Welsh: How The Metaphysics Of Capitalism Destroyed The World

How The Metaphysics Of Capitalism Destroyed The World. Ian Welsh. July 22, 2021.

Back in 1968 the book “Limits to Growth” stormed the world. Computer models predicted that humans would run out of almost every resource, overshoot carrying capacity, then crash.

It was well known and widely discussed and combined with the oil crashes, made the 70s a ferment of practical and theoretical work on alternative energy, different ways of farming and so on.

Almost all of that came to an end in the 80s, with Reagan. Carter had put solar panels on the White House, Reagan had them torn down. A decision was made to crush wages and thus the oil consumption of ordinary people, while bringing new sources online as fast as possible. Obama, with fracking, made the same decision, by the way. Essentially the exact same decision, but even more successfully, turning the US back into a HUGE producer of oil.

But what’s important today isn’t all of that, which I’ve discussed at tedious length in the past.

Instead I want to discuss the basic argument against the “Limits To Growth”.

“We will substitute away.”

In other words, alternate energy will step up and we’ll move away from oil and coal. We’ll find substitutes for steel and nickel and rare earths and anything else in short supply.

BUT what matters is the metaphysics of the argument. When the people making this argument said it would happen, they assumed “the market” would do it.

Which, it sort of has, but too late. Much too late.

There was a strong assumption that prices were information which stored in them all known information about the past and the future, and that therefore prices would drive self-interested people to make the necessary substitutions or find new sources.

To market disciples, the market’s “free hand” was like God, all-knowing and all-powerful and weirdly benevolent. All we had to do was let the market run and it would solve all our problems.

So why didn’t that happen?

Well, to start, the market doesn’t price the future well at all. Never has, and never will. People making decisions in 1970 will mostly be dead before all this stuff matters, and the same is true of people making decisions in the 2010s. Even if they aren’t dead, is there anything in human history which makes us believe humans are good at making very long term plans, over decades to generations?

Why would you believe the market would do it based on a discipline which suggests humans are rational and know what is good for them and act rationally to get what is good for them? (If you believe all of that, you are more of a fantasist than some fanatic whipping himself while screaming for God to save him.)

Now I’m not concerned here with the hypocrites: the people who knew this was all bunk but expected to get rich off it (they were, in a real sense, very rational. A bad future they don’t see or don’t care about, “I get 50 good years and die rich when the bad times come, whatever” isn’t a reason not be rich now, if you don’t care about future people.

But many many people really believed this bunk and the issue is that by believing that the “market” and “price signals” and *vague hand waving* would solve the problem: by saying “we have a system that solves these problems automatically by giving correct feedback” they made it impossible to solve to the extent that they were believed. (And remember, huge amounts of money were run on the markets for decades based on these ideas. People believed and put their cash on the line.)

In fact, of course, we could have taken the warning of “Limits To Growth”, “Peak Oil” and “Global Warming” and used them to make changes.

Ironically a lot of those changes would be exactly what the disciples of hand-wavy “market” crap suggested would happen automatically.

Use markets and public policy: massively subsidize alternative energy and research so that where we are with solar today is where we would have been in the 90s. Massively research alternatives to bottleneck resources. Stop over-fishing, by force if necessary. If you’d rather get more resources or if you want more than one strategy, massively fund space exploration with an eye to mining rather than defund NASA in waves (Obama, classically, did the worst cuts to NASA ever, but their funding should have been increased in the 70s.)

Warnings only serve those who heed them and when you believe in metaphysical entities which don’t have the attributes they think they do (God, Markets), then you don’t act to save yourself. Markets were never, by themselves, going to miraculously do what needed being done in time. Oh sure, price feedback has eventually gotten us some decent solar, and so on, but decades later than we needed it.

Markets are human creations, like God, and to work correctly they have to tuned for the problem at hand or, even (heresy) one has to consider that there are things that Markets can’t do, or are bad at, and find other solutions.

So here we are, and markets have not made everything good and the world’s forests are burning and we’re about to have another oil boom, as best I can tell.

Like God, mis-using markets or assigning them powers they don’t have, leads to terrible consequences, so get ready for the invisible hand to slap us silly.

Time to tell it like it is

An open letter to all climate scientists: Time to tell it like it is. Bill McGuire.

