http://carolynbaker.net/2012/12/05/the-sixth-extinction-beyond-transition-the-long-emergency-and-the-great-turning-by-carolyn-baker/#comment-13724
The Sixth Great Extinction: Beyond Transition, The Long Emergency, And The Great Turning
Despair is the loss of the assumption that the species will inevitably pull through. It represents a genuine accession to the possibility that this planetary experiment will end, the curtain rung down, the show over.
~Joanna Macy~
In October, 2012, professor and blogger, Guy McPherson presented a devastating report on climate change at Bluegrass Bioneers in Louisville, Kentucky. Much of what McPherson stated has been written about over the years at his blog, Nature Bats Last, but watching the video presentation and absorbing its contents through that medium takes this information to an entirely new level.
McPherson begins by telling the audience that he has some really bad news for them as well as some astonishingly good news, and he begins with what he calls, the “good” news.
One of the first slides of his presentation lists the names of 80 researchers in the areas of energy, environment, and economics who believe that by the end of 2012, our current set of living arrangements will be done. They have projected that by that time, “we’ll have no water coming out of the municipal taps, no food at the grocery store, no fuel at the filling station, no lights on here in the Empire.” Obviously, at the point at which McPherson was giving his presentation, there were only two months left in 2012.
McPherson acknowledges that some of these individuals have been wrong, and some of them wrong many times; nevertheless, he emphasizes that the world’s industrial economy has been declining since 1999 or 2000, depending on which metric you use. And he says, “If you think that can’t happen quickly, that an empire can’t fall relatively quickly, think about the events of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The last superpower didn’t take a dozen years to fall.” McPherson referring, of course, to theSoviet Union.
Why is all of this good news? According to McPherson:
This is good news because if we stop this omnicidal, suicidal set of living arrangements that we call industrial civilization, then that will actually force us to stop climate chaos–which threatens us with near-term extinction. It will force us to stop human population overshoot, which proceeds currently at the rate of more than 200,000 individuals per day added to the planet–that’s births minus deaths. 200,000 people per day brought into the world that they didn’t choose to be brought into. It’s not like we vote for that. We just appear here. Nobody chose this time in history. And we don’t have food for those people. We don’t have clear water. We don’t have clean air for all those people we’re adding every day. And there’s seven billion plus of us now. At what point do we stop demanding this on an overpopulated planet?
McPherson does not see any hope of humans, of their own accord, coming to any agreements to alter their lifestyles in the ways that are absolutely necessary to significantly reduce climate change. While climate summits continue to occur regularly such as the one which began last month in Doha, Qatar, very little has changed in terms of humankind’s willingness to live differently. In fact, a story at the Common Dreams website this week reported that As Global Pollution Hits Record High, Frighteningly Hot Future Seems Inevitable. The opening paragraph of the story states:
New global carbon emission numbers released on Sunday show that the world is heading in the exact wrong direction when it comes to its energy production policies and scientists at the Global Carbon Project now say that frightening climate change impacts are all but inevitable without a “radical plan” to decrease the level of greenhouse gasses spewing into the atmosphere.
For McPherson, the good news is that:
When the industrial economy collapses–and I’m not saying that it will happen this year or next year, but it will happen; this set of living arrangements will come to an end. All civilization fall, including industrial civilization. When that happens, we’ll be forced to slow or stop the sixth great extinction, which is proceeding at a pace of 200 species a day, every single life-destroying day. 200 species a day. That’s genocide. That’s what the industrial economy allows us and apparently forces us to do. 200 species a day, as if we have the right.
And finally, termination of this set of living arrangements will force us to stop environmental decay. And here I’m thinking about every part of the world that has become worse every year of my 52 years on the planet. Everybody that I know thinks that every year has been better than the year before because we’ve got iPads and Kindles, right. But from my perspective, every year has been worse than the year before. Every year we have more soil that we wash into the worlds oceans. Every year we foul more air and dirty more water. Every year we destroy every aspect of the living planet that we actually need to survive. And we think it’s cool because we have smart phones. Let’s make the right trade.
But before proceeding with McPherson’s presentation and other daunting realities about what is happening to our planet, let’s be clear about what the Sixth Great Extinction is. If we understand the other five extinctions on this planet, we will have a context for the impending extinction that humans are now busy engendering. According to National Geographic’s Newswatch website:
The first extinction, named the Ordovician-Silurian extinction, occurred around 440 million years ago (m.y.a.). Scientists hypothesize that both a southerly continental drift that led to a drastic decrease in temperatures and radiation caused by the collapse of a massive star known as a hyper nova may have caused this massive loss of diversity on Earth.
The second extinction was the Late Devonian. Approximately 370 m.y.a., there was a sharp decrease in marine reef biodiversity. Many factors may have played a part in the Late Devonian extinction, but the causes remain mostly unknown.
Around 245 million years ago, during the Permian-Triassic extinction event, marine species died off to such an extent that oceanic reefs did not exist anywhere on the planet for ten million years. A combination of factors, including volcanic eruptions, climate change and a possible meteorite impact, made this the largest historical extinction event.
