Climate Links: May 2019

** updated May 22, 2019; * May 20

** In the Hands of Angry Gods. Ed Simon, The Baffler. May 22, 2019.

The case for hell on earth

And we abolish the idea of hell at the very moment when it could be the most pertinent to us. An ironic reality in an era where the world becomes seemingly more hellish, when humanity has developed the ability to enact a type of burning punishment upon the earth itself. Journalist David Wallace-Wells in his terrifying new book about climate change The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming writes that “it is much, much worse, than you think.” Wallace-Wells goes onto describe how anthropogenic warming will result in a twenty-first century that sees coastal cities destroyed and refugees forced to migrate for survival, that will see famines across formerly verdant farm lands and the development of new epidemics that will kill millions, which will see wars fought over fresh water and wildfires scorching the wilderness. Climate change implies not just ecological collapse, but societal, political, and moral collapse as well. The science has been clear for over a generation, our reliance on fossil fuels has been hastening an industrial apocalypse of our own invention. Wallace-Wells is critical of what he describes as the “eerily banal language of climatology,” where the purposefully sober, logical, and rational arguments of empirical science have unintentionally helped to obscure the full extent of what some studying climate change now refer to as our coming “century of hell.” 

* George Clooney releases PSA against climate change “dumbf**kery”. Melissa Locker, Fast Company. May 8, 2019.

Clooney noted that science has given “unprecedented knowledge of the natural world from subatomic particles to the majesty of space.” Tragically, though, that knowledge is threatened by “an epidemic of dumbf**ing idiots” saying “dumbf**king things.” 

Unfortunately, according to Clooney, “dumbf***ery is highly contagious, affecting the minds of even the most stable geniuses,” leading people to deny climate change, not vaccinate their kids, and not believe in dinosaurs. Now, that “rampant dumbf***ery” threatens “our health, our security and now our planet.”

* Because 'The House Is on Fire,' Naomi Klein Takes Centrism-Obsessed Media to Task for Failed Climate Coverage. Eoin Higgins, CommonDreams. May 1, 2019.

"You can't leave it all to the markets."


* Humanity Is About to Kill 1 Million Species in a Globe-Spanning Murder-Suicide. Eric Levitz, NY Mag. May 6, 2019.
[MW: most headlines captured just the sentiments of the first 9/10ths of this headline, but its the final word of the headline that's crucial.]


* Traditional Economics Has Absolutely Screwed Us. Mitchell Anderson, TheTyee.ca. May 9, 2019.

UN’s biodiversity crisis report screams for new ways of natural accounting.

"Conventional capitalism is failing because it considers the services provided by nature such as oxygen and food production as free and limitless. Only an economist could fail to see how a collapsing biosphere might be bad for business."

* A War Reporter Covers "The End of Ice" -- and it will change the way you think about climate catastrophe. Elise Swain, The Intercept. May 4 2019.

“A willingness to live without hope allows me to accept the heartbreaking truth of our situation, however calamitous it is. Grieving for what is happening to the planet also now brings me gratitude for the smallest, most mundane things,” Jamail explains. “I have found that it’s possible to reach a place of acceptance and inner peace, while enduring the grief and suffering that are inevitable as the biosphere declines.” 

“The End of Ice” readers won’t find calls for technology-based solutions, politicians, mitigating emissions, or the Green New Deal to save us. 

“This global capitalist experiment, this experiment of industrialization and burning fossil fuels rampantly is an utter, abject failure,” Jamail told The Intercept.

415.26 parts per million: CO2 levels hit historic high. Patrick Galey, AFP. May 13, 2019.

Scientists in the United States have detected the highest levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere since records began, sounding new alarm over the relentless rise of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. 

The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which has tracked atmospheric CO2 levels since the late 1950s, on Saturday morning detected 415.26 parts per million (ppm). 

It was also the first time on record that the observatory measured a daily baseline above 415 ppm. 

The last time Earth's atmosphere contained this much CO2 was more than three million years ago, when global sea levels were several metres higher and parts of Antarctica were blanketed in forest.

Climate Stasis: German Failure on the Road to a Renewable Future. By Frank Dohmen, Alexander Jung, Stefan Schultz and Gerald Traufetter, Spiegel Online. May 13, 2019.

In 2011, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced the country was turning away from nuclear energy in favor of a renewable future. Since then, however, progress has been limited. Berlin has wasted billions of euros and resistance is mounting.

Gray whales starving, washing up dead in startling numbers along SF coast. Peter Fimrite, SanFran Chronicle. May 11, 2019.


Why rapid extinction of plant, animal species matters. Daryl Choo, Today Online. May 12, 2019.

Human activities are putting a million species worldwide at risk of extinction, threatening ecosystems that people around the world depend on for survival, a United Nations (UN) assessment has found. 

The 1,500-page report, compiled by more than a hundred international experts, is the most comprehensive assessment on biodiversity and ecosystems yet.

The problem is capitalism. George Monbiot. April 30, 2019.

It is a weapon pointed at the living world. We urgently need to develop a new system.  

For most of my adult life, I’ve railed against “corporate capitalism”, “consumer capitalism” and “crony capitalism”. It took me a long time to see that the problem is not the adjective, but the noun. 

While some people have rejected capitalism gladly and swiftly, I’ve done so slowly and reluctantly. Part of the reason was that I could see no clear alternative: unlike some anti-capitalists, I have never been an enthusiast for state communism. I was also inhibited by its religious status. To say “capitalism is failing” in the 21st century is like saying “God is dead” in the 19th. It is secular blasphemy. It requires a degree of self-confidence I did not possess. 

But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognise two things. First, that it is the system, rather than any variant of the system, which drives us inexorably towards disaster. Second, that you do not have to produce a definitive alternative to say that capitalism is failing. The statement stands in its own right. But it also demands another, and different, effort to develop a new system. 

Capitalism’s failures arise from two of its defining elements. 

The first is perpetual growth. Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity. 