OK. Let's not beat about the bush. While our world has been going to hell in a handcart, many of you studying and recording its demise have had nothing to say on the subject and have remained deep in the shadows, when what has been needed is for you to hog the limelight. The cod justification you have used is always the same, muttered excuses about the need for objectivity, about how you shouldn't become involved in politics, about how you are merely faithful recorders of facts; a silo mentality that shields you from having to make difficult decisions or engage with others outside your comfort zones. You know who you are.

In truth, the reason you have never liked to stick your head above the parapet is for fear of being shot at by your peers. As a fellow scientist I understand that – I really do. There is nothing worse than being ridiculed within your own community. It can, I know, mean loss of prestige, a squeeze on funding, and a closing down of opportunities for advancement. I understand, therefore, why you continue to play down anything that might draw attention, why you lie low, tow the party line. I know, too, what you really think and feel about climate change, because I have talked to many of you in private, and the response – without exception – has been that the true situation is far worse than you are prepared to admit in public. So, behind the facade, I know that you are torn between speaking out and holding back, that you are as desperate as anyone for the measures to be taken that the science demands. Most of all, I know that you fear, as much as anybody else, for your children's future in the world of climate chaos they will be forced to inhabit.

So, what to do. I don't need to tell you that the chasm between what is needed to tackle the climate emergency, and what measures are actually being taken, flags the extraordinary scale of the uphill battle we face. If we are not to bequeath to our descendents a desiccated, lifeless, hothouse, then we need your help, your support. Now. Today. The time to worry about what your colleagues think of you is long gone. Prestige will mean nothing in the world to come, academic advancement won't alter the fate of your children and grandchildren one iota. So, speak out, tell it like it is. Force those who need to know to listen. Welcome any flack and hurl it back ten-fold. Come down off the fence and choose the path you know, in your heart of hearts, is the right one.



Bill McGuire is Professor Emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at UCL and was a contributor to the IPCC 2012 SREX report on Climate Change & Extreme Events and Disasters. His novel, Skyseed - an ecothriller about climate engineering gone wrong - is published by The Book Guild.

Welsh: Too Late

Understanding Your Control Over Climate Change. Ian Welsh. July 12, 2021.


This is what all political efforts to reduce CO2 emissions have accomplished:


Meanwhile:

https://twitter.com/Crof/status/1413580637055852544



It is often argued that individuals are not helpless, they can join political movements intended to stop climate change.

I’m sorry, but it’s too late. The time to do that was decades ago. People did do it, and they failed. They didn’t move the needle at all.

We’re done. Climate change is happening. 

We have broken the old homeostasis and where the new homeostasis is, there is no way of telling. Everything we did doesn’t show up in the CO2 chart, while meanwhile we’re actually accelerating destroying one of the world’s two most important tropical rain forests, as the temperate rain forest of the Northwest burns down, changing the Pacific Northwest into a different ecosystem, one which will fix a lot less carbon. In the permafrost areas, permafrost is literally burning and exploding out of the ground, releasing methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas.

The world’s most powerful state, the US, is ruled by an oligarchy. In 2014, Princeton did a study which found that the opinion of anyone who is not part of the oligarchy (a.k.a., probably you, the reader) has no effect on what the government does. NONE.

This should hardly be a surprise to anyone who was awake during the last 40 odd years.

China is still industrializing and modernizing. More and more cars, more and more power plants, vast use of oil, gas, and coal.

The Paris climate accords, which driveling idiots gushed over, had no enforcement mechanism. None.

Politics is not going to stop climate change. Period.

Climate change is a FACT, it is past the point where it can be stopped. It is happening, now, and catastrophically. The catastrophic period has occurred: Lytton, in British Columbia Canada, had Canada’s highest ever temperature, then burned 90 percent down. The fires over B.C were so fierce they were causing their own thunderstorms, complete with lightning strikes starting new fires.

YOU ARE NOT HELPLESS.

When the Titanic is going down, some people survive. When the Roman Empire is collapsing, some people survive.

I’m not saying “don’t engage politically,” at least in countries where it won’t get you dead or locked up or beaten to the point of lifelong disability.

What I am saying is: Don’t count on political action to save you from climate change.

