War and Empire Links - October 2019

Let me know when it's over. Charles Hugh Smith. Oct. 16, 2019.

Let me me know when it's over: yes, all of it: the impeachment, the trade dispute with China, U.S. involvement in Syria, the manic stock market rally and the 2020 election.

I'm not interested in following every twist and turn of the endless trauma-drama because none of it changes anything: Swapping Pence for Trump changes nothing, and then swapping Warren for Pence in 2020 doesn't change anything, either: the rot is too deep for any one person to do much beyond feel-good virtue-signaling and symbolic gestures (tax the billionaires, etc.)

The entire political process has devolved to staged battles in the Bread and Circuses Coliseum, entertainment that is highly profitable for the corporate media that whips the partisan mobs into a frenzy and highly useful for the status quo, as the sound and fury signifying nothing serves to distract the restive audience from the decline of everything of value: civil liberties, free expression, social mobility, free markets and so on.

The nation is in the deadly grip of cartels, monopolies and bureaucracies tasked with increasing and protecting the continuing concentration of wealth and power in financial and political elites.

We are eating our seed corn while borrowing profligately from the future to create an illusion of growth--an illusion that requires ever greater levels of intervention / manipulation and propaganda. Dissent must be buried or silenced, as the absurd disconnects from reality reach new extremes.

China is in the same boat, ...

Peace Expert George W Bush Says ‘Isolationism’ Is Dangerous To Peace. Caitlin Johnstone. Oct. 18, 2019.

For those who don’t speak fluent neoconservative, “isolationist” here means taking even one small step in any direction other than continued military expansionism into every square inch of planet Earth, and “We are becoming isolationist” here means “We have hundreds of military bases circling the globe, our annual military budget is steadily climbing toward the trillion-dollar mark, and we are engaged in countless undeclared wars and regime change interventions all around the world.” 

...

From a certain point of view it’s hard to say which is stranger: (A) a war criminal with a blood-soaked legacy of mass murder, torture and military expansionism telling Trump that he is endangering peace with his “isolationism”, or (B) the claim that Trump is “isolationist” at all. As we’ve discussed previously, Trump’s so-called isolationism has thus far consisted of killing tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions in an attempt to effect regime change in the most oil-rich nation on earth, advancing a regime change operation in Iran via starvation sanctions, CIA covert ops, and reckless military escalations, continuing to facilitate the Saudi-led slaughter in Yemen and to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, inflating the already insanely bloated US military budget to enable more worldwide military expansionism, greatly increasing the number of bombs dropped per day from the previous administration, killing record numbers of civilians in airstrikes for which he has reduced military accountability, and of course advancing many, many new cold war escalations against the nuclear superpower Russia. ...

...

Nobody actually believes that US foreign policy is under any threat of anything remotely resembling isolationism. The real purpose of this buzzword is to normalize the forever war and drag the Overton window so far in the direction of ghoulish hawkishness that the opposite of “war” is no longer “peace”, but “isolationism”. By pulling this neat little trick, the propagandists of the political/media class have successfully made endless war seem like a perfectly normal thing to be happening and any small attempt to scale it back look weird and freakish, when the truth is the exact opposite.

... 

It would actually be great if George W Bush could shut the fuck up forever, ideally in a locked cell following a public war tribunal.

Truth Is A Kremlin Talking Point. Caitlin Johnstone. Oct. 17, 2019.

If you’re in the mood for some depressing amusement, just type the words “Kremlin talking point” without quotation marks into Twitter’s search engine and scroll through all the results which come up. Just keep on scrolling and observe how this label, “Kremlin talking point”, gets bleated by mainstream empire loyalists to dismiss subjects ranging from the rigging of Democratic primaries to criticism of US regime change wars to endless US warmongeringto concerns about new cold war escalations to disliking John McCain to criticism of Nancy Pelosi. Any criticism of the status quo which cannot be labeled false or misleading gets labeled a “talking point” of Russia/Putin/the Kremlin by those who support and defend the status quo of US-centralized imperialist world hegemony.

... 

Facts are a Kremlin talking point, and anyone who believes them is Russian. Facts are Russian. Truth is Russian. Skepticism is Russian. Asking questions is Russian. Dissent is Russian. Revolution is Russian. 

So let’s all get Russian then, baby. Let’s all fill our heads with objectively true Kremlin talking points and Cossack dance our way to a fact-based relationship with reality. Get as Russian as possible. Get aggressively Russian. Get offensively Russian. Get so Russian it hurts. Get so Russian it curls Louise Mensch’s hair. If they are going to start telling us that truth is Russian, then the only appropriate thing to say in response is dasvidaniya.

Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack. Johnstone. Oct. 24, 2019.

OPCW Losing Credibility As Even More Revelations Surface On Douma. Johnstone. Oct. 28, 2019.

... They are lying to us about what’s happening Syria. Shortly after the political/media class began blaring that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad had killed dozens of civilians with chemical weapons in April of last year, Grayzone‘s Max Blumenthal wrote the following in an article for TruthDig: 

“In 2007, journalist James Bamford recalled how Americans had been subjected to ‘a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq—the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.’ The dirty war on Syria represents an extension of that strategy, with the mainstream media operating hand in glove with insurgent-allied influence operations like the White Helmets to cultivate public support for another war of regime change.” 

Indeed, the narrative manipulation campaign against the Syrian government is historically unprecedented in its depth and scale. From bizarre narrative management operations posing as rescue services, to CNN staging a fake, scripted interview featuring a seven year-old Syrian girl blaming Assad for a chemical weapons attack, to the BBC’s manipulative and transparently bogus Saving Syria’s Children documentary, to the US-centralized empire’s increasingly evident influence over the OPCW, we’re seeing evidence of a campaign to distort the public understanding of what’s going on in a foreign nation the likes of which we’ve never before seen.

US Democrats cultivated the Barbarism of Isis. Jonathan Cook, Dissident Voice. Oct. 18, 2019.

There is something profoundly deceitful in the Democratic Party and corporate media’s framing of Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria.

One does not need to like Trump or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the sudden departure of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger picture.

...

Overthrow, not regime change

You don’t have to be a Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar Assad apologist to accept this point. You don’t even have to be concerned that these so-called “humanitarian” wars violated each state’s integrity and sovereignty, and are therefore defined in international law as “the supreme war crime”.