In the Triassic-Jurassic extinction, circa 210 m.y.a., 48 percent of genera vanished from the earth, including 80 percent of quadrupeds and half of all marine invertebrates. Although the causes of this event are unknown, scientists believe that volcanic activity contributed to extinctions.
The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, circa 65 m.y.a. (formerly known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary or K-T), is best known for the extinction of the dinosaurs and nearly all large animal species. During this event, temperatures increased by as much as 57 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) and sea levels rose as much as three hundred meters.
During each extinction event, between 50 and 95 percent of the planet’s life was lost, resulting in dramatically changed biotic characteristics. Generally, ten million years pass before biodiversity reaches pre-event levels.
This chronology is useful, but it is followed by a devastating statement:
The Sixth, however, may be the most catastrophic in history. It is estimated that half of all plants, animals and birds on the planet will die off before 2100. This extinction is the first to occur during the existence of homo sapiens, and it simultaneously began 100,000 years ago, a date that corresponds with the beginnings of our dispersion fromAfrica. In fact, this extinction is almost exclusively human driven.
But back to Guy McPherson who is getting ready to deliver the really bad news:
And here comes the bad news, and most people stop right here, by the way. Most people stop with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with their five year old assessment of one degree C in 88 years. And we know so much more than that now. For a couple of reasons. We have an abundance of data. We’re collecting planet data on an enormous level. And the models are so much better than they were five years ago. You probably know Moore’s Law–the rapidity with which computation speed is increasing. So we know better than this, yet most people stop right here. By the way, one degree C is catastrophic. We’ve been convinced by a neoclassical economist, of all things, that two degrees C is something we should worry about. William Nordhaus somehow hijacked the conversation and said, “Two degrees C is something to worry about. One degree is no big deal.”
One degree is a big deal, as we’ve known for more than 20 years. One degree C temperature increase leads to “rapid, unpredictable, and non-linear responses that could (will, and have) lead to extensive ecosystem damage.” We’ve known this for over 20 years. This is one of the greatest coverups by the corporate media I’ve ever heard about.
So both one degree is a big deal, and two degrees are even more worrisome. But McPherson is just beginning because here are two more incredibly frightening statistics:
The International Energy Agency with their World Energy Outlook … since November of 2010 has said that we’ll be at 3.5 degrees C warmer by 2035. That’s a big deal. That’s not very long from now.
What is more, according to McPherson:
United Nations Environmental Program, December of 2010, says more than five degrees C by 2050. More than five degrees C kills the oceans. The ocean become so acidified that essentially nothing can live there, including the thermophiles found at incredible depths and at enormous temperatures. Phytoplanktons in the ocean produce half our oxygen, by the way.
Additionally, a report by the esteemed Price Waterhouse accounting firm asks Is It Too Late For Two Degrees? The answer: “Governments’ ambitions to limit warning to 2°C now appear highly unrealistic. This new reality means that we must contemplate a much more challenging future. Whilst the negotiators continue to focus on 2°C, a growing number of scientists and other expert organisations are now projecting much more pessimistic scenarios for global temperatures. The International Energy Agency, for example, now considers 4°C and 6°C scenarios as well as 2°C in their latest analysis.”
But believe it or not, the news is worse than this because as McPherson notes, none of these assessments include positive feedback loops. That is, in his words, “These all assume simple linear projections from one year to the next, one decade to the next.” Can there be any worse news than this? Actually, there is. Here McPherson cites the National Academy of Sciences:
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, one of the premier science journals in the entire world, in a paper published in February of 2009–so a long time ago now–”Climate Change is Irreversible”–what the paper actually found was that the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide today is the minimum level we will observe for at least the next thousand years. So we’re at an average carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere right now of 396 parts per million. And we’ll be at 396 ppm for at least the next thousand years. That’s the minimum. 350.org is a bad joke. It’s disingenuous, or ignorant. There’s no way we’ll see 350 ppm CO2 within at least the next thousand years. Promoting that as if we could get there is ridiculous.
At this point McPherson adds, “I suspect we’re going to see an ice-freeArcticwithin the next three years. If so, it will be the first time for three million years–before there were human beings on the planet, in other words. It will be the first time for three million years there will be an ice-freeArctic. We’re on path for that to happen in 2014 or 2015.”
He then reminds us of the huge 800-pound gorilla beneath the Arctic ice melt, namely methane.
…methane is also escaping from the world’s oceans, and particularly in theArctic. There are methane hydrates or clathrates–those are synonyms–little cages of methane that are floating up to the surface as the ocean warms, and then the methane is being released into the atmosphere. Methane is about 100 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide in the short time, 20 to 30 times more powerful molecule for molecule than carbon dioxide in the long term, over a hundred years or so–but we don’t have a hundred years.
In terms of Antarctica, Live Science reported on August 29, 2012, as did a number of other media, that Billions Of Tons Of Methane Lurk Beneath Antarctic Ice. “There could be tons of methane hydrate beneath the Antarctic ice sheet,” said study researcher Jemma Wadham of theUniversity ofBristol’sSchool ofGeographical Sciences. “If you start to thin that ice cover, that hydrate starts to become unstable and turns into gas, and that gas can go into the atmosphere.”
On November 25, the UK Independent reported a related and similarly chilling story Rise Of Acid Ocean Eats Away Base Of Food Chain, which adds yet another lethal reality to the equation.