Those who defend capitalism argue that, as consumption switches from goods to services, economic growth can be decoupled from the use of material resources. Last week, a paper in the journal New Political Economy by Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis examined this premise. They found that while some relative decoupling took place in the 20th century (material resource consumption grew, but not as quickly as economic growth), in the 21st there has been a re-coupling: rising resource consumption has so far matched or exceeded the rate of economic growth. The absolute decoupling needed to avert environmental catastrophe (a reduction in material resource use) has never been achieved, and appears impossible while economic growth continues. Green growth is an illusion. 

A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There must always be an extraction zone, from which materials are taken without full payment, and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases, until capitalism affects everything from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.

This drives us towards cataclysm on such a scale that most people have no means of imagining it. The threatened collapse of our life support systems is bigger by far than war, famine, pestilence or economic crisis, though it is likely to incorporate all four. 

Societies can recover from these apocalyptic events, but not from the loss of soil, an abundant biosphere and a habitable climate. 

The second defining element is the bizarre assumption that a person is entitled to as great a share of the world’s natural wealth as their money can buy. This seizure of common goods causes three further dislocations. First, the scramble for exclusive control of non-reproducible assets, which implies either violence or legislative truncations of other people’s rights. Second, the immiseration of other people by an economy based on looting across both space and time. Third, the translation of economic power into political power, as control over essential resources leads to control over the social relations that surround them.

In the New York Times on Sunday, the Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz sought to distinguish between good capitalism, that he called “wealth creation”, and bad capitalism, that he called “wealth grabbing” (extracting rent). I understand his distinction, but from the environmental point of view, wealth creation is wealth grabbing. Economic growth, intrinsically linked to the increasing use of material resources, means seizing natural wealth from both living systems and future generations. 

To point to such problems is to invite a barrage of accusations, many of which are based on this premise: capitalism has rescued hundreds of millions of people from poverty – now you want to impoverish them again. It is true that capitalism, and the economic growth it drives, has radically improved the prosperity of vast numbers of people, while simultaneously destroying the prosperity of many others: those whose land, labour and resources were seized to fuel growth elsewhere. Much of the wealth of the rich nations was – and is – built on slavery and colonial expropriation.

Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good. Just as we have found means of generating useful energy that are better and less damaging than coal, so we need to find means of generating human wellbeing that are better and less damaging than capitalism. 

There is no going back: the alternative to capitalism is neither feudalism nor state communism. Soviet communism had more in common with capitalism than the advocates of either system would care to admit. Both systems are (or were) obsessed with generating economic growth. Both are willing to inflict astonishing levels of harm in pursuit of this and other ends. Both promised a future in which we would need to work for only a few hours a week, but instead demand endless, brutal labour. Both are dehumanising. Both are absolutist, insisting that theirs and theirs alone is the one true God. 

So what does a better system look like? I don’t have a complete answer, and I don’t believe any one person does. But I think I see a rough framework emerging. Part of it is provided by the ecological civilisation proposed by Jeremy Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Other elements come from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and the environmental thinking of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Raj Patel and Bill McKibben. Part of the answer lies in the notion of “private sufficiency, public luxury”. Another part arises from the creation of a new conception of justice, based on this simple principle: every generation, everywhere shall have an equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth. 

I believe our task is to identify the best proposals from many different thinkers and shape them into a coherent alternative. Because no economic system is only an economic system, but intrudes into every aspect of our lives, we need many minds from various disciplines – economic, environmental, political, cultural, social and logistical – working collaboratively to create a better way of organising ourselves, that meets our needs without destroying our home.

Our choice comes down to this. Do we stop life to allow capitalism to continue, or stop capitalism to allow life to continue?

One million species at risk of extinction, ... + One. Ian Welsh. May 6, 2019.

So you’ve probably seen all the articles about the UN report which finds that one million species are at risk of extinction, out of the 8.7 million species we believe exist. 

That’s more than 10%. 

The key thing that tends not to be emphasized in this is that ecosystems are chains, or complex webs of interactions. The death of insects, for example (remember when driving caused bug splat? I can’t remember the last time I saw that), will revebrate through the entire web, starting with birds. 

These interactions are complicated and we do not understand them well at all. 

There is a non trivial risk that the algae which are the major oxygen producers in the Oceans will die, for example. They produce 70 to 80% of our oxygen. 

If that happens, humanity will go extinct, along with a lot more than 1 million other species. 

Our actions are insanity. Absolute insanity. We are destroying the web of life which makes our own existence possible. 

We have no escape. We cannot even make biospheres (enclosed environments) work. Without that we cannot try to keep even a small population alive in the collapse (not that that would be anything but a catastrophe anyway.) 

But that we can’t make even a simple enclosed environment which can support human life work is the point. We are playing with systems we don’t understand. We are committing mass genocide of other life forms. 

And there is a better than even chance that it will be a million, or millions, +1. 

We do not exist separate from the web of beings who make life on Earth possible.

Say Goodbye To Permafrost (And Civilization?) Ian Welsh. May 13, 2019.

So, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are now higher than they have ever been since homo sapiens has existed. 

Meanwhile, on Russia’s arctic coast, which is permafrost, the temperature is 29C, 84F. 

That means the permafrost is melting. 

Since we continue to pump greenhouse gasses out, since every scenario includes more significant warning, I will state again: we are not going to avoid permafrost melting. 

Permafrost holds vast amounts of methane. Methane is, short term, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. 

This will likely then lead to methane releases from arctic seas. It will lead to faster melting of glaciers and polar and antarctic ice. As oceans warm, they will expand further, leading to sea level rises.
Increased temperatures will lead to even more extreme weather events such as category 6 hurricanes. 

We will see changes in weather patterns and so on. 

But the key point is that we are about to hit, and there is no actual possibility of avoiding, the accelerator, almost certainly leading to exponential uncontrolled increases in climate change. 

We are, for all practical purposes, past the point of no return. We will lose our coastal cities, for example, the only question is when. The glaciers and snowcap in most of the world will go away, leading to many rivers drying up. 

Etc, etc… 

Climate change is not a question, it is a certainty, and the question is not will it be bad, but “how bad?” 

The answer is almost certainly, “very, very bad.”