The bigger picture – the one no one appears to want us thinking about – is that the US intentionally sought to destroy these states

Incentives (And Sociopaths) Rule The World. Michael Krieger, zerohedge. Sep. 16, 2019.

Ryan Murphy, an economist at Southern Methodist University, recently published a working paper in which he ranked each of the states by the predominance of—there’s no nice way to put it—psychopaths. The winner? Washington in a walk. In fact, the capital scored higher on Murphy’s scale than the next two runners-up combined. 

“I had previously written on politicians and psychopathy, but I had no expectation D.C. would stand out as much as it does,” Murphy wrote in an email… 

On a national level, it raises the troubling question as to what it means to live in a country whose institutions are set up to reward some very dubious human traits. Like it or not, we’re more likely than not to wind up with some alarming personalities in positions of power. 

– From last year’s Politico article, Washington, D.C.: the Psychopath Capital of America

One of the most frustrating aspects of modern American politics - and the culture in general - is our all encompassing fixation on the superficial. It’s also one of the main reasons I have very little interest in presidential politics, which basically consists of a bunch of billionaire friendly puppets auditioning to become the next public face of imperial oligarchy. Though I understand the desire for quick fixes, our focus on highlighting and mitigating only the symptoms of societal decay as opposed to the root causes, ensures we’ll never achieve the sort of positive paradigm-level shift necessary to bring humankind forward.

A Road to Hell Paved with Bad Intentions. Michael Krieger. Oct. 9. 2019.

If nothing else, one silver lining to Donald Trump’s election is the exposure of establishment types, whether Democratic or Republican, for what they really are. We now recognize that there’s very little daylight between a neocon and a neoliberal, and that the back and forth fighting over power between these two camps — which defined American politics for decades — was nothing more than a manipulative pro-wrestling circus.

Trump’s election has forced many establishment Democrats out of the closet as the intelligence agency, surveillance state, empire-worshipping, centralized power bootlickers they always were. Since neocons were historically more in your face shameless about their support for endless war, oligarch-coddling, and authoritarianism, establishment Democrats could pretend to represent an ethical opposition to such things. Alas, it was all an act and if the Obama administration didn’t already prove that to you, the embarrassingly clownish neoliberal “resistance” movement should.

There are endless ways for those who dislike Donald Trump to push back against him and his administration in an ethical and productive manner, but establishment Democrats always choose the most damaging and destructive route. This is no accident. The manner in which they respond to Trump is them showing you who they really are.

There are countless examples of this sort of behavior, but one of the most disturbing has been the intentional and completely maniacal rehabilitation of war criminal, torturer-in-chief and surveillance state architect George W. Bush and his catastrophic administration. Whether you feel love, hatred or indifference toward Donald Trump, there’s no comparing his administration thus far to that of the younger Bush. Bush’s policies directly killed more people all over the world and did far more to erode American civil liberties and the Constitution than Trump. There’s absolutely no reason for anyone ethically opposed to Trump to voluntarily embrace George W. Bush, yet that’s exactly what “resistance” celebrities have been doing and continue to do

Will the Clintons Destroy the Democratic Party? Charles Hugh Smith, of two minds. Oct. 9, 2019.

Let's start by stipulating my bias: I would cheer the collapse of both self-serving, venal political parties, which have stood by for decades as the rich have become immeasurably richer and the politically powerful few have disempowered the many. The transparent "populist" bleatings of both parties--"we serve the people!"--sound increasingly like stale, pathetically disconnected from reality Soviet-era propaganda.

Let's say I'm a relatively disinterested observer other than my fervent wish that both corrupt, self-serving parties slide into the dustbin of history, the sooner the better.

The Republicans were hijacked by Donald Trump and given a binary choice: accept Trump as their candidate and have a chance of winning, or reject him and guarantee losing. After surveying the wreckage left by the Bush dynasty and Romney's loss, the Repubs swallowed their distrust and distaste for The Donald and chose winning over losing--the easily predictable choice for all politicos.

The Democrats chose to enact a Greek tragedy featuring off-the-charts hubris. Despite Hillary's private email server, the Clinton Foundation's shameless shakedowns for millions of dollars in "contributions" (the polite word for influence peddling), and her delight in mocking those who chose not to vote for her as "deplorables," the Democrats were supremely confident that the Clinton dynasty would sweep them to an easy and overwhelming victory.

As the Greek dramatists understood, hubris doesn't just invite disaster, it welcomes disaster. The Democrats were then handed a binary choice: either cast the Clintons adrift with a few provisions and a hearty cheer and move on, or set the course of the Party for the next four years to the Clintons' Ahab-like obsession: we wuz robbed, and the terrible error of history (Hillary losing the 2016 election) would have to be corrected regardless of the cost.

To aid their mono-maniacal campaign, the Democrats partnered with the most anti-Democratic and corrupting force in America, the alphabet agencies of Imperial Pretensions, the CIA et al., who are institutionally bound to view the citizenry's right to choose its government and its government's policies with utter disdain: we rule the Empire, and democracy is only acceptable as long as it rubber-stamps our rule.

This aligned perfectly with the Clinton dynasty's view, and so the unending campaign to unseat The Donald was launched.

For better or worse, this unholy alliance put the Democratic Party's legitimacy on the gambling table. The Democratic Party, whether it accepts or understands this reality or not, has devolved to an absurdist cable-channel devoted exclusively to unseating The Donald, regardless of the cost and regardless of the sacrifices required to pursue what is increasingly a quixotically misguided venture.

Wittingly or unwittingly, every institution allied with the Democrats has also put its legitimacy on the gaming table, the most important of which is the mainstream media, including the quasi-public Propaganda Broadcast Service (PBS). The corporate media and PBS have been reduced to late-night TV programming, selling the same flimsy gadgets with the same tired pitch: "But wait--there's more!"

All of which leads us to the question: will the Clintons destroy the Democratic Party, or perhaps even more saliently: have the Clintons already sealed the fate of the Democratic Party?

We won't know the voters' judgment until November 2020, but judging by campaign contributions, the delegitimizing ill-will being generated by the Party's transparent suppression of Tulsi Gabbard, its Ahab-like obsession with impeachment and its bad-karma reliance on the FBI and CIA's most treacherous operatives, the Party's leadership might not hold a winning hand.