On Monday, November 12, Radio Ecoshock broadcast, “What They Won’t Tell You About Climate Catastrophe,” a presentation by Professor Kevin Anderson of the UK’s Tyndall Center For Climate Change Research, that nation’s premier climate modeling institution. Speaking at the Cabot Institute of the University of Bristol on November 6, Anderson told the audience that “our future is not possible.” He accused “too many climate scientists of keeping quiet about the unrealistic assessments put out by governments, and our awful odds of reaching global warming far above the proposed 2 degree safe point. In fact, saysAnderson, we are almost guaranteed to reach 4 degrees of warming, as early as 2050, and may soar far beyond that – beyond the point which agriculture, the ecosystem, and industrial civilization can survive.”
Chris Hedges at his Truthdig website in an article entitled Stand Still For The Apocalypse cited the 2012 World Bank Report written by the Postdam Institute For Climate Impact Research And Climate Analytics which paints a picture of “a world convulsed by rising temperatures…a mixture of mass chaos, systems collapse and medical suffering like that of the worst of the Black Plague, which in the 14th century killed 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population.” Quoting the report, Hedges states:
A failure to respond will assure an ecological nightmare that will most probably be accompanied by an economic, social and political breakdown. The human species, the report says, will cross “critical social system thresholds,” and “existing institutions that would have supported adaptation actions would likely become much less effective or even collapse.” The “stresses on human health, such as heat waves, malnutrition, and decreasing quality of drinking water due to seawater intrusion, have the potential to overburden health-care systems to a point where adaptation is no longer possible, and dislocation is forced.
Catastrophic climate change, oceans releasing methane, and oceans rapidly acidifying. These phenomena are essentially final, irreversible, and constitute a massive extinction scenario.
Making Sense Of Our Predicament
Near the conclusion of his presentation, McPherson asks: “What underlies the Armageddon we have triggered? …What underlies it is our drive to consume. The way we live–particularly in this country, requires us to live far from where we work, far from where we play, far from where we shop for all the things we think we need with the money we don’t have–forces us to consume. What underlies the industrial economy of theUnited States? 70 percent of it is underlain by personal consumption.”
Climate change is real, and it is human-caused. We engender climate change in different ways—overpopulation, using fossil fuels, and above all, by consuming. Before the advent of industrial civilization, humans used to consume, for the most part, what they actually needed. Today, consuming has become an addiction. In answer to McPherson’s question, “What underlies our drive to consume?” I would answer: the profound emptiness that inhabits the psyches of human beings in the modern, industrial world. Yes, many aspects of the industrial living arrangement force us to consume, but whenever those aspects are threatened by any talk of creating different living arrangements because those arrangements are creating climate change, both the politician and the ordinary citizen begin recoiling in terror. In other words, we consume voraciously because we cannot imagine another, more satisfying way of life, and we know that if we do not maintain our consumption-saturated lifestyles, we will be forced to confront our sense of emptiness and lack of meaning.
McPherson asks: “So now what? What do we do in the face of this information? Most people I know will just run from it…or pretend that this never happened.” Then he adds: “Channeling a little Springsteen, ‘In the end, what you don’t surrender well the world just strips away.’ So, let go. Let go, or be dragged. Seize the day. Or, a quote by my own personal hero (Nietzsche), ‘Live as though the day were here’.”
Words like “surrender” or “letting go” are foreign concepts in our culture, and the only thing most people in the modern world are open to seizing is the next shopping event or the next lottery ticket.
Human beings, as McPherson notes and as Derrick Jensen has written for years, are successfully making every species on this planet extinct, including our own. We appear to be so addicted to consumption and so intransigently locked into our lifestyles that we are willing to manifest the Sixth Extinction on earth.
As McPherson argues, the efforts of 350.Org, while admirable are woefully inadequate because of the realities and the rapidity of temperature increases. While such campaigns may make us feel better for a little while, they are not adequate for addressing the fundamental issue which is the trajectory on which industrial civilization is moving and the fact that it, not carbon quantities per se, is the problem that needs to be addressed.
Responding Resiliently
In our addiction to technological fixes and puerile happy endings, some have proposed massive geo-engineering feats to alleviate or reverse climate change. Naturally, they are highly invested in government contracts and the profits that can accrue as a result of what a recent Al Jazeera story calls “A Climate Frankenstein.” Moreover, these endeavors could backfire and actually worsen the effects of climate change. What is more, we do not have time to experiment with measures that rather than alleviating our predicament, may actually prove to worsen it.
Since we cannot reverse or significantly affect climate change short of the collapse of industrial civilization, what can we do?
First, we must recognize that there is nowhere on this planet to which we can “escape” in order to avoid the devastating repercussions of climate change. Therefore, it is necessary to adapt in place. If one’s place is situated in a drought zone, then one must adapt accordingly by radically conserving water. If living in a likely earthquake zone, then one must become a student of earthquake preparation. The same is true for nearly all geographical areas and their inherent risks in the face of dramatically rising temperatures.
Secondly, get involved in local politics—your city council and county commissions and present the facts regarding climate change and its repercussions in your area. Organize other citizens in your vicinity to petition and to get resilient response initiatives on the ballot.