Deceptive sustainability: Cognitive bias in people's judgment of the benefits of CO2 emission cuts.
Mattias Holmgren et al, Journal of Environmental Psychology. 2019.

Abstract

People's beliefs in the actions necessary to reduce anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are important to public policy acceptability. The current paper addressed beliefs concerning how periods of small emission cuts contribute to the total CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, by asking participants to rate the atmospheric CO2 concentration for various time periods and emission rates. The participants thought that a time period with higher emission rates combined with a period of lower emission rates generates less atmospheric CO2 in total, compared to the period with high emission rates alone – demonstrating a negative footprint illusion (Study 1). The participants appeared to base their CO2 estimates on the average, rather than on the accumulated sum, of the two periods' emissions – i.e. an averaging bias (Study 2). Moreover, the effect was robust to the wordings of the problem presented to the participants (Study 3). Together, these studies suggest that the averaging bias makes people exaggerate the benefits of small emission cuts. The averaging bias could make people willing to accept policies that reduce emission rates although insufficiently to alleviate global warming.

Introduction 

Anthropogenic climate change (Figueres et al., 2017, Hansen et al., 2005, IPCC, 2014, Oreskes, 2004) has already raised sea levels (Solomon, 2007), increased global mean temperature (Houghton, 1996) and caused extreme weather events (Meehl et al., 2000), and the consequences risk being even more dramatic in the future. To mitigate global warming and climate change by reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is thus one of the most important steps to a sustainable future. However, unless corporate and political opinions reinforce necessary national and international regulations of GHG emissions (Zhao, 2017), this will hardly be possible. Because public opinion influences the direction of corporate and political opinion, people's ability to understand and accept the forces behind global warming is essential to take into consideration. 

People tend to mentally account for climate change as an object, instead of a process characterized by temporal totality and inertia (Chen, 2011). A consequence of this mental construal is that the stock-flow relationship of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere (the “inflow” via anthropogenic CO2emissions, and the “outflow” via natural CO2 absorption; Newell, Kary, Moore, & Gonzalez, 2016, p. 138) becomes difficult to grasp (e.g., Chen, 2011). For example, people tend to mistakenly believe that it is possible to stabilize atmospheric CO2 by keeping the anthropogenic emissions at current rates (Sterman & Booth Sweeney, 2007). The fundamental limitation of people's mental model of global warming is one of the underlying reasons for the erroneous beliefs individuals have about the relationship between the stock of CO2 in the atmosphere, the inflow via anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and the outflow via natural CO2 absorption. The belief that the CO2 concentration can stabilize by keeping CO2 emissions at current rates fails to take the process of accumulation into consideration. Maintenance of current emission rates in fact result in a continuous accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, as long as the emission rates are higher than absorption rates. This insufficient understanding of climate change may be one reason for people's reluctance to take costly and immediate actions to respond to climate change, as people's understanding and perception of climate change, its mechanisms and consequences appears to be one factor that drives climate action and behavioral responses to this phenomenon (Gifford, 2011). 

People's views of climate change and global warming are affected by biases and are easily influenced by extraneous information (Schuldt, Konrath, & Schwarz, 2011). For example, people are more likely to believe in global warming on hot days (Zaval, Keenan, Johnson, & Weber, 2014); they respond differently to the threats of climate change depending on perceived distance to the problem (Ejelöv, Hansla, Bergquist, & Nilsson, 2018); and people tend to think that “environmentally friendly” objects can compensate for more harmful ones (a negative footprint illusion; Holmgren et al., 2018a, Holmgren et al., 2018b). This paper extends research on the negative footprint illusion by exploring it in the context of people's beliefs regarding benefits of small emission cuts. 

People tend to think that ‘climate friendly’ behaviors can compensate for less friendly behaviors (Kaklamanou et al., 2015, Sörqvist and Langeborg, 2019). For example, a common idea is that “I recycle - therefore I can take my car to work”. One possible explanation of these beliefs is that people try to find a balance between good and bad deeds (Sachdeva, Iliev, & Medin, 2009). In other words, people tend to use moral licensing (e.g., Mazar & Zhong, 2010), in which they believe that they can license themselves to act immorally after establishing moral credentials. This manifests in relationships between higher fuel efficiency and increased driving distance (Matiaske, Menges, & Spiess, 2012). Similarly, decreased water use due to a water saving campaign, is related to increased electricity usage (Tiefenbeck, Staake, Roth, & Sachs, 2013); and electric car owners generally feel less obliged to act environmental friendly compared to conventional car owners (Klöckner, Nayum, & Mehmetoglu, 2013).

The idea that ‘environmentally friendly’ or ‘climate friendly’ behaviors can compensate for less friendly behaviors is sometimes applied to ‘friendly’ and ‘harmful’ objects as well. For example, people tend to think that a hamburger combined with an organic apple has a smaller carbon footprint than the hamburger alone (Gorissen & Weijters, 2016), and even experts intuitively think that a set of conventional and “green” buildings are less harmful to the environment compared to the conventional buildings alone (Holmgren, Andersson, & Sörqvist, 2018a). In general terms, when ‘environmentally friendly’ items are added to a category of ‘regular’ items, people tend to think that the environmental impact of the category decreases (Holmgren et al., 2018a). This effect is called the negative footprint illusion and is associated with people failing to take into consideration the simple fact that A + B must necessarily be larger than, or equal to, A. The illusion seems to arise because people base their estimates on the average of the items in the set rather than on their sum, i.e. an average bias (Holmgren et al., 2018a). Because people tend to think that “environmentally friendly” objects can compensate for more harmful ones, the estimated environmental impact become the average of the environmental impact of the objects rather than on their aggregated sum (Fig. 1). It should also be mentioned that the illusion has been shown to arise in both between-participants (Gorissen and Weijters, 2016, Holmgren et al., 2018a, Kim and Schuldt, 2018) and within-participants experimental designs (Holmgren, Kabanshi, Marsh, & Sörqvist, 2018b).

....