History is full of ironies, and perhaps it will suit the irony gods for The Donald to take down the Republican Party and the Clinton dynasty to destroy the Democratic Party.

Green Abundance or Righteous Austerity?... or, The Jackpot

Take Your Pick of Left Wing Climate Change Narratives: Green Abundance or Righteous Austerity. Peter Dorman, Econospeak. Sep 23, 2019.

While I was preoccupied with other things, the US left settled on a pair of competing climate change narratives.  By the time I looked, the choice was down to just these two, and no other views could be considered.

View #1, Green Abundance, is that combating climate change means unleashing the power of renewable energy.  Fortunately, according to this story, renewables are already the cheapest way to go, or if not quite, they will be once they are scaled up through a massive infusion of public investment.  And this investment is a golden opportunity to ameliorate other problems like anemic economic growth, un- and underemployment, and sluggish incomes.  We will provide green jobs at union wages for everyone who wants one, with special opportunities for workers in the fossil fuel sector.  We will do for this generation what FDR’s original New Deal did for our grandparents, restoring prosperity and a building a vibrant middle class.  We’ll do it even better this time, because we will design our programs to fight racism, sexism, and the oppression of LGBTQ people, immigrants and indigenous nations, along with every other impediment to social justice.  Meanwhile, we will tax the handful of giant corporations that are responsible for most of the carbon emissions, using their ill-gotten gains to finance an environment that’s healthy for people and other living things.  Climate change will turn out to be a godsend, because the struggle against it will unite us around an all-inclusive economic, ecological and social agenda.

View #2, Righteous Austerity, is that the root cause of the ecological crisis is capitalism’s incessant drive to expand, which has fostered the toxic ideology of economic growth.  We can’t have endless growth on a finite planet, so growth has to end right now.  We don’t need a bigger economy, because we can be happier and live more meaningful lives by shifting away from the false god of consumption.  Another benefit of a non-growing economy is that it will force us to undertake redistribution, since that will then be the only way the poor the can advance.  Of course, by curtailing economic growth we will also be overturning capitalism, which means that all the other ills caused by this irrational, outmoded system will diminish or disappear altogether.  We can then finally say goodbye to our political overlords who have forced us to endure economic growth whether we wanted it or not.  Ultimately, climate change is a message delivered to the human race from a beleaguered planet that can’t absorb any more of our exploitation.  We must heed this message and radically change what we value and how we live, abandoning excessive material desires for the deeper pleasures of community and spirituality.

And then there are those on the left who adopt both views: they are for ending economic growth and producing an abundance of green, well-paying jobs for all.  They want to eat their cake and not have it too.

As far as I can see, that’s the progressive political landscape on climate change.  Anyone else besides me feel left out?

Take Your Pick of Left-Wing Climate Change Narratives. Yves Smith, naked capitalism.

Yves here. Since we don’t consider this site to be left wing (we regularly get in arguments with the orthodox types), it shouldn’t be surprising that like Dorman, we aren’t comfortable with what he depicts as the two acceptable views of goodthinking lefties on climate change. I can’t speak for Lambert or Jerri-Lynn, but my position is probably more like: “Too late, the Jackpot is coming. Responses will be erratic and not well coordinated.”

And in case you have not read Gibson’s book The Peripheral, the Jackpot is a roughly 40 year period in the 21st Century in which most people die due to climate change and pestilence. It is still optimistic given his givens. We’ve quoted this passage before, of a character from the future, Wilf, telling the heroine Flynn what is to come:

[The Jackpot] was androgenic, [Wilf] said, and [Flynn] knew from Ciencia Loca and National Geographic that meant because of people. Not that they’d known what they were doing, had meant to make problems, but they’d caused it anyway. And in fact the actual climate, the weather, caused by there being too much carbon, had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late.

So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn’t happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming anyway. She’d looked across the silver lawn, that Leon had cut with the push-mower whose cast-iron frame was held together with actual baling wire, to where moon shadows lay, past stunted boxwoods and the stump of a concrete birdbath they’d pretend was a dragon’s castle, while Wilf told her [the Jackpot] killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about forty years. ….

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there. ….

But science, he said, had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable. ….

None of that, he said, had necessarily been as bad for very rich people. The richest had gotten richer, there being fewer to own whatever there was. Constant crisis had provided constant opportunity. That was where his world had come from, he said. At the deepest point of everything going to shit, population radically reduced, the survivors saw less carbon being dumped into the system, with what was still being produced being eaten by those towers they’d built… And seeing that, for them, the survivors, was like seeing the bullet dodged..

“The bullet was the eighty percent, who died?”

Needless to say, we’re not betting on the “rescued by science” part.

Climate Change Bibliography

originally posted April 2019; updated October 2019.
this bibliography will be updated as warranted at the Bibliography link on the header.

Bibliography

Climate Science

Authors, various.

World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity. 1992.

World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice. 2017.

Alley, Richard.

Abrupt climate change. 2003.

How high will the seas rise? 2016.

A heated mirror for future climate. 2016.

Anderson, James.

Recasting the climate debate: feedbacks that set the timescale for irreversible change. 2014.

Anderson, Kevin.

Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends. 2008.

From long-term targets to cumulative emission pathways: reframing UK climate policy. 2008.

Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world. 2011.

A new paradigm for climate change. 2012.

Duality in climate science. 2015.

The trouble with negative emissions. 2016.

What if ‘negative emission technologies’ (NETs) fail at scale: Implications of the Paris Agreement for big emitting nations. 2017.

Barnosky, Anthony.

Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere. 2012.

Box, Jason.

The urgency of Arctic change. 2018.

Clark, Peter.

Consequences of 21st-century policy for multi-millennial climate and sea-level change. 2016.

Crutzen, Paul.

The Anthropocene. 2006.

The Anthropocene: Are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature? 2007.

Glikson, Andrew.

The advent of extreme weather events and climate tipping points. 2019.

A Revision of Future Climate Change Trends. 2019.

Goreau, Thomas.

The other half of the global carbon dioxide problem. 1987.

Global Biogeochemical Restoration to Stabilize CO2 at Safe Levels in Time to Avoid Severe Climate Change Impacts to Earth’s Life Support Systems: Implications for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. 2014.