Even if it works, the best it could and can do is slightly mitigate what is going to happen, and convince governments to prepare and maybe help people who aren’t in the top .1 percent of the population.

Your power isn’t in stopping climate change by getting government and corporations to change their behaviour — it is too late. They will change when the oligarchy decides to change, and not before, or when the oligarchy is overthrown.

BUT, you can change how you prepare. Where you live, what your housing is like, who your friends are, what your skills are, and so on. Perhaps it is time for some people to join a monastery or a mutual aide society (or church that operates as one). Perhaps it is time to migrate to a place where the bottom level aquifers aren’t polluted. Perhaps… well, whatever.

Catastrophes have started. They will continue. Whether you survive and how well will be determined, to a large extent, by you: You must prepare and adapt, and so must your friends and family. You cannot count on government or corporations, though they will give some aid. Helping you will never be a priority unless it serves the interests of the oligarchy (or CCP, or whatever).

In some countries (Vietnam, for example) the well-being of the masses is important to the elites, but in most, and certainly most developed, countries, it is not. Whether it is or not, climate change is now written into our future’s history, past the point of no return.

So don’t be fooled; don’t waste your life and energy trying to stop the Titanic from sinking after it has already been holed.

Instead, this is a self-preservation and triage situation: Decide what you can do to save yourself and some others and do that.

This isn’t an article I take any pleasure in writing. I am one of those who spent a decent chunk of their life trying to change politics to stop climate change. I, and those like me, failed (most people didn’t even try, so I don’t have any real guilt about the failure).

I wasted my life trying to stop climate change from reaching the runaway stage, but it has.

So, now, as one of those who saw this coming for decades and wrote about it repeatedly, listen to me, and do what you can to save your own life and the lives of others you care about.

Caitlin Johnstone on Rich Rocket Men, aka sociopathic ecocidal tyrants

Our Rulers Have All The Power And None Of The Responsibility. Caitlin Johnstone. July 14, 2021.



As the world burns, as ecosystems die off, as the insects vanish, as the forests disappear, as soil becomes rapidly less fertile, as extinction takes over, as the oceans gasp for air and become lifeless deserts while continents of plastic form in their waters, it is interesting how often you hear the sentiment that this is the result of some flaw in humanity for which we all share equal guilt.

To hear people talk about it, you’d think we all had some say in the way our society is organized, the way food, goods and energy are distributed, the kinds of vehicles which dominate our civilization, the way our planet is being stripped bare to turn millionaires into billionaires and billionaires into trillionaires.

And of course, we don’t. We’ve never gotten to vote on how corporations behave in our world. We never got a vote on which technologies would be suppressed and which would be subsidized and backed by wars and military scams. We never got a vote on the US war machine becoming the worst polluter of any institution on earth. We never got a vote on whether a tree should be cut down for profit or left standing for the benefit it provides to our ecosystem.

And the things we do get to vote on don’t count because our dominant political systems are owned by corporate elites. And even if they weren’t it wouldn’t matter because those elites use media propaganda to brainwash us at mass scale and manufacture our consent for the ecocidal paradigm that has turned them into modern-day kings.

The kings of today do not live as the kings of old. They don’t sit on thrones publicly issuing decrees to their subjects; they hang out in the background behind the theatrical performance of the officially elected government, quietly funding think tanks and corporate lobbyists, buying up media, bribing politicians with campaign donations, rigging the system, amassing more and more wealth and power, and shaping the fate of our world.

Yet if you ask the wealthy who is to blame for the death of our planet, they’ll tell you it’s the fault of the riff raff for having too many babies. If you ask the billionaire-owned media who is to blame, they’ll tell you it’s your fault because you didn’t go vegan and ride your bike to work.

In our extinction existence of invisible kings and wall-to-wall lies, those with all the wealth and power are completely free of responsibility, while their rank-and-file victims are made to justify their very existence to the system every day and pay through the nose for every misstep. None of the world’s worst people are in prison, and if you tell the police your employer stole your wages you’ll get a very different response than if your employer tells them you stole from the company.

You can get a hefty fine for throwing a paper cup out a window, but corporations can fill the oceans with plastic without ever being told “This is your fault. Fix it.” You can go to jail for smoking a leaf, but corporations can blacken the air at immense profit without ever facing any consequences.