Thirdly, recognize that beyond natural disasters and the devastation of resources such as water and soil as a result of climate change, the health of all human beings is at risk as a result of infectious and degenerative diseases that will ensue from climate change. In order to maintain one’s own well being, it is crucial to attend to one’s fitness. Fitness in this culture has become synonymous with becoming a champion weight lifter or marathon runner. However, fitness simply means that one is living in a state of physical and mental well being. Keeping the immune system vibrant and resistant is one of the most fundamental issues in preventing illness. This means attending assiduously to one’s nutrition, exercise, sleep, and relaxation regimen.
Confronting One’s Own Extinction
Independent of climate change, life has always been fatal. None of us leaves here alive. Few individuals, however, begin confronting their mortality until the second half of life, but climate change is leveling that playing field. Humans of all ages who are willing to face the dire realities of climate change invariably confront not only their own mortality but the likelihood that it will occur sooner rather than later. I believe that this is the fundamental reason that humans refuse to engage with climate change and alter their lifestyles in response to it. On some level, the inhabitants of industrial civilization believe that downsizing their lives is synonymous with death. How not in a culture that has inculcated us to believe that we aren’t really alive unless we have all of the stuff and things that civilization delivers? To downsize is to die; to live in relationship with the planet we inhabit means we will cease to exist.
But there is a grain of truth in these assumptions. In fact, downsizing is a form of death. It requires us to die to our cherished beliefs and expectations, and that means “we” will cease to exist. The “we” to which I’m referring, of course, is our identity as consumers as opposed to our sense of ourselves as a community of creatures living in relationship with the other creatures on this planet. If I don’t know who I am, then I must live by the rules of a suicidal, voracious, devouring culture that is killing every living thing on earth, including myself.
Joanna Macy writes in World As Lover, World As Self, that:
When you look at what is happening to our world—and it is hard to look at what is happening to our water, our air, our trees, our fellow species—it becomes clear that unless you have some roots in a spiritual practice that holds life sacred and encourages joyful communion with all your fellow beings, facing the enormous challenges ahead becomes nearly impossible. (185)
Therefore, does it not make sense that in addition to the collapse of industrial civilization, which in my opinion, everyone of us must be busy facilitating, we must radically alter our relationship with ourselves? Is it not now painfully obvious that without a transformation of consciousness in which we intimately encounter the deeper, sacred self within us, we will forever be searching externally for treasure that can only be discovered in the inner world? In this way, we access meaning and purpose, both in our own human experience and in our human predicament. We commit to adapting in place, building community, and alleviating the myriad forms of suffering resulting from climate change. At the same time, we recognize our limits in this endeavor and come to terms with our own personal extinction. None of this is easy, but wanting the human condition to be easy is part of what got us where we are.
If you have read this far, you have opened yourself to far more than most inhabitants of planet earth will ever entertain. Now knowing what you have let yourself know, is it not imperative to expand your sense of self so that you can empower and enrich the rest of your days on earth and surrender (as McPherson channeling Nietzsche would say) to “living as if the day were here”?
This article began with a quote by Joanna Macy about despair—a word that literally means out of air, out of breath, out of inspiration. One synonym is hopelessness. Yet I believe we can face our extinction and still live as if the day were here because despair has the capacity to compel us to make meaning from our circumstances and demonstrate previously-untapped layers of compassion within us. I do not wish to attempt to put a pretty face on despair, yet our despair regarding extinction dispels all illusions of separateness from all other members of the earth community. As we drink the cup of despair, we join every other being in embracing our mutual finitude and the inexorable reality that we matter to each other. We acknowledge the tragedy of a species that within two hundred years destroyed an entire planet and its myriad ecosystems. We surrender to our fate, but in the same moment, we cherish the feelings we allowed ourselves to feel, the beauty we savored and created, the difference we made in the lives of others, the commitments we made single-handedly to living in harmony with the earth community even when other members of our species were oblivious to their participation in it. Ultimately, we recognize the weaving of the earth’s story within our own story, and we celebrate our biological union with the rivers and the soil. And when the last species has been made extinct, this recognition is what makes the demise sacred.
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/stand_still_for_the_apocalypse_20121126/
Stand Still for the Apocalypse
Humans must immediately implement a series of radical measures to halt carbon emissions or prepare for the collapse of entire ecosystems and the displacement, suffering and death of hundreds of millions of the globe’s inhabitants, according to a report commissioned by the World Bank. The continued failure to respond aggressively to climate change, the report warns, will mean that the planet will inevitably warm by at least 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, ushering in an apocalypse.
The 84-page document,“Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must Be Avoided,” was written for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics and published last week. The picture it paints of a world convulsed by rising temperatures is a mixture of mass chaos, systems collapse and medical suffering like that of the worst of the Black Plague, which in the 14th century killed 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population. The report comes as the annual United Nations Conference on Climate Change begins this Monday [Nov. 26] in Doha, Qatar.