Hansen, James.

Climate change in a nutshell. Dec. 18, 2018.

Young people’s burden: requirement of negative CO2 emissions. 2017.

Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2C global warming could be dangerous. 2016.

Making things clearer: exaggeration, jumping the gun, and the Venus Syndrome. 2013.

Climate forcing growth rates: doubling down on our Faustian bargain. 2013.

Assessing “dangerous climate change”: Required reduction of carbon emissions to protect young people, future generations and nature. 2013.

Climate sensitivity, sea level, and atmospheric carbon dioxide. 2013.

Climate sensitivity in the Anthropocene. 2013.

Paleoclimate implications for human-made climate change. 2012.

Earth's energy imbalance and implications. 2011.

Global surface temperature change. 2010.

Tipping point: Perspective of a climatologist. 2008.

Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim? 2008.

Scientific reticence and sea level rise. 2007.

Climate catastrophe. 2007.

Dangerous human-made interference with climate: A GISS modelE study. 2007.

A slippery slope: How much global warming constitutes "dangerous anthropogenic interference"? An editorial essay. 2005.

Defusing the global warming time bomb. 2004.

Can we defuse the global warming time bomb? 2003.

The ice-core record: Climate sensitivity and future greenhouse warming. 1990.

Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. 1981.

Holmes, Jonathan.

Rapid climate change: lessons from the recent geological past. 2011.

Hulbe, Christina.

Is ice sheet collapse in West Antarctica unstoppable? 2017.
Jackson, R.B.

Global energy growth is outpacing decarbonization. 2018. 

Larkin, Alice.

What if negative emission technologies fail at scale? Implications of the Paris Agreement for big emitting nations. 2017.

 Lenton, Timothy.

Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system. 2008. (with Rahmstorf and Schellnuber)

Early warning of climate tipping points. 2011.

Detecting and Anticipating Climate Tipping Points. 2015.

Le Quere, Corinne.

Global Carbon Budget 2018.

Mann, Michael.

Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries. 1998.

Marcott, Shaun.

Centennial-scale changes in the global carbon cycle during the last deglaciation. 2014.

Mayewski, Paul A.

Holocene climate variability. 2004.

Meinshausen, Malte.

Historical greenhouse gas concentrations for climate modelling (CMIP6). 2017.

Oppenheimer, Michael.

The limits of consensus. 2007.

Evaluation, characterization, and communication of uncertainty by the intergovernmental panel on climate change—an introductory essay. 2011.

The rapid disintegration of projections: The West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 2012.

IPCC reasons for concern regarding climate change risks. 2017.

The social cost of carbon: a global imperative. 2017.

Peters, Glen.

The challenge to keep global warming below 2C. 2012.

Reaching peak emissions. 2015.

Rahmstorf, Stefan.

Rapid changes of glacial climate simulated in a coupled climate model. 2001.

Recent Climate Observations Compared to Projections. 2007.

Abrupt climate change. 2009.

A decade of weather extremes. 2012.

Rees, William.

Our ecological footprint. 1996.

What’s blocking sustainability? Human nature, cognition and denial. 2010.

Avoiding Collapse: An agenda for sustainable degrowth and relocalizing the economy. 2014.

Rignot, Eric.

Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica, from 1992 to 2011. 2014.

Rapid submarine ice melting in the grounding zones of ice shelves in West Antarctica. 2016.

Four decades of Antarctic Ice Sheet mass balance from 1979-2017. 2019.

Rockstrom, Johan.

Planetary boundaries: Exploring the safe operating space for humanity. 2009. (with Hansen, Steffen, Lenton, Schellnhuber, Crutzen et al)

A safe operating space for humanity. 2009. (ditto)

Climate change: the necessary, the possible and the desirable. 2014.

Natural capital and ecosystem services informing decisions: From promise to practice. 2015.

The world’s biggest gamble. 2016.

A roadmap for rapid decarbonization. 2017.

Rogelj, Joeri.

Energy system transformations for limiting end-of-century warming to below 1.5C. 2015.

Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim.

Disentangling the effects of CO2 and short-lived climate forcer mitigation. 2014.

System crash as dynamics of complex networks. 2016.

Closing the loop: reconnecting human dynamics to Earth system analysis. 2017.

The limits to global-warming mitigation by terrestrial carbon removal. 2017.

Three years to safeguard our climate. 2017.

Club of Rome Climate Emergency Plan. 2018.

Shakhova, Natalia.

Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. 2010.

Current rates and mechanisms of subsea permafrost degradation in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. 2017.

Steffen, Will.

The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration. 2015.

Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. 2018.

Trenberth, Kevin.

An imperative to monitor Earth’s energy imbalance. 2016.

Wadhams, Peter.

The global impacts of rapidly disappearing Arctic sea ice. 2016.

White, Jim.

Thoughts on abrupt climate change, as in 30 years, not 100. 2014.

Wilson, Edward O.

Is humanity suicidal? 1993.

Agencies

Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Technical Update to Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Social Cost of Greenhouse Gas Estimates. 2016.

Canada’s Changing Climate Report. 2019.

National Research Council / National Academies Press.

Changing Climate: Report of the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee. 1983.

Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises. 2002.

Understanding Earth’s Deep Past: Lessons for our Climate Future. 2011.

Abrupt Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises. 2013.

Valuing Climate Damages: Updating Estimation of the Social Cost of Carbon Dioxide. 2017.

OECD.

Climate Change Risks and Adaptation: Linking Policy and Economics. 2015.

The Economic Consequences of Climate Change. 2015.

World Bank.

Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must be Avoided. 2012.

Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts, and the Case for Resilience. 2013.

Turn Down the Heat: Confronting the New Climate Normal. 2014.

Resources

Climate Scientists:

Kevin Anderson: http://kevinanderson.info/blog/home-2/

Johan Rockstrom: https://www.pik-potsdam.de/members/johanro

Stefan Rahmstorf: http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/

James Hansen: http://csas.ei.columbia.edu/blog/ & http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber: https://www.pik-potsdam.de/members/john/public

James Anderson: https://climatechange.environment.harvard.edu/james-anderson & https://www.arp.harvard.edu/

Andrew Glikson: http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2008/11/andrew-glikson-21st-century-climate.html

James White: https://instaar.colorado.edu/galleries/how-climate-works-by-dr-jim-white/

Glen Peters: https://www.cicero.oslo.no/en/employee/30/glen-peters

Tim Osborn: https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/~timo/papepages/publist.htm

Eric Rignot: https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/erignot/

Jason Box: https://www.jasonbox.net/





Other Authors:

Lester Brown: Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. 2009.