11. Conclusions 

Heuristics and systematic biases of the human mind lead to misconceptions about climate change and global warming. We need to develop more effective educational approaches to overcome the barrier of human cognition in order to avoid wicked outcomes in solving environmental problems. Campaigns and consumer information based solely on scientific rationales seem quite ineffective (Stoknes, 2015). For one thing, policy makers, planners and climate-change researchers need to package the message of global warming in more effective ways. As shown here, insights developed within the subject area of environmental psychology have much to offer in this context. What might seem to be logical policy interventions may in fact be quite deceptive interferences for achieving sustainability. Hence, strengthened legislations about information concerning emission cuts and ‘environmentally friendly’ choices could be a necessary tool to overcome the influence that the averaging bias seems to have in people's thinking about the benefits of emission cuts.

Terrawatch: snowball Earth – when glaciers reached the tropics. Kate Ravilious, Guardian. Apr. 30, 2019.

Rock deposits show there have been many times when the planet has been covered in ice

Topic: Collapse

Preparing for the end of capitalism. Survival Acres. Mar. 8, 2019.

This is how UN scientists are preparing for the end of capitalism

The research paper is more interesting (to me) – GOVERNANCE OF ECONOMIC TRANSITION

Essentially, the realization that the world is running out of resources, consuming too much energy, and polluting the planet has finally come to the attention of some of the folks at the United Nations. A group of scientist were commissioned by the United Nations to present some ideas on these issues.

One of the things they identified is how capitalism isn’t going to be compatible with the world environment going forward. Well, it’s about time that somebody admitted to that. Energy and material abundance are fast declining and capitalism was the cause (along with triggering climate change).

The scientist admit that “that no widely applicable economic models have been developed specifically for the upcoming era.” That’s because capitalism has a death-grip on the lives over everyone, including scientists and researchers, and where funding for these studies come from, but I digress.

Massive changes in energy, transportation, food production, housing, and government responsibilities were identified – but alas, they have not gone anywhere near far enough in this study.

This is interesting, but another “let’s kick the can down the road a bit farther” effort. It’s not sweeping enough and despite making the attempt, it won’t be the solution needed.

Yes, we do need to eventually prepare for the end of capitalism, but I suspect that we will have this vampire on our necks for many more years as we struggle to survive in a declining world (that will still demand to be profitable even as we’re all dying). The truly radical changes that society and civilization urgently requires won’t be forthcoming with this “transition” or the nascent Green New Deal movement.

Neither policy makers nor scientists are yet truly serious about saving humanity. Not in my estimation, not even close. I am still convinced that we are firmly on the pathway to failure.

If they or anyone else was truly “serious”, they’d include some of the ideas like what was listed in this post – Science Refused.

I don’t believe for one second that the “transition” to a supposedly different way of life is going to be easy, pleasant or properly planned (by anyone). I don’t get the sense that we have any real idea what to do or how to handle this at any level of science or government.

And I definitely do not fall for the hopium and propaganda that surrounds this issue. It’s plain as day that they are not planning for mass deaths, depopulation, degrowth, massive starvation, pandemic, disease vectors, sudden temperature increases or sudden sea level rise, oxygen depletion, civil unrest, riots, economic collapse or runaway inflation. Nobody can actually plan for all of that, but when they don’t actually bother to even mention it, you have to wonder what they’re really thinking and whether or not the understand the scope of how civilization will unravel.
They need to go MUCH further in their assessments in my opinion. That’s why I still think the Life Project will be the kind of idea that will eventually be attempted. However, not planning ahead far enough means (as I’ve often warned) that “everything will be tried” while wasting precious time and resources.

Climbing Everest in High Heels. Tim Watkins, The Consciousness of Sheep. Dec. 11, 2018.

Britain has – apparently – been thrown into crisis overnight. Meanwhile across the channel, French president Macron is desperately trying to extinguish the flames of another weekend of mass protests that have now spread to Belgium and Holland. In Eastern Europe the hard-right are gaining support; even undermining the previously untouchable Angela Merkel’s power base in the former East Germany. Across the Atlantic meanwhile, the lines between deranged Democrats and MAGA nationalists are being drawn in readiness for America’s second civil war. We are surely living through the greatest crisis in modern history.

Well, yes indeed we are. But everything set out in the first paragraph is no more than the froth on the beer. These political spasms are merely the outward manifestation of a human catastrophe that has been decades in the making.

Two far greater symptoms of our predicament have gained at least some public traction this year. First was an all too visible plastic pollution crisis that is increasingly difficult to ignore now that China has ceased acting as the West’s rubbish dump. Second is the somewhat less visible insect apocalypse that has seen the near extinction of a raft of pollinating insect species; without which we humans are doomed to starvation. Interestingly, while these two symptoms are only tenuously related to climate change, they have tended to be included under that shorthand heading. Plastic certainly damages the environment, but its build up owes far more to the ongoing power of the petrochemicals industry and the myth of recycling than to changes in climate. The same goes for the insects. While there may have been some climactic impact on migrations and reproduction, the main cause is the vast quantities of chemical insecticides required by an industrialised agriculture tasked with feeding 7.5 billion humans on a planet that could barely feed one seventh of that without fossil fuels and agrochemicals.

In the affected areas, local populations have been stunned by a series of “red tide” events that result in the mass deaths of fish and other marine creatures. Climate change is indirectly involved in these events because of the increased rainfall from warmer storms. But once again it is our industrial agriculture that is the primary cause – the giant oxygen-free zones beneath algae and phytoplankton blooms that form because of artificial fertilisers washed off the land when it rains. When marine creatures stray into these oxygen-free zones (which are pinkish-red in colour due to concentrated hydrogen sulphide) they suffocate before they can swim to safety.

Off most people’s radar is the ongoing sixth mass extinction, as we lose thousands of species every year. Again, while some of this is directly due to the changing climate, the larger part is due to human activities like agriculture, deforestation and strip mining simply chewing up natural habitats to make way for the creation of the various resources – including food – required to sustain a human population that is projected to reach 10 billion by mid-century.

The use of the term “climate change” to describe these catastrophes is deceptive. If we were looking at our predicament in totality, we would include these crises alongside climate change as a series of (often interacting) sub-sets of a much greater problem… let’s call it the “human impact crisis.”

