next decade or so of politics and culture in the United States to be twisted into strange shapes by the frantic efforts of the downwardly mobile to claw their way back up to positions of privilege that aren’t there any more. Politicians and pundits will doubtless come up with any number of ways to exploit those efforts. In the end, however, it’ll all be wasted breath, because the process of decline cannot be reversed.

The extravagant prosperity we had in America in the recent past, after all, existed for two reasons. The first was the accident of geology that blessed the United States with gargantuan petroleum reserves, many of them very close to the surface and easy to extract. That made it possible for the United States in the mid-twentieth century to pump more petroleum out of the ground than the rest of the world combined. The extraordinary bonanza of unearned wealth provided by that torrent of black gold, together with bare-knuckle international politics during and after the Second World War, created a temporary situation in which the United States had 50% of world GDP, and the 5% of the world’s population that lived in this country had at its disposal a third of the world’s manufactured products and a quarter of its energy.

That was never sustainable in the first place, and the attempts that were made to prolong it after it stopped making any kind of economic sense simply pushed problems further down the road while doing nothing to solve them. Now the consequences of those short-term decisions are piling up, the underlying depletion of fossil fuel reserves are continuing, and the consequences of all that fossil fuel consumption are driving disruptive changes in the global biosphere that are imposing rising costs of their own. It’s a messy situation.


It’s a familiar story.

It’s also one that every other civilization has encountered in its own way once it finished its era of expansion, depleted whatever resource base was central to its rise, and began to stumble down the long ragged slope of its future. The experiences of people living through the same process in earlier ages shows that there are constructive options available, for those who are willing to be dismissed as cranks by all right-thinking people. I’ve discussed some of those choices already, here and in my previous blog. We’ll be discussing more of them in the future—and if those discussions give you a sense of déjà vu, dear reader, then you’re paying attention, because we really have been here before.

Cait Johnstone again, on Tankies

Tankie, Conspiracy Theorist, And Other Pejorative Tools Of Narrative Control. Johnstone. April 4, 2021.

Bloomberg pundit Noah Smith had a very revealing interaction on Twitter the other day that I’ve been meaning to write about ever since.

It began with Smith sharing a screenshot of an article by journalist Yasha Levine which condemns US imperialist escalations against China and ties them to the sudden spike in anti-Asian hate crimes we’ve been seeing. Smith shared his screenshot with the caption, “I hold by my prediction that the American Left is going to split into A) social democrats, and B) foreign-policy-obsessed pseudo-tankies.”

“How do we stop the B group from driving the narrative?” one of Smith’s followers asked him.

“Well, first we teach everyone the word ‘tankie’!” Smith replied, with a Substack article he authored explaining that any leftist who opposes western imperialist agendas against China should be branded with that label and dismissed.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1376584135548936199?s=20

Which is just so refreshing in its honesty, really. It’s been obvious for ages that such pejoratives are being used by imperialists to control the narrative in a way that benefits ruling power structures, but it’s not often you’ll have a mainstream narrative manager come right out and say that this is exactly what they are trying to do.

Smith’s admission that he is training his audience to bleat the word “tankie” at any leftist who is “obsessed” with a tiny trivial matter like US foreign policy in order to control the dominant foreign policy narrative is born out by the rest of his Twitter activity, which sees him repeating that word constantly and weaponizing it against anyone who expresses skepticism of the empire’s official foreign policy narratives.

“Tankie” used to be a term which referred specifically to British communists who supported the Soviet Union, but under the facilitation of narrative managers like Smith it’s enjoying a mainstream resurrection in which it is commonly weaponized against anyone to the left of Bernie Sanders who opposes US imperialist agendas. I wrote against anti-imperialism for years without anyone ever applying that pejorative to me, but now it comes up on a near-daily basis. I haven’t changed the basics of my beliefs or my approach to anti-imperialism, but the widespread use of “tankie” as a pejorative against people like me most certainly has changed.

It joins the ranks of famous weaponized pejoratives like “Russian bot”, “CCP propagandist”, “Assadist”, and the one size fits all perennial favorite “conspiracy theorist” in labels which can be applied to ensure the dismissal of anyone who voices skepticism of narratives that are being promoted by known liars to facilitate the agendas of murderous psychopaths. Another new crowd favorite is “genocide denier”, a label that gets applied to anyone who points out the glaring plot holes in the imperial Uyghur narrative which narrative managers are overjoyed about being able to use because it lets them equate skepticism of a geostrategically significant US narrative with Nazism.

What these pejoratives accomplish, as Noah Smith is well aware, is the ability to inoculate the mainstream herd from the wrongthink of anyone to whom that label has been applied. That way they never have to engage the argument or the evidence that gets laid out contradicting the official imperial line; as long as they can convince enough people to accept their pejorative as legitimate, they have a magical phrase they can utter to dispel any anti-imperialist argument which appears anywhere in the information ecosystem.

https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1378142326204293124

This is a major part of an imperial narrative manager’s job these days: smearing anti-imperialists and critical thinkers as untrustworthy. The debate is never to be engaged and counter-arguments are never to be made; why engage in a debate you will probably lose when you can simply explain to everyone why nobody should listen to the other side?

A perfect example of this would be the recent smear piece the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) put out on The Grayzone with the title “Strange bedfellows on Xinjiang: The CCP, fringe media and US social media platforms“.

As explained in a thread by Grayzone‘s Aaron Maté, the government-funded and arms industry-funded think tank ASPI makes no effort in its report to dispute or debunk any of the reporting that The Grayzone has been putting out on China or on anything else. Rather, they simply work to associate the outlet with the Chinese government by citing incidents in which Chinese officials shared Grayzone articles on social media. By fallaciously associating The Grayzone with the Chinese government, narrative managers now have a weapon which enables them to dismiss the outlet as “CCP propaganda”.

As anyone who has been active in anti-imperialist online discourse knows, this is an extremely common tactic which narrative managers and their indoctrinated herd use to dismiss questions, criticisms and evidence which is inconvenient to the US-centralized imperial war machine. Try countering their claims with a well-sourced article full of robust argumentation and solid evidence, and they’ll dismiss you with a “Ha ha, THAT outlet? That outlet is propaganda!” Because it came from an anti-imperialist outlet like The Grayzone or Consortium News instead of an outlet which never fails to support US military agendas like The New York Times.

But it’s a completely ridiculous tactic if you think about it. All they’re really saying is “You can’t use that anti-imperialist outlet to substantiate your anti-imperialist position! You can only use the pro-US outlets which have helped deceive westerners into backing every US war!” It’s also logically fallacious; attacking the source instead of the argument is what people do when they can’t attack the argument.

Citing an empire-targeted government sharing an anti-imperialist article as evidence that that government is tied to that outlet in some way is an equally absurd argument; obviously governments are going to cite evidence and arguments which favor them, and the imperialist western media isn’t going to be publishing such evidence or arguments. The fact that western anti-imperialists and nations like Russia and China both oppose western imperialism doesn’t mean western anti-imperialists work for Russ or China, it means those groups all oppose western imperialism for their own reasons. Since western imperialism is the most murderous and oppressive force on this planet, it’s to be expected that multiple different groups will oppose it.

Pay attention to the way imperial narrative managers try to use smears and pejoratives to file away anti-imperialists into a “don’t listen to the things this person says” box, and help others pay attention to it too. This is no more legitimate an argument than the Wizard of Oz yelling “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” and it should be treated with no more respect than that.