A planetwide temperature rise of 4 degrees C—and the report notes that the tepidness of the emission pledges and commitments of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will make such an increase almost inevitable—will cause a precipitous drop in crop yields, along with the loss of many fish species, resulting in widespread hunger and starvation. Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to abandon their homes in coastal areas and on islands that will be submerged as the sea rises. There will be an explosion in diseases such as malaria, cholera and dengue fever. Devastating heat waves and droughts, as well as floods, especially in the tropics, will render parts of the Earth uninhabitable. The rain forest covering the Amazon basin will disappear. Coral reefs will vanish. Numerous animal and plant species, many of which are vital to sustaining human populations, will become extinct. Monstrous storms will eradicate biodiversity, along with whole cities and communities. And as these extreme events begin to occur simultaneously in different regions of the world, the report finds, there will be “unprecedented stresses on human systems.” Global agricultural production will eventually not be able to compensate. Health and emergency systems, as well as institutions designed to maintain social cohesion and law and order, will crumble. The world’s poor, at first, will suffer the most. But we all will succumb in the end to the folly and hubris of the Industrial Age. And yet, we do nothing.
“It is useful to recall that a global mean temperature increase of 4°C approaches the difference between temperatures today and those of the last ice age, when much of central Europe and the northern United States were covered with kilometers of ice and global mean temperatures were about 4.5°C to 7°C lower,” the report reads. “And this magnitude of climate change—human induced—is occurring over a century, not millennia.”
The political and corporate elites in the industrialized world continue, in spite of overwhelming scientific data, to place short-term corporate profit and expediency before the protection of human life and the ecosystem. The fossil fuel industry is permitted to determine our relationship to the natural world, dooming future generations. Carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas, increased from its pre-industrial concentration of about 278 parts per million (ppm) to more than 391 ppm in September 2012, with the rate of rise now at 1.8 ppm per year. We have already passed the tipping point of 350 ppm; above that level, life as we have known it cannot be sustained. The CO2 concentration is higher now than at any time in the last 15 million years. The emissions of CO2, currently about 35 billion metric tons per year, are projected to climb to 41 billion metric tons per year by 2020.
Because about 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by the greenhouse effect since 1955 is momentarily in the oceans, we have begun a process that, even if we halted all carbon emissions today, will ensure rising sea levels and major climate disruptions, including the continued melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets as well as the acidification of the oceans. The report estimates that if warming accelerates toward 4 degrees Celsius, sea levels will rise 0.5 to 1 meter, possibly more, by 2100. Sea levels will increase several meters more in the coming centuries. If warming can be keep to 2 degrees or below, sea levels will still rise, by about 20 centimeters by 2100, and probably will continue to rise between 1.5 and 4 meters above present-day levels by the year 2300. Sea-level rise, the report concludes, is likely to be below 2 meters only if warming is kept to well below 1.5 degrees. The rise in sea levels will not be uniform. Coastal areas in tropical regions will be inundated by sea-level rises that are up to 20 percent higher than those in higher latitudes.
“In particular, the melting of the ice sheets will reduce the gravitational pull on the ocean toward the ice sheets and, as a consequence, ocean water will tend to gravitate toward the Equator,” the report reads. “Changes in wind and ocean currents due to global warming and other factors will also affect regional sea-level rise, as will patterns of ocean heat uptake and warming. Sea-level rise impacts are projected to be asymmetrical even within regions and countries. Of the impacts projected for 31 developing countries, only 10 cities account for two-thirds of the total exposure to extreme floods. Highly vulnerable cities are to be found in Mozambique, Madagascar, Mexico, Venezuela, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. For small island states and river delta regions, rising sea levels are likely to have far ranging adverse consequences, especially when combined with the projected increased intensity of tropical cyclones in many tropical regions, other extreme weather events, and climate change-induced effects on oceanic ecosystems (for example, loss of protective reefs due to temperature increases and ocean acidification).”
“By the time the concentration reaches around 550 ppm (corresponding to a warming of about 2.4°C in the 2060s), it is likely that coral reefs in many areas would start to dissolve,” the report reads. “The combination of thermally induced bleaching events, ocean acidification, and sea-level rise threatens large fractions of coral reefs even at 1.5°C global warming. The regional extinction of entire coral reef eco-systems, which could occur well before 4°C is reached, would have profound consequences for their dependent species and for the people who depend on them for food, income, tourism, and shoreline protection.” The report projects that the rates of change in ocean acidity over the next century will be “unparalleled in Earth’s history.”
The global production of maize and wheat has, because of rising temperatures, been in steady decline since the 1980s. But these crop declines will be vastly accelerated in the coming years, with rising temperatures resulting in widespread malnutrition and starvation. It will mean that the poor, and especially children, will endure chronic hunger and malnutrition. There will be an increase in a variety of deadly epidemic diseases. Persistent flooding will contaminate drinking water, spreading diarrheal and respiratory illnesses. The 2012 drought, which affected 80 percent of the agricultural land in the United States, will become the norm. Tropical South America, Central Africa and all tropical islands in the Pacific are, the report says, likely to regularly experience heat waves of unprecedented magnitude, making human life in these areas difficult if not impossible to sustain.
“In this new high-temperature climate regime, the coolest months are likely to be substantially warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century,” the report reads. “In regions such as the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Tibetan plateau, almost all summer months are likely to be warmer than the most extreme heat waves presently experienced. For example, the warmest July in the Mediterranean region could be 9°C warmer than today’s warmest July.” It notes that these changes “potentially exceed the adaptive capacities of many societies and natural systems.”