Crucially, by focusing solely on a changing climate, we can exercise a form of psychological denial in which human civilisation is able to continue chasing infinite growth on a finite planet while yet-to-be-invented technologies are deployed to magically heal the damage that our over-consumptive lifestyles are having on the human habitat.

The focus on climate change also permits us to avoid any examination of those human activities that increasingly stand in the way of the bright green technological future we keep promising ourselves. Shortages in a range of key resources, including several rare earths, cobalt, lithium, chromium, zinc, gold and silver are very likely to materialise in the next decade if Western countries get anywhere close to their targets for switching to renewable electricity and electric cars (even though even these are just a fraction of what would be required to decarbonise the global economy).

Energy is an even bigger problem. For the first time since the dark ages, humanity is switching from high-density energy sources (nuclear, coal, gas and oil) to ultra-low density energy sources (tide, wind, wave and solar). We are – allegedly – choosing to do this. However, because we have depleted fossil fuels on a low-hanging fruit basis, it is costing us more in both energy and money to maintain the energy needed to power the global economy. As more of our energy has to be channelled into energy production (e.g. the hugely expensive Canadian bitumen sands and the US fracking industry) ever less energy is available to power the wider economy. This has forced us into a crisis I refer to as “Schrodinger’s renewables,” in which the technologies being deployed supposedly to wean us off fossil fuels end up merely being added in order to maintain sufficient economic growth to prevent the entire civilisation collapsing.

This, of course, brings us back to the increasingly heated debates in the US Congress, the UK Parliament and the streets of 100 French towns and cities. Economic growth is the fantasy that almost everyone is buying into as a solution to our predicament. Sure, some call it “green growth,” but it isn’t. In reality it is, and always was central bank growth. Why? Because every unit of currency in circulation in the West was created with interest attached. In such a system, we either grow the economy or we inflate the value currency back to something more in line with the real economy. The former is impossible and the latter is devastating… which is why central bankers around the world have been quietly panicking for the best part of a decade.

To be clear, since 1980 the western economic system has inflated a series of asset bubbles, each of which has subsumed and outgrown its predecessor. In the 1980s companies bailed out failing companies to save themselves. In the 1990s stock markets bailed out companies to save stock markets. In the 2000s banks bailed out stock markets and then states and central banks bailed out banks. Next time around it will be states and currencies that need bailing out. And in the absence of space aliens, it is not clear who is going to be riding to the rescue. What that means, dear reader, is that everything you depend upon (but didn’t know it) for life support – inter-bank lending systems, letters of credit and freight insurance, international trade arrangements, employment, state pensions, etc. – is going to go away (at least until some kind of debt-write-off (either directly or via “helicopter money”) and a new currency system can be put into place.

The other legacy from this period of debt-based asset inflation is a series of grossly unequal societies; divided, ultimately, between those who get to spend the (uninflated) debt-based currency first and those (the 99 percent) who only get the currency after its value has been inflated away – primarily those who depend upon a wage/salary from employment rather than an income from shares and other investments. Most people accept some inequality. However a lack of economic growth (outside banking and tech) has created deep hostility to those political parties that cling to the pre-2008 neoliberal orthodoxy. The result has been a growth in populist movements claiming to know how to restore the economy to rates of growth last seen in the 1990s. Political economist Mark Blyth summed up the difference between the left and right wing variants of populism thus:

• The right says neoliberalism ruined the economy and immigrants took your jobs
• The left says neoliberalism ruined the economy and capitalists took your jobs.

Needless to say – as the boy Macron is learning to his cost – now is not a happy time to be a neoliberal politician. The broader problem, however, is that the proposed solutions from the populists are no more likely to result in another round of economic growth simply because western civilisation is already well past the point of overshoot. China – the place where most of the jobs went and where most of the stuff we consume is made – already consumes half of the world’s coal, copper, steel, nickel and aluminium. It also consumes nearly two-thirds of the world’s concrete. To grow at just 3.5 percent would require that China consume all of the world’s reserves of those resources by 2038 – at which point it would also be consuming a quarter of the world’s oil and uranium and half of the world’s grain harvest. The impossibility of this is what people mean when they use the word “unsustainable” to describe our situation.

Nevertheless, even supposedly green parties cling to the promotion of economic growth as an electoral strategy. Rather than admit the impossibility of further growth, however, they reach instead for some mythical “green growth” that will supposedly follow the industrial scale deployment of non-renewable renewable energy harvesting technologies like wind turbines and solar panels that require fossil fuels in their manufacture , and for which the planet lacks sufficient material reserves. Promising de-growth is, however, politically toxic in the current climate.

Most green growth advocates imagine a switch from extraction and manufacturing to (largely digital) services that will somehow decouple resource and energy growth from GDP. That is, we can all continue to prosper even as our use of planetary resources falls back to something like the amounts consumed in the 1750s. Writing in Resilience, Jason Hickel gives the lie to this:

“This sounds reasonable on the face of it. But services have grown dramatically in recent decades, as a proportion of world GDP — and yet global material use has not only continued to rise, but has accelerated, outstripping the rate of GDP growth. In other words, there has been no dematerialization of economic activity, despite a shift to services. 

“The same is true of high-income nations as a group — and this despite the increasing contribution that services make to GDP growth in these economies. Indeed, while high-income nations have the highest share of services in terms of contribution to GDP, they also have the highest rates of resource consumption per capita. By far. 

“Why is this? Partly because services require resource-intensive inputs (cinemas and gyms are hardly made out of air). And partly also because the income acquired from the service sector is used to purchase resource-intensive consumer goods (you might get your income from working in a cinema, but you use it to buy TVs and cars and beef).”

And, of course, without the income derived from making all of that stuff for service providers to consume, nobody can afford to buy the services and the economy will collapse. Not that anyone has noticed this for now, as we are descend into the politics of blame in which widening inequality and poverty at the bottom is blamed on one or other of a culture’s preferred out groups – Tories, Democrats, socialists, libertarians, migrants, the banks, the European Union, Israel, Angela Merkel, the Rothschild family, Donald Trump… choose your favourite pantomime villain; but don’t expect to be going anywhere but down.