Bill McKibben: http://billmckibben.com/articles.html

Richard Heinberg: http://richardheinberg.com/

Clive Hamilton: https://clivehamilton.com/papers/

Vaclav Smil: http://vaclavsmil.com/publications/

Naomi Klein: https://naomiklein.org/on-fire/ & https://naomiklein.org/this-changes-everything/

Al Bartlett: https://www.albartlett.org/books/essential_exponential.html




Videos, Graphics, Data:

A Brief History of CO2 Emissions. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Sept. 2017.

Climate Spirals. Open Climate Data.

Trends in Atmospheric CO2. Earth System Research Laboratory, NOAA.

Our World in Data.

Sites:

Climate Emergency Institute. 

Climate Code Red. David Spratt.

Global Carbon Project.

Global Warming.

The Great Decoupling. Rob Jackson, Glen Peters et al. July 2017.

Blogs:

Tim Garrett: http://nephologue.blogspot.com/ & http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Economics/About.html

Tim Morgan: https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/

Nate Hagens: http://www.themonkeytrap.us/

Tad Patzek: http://patzek-lifeitself.blogspot.com/

Rob Mielcarski: https://un-denial.com/

George Mobus: https://questioneverything.typepad.com/

Paul Chefurka: http://www.paulchefurka.ca/

Ugo Bardi: https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/

Jean-Marc Jancovici : https://jancovici.com/en/

Rick Nolthenius : https://www.cabrillo.edu/~rnolthenius/astro7/A7PowerIndex.html

Tom Murphy: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/ (sadly, Prof. Murphy’s seems to have gone dormant since 2015)

Mike @: https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/

Tim Watkins: http://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/

James @: http://megacancer.com/

Gail Zawacki : http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/

Mike Stasse: https://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/

Jack Alpert: http://www.skil.org//position_papers_folder/TourlectureSKILconcepts.html

Jem Bendell: https://jembendell.wordpress.com/

Geoffrey Chia @: http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/blog/author/geoffrey-chia/

Decarbonizing the U.S. economy

Decarbonizing the US Economy: Pathways Toward a Green New Deal. MARK PAUL , ANDERS FREMSTAD , J.W. MASON. Roosevelt Institute. Jun 11 2019.


The greatest challenge of the 21st century—the climate crisis—is here: The global community has just 11 years to cut emissions by 45 percent and must achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 to prevent temperatures from rising more than 1.5C, according to climate scientists. 

In Decarbonizing the US Economy: Pathways Toward a Green New Deal, Roosevelt Fellows Mark Paul and J.W. Mason and assistant professor of economics at Colorado State University Anders Fremstad argue that a rapid decarbonization program is not only possible, but that it will create jobs, improve economic growth, and promote equity. Such an endeavor, however, necessitates immediate action and a broad range of policy tools. They outline the three pillars of such an approach: 1) carbon pricing that ensures that we meet our emissions goals in an equitable way; 2) comprehensive regulations to promote decarbonization across the board; and 3) large-scale public investments. The authors also explore how to pay for a Green New Deal, outlining the macroeconomic reasons why more public spending is a pro-growth proposal.

For nearly 50 years, flawed economic assumptions have guided American politics and policymaking, ultimately stunting action on this issue. Economists and policymakers argued that disrupting markets through environmental regulation or carbon taxes would cost too much in terms of economic growth; that government spending to decarbonize the economy would bankrupt our country; and that public investment would be ineffective and wasteful. Combatting climate change in the US and decarbonizing the economy will require a comprehensive social transformation, which includes dismantling the markets-first approach that has dominated policy decisions for nearly half of a century.

We believe that the public sector must play the leading role in directing decarbonization and in a broader Green New Deal movement. Though markets have many virtues, markets alone are not a suitable tool for the rapid, society-wide reorganization of production that this moment requires. The Green New Deal has initiated a critical discussion on mass mobilization that is capable of redefining and improving the planet, the economy, and people’s lives. And it offers the American people a chance to reclaim our collective power and reshape our society into one that is more just and equitable—one that is more focused on human flourishing and less on private profit. We should not let this chance go to waste.

Read more in our summary document, the “Realities of Climate Change” issue brief, “The Macroeconomic Case For the Green New Deal” brief, and our five policy briefs on eliminating fossil fuel subsidies, implementing a carbon cap-and-dividend program, directing credit to green businesses, building a high-capacity national grid, and paying farmers to capture carbon.




See also:


The Green New Deal: A Ten-Year Window to Reshape International Economic Law. TODD TUCKER. Roosevelt Institure. July 30, 2019.

To address the existential threat of climate change, the international community must come together and rewrite the rules. In a new working paper, Roosevelt Fellow Todd Tucker argues that a global Green New Deal—in tandem with a domestic Green New Deal—can both remake an international trade infrastructure in crisis and decarbonize the global economy in a socially sustainable and equitable way.

Ronald Wright: The Progress Trap

Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap? Ronald Wright, TheTyee.ca. Sep 20, 2019.

Author of 2004’s ‘A Short History of Progress’ issues a progress report.

[Editor’s note: Ronald Wright’s 2004 Massey Lectures, A Short History of Progress, are being re-issued in a special 15th anniversary edition this month by Anansi. With permission, this is adapted from his new introduction to the book.]
In the 2004 Massey Lectures, A Short History of Progress, I wrote about the fall of past civilizations and what we might learn from them to avoid a similar fate. Societies that failed were seduced and undone by what I called a progress trap: a chain of successes which, upon reaching a certain scale, leads to disaster. The dangers are seldom seen before it’s too late. The jaws of a trap open slowly and invitingly, then snap closed fast.

The first trap was hunting, the main way of life for about two million years in Palaeolithic times. As Stone Age people perfected the art of hunting, they began to kill the game more quickly than it could breed. They lived high for a while, then starved.