They are living as kings on wealth they made by raping the planet we all live on, whose health we all depend on for survival, and because their mass media propaganda is so successful it hardly ever even occurs to anyone that they should have to pay for it. They take what they want and do as they please, at our expense, for free. They are spoiled little boys with flamethrowers.

The people who are leading us to armageddon are hailed as charitable and industrious job creators. Rob a man for money and they’ll call you a thief. Rob future generations for money and they’ll call you a philanthropist.

This cannot stand. The one area in which we do have power is the fact that there are a lot more of us than there are of them, a fact that secretly terrifies them which they spend vast amounts of energy making sure we never notice ourselves. As folk singer Utah Phillips famously said, “The Earth is not dying, it is being killed. And those who are killing it have names and addresses.”

But this insight does us no good if only a few of us realize it. Until a critical mass of the human collective rises up against these sociopathic ecocidal tyrants, we won’t be able to stop them. But stop them we must, which is why it’s so important to spread awareness of what’s going on and where the blame really lies. All positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an increase in awareness, whether it be individually or collectively.

And from there, perhaps we can create a healthy world directed not for the greed of the few but for the good of everybody. Where scientific endeavor is poured not into creating billionaires and finding new ways for the war machine to kill people but into ways we can harmoniously collaborate with our natural environment.

If we can’t find some way to pull this off, humanity’s epitaph will read, “In the end it was easier to let them kill the ecosystem than to take away rich people’s rocket money.”

Ian Welsh: Climate Change is NOT Going to be Stopped

Yes, Virginia, Permafrost IS Going To Release Carbon and Methane. Ian Welsh. June 25, 2021.

So, for years I’ve been saying that a great point of concern was methane/carbon release from permafrost. Every time I brought this up, I was told by someone that studies said it was unlikely.

This summer in the Russian arctic:

Feel free to take a break from reading to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.

There is more carbon stored in permafrost that there is carbon in the atmosphere. When permafrost thaws it comes out as a combination of carbon and methane.

The greatest concern for climate change has always been “when do we hit the self-reinforcing spirals?” Put another way “when does it stop mattering if humans reduce emissions?”

The problem is that we really don’t understand climate very well: our models are crude. Almost everything is actually coming in faster than anticipated–arctic ice is clearing faster than expected, Antarctic ice is calving soon that we thought it would, glaciers are retreating faster than expected, etc, etc…

This, again, was easily predictable in the sense that for decades now consensus forecasts have always come in “under” the actual results: so the smart bet was always on the over, and that’s the bet I’ve made and shared with my readers for many years now.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT GOING TO BE STOPPED

Even if it is still possible to do, we are not going to do it: our political masters aren’t doing anything significant enough to even nudge the curves. Our populations are not voting primarily on climate change, or Sanders would be President of the US and Corbyn Prime Minister of the UK.

You must plan for climate changed based on the assumption that government will be of little help–it’s you and your friends and any other people you can find who want to prepare with you.

This means assuming breakdowns in the supply chain. It means assuming hotter weather in general BUT more variable weather also — cold waves and so on will also become more frequent. Hurricanes and other extreme weather events will continue their trend to being more common and more powerful.

Assume a marine inundation event sooner than expected: if you aren’t at least a couple feet above sea level, don’t assume you have forever do something about that — a couple decades, maybe, and extreme weather could easily cause a flood before that.

Remember that water is going to be harder and harder to get: as the glaciers go away and as there is less snow pack, rivers will be fed far less. A vast amount of groundwater has been polluted by farm runoff, fracking and other stupidity.

I also expect that oxygen concentration in the air will decline, and air quality will be worse.

This is an accelerating trend. It has moved very slowly, but it is speeding up and will continue to speed up. Think about how Covid curves have gone in incompetent countries: slow, slow, slow — VERTICAL. We’re a ways from vertical yet, but the lines for effects are no longer in “looks flat” territory.

It may be that your circumstances allow you to do little, but do what you can. And turn your efforts towards triage: saving or helping yourself and those you want to save. The political battle is lost; was lost, and until absolute catastrophe hits nothing will be done of significance.

That’s the future. Plan for it, please.