Politics matter, of course. In a future of economic contraction it is far better to be governed consensually by people who understand the predicament and who plan a route to deindustrialisation that has as few casualties as possible on the way down… one reason not to keep voting for parties that dole out corporate welfare at the top while driving those at the bottom to destitution. That road tends to end with guillotines and firing squads.

For all of its passion and drama, however, the role of politics in our current predicament is somewhat akin to the choice of footwear when setting out to climb a mountain. Ideally you want to choose a pair of stout climbing boots; but nobody is offering those. For now the choice is between high heels and flip-flops to climb the highest mountain we have ever faced. If we are lucky, the political equivalent a half decent pair of training shoes might turn up, but while the world is focussed on economic growth; that is the best we can hope for… and we still have to climb the mountain whatever shoes we wear.

Sargon and the Sea Peoples. Albert Bates. June 24, 2018.

Back in 4300 BCE, Sargon of Akkad found the grain farming good in the broad, flat alluvial valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Being an accomplished bully and not fond of toiling in the heat of the sun himself, he assembled a gang of thugs and enslaved weaker people to work for him. They built vast irrigation systems, knocked down forests and opened up much of the fertile Mesopotamian Plain to oxen and wooden plows. With good soil, good seed and adequate rain, his tribe prospered and applied their surplus to erect a number of market cities that were considered quite grand for the period.

You can’t just knock down forests and dig long irrigation ditches and expect Nature to let you off scott-free, however. The plowing opened the soil to the sun and killed the rich microbial life built by those erstwhile forests. Irrigation made the fields salted and addicted. Major lakes silted. Without the trees and their fungal network, the weather changed. It stopped raining.

After a mere 130 years of prosperity, the Akkadian empire collapsed abruptly in 4170 BCE. There was general abandonment of agriculture, dramatic influxes of refugees, and widespread famine. The same calamity befell much of the rest of the region. Poorer tribes flocked to wealthy Akkad seeking help.

Faced with the rising tide of hungry people, Sargon’s successor thought a good solution would be a 112-mile-long wall, roughly the distance by patrol car between Brownsville TX and Rio Grande City, which Akkadians dubbed the “Repeller of the Amorites.” They may even have claimed they were going to get the Amorites to build it, but those clay tablets haven’t been located yet.

Fast forward a few decades and we find Akkadian cities in ruins, the plains desertifying, and smaller sedentary populations farther north around the shores of Lake Van trying to eke out a frugal living eating grasshoppers and frogs. It was a rough come-down from former glory.

Of course, the Akkadians were not entirely to blame. Their changing climate was also influenced by 1 to 2 degree cooler sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic that changed rainfall in the higher elevations. In their haste to develop, they had not left themselves any safety margin.

A few thousand years later another serious drought struck that part of the world — much of it within what is now Syria and Palestine — and by this time the population was much larger than back in Sargon’s day. The first wave of these “Sea Peoples” washed over Egypt in the second year of Ramesses II, 1276 BCE, but rather than build tent cities to house them, the Pharaoh simply trapped and slaughtered some 6000 people arriving in boats with all their goods, and then sent his chariots to drive stragglers back into the sea. A bit of a blowhard, Ramesses claimed a great victory and had the story inscribed in stone and read on ceremonial days.

The Syrian drought continued, however, and Ramesses son, Merenptah, writes how, in the fifth year of his reign (1209 BCE), Libyans allied with the Sea Peoples to invade Egypt and were repulsed with 6000 casualties. Six thousand seems to be a popular number when you are killing Sea Peoples.

Then Merenptah’s son, Ramesses III, in c. 1200 BCE was informed they were coming again. The populations fleeing drought-stricken Syria had already destroyed the Hittite state and Ramesses III wrote, “they were coming forward toward Egypt.” Ramesses also makes the first recorded mention of the Israelites as one of those groups trying to illegally migrate into Egypt.

“If they would just report to processing centers they could apply for asylum,” Ramesses III might have said. But secretly he set ambushes all along the border and made especially effective use of his archers, positioning them along the shoreline to rain down arrows on approaching ships. Once the ships’ passengers were dead or drowning the vessels were set on fire with flaming arrows so that not even children could escape. Then Ramesses III turned his archers toward any survivors who made it to land. Egyptian records again detail a glorious victory in which many of the Sea Peoples were slain and others taken captive or pressed into the Egyptian army and navy or sold as slaves. For hundreds of years, stories of marauding Sea Peoples were told to frightened children.

Ramesses’s border defenses were so expensive they drained the Royal Treasury. This led to the first labor strike in recorded history.

Century-long droughts can be found at many points in the historic record. California experienced a 240-year-long drought that started in 850 CE and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years. Mexico experienced an abrupt climate shift between 800 to 1000 CE that brought dry conditions to the central Yucatan for 200 years, curtailing the era of monumental Mayan architecture. Lowland population densities plunged from 200 persons/km2 at the peak of the Late Classic period to less than half that by 900 CE. City complexes of more than 50,000 people, like Tikal, were abandoned to the rats and weeds.

Houston and Miami take heed.

Challenged by unprecedented environmental stresses, cultures can shift to lower subsistence levels by reducing social complexity, abandoning urban centers, and reorganizing systems of supply and production, as the Maya, Akkadians, Romans, Tiwanaku, Mochica, Athenians and many others have done, but more often — and even in those cases — they failed to recognize what was happening until it was too late to escape unscathed. They waved their arms, followed militant leaders, found convenient scapegoats, increased debt, took to the streets in protest, overtaxed their most vital resources, and kept trying to grow their way out as if growth was the only solution they could imagine.

It never works. Sometimes civilizations go the way of the Easter Islanders. Other times they are conquered and destroyed by an even more desperate and militant neighbor they foolishly made into an enemy.

George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but he was peddling his Harvard theory of cyclic history and really could have done a better job of thinking that through. His actual theory was that both those who do not learn history and those who do learn history are doomed to repeat it.