Most survivors of that progress trap became farmers — a largely unconscious revolution during which all the staple foods we eat today were developed from wild roots and seeds (yes, all: no new staples have been produced from scratch since prehistoric times). Farming brought dense human populations and centralized control, the defining ingredients of full-blown civilization for the last five thousand years. Yet there were still many traps along the way. In what is now Iraq, the Sumerian civilization (one of the world’s first) withered and died as the irrigation systems it invented turned the fields into salty desert. Some two thousand years later, in the Mediterranean basin, chronic soil erosion steadily undermined the Classical World: first the Greeks, then the Romans at the height of their power. And a few centuries after Rome’s fall, the Classic Maya, one of only two high civilizations to thrive in tropical rainforest (the other being the Khmer), eventually wore out nature’s welcome at the heart of Central America.

In the deep past these setbacks were local. The overall experiment of civilization kept going, often by moving from an exhausted ecology to one with untapped potential. Human numbers were still quite small. At the height of the Roman Empire there are thought to have been only 200 million people on Earth. Compare that with the height of the British Empire a century ago, when there were two billion. And with today, when there are nearly eight. Clearly, things have moved very quickly since the Industrial Revolution took hold around the world. In A Short History of Progress, I suggested that worldwide civilization was our greatest experiment; and I asked whether this might also prove to be the greatest progress trap. That was 15 years ago.

What has happened — and not happened — since then to alarm or reassure us?

First, our numbers have risen by 1.4 billion, nearly a hundred million per year. In other words, we’ve added another China or 40 more Canadas to the world. The growth rate has fallen slightly, but consumption of resources — from fossil fuel to water, from rare earths to good earth — has risen twice as steeply, roughly doubling our impact on nature. This outrunning of population by economic growth has lifted perhaps a billion of the poorest into the outskirts of the working class, mainly in China and India. Yet those in extreme poverty and hunger still number at least a billion.

Meanwhile, the wealthiest billion — to which most North Americans and Europeans and many Asians now belong — devour an ever-growing share of natural capital. The commanding heights of this group, the billionaires’ club, has more than 2,200 members with a combined known worth nearing $10 trillion; this super-elite not only consumes at a rate never seen before but also deploys its wealth to influence government policy, media content, and key elections. Such, in a few words, is the shape of the human pyramid today.

The 2008 crash triggered by banking fraud was staved off by money-printing and record debt. This primed a short-run recovery, which has in turn revived illusions we can borrow from nature and the future indefinitely — illusions fed by corporate think-tanks, irresponsible politicians, and Panglossian cherrypickers such as Steven Pinker. But what about the long run? In 1923 the great economist John Maynard Keynes famously answered, “In the long run we are all dead.” By that he meant, let’s deal with the problems we see now and leave the unforeseeable to those who come later. Fair enough in the 1920s, when there was only one person on Earth for every four today and the future seemed to have room for endless outcomes, good or bad. Nearly a century later, Keynes’s quip sounds more like dire prophecy, as short-term thinking lures us ever deeper into very difficult problems that science can not only observe but foresee. Predicted consequences of global warming — blighted coral reefs, melting glaciers, spreading deserts, and extreme weather — are already upon us.

One of the sad ironies of our time is that we have become very good at studying nature just as it begins to sicken and die under our weight. “Weight” is no mere metaphor: of all land mammals and birds alive today, humans and their livestock make up 96 per cent of the biomass; wildlife has dwindled to four per cent. This has no precedent. Not so far back in history the proportions were the other way round. As recently as 1970, humans were only half and wildlife more than twice their present numbers. These closely linked figures are milestones along our rush towards a trashed and looted planet, stripped of diversity, wildness, and resilience; strewn with waste. Such is the measure of our success.

The archaeologists who dig us up will need to wear hazmat suits. Humankind will leave a telltale layer in the fossil record composed of everything we produce, from mounds of chicken bones, wet-wipes, tires, mattresses and other household waste, to metals, concrete, plastics, industrial chemicals, and the nuclear residue of power plants and weaponry. We are cheating our children, handing them tawdry luxuries and addictive gadgets while we take away what’s left of the wealth, wonder, and possibility of the pristine Earth.

Calculations of humanity’s footprint suggest we have been in “ecological deficit,” taking more than Earth’s biological systems can withstand, for at least 30 years. Topsoil is being lost far faster than nature can replenish it; 30 per cent of arable land has been exhausted since the mid-20th century.

We have financed this monstrous debt by colonizing both past and future, drawing energy, chemical fertilizer, and pesticides from the planet’s fossil carbon, and throwing the consequences onto coming generations of our species and all others. Some of those species have already been bankrupted: they are extinct.

Others will follow. Whether we are triggering an extinction as severe as that which killed the dinosaurs, when three-quarters of all species were wiped out, is still to be seen. By the time the answer is clear, there could be nobody left to know it. The lesson of fallen societies is that civilization is a vulnerable organism, especially when it seems almighty. We are the world’s top predator, and predators crash suddenly when they outgrow their prey. If the resulting chaos unleashes nuclear war, it could bring mass extinction in a heartbeat, with Homo sapiens among the noted dead.

Awareness of our predicament is spreading, if slowly and with mixed results. The warnings of science are growing more urgent and precise, gaining wider attention and sparking grassroots movements such as Extinction Rebellion and the schoolchildren’s strikes inspired by Greta Thunberg. People are beginning to see the world dying before their eyes. The dwindling of birdlife in their gardens and bugs on their windshields backs up the scientists’ alarm that falling insect numbers threaten a “catastrophic collapse” of natural systems. 

Effective reform will take political will at world level. Yet the very idea of international cooperation is under attack — just when it is needed most. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says in its October 2018 report, keeping global warming below 1.5 C “is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics” but will require “unprecedented changes” before 2030.

Conservation and environmentalism have had some success, a few species have been pulled back from the brink, a few Green politicians have been elected, a few promising fixes (renewable energy, electric cars, etc.) are being developed. Yet at this writing, the momentum of extraction, consumption, and destruction is still gathering speed, driven by the delusion of endless growth, and the willingness of corporations to set financial profit above life itself. Even if fossil energy were replaced at once by clean sources, our other problems — overpopulation, overconsumption, erosion, deforestation, and accumulating waste — would still persist.