The stress and insecurity caused by the breakdown in the climate will, the report says, “have negative effects on psychological and mental health.” It will lead to an increase in “levels of conflict and violence.” These changes “will have ramifications for national identification and alter the dynamics of traditional cultures.”
The report calls on the leaders of the industrial world to immediately institute radical steps—including a halt to the dependence on fossil fuels—to keep the global temperature rise below 2 degrees C, although the report concedes that even an increase of less than 2 degrees would result in serious damage to the environment and human populations. Without a massive investment in green infrastructure that can adapt to the heat and other new extreme weather, and in the building of efficient public transportation networks and renewable energy systems to minimize carbon emissions, we will succumb to our own stupidity.
A failure to respond will assure an ecological nightmare that will most probably be accompanied by an economic, social and political breakdown. The human species, the report says, will cross “critical social system thresholds,” and “existing institutions that would have supported adaptation actions would likely become much less effective or even collapse.” The “stresses on human health, such as heat waves, malnutrition, and decreasing quality of drinking water due to seawater intrusion, have the potential to overburden health-care systems to a point where adaptation is no longer possible, and dislocation is forced.”
“There is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible,” it goes on. “A 4°C world is likely to be one in which communities, cities and countries would experience severe disruptions, damage, and dislocation, with many of these risks spread unequally. It is likely that the poor will suffer most and the global community could become more fractured, and unequal than today. The projected 4°C warming simply must not be allowed to occur—the heat must be turned down.”
Stand Still for the Apocalypse
Humans must immediately implement a series of radical measures to halt carbon emissions or prepare for the collapse of entire ecosystems and the displacement, suffering and death of hundreds of millions of the globe’s inhabitants, according to a report commissioned by the World Bank. The continued failure to respond aggressively to climate change, the report warns, will mean that the planet will inevitably warm by at least 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, ushering in an apocalypse.
The 84-page document,“Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must Be Avoided,” was written for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics and published last week. The picture it paints of a world convulsed by rising temperatures is a mixture of mass chaos, systems collapse and medical suffering like that of the worst of the Black Plague, which in the 14th century killed 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population. The report comes as the annual United Nations Conference on Climate Change begins this Monday [Nov. 26] in Doha, Qatar.
A planetwide temperature rise of 4 degrees C—and the report notes that the tepidness of the emission pledges and commitments of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will make such an increase almost inevitable—will cause a precipitous drop in crop yields, along with the loss of many fish species, resulting in widespread hunger and starvation. Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to abandon their homes in coastal areas and on islands that will be submerged as the sea rises. There will be an explosion in diseases such as malaria, cholera and dengue fever. Devastating heat waves and droughts, as well as floods, especially in the tropics, will render parts of the Earth uninhabitable. The rain forest covering the Amazon basin will disappear. Coral reefs will vanish. Numerous animal and plant species, many of which are vital to sustaining human populations, will become extinct. Monstrous storms will eradicate biodiversity, along with whole cities and communities. And as these extreme events begin to occur simultaneously in different regions of the world, the report finds, there will be “unprecedented stresses on human systems.” Global agricultural production will eventually not be able to compensate. Health and emergency systems, as well as institutions designed to maintain social cohesion and law and order, will crumble. The world’s poor, at first, will suffer the most. But we all will succumb in the end to the folly and hubris of the Industrial Age. And yet, we do nothing.
“It is useful to recall that a global mean temperature increase of 4°C approaches the difference between temperatures today and those of the last ice age, when much of central Europe and the northern United States were covered with kilometers of ice and global mean temperatures were about 4.5°C to 7°C lower,” the report reads. “And this magnitude of climate change—human induced—is occurring over a century, not millennia.”
The political and corporate elites in the industrialized world continue, in spite of overwhelming scientific data, to place short-term corporate profit and expediency before the protection of human life and the ecosystem. The fossil fuel industry is permitted to determine our relationship to the natural world, dooming future generations. Carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas, increased from its pre-industrial concentration of about 278 parts per million (ppm) to more than 391 ppm in September 2012, with the rate of rise now at 1.8 ppm per year. We have already passed the tipping point of 350 ppm; above that level, life as we have known it cannot be sustained. The CO2 concentration is higher now than at any time in the last 15 million years. The emissions of CO2, currently about 35 billion metric tons per year, are projected to climb to 41 billion metric tons per year by 2020.
Because about 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by the greenhouse effect since 1955 is momentarily in the oceans, we have begun a process that, even if we halted all carbon emissions today, will ensure rising sea levels and major climate disruptions, including the continued melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets as well as the acidification of the oceans. The report estimates that if warming accelerates toward 4 degrees Celsius, sea levels will rise 0.5 to 1 meter, possibly more, by 2100. Sea levels will increase several meters more in the coming centuries. If warming can be keep to 2 degrees or below, sea levels will still rise, by about 20 centimeters by 2100, and probably will continue to rise between 1.5 and 4 meters above present-day levels by the year 2300. Sea-level rise, the report concludes, is likely to be below 2 meters only if warming is kept to well below 1.5 degrees. The rise in sea levels will not be uniform. Coastal areas in tropical regions will be inundated by sea-level rises that are up to 20 percent higher than those in higher latitudes.