Samuel Clemens added greater depth to Santayana’s theory, fifty years earlier, when he said “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Last week, speaking at Wells College, I concluded by saying, “As a global culture, we can create social norms that would permit us to sustain healthy economies and ecologies into the turbulent climate future we cannot now avoid. There are neither technological nor resource barriers to prevent that outcome.” There are, however, biological limits, including the psychology of sunk investments.

Sad to say, even if the 45th President of the United States had not cheated and bullied his way through his education and actually studied history, it would not have made any difference. We are just in that part of the cycle now where stupidity trumps the obvious. The queues of refugees may not be quite the same as the Sea Peoples, but they rhyme.

How Resource Depletion Leads to Collapse. The Story of a Lost Kingdom. Ugo Bardi, The Seneca Effect. April 9, 2021.

The idea that a civilization may collapse because of resource depletion is often hard to believe for historians. They seem to believe that society is such a complex entity that it is impossible to find a single reason for it to collapse. And, yet, it is typical of complex systems that an external perturbation generates a cascade of feedback effects that may mask their origin and make it appear as a series of events had somehow cooperated to bring down the whole structure. But it is all the effect of that initial perturbation unbalancing the whole system: it is the straw that brought down the overloaded camel. This is the basic idea of what I call the "Seneca Collapse." 

The Garamantes were a classic case of a civilization that collapsed because they ran out of an unreplaceable resource: in this case, water.

A Requiem for the Beautiful Earth. Tad Patzer, Life Itself. Dec. 10, 2018.

First, let me remind you that a pessimist is an optimist who shed his delusions and denial, and educated himself. Please keep this in mind, if you continue reading. If you don’t, that’s fine too. You will remain in your blissful bubble of denial and ignorance, which are the dominant genetic traits of most denizens of the fossil superorganism. Please understand that many democratically elected governments know very well about your truth aversion and are making best use of it.

Imagine now that your favorite airline offers a vacation package to a world-class city like the one shown below. That city is Beijing. China is the rising economic superpower that will collapse rather immediately, because there is not enough of the environment left to protect her 1.4 billion people from disease and death. But before China collapses, she will suck dry most of the world that remains. The brutal global competition for resources may precipitate a war between China and US.

By the way, a famous photographer, who captured China's multitudinous industrial achievements just went missing. And rightly so, why need we talk about the small side-effects of an economic miracle that lifted most from poverty? But what is poverty when a rich environment allows families to subsist with little cash? Conversely, what is affluence, when air, water and soil are toxic, and bees are dead?

Welcome to your vacation travel destination. As you can see, this is a giant beautiful city, but can you see at all?
















And how about getting a suite in a beach hotel with a view like this?














Here is your hotel suite on the beach. We hope you don't mind some messiness. Rest assured that you will enjoy your stay in our resort and our hospitality. The local fish are to die for; literally, because we stuffed them with lethal sewage.





I hope that you get my point. The vacation package above probably would not be your idea of having the best time of your life, but this environment just might be:







You'd rather vacation in this place, where nature still can protect you from human invasion and environmental destruction. But there is a catch, all these places are about to succumb to global climate change, overpopulation and pollution. Even this peaceful scene is deceiving. Every morning, workers must remove sea-borne plastic trash so that you are not disgusted when you wake up.






Instead of telling you the dirty truth, your fossil amoeba airline will try to woo you like this. In the ad you just saw, this airline has relied on your life-long self deception and improbable lies you weave to remain "hopeful," that is inoculated from the cold facts staring into your eyes wide shut. They already know that you are a brainwashed fossil superorganism monkey. Snap out of it, will you? Recapture you atrophied power of human thinking.






All right, I might have woken you up from that hopeful stupor, punctuated by resentments from the perceived lack of privilege the fossil amoeba should have bestowed upon you, but didn't because she lied. But if you remain in denial, you are in good company. The gangster from New York and a suspected Russian agent, our President, has just rejected the science in the latest UN report published in Katowice, 25 km from Gliwice, where I was born. He also claimed that the current "yellow vest" upheaval in France was linked directly to the Paris climate agreement.






Not! The French riots are directly related to the depletion of many resources, but specifically to the intermediate distillates (abbreviated here as the naphtha fraction) that are disappearing from the refinery feedstock crudes worldwide. The ultralight condensates produced from the US shale plays have none. Naphtha is the petroleum fraction from which diesel fuel is produced. Since almost all trucks run on diesel fuel, which one would you rather have: food and other goods in stores or an unrestricted supply of fuel to private diesel cars?






The fossil amoeba will never admit that she is limited by anything. She cannot violate her own principle of indiscriminate, eternal growth that will pay for the ginormous debt the rich took everywhere to bail themselves out. This debt is now sloshing around the world killing what remains of the healthy environment and speeding up the collapse of our civilization.






The detached Macron was manipulated into an environmentally friendly explanation: less emissions. Of course, this explanation is nonsensical, and it came on the heels of many real and perceived social injustices in France that span two decades or more. To make things worse, air quality has become so bad in most places that ships will have to use low-sulfur fuel, which will further increase demand on the heavy naphtha fraction. Aviation too is growing everywhere to move people and goods across the global economy (soon to be discontinued). Jet fuel, which is essentially diesel fuel, also competes with your poor little diesel car. Finally, please do not forget that heating oil you use to avoid freezing in winter, is diesel fuel that is a little heavier.






Not to be outdone, President of Poland, Andrzej Duda (Windpipe in Polish), seconded Trump's ravings, and proclaimed that he supports actions against climate change as long as Poland continues using coal to satisfy 80% of her energetic needs for the next two centuries. Two centuries?! People, if we have 10 more years without a major war that will wipe out most of us, I will feel really lucky. In fact, when there is a major war, the habitually clueless, self-absorbed Poles will evaporate first. Obviously, Duda was blowing hot air, which is his job description by any other name.






Here is what my friend, Rex Weyler, an American-Canadian author, historian, journalist and ecologist, wrote yesterday in an email exchange on the very subject of this blog:






"Like you, your colleague, and our colleagues on this list, I’ve been monitoring the ecological trends all of my adult life, for some fifty years. As far as I can see, all the trend lines converge on collapse, including “technology.” Nate is correct that economic growth is running on fumes, mostly on plunder and debt.