The failure of democratic governments to stand up for the greater good over the long run is fuelling disillusionment with democracy itself. There is something badly wrong with an economic regime in which 26 individuals own as much as half the world’s population. Such extreme disparity has never been seen before. Inequality is the main driver behind rising population and consumption. The highest birthrates are in the poorest places, mainly Africa and the Indian subcontinent. At the other end of the seesaw, obscene wealth — the kind which owns mansions around the world and gigantic yachts with helicopter pads — has a colossal footprint, while its undue influence amounts to a dark tyranny.

Back in Classical Greece, Plato suggested that in a just society there should be no more than a 5:1 spread in income between richest and poorest. That was a hard sell then, and still would be. But what might be reasonable today? Where should the balance be struck to help the weakest while still rewarding effort and achievement? Given the seriousness of what we face, this is a conversation we must have. The wealth already wrenched from nature might just be enough to buy us a lasting future if it were shared, managed, and ploughed into solutions.

Of one thing we can be sure: if we fail to act, nature will do so with the rough justice she has always served on those who are too many and who take too much.

Climate Links - October 2019 #1

If you're keeping track, planet earth had the hottest June ever recorded, the hottest July, the 2nd-hottest August, and now the hottest September. Please join the fight for a livable future.

Bill McKibben. Twitter.

Global Climate Emergency: after COP24, climate science, urgency, and the threat to humanity. Barry Gills and Jamie Morgan, via TandFonline. Sep. 24, 2019.

We live in a time of Climate Emergency. Nevertheless, our collective actions do not yet approximate a real understanding nor fully appropriate actions. We are not yet acting as if we are facing an urgent and life threatening Emergency. What does ‘Climate Emergency’ actually mean? According to David Attenborough:

It may sound frightening, but the scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies.    (Attenborough, Our Planet)

History is written later, but the future is written now. Perhaps the central message of contemporary climate sciences consists in the realization that the entire planet is deeply interconnected. There are no isolated ecosystems. There are no ecosystems that are safe from the effects of climate change. All life on this planet is profoundly interrelated. What happens in one area of the globe has far reaching, but as yet insufficiently understood, effects upon and consequences for even far distant regions. . . .

In other words, the present Global Climate Emergency demands a profound historical transformation of our civilization. We have not only been pouring greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere; we have been collectively exceeding the regenerative capacity of the earth’s natural resources and ecological systems. Earth Overshoot Day, the day in the annual cycle when humanity’s demands for resources exceeds the capacity for regeneration of those resources, has advanced by two whole months over the past twenty years. This year Earth Overshoot Day took place on 29 July 2019. It now requires the equivalent of 1.75 planets to sustain us. Humanity is damaging the whole system upon which our lives, and that of all other species depends.

'I would like people to panic’ – Top scientist unveils equation showing world in climate emergency. Joanna Roberts, Horizon. Sep. 24, 2019.

A new equation showing that the world is ‘deep in a climate emergency’ was unveiled on 24 September by Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, one of the world’s leading authorities on climate change, who said that people still don’t want to see the truth about the state we’re in.

‘Based on sober scientific analysis, we are deeply within a climate emergency state but people are not aware of it,’ he told Horizon on the sidelines of the European Research and Innovation Days event in Brussels, Belgium. ‘We don’t want to see the truth. As Greta Thunberg would say, I would like people to panic and take action according to the state of emergency we are in.’

Interview: Vaclav Smil: ‘Growth must end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realise that’. Jonathan Watts, the Guardian. Sep 21, 2019.

The scientist and author on his latest book – an epic, multidisciplinary analysis of growth – and why humanity’s endless expansion must stop.


The Delusion and Danger of Infinite Economic Growth. Christopher Jones, The New Republic. Oct. 1, 2019.

How economists came to ignore the natural world.

 “Fairytales of eternal economic growth.” That’s how climate activist Greta Thunberg depicted the dominant mindset at the United Nations last week. “How dare you,” she said, admonishing them for “empty words” instead of concrete actions to preserve the planet.

She’s right. One of the reasons nations fail to address climate change is the belief that we can have infinite economic growth independent of ecosystem sustainability. Extreme weather events, melting arctic ice, and species extinction expose the lie that growth can forever be prioritized over planetary boundaries.

It wasn’t always this way. The fairytale of infinite growth—which so many today accept as unquestioned fact—is relatively recent. Economists have only begun to model never-ending growth over the last 75 years. Before that, they had ignored the topic for a century. And before that, they had believed in limits. If more people saw the idea of infinite growth as a departure from the history of economics rather than a timeless law of nature, perhaps they’d be readier to reimagine the links between the environment and the economy.

In 1950, the economics profession had surprisingly little to say about growth. That year, the American Economic Association (AEA) asked Moses Abramovitz to write a state-of-the-field essay on economic growth. He quickly discovered a problem: There was no field to review.

The founding fathers of economics shared a belief that growth was finite, and that the reason for limits lay in the natural world.

Yes, John Maynard Keynes had offered a theory of stagnation, demonstrating the need for government spending to stimulate an economy mired in recession, and Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter had studied creative destruction, highlighting the importance of entrepreneurs and innovation. Wesley Mitchell, founder of the National Bureau of Economic Research, had looked at business cycles and others had analyzed monetary forces. But no one had put it all together in a theory of growth. Modern work was “fragmentary” and had “remained on the periphery of economics,” Abramovitz explained to AEA members. Development economist W. Arthur Lewis agreed, noting in 1955 that “no comprehensive treatment of [economic growth] has been published for about a century.”

It was an interesting turn for a field originally quite interested in growth, but convinced it was bounded. The founding fathers of economics—luminaries including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill—shared a belief that growth was finite, and that the reason for limits lay in the natural world.

Why are economists letting down the world on climate change? Andrew Oswald and Nicholas Stern, voxeu. September 17, 2019.

Action on climate change is arguably the greatest challenge for public policy of our times. But despite economic forces being the major driver of the carbon dioxide problem, this column argues that economists have so far been too silent on the subject. For example, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the most-cited journal in economics, has never published an article on climate change. Good economics can and should play a fundamental role in guiding the policy framework that will influence investment decisions in the coming years, so it is important that the profession dramatically increases its work now.

Out of Time: Listening to the climate’s clock. Astra Taylor, Lapham's Quarterly.