“In particular, the melting of the ice sheets will reduce the gravitational pull on the ocean toward the ice sheets and, as a consequence, ocean water will tend to gravitate toward the Equator,” the report reads. “Changes in wind and ocean currents due to global warming and other factors will also affect regional sea-level rise, as will patterns of ocean heat uptake and warming. Sea-level rise impacts are projected to be asymmetrical even within regions and countries. Of the impacts projected for 31 developing countries, only 10 cities account for two-thirds of the total exposure to extreme floods. Highly vulnerable cities are to be found in Mozambique, Madagascar, Mexico, Venezuela, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. For small island states and river delta regions, rising sea levels are likely to have far ranging adverse consequences, especially when combined with the projected increased intensity of tropical cyclones in many tropical regions, other extreme weather events, and climate change-induced effects on oceanic ecosystems (for example, loss of protective reefs due to temperature increases and ocean acidification).”
“By the time the concentration reaches around 550 ppm (corresponding to a warming of about 2.4°C in the 2060s), it is likely that coral reefs in many areas would start to dissolve,” the report reads. “The combination of thermally induced bleaching events, ocean acidification, and sea-level rise threatens large fractions of coral reefs even at 1.5°C global warming. The regional extinction of entire coral reef eco-systems, which could occur well before 4°C is reached, would have profound consequences for their dependent species and for the people who depend on them for food, income, tourism, and shoreline protection.” The report projects that the rates of change in ocean acidity over the next century will be “unparalleled in Earth’s history.”
The global production of maize and wheat has, because of rising temperatures, been in steady decline since the 1980s. But these crop declines will be vastly accelerated in the coming years, with rising temperatures resulting in widespread malnutrition and starvation. It will mean that the poor, and especially children, will endure chronic hunger and malnutrition. There will be an increase in a variety of deadly epidemic diseases. Persistent flooding will contaminate drinking water, spreading diarrheal and respiratory illnesses. The 2012 drought, which affected 80 percent of the agricultural land in the United States, will become the norm. Tropical South America, Central Africa and all tropical islands in the Pacific are, the report says, likely to regularly experience heat waves of unprecedented magnitude, making human life in these areas difficult if not impossible to sustain.
“In this new high-temperature climate regime, the coolest months are likely to be substantially warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century,” the report reads. “In regions such as the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Tibetan plateau, almost all summer months are likely to be warmer than the most extreme heat waves presently experienced. For example, the warmest July in the Mediterranean region could be 9°C warmer than today’s warmest July.” It notes that these changes “potentially exceed the adaptive capacities of many societies and natural systems.”
The stress and insecurity caused by the breakdown in the climate will, the report says, “have negative effects on psychological and mental health.” It will lead to an increase in “levels of conflict and violence.” These changes “will have ramifications for national identification and alter the dynamics of traditional cultures.”
The report calls on the leaders of the industrial world to immediately institute radical steps—including a halt to the dependence on fossil fuels—to keep the global temperature rise below 2 degrees C, although the report concedes that even an increase of less than 2 degrees would result in serious damage to the environment and human populations. Without a massive investment in green infrastructure that can adapt to the heat and other new extreme weather, and in the building of efficient public transportation networks and renewable energy systems to minimize carbon emissions, we will succumb to our own stupidity.
A failure to respond will assure an ecological nightmare that will most probably be accompanied by an economic, social and political breakdown. The human species, the report says, will cross “critical social system thresholds,” and “existing institutions that would have supported adaptation actions would likely become much less effective or even collapse.” The “stresses on human health, such as heat waves, malnutrition, and decreasing quality of drinking water due to seawater intrusion, have the potential to overburden health-care systems to a point where adaptation is no longer possible, and dislocation is forced.”
“There is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible,” it goes on. “A 4°C world is likely to be one in which communities, cities and countries would experience severe disruptions, damage, and dislocation, with many of these risks spread unequally. It is likely that the poor will suffer most and the global community could become more fractured, and unequal than today. The projected 4°C warming simply must not be allowed to occur—the heat must be turned down.”
Sunday, December 2, 2012
SC113-15
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/i-am-a-sick-man-the-depravity-of-collapse/
The Depravity of Collapse
“I am a sick man… I am a wicked man.” So opens Dostoyevsky’s small literary offering, Notes From Underground. It is, in significant respects, a profound critique of modern rationality, our perverse preoccupation with self-interest, and the crisis currently facing our global community.
In a world that is already bracing for cataclysmic failure, the political and military elites of the most advanced nations on earth are making a mad – that is to say, a sick and wicked – dash to the finish line. As world economies teeter on collapse, and more primitive polities fall prey to greedy and over-reaching imperial aggressors, the Western hegemony drives full speed ahead, hastening planetary failure through global looting and pillaging of any and all appropriately objectified ‘resources’– natural or human. It is a game of capture the flag like none the world has ever seen before.