When people talk about ingenuity, “new technology,” and “advancing technology,” I am reminded that human technology has been advancing for two million years. Advancing technology is not new. It is our story. At every step of that long, advancing technology story - stone scrapers, axes, fire ignition, bows & arrows, steam engines, computers, super-sonic stealth bombers, and XBox games - humans gained some measure of power, ease, comfort, or entertainment.






Meanwhile, at every step, humanity has become more destructive to Earth’s ecosystems. I see no trend that we are solving more problems than we are creating. When the techno-optimists hail future “solutions,” I’m reminded that all the problems we face today are the results of earlier “solutions,” and all the solutions of today are creating new problems.






I know you know all this, but it’s worth saying: There are no significant ecological trend lines that are getting better for the ecosystems:

Human population is growing, getting worse
Human livestock population is growing, getting worse
Human consumption is increasing, getting worse for all but the consumers
Human ecological and war-victim refugees are increasing, getting worse
Toxin load in biological systems is growing, getting worse
Wild flora / fauna diversity is shrinking, getting worse
Aquifers, and all freshwater resources are shrinking, getting worse
CO2 content in atmosphere is increasing, getting worse for existing biodiversity
Acid content of oceans is increasing, getting worse
Human economic unpayable debt load (fake energy, fake “growth”) is increasing, getting worse
Quality and availability of every critical resource are shrinking, making these resources more expensive and more destructive to recover
Net energy from energy resources is shrinking
Habitats and food for wild fauna are shrinking
Carbon and nutrient content of arable soils are shrinking
Nitrogen and Phosphorus cycles are disrupted and concentrated, creating dead lakes and dead ocean zones
Coral bed sea-life nurseries are shrinking
Tropical forest terrestrial nurseries are shrinking
Estuaries are shrinking
Ponzi schemes, stock swindles, and scams are increasing in frequency and monetary value
Forest fires and violent storms are increasing with CO2 and heating
War budgets are increasing, etc.


And what, pray-tell, is offsetting this Earth balance sheet asset collapse? Windmills? Solar panels? Carbon capture? Artificial intelligence? A few rich humans getting richer? Computer chip processing speeds increasing? Video conferences? “Smart” bombs?






No, whenever I doubt we are right about collapse, I take stock of this large-scale Earth balance sheet and must conclude again that human enterprise itself is a giant Ponzi scheme, plundering the mother that gave birth to us, high-grading every resource, squandering the riches for idle pleasures, and leaving behind a smoldering, toxic trail. " [With minor edits and additions by TWP.]










So you get the point? If you don't, please go and treat yourself to Faux (meaning fake in French) News or read "Mein Kampf." Or, better yet, read Trump's tweets.






I end with a sample of the images sent to me by the Greenpeace friends, when I was getting ready to battle the liberal EU ministers of environment. In 2007, I participated in an OECD ministerial meeting on the potentially destructive environmental effects of the clean biofuels. This also was the year when the Renewable Biofuel Standards were pushed through in the US by an unusual coalition of the darkest forces of humanity, Monsanto, Cargill, Archer-Daniels Midland, Syngenta, Bayer, etc., and the greedy, vain, arrogant and uneducated "liberals," like Nancy Pelosi and several Berkeley professors, Dan Kammen and Steven Chu (Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) founders), Chris Somerville (hired from Stanford as EBI director), Jay Keasling, and so many others. One assistant professor, Alex Farrell in Kammen's group, was pushed to commit suicide. Oh, what a year it was!






By the way, Rex Weyler was one of the original founders of Greenpeace International in 1979. In 2007, I got nowhere in Paris with the well meaning, do-nothing ministers. They could not fathom using satellite images to verify the environmental carnage committed in the name of our clean biofuels. Today, we have COP 2018 in Katowice with identical results. The global fossil amoeba will never let anyone challenge her. Until she shrivels, that is, and most of us die.






In closing, here is my son, Lucas, interviewing a Scottish priest (please click on this beautiful conversation), Father Tiago, who risked his life helping poor people working the giant sugarcane plantations in Brazil. We, in turn, helped to save his life, threatened by thugs hired by the sugarcane barons to terrorize or kill these poor people. Please listen, weep for all of us, and understand my decades-old rage. Father Tiago also speaks about us, a small band of Berkeley faculty, who in 2007 tried to challenge the clean biofuels, that creeping Gaia-cide committed against our beautiful Earth.













The Brazilian tropical rainforest is being cut for soybean plantations dedicated to clean biofuels. This single Brazilian nut tree was protected by law and left behind. This was in 2006 and 2007. Today no one bothers about protecting any trees. A neo Nazi government is in charge in Brazil. We, the US, helped in installing it. Image source: the Greenpeace volunteers risking their lives to overfly in a small plane this illegal forest cutting operation full of armed men. At that time, parts of Amazonia were outside of control of Brazilian government and Cargill operated an illegal port on the Amazon river.













Another Brazilian nut tree to show you the scale of destruction. This tractor sprayer is applying a herbicide. The iron-rich oxidized paleosol is no good and will fail in a few years. The rainforest cutters will then move on and cut more forest until nothing but a hot dry desert is left. When enough of the rainforest is gone, its captive rain system will stop. The hot dry desert in Amazonia will then migrate north, all the way to Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, etc., where new sand deserts will emerge. Do you get this?! Image source Greenpeace, 2007, personal communication.









Hundreds of square kilometers of the tropical rainforest in Brazil are being cut for soybean plantations. There go the associated cloud system and rain. Image source: Greenpeace, 2007, personal communication.






P.S. (12/16/2018) Now it is official. If you photograph the environmental devastation in Inner Mongolia, the home of rare earth metal mining and processing, you get "reeducated." These rare earth metals are used in batteries, motors, etc. in electric cars. The sustainable, clean electric cars will solve all humanity's problems with transportation. Have we heard this before? In 2007, perhaps?

Closing the Collapse Gap. Orlov.