Twelve years, or so the scientists told us in 2018, which means now we are down to eleven. That’s how long we have to pull back from the brink of climate catastrophe by constraining global warming to a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Eleven years to prevent the annihilation of coral reefs, greater melting of the permafrost, and species apocalypse, along with the most dire consequences for human civilization as we know it. Food shortages, forest fires, droughts and monsoons, intensified war and conflict, billions of refugees—we have barely begun to conceive of the range of dystopian futures looming on the horizon. 

One person who looks squarely and prophetically at the potential ramifications of climate change and insists on a response is Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old Swedish environmentalist who launched a global wave of youth climate strikes. In April 2019 she gave a tour de force address in the British Parliament, invoking not just her peers who were regularly missing class to protest government inaction but those yet to be born. “I speak on behalf of future generations,” Thunberg said. “Many of you appear concerned that we are wasting valuable lesson time, but I assure you we will go back to school the moment you start listening to science and give us a future.” 

Thunberg accepts what many influential adults seem unable to face: the inevitability of change. Change is coming, either in the form of adaptation or annihilation; we can respond proactively or reactively to this discomfiting fact. Perhaps she can accept this because she is so young. Eleven years, a little over a decade, is the time for a human infant to become a preteen and for a preteen to become a young adult. For Thunberg, eleven years is more than two-thirds of her life, a veritable expanse that, projected forward, will involve crossing the threshold from adolescence to the first stage of maturity. Yet for a relatively contented middle-aged or elderly adult, eleven years isn’t as substantial—not quite the blink of an eye but a continuation of the present, a deeper dive into one’s golden years. At a certain point, stasis is the goal, to ward off decline. But decline awaits us all—as the economist John Maynard Keynes bluntly put it, “In the long run we are all dead.” Everyone’s time on earth must come to an end. The question is, What do we do with such knowledge?

Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap? Ronald Wright, TheTyee.ca. Sep. 20, 2019.
Author of 2004’s ‘A Short History of Progress’ issues a progress report.


Waiting for the Next Panic. John Michael Greer, Ecosophia. Oct. 2, 2019.

... Those of us who expected the shale oil boom to turn into a bubble and then a bust were wrong. We were wrong because we forgot the first law of petroleum: when it comes to oil, politics always trumps economics. Access to petroleum is so crucial for industrial nations, and especially for extremely wasteful industrial nations such as the United States and Canada, that all other factors get to sit in the waiting room when decisions about petroleum are made. That’s why Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, for all his environmental rhetoric, has backed a petroleum pipeline meant to get Canadian crude from the tar sands to the Pacific coast. He knows perfectly well that when push comes to shove, Canadian voters love to give the environment lip service but don’t want environmental protections to affect their lifestyles, which is why Canada is one of the only countries on Earth that uses more energy per capita than the United States.

That’s also why shale oil producers have continued to drill and pump away in blithe disregard for the fact that in terms of strict economics, their activities don’t make enough money to keep them from going broke. It doesn’t matter, because the US government sees to it that a steady stream of cheap credit makes up the difference.  Having another seven million more barrels of oil per day is important enough to the US economy that gimmicking the money system to cover it is a small price to pay, and so an unspoken bipartisan consensus supports the necessary gimmicks. That was the point that we missed back in the day, and I missed it as much as anyone.

Unpacking Extinction Rebellion — Part III: The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Kim Hill, Damn The Matrix. Sept. 26, 2019.

Part I of this series investigated the corporate interests and fossil fuel companies behind the rebellion’s goal for net-zero emissions. In Part II we looked at XR’s goals, tactics and proposed solutions to the climate crisis, which are all serving capital at the expense of the natural world. In Part III, we dive in to the history of the climate movement, the tactics being used by the elites to co-opt activist movements into supporting corporate agendas, and what those agendas entail. 

This article is largely a synthesis of the extensive research of Cory Morningstar into the manipulations of the climate movement by corporations and nonprofits, which is well worth reading, at Wrong Kind of Green, to get a deeper understanding of the actors involved and their elaborate marketing strategies

The Global Climate Strikes: No, This Was Not Co-Optation. This Was and Is PR. A Brief Timeline. Cory Morningstar, Wrong Kind of Green. Oct. 6, 2019.

TAKE AWAY POINTS

We dance to the tune of our oppressors

“The ruling class exists, it’s not a conspiracy theory. They operate as a class, too. They share the same values, the same sensibility and in Europe and North America they are white. They act in accordance with their interests, which are very largely identical. The failure to understand this is the single greatest problem and defect in left discourse today.”
— John Steppling

• Climate change is real – but capitalism is the crisis.
• The structure of the system is working exactly as it is designed to. The NPIC exists to insulate the current power structures and capital itself.
• Economic growth is sacrosanct – to those in power, and those it serves. Economic growth trumps all priorities including life itself.
• The Thunberg campaign belongs to the ruling class, not to the people.
• A decade of social engineering (“together”) has effectively erased class analysis, which is a massive blow, and even a betrayal, to the working class and peasantry.
• The West is under the rule of a corporatocracy, therefore voting is a massive distraction and spectacle that will never solve or mitigate our ecological crisis.
• The same system that created the crisis will not and cannot now rectify the crises. The same people that protected and defended this system will do anything and exploit anyone to keep it intact.
• The NGOs comprising the NPIC must be isolated, shamed and abandoned. The exact methods they use against radical activists and radical grassroots groups. Without the support of the people, they lose all power and influence (and then funding).
• A litmus test must be placed on all organizations that claim to fight for ecological and social justice: They must be united in opposition to imperialism/colonialism, militarism, white supremacy and patriarchy – all leading drivers of climate change and ecological devastation.
• Capitalism will destroy everything in its path. Either we kill capitalism, or capitalism will kill us.

315 billion-tonne iceberg breaks off Antarctica. Jonathan Amos, BBC. Sep. 30, 2019.

The Amery Ice Shelf in Antarctica has just produced its biggest iceberg in more than 50 years. The calved block covers 1,636 sq km in area

but, not to worry:

The Scripps researcher stressed that there was no link between this event and climate change. Satellite data since the 1990s has shown that Amery is roughly in balance with its surroundings, despite experiencing strong surface melt in summer. 

"While there is much to be concerned about in Antarctica, there is no cause for alarm yet for this particular ice shelf," Prof Fricker added.