In the face of stark climatic disruption, urban-industrial-induced global warming, and run away resource depletion, the captains of Western industry and political economy are competing for the final bits of increasingly rare, but once plentiful earthly treasures. The visceral reactions of mother earth, along with the cries of indigenous populations, be damned! And commercializing our circumstance only exacerbates the real problem when, for example, the climate news blog ThinkProgress awards cover of the year to Bloomberg Businessweek for its Monday morning quarterbacking diagnosis that “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.” We all then dutifully salute, applaud, and go on our merry way living the high life. It is the same strategy exercised by all the new green companies now peopling our airwaves, including those clean-coal and other energy strategies touting safe ways of extending the parade.
Let super storms wash away the continental shorelines, let tidal waves engulf our cities as well as the placid island holdouts, let fault lines cringe and crack against our drilling and horizontal fracking, let the indigenous and the poor vanish into the black-hole of rapacious commerce; as long as we civilized ones get our stuff! Let the glaciers melt, the oceans rise, homes disappear, and fires rage – so long as we have our way! There seems to be nothing to deflect us from the current path of planetary annihilation. In a world now peopled with purely profane ‘objects’ for manipulation and control, nothing sacred remains to be cherished except acquisitiveness. All is expendable in the incessant drive for progress and prosperity in the refined atmosphere of the elite first world.
Yet, this project of constant advancement and the unrestrained expansion of our Western hegemony has become a farce – a fantastical caricature of itself. The clowns in business suits have taken control of the bus and are driving it straight into oblivion with all of us onboard. Why, even the latest “terrorist” plots are seeming rather farcical, like cartoon characters cobbled together by the hands of our own militaristic propaganda machine. Even an old and pathetic Osama, gunned down by a crew of professional military SEALS, was memorialized in a fantastic story told by one of the fools, and then sold as a book for self-enriching profit while the going was good. But what good does such a spectacle achieve? Of course we had to do it, because the only just alternative was unacceptable – get out of the Middle East. So, we kill, and we stay, and we kill some more so we can keep up our lifestyle with more oil, markets and commercial successes. A chicken in every pot has now become a McDonalds, a Subway, or a Cinnabon shop in every city and village across the globe, and armed drones to protect their profit margins and labor costs.
Meanwhile, the mass of the industrialized West stands idly by, even cheering the militarists on, as the aggressive and apparently psychotic Israeli’s decimate the more traditional populations of Palestine, unwittingly accepting as purely objectified ‘collateral damage’ the lives of innocents. Yet, we continue to justify our own acts of aggression and death-dealing among the innocents in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere, while severely chastising the similar fate of innocents in Syria. Will the hypocrisy of this empire never cease? Our policies would be comical if they were not so very tragic. Somebody should consider placing Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama together in a rubber-padded cell to contemplate the depth of their own depravity and inhumanity. Why not try members of the Israeli government for crimes against humanity… along with Obama, Clinton, Petraeus, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush and the rest of the cadre? And we have not even touched on the crimes of the corporate elite, the 0.1%
The dissimulation, the sickness, indeed, the wickedness of this charade – this race to the bottom – is as frightening as it is demonic; destructive to the earth and its diverse inhabitants, including ourselves. OK! So, we are lost in this labyrinth, my friends. And what are we to do? As Derrick Jensen once pronounced: taking shorter showers is not the solution. Nor is implementation of new salvific technologies. This will only serve to extend the reign of terror loosed by our Western curriculum. As long as the politics of salvation, the myth of infinite progress, and a futuristic vision of global expansion continue to permeate our souls, the endgame is already lost amidst the propaganda and the promises.
The only “hope” is to hope-against-hope that the intellectual scaffolding and epistemological underpinning of the system will implode from greed-laden-overload and overly enlightened self-interest. I understand that my position may seem irrational, indeed inhuman from a certain majority perspective, but majority rule is not equivalent to egalitarian democracy. The irrationality and inhumanity of the system itself dictates that reason may only be the crutch enabling us to forge ahead blindly and happily into the future. On this view, un-reason may be a fundamental requirement to correcting our fatal and fateful course. But, of this, I am uncertain. Why? Because it is a fundamentally irrational position. And I, too, am Homo sapiens sapiens, a twice wise and hyper-rational animal.
The Depravity of Collapse
“I am a sick man… I am a wicked man.” So opens Dostoyevsky’s small literary offering, Notes From Underground. It is, in significant respects, a profound critique of modern rationality, our perverse preoccupation with self-interest, and the crisis currently facing our global community.
In a world that is already bracing for cataclysmic failure, the political and military elites of the most advanced nations on earth are making a mad – that is to say, a sick and wicked – dash to the finish line. As world economies teeter on collapse, and more primitive polities fall prey to greedy and over-reaching imperial aggressors, the Western hegemony drives full speed ahead, hastening planetary failure through global looting and pillaging of any and all appropriately objectified ‘resources’– natural or human. It is a game of capture the flag like none the world has ever seen before.
In the face of stark climatic disruption, urban-industrial-induced global warming, and run away resource depletion, the captains of Western industry and political economy are competing for the final bits of increasingly rare, but once plentiful earthly treasures. The visceral reactions of mother earth, along with the cries of indigenous populations, be damned! And commercializing our circumstance only exacerbates the real problem when, for example, the climate news blog ThinkProgress awards cover of the year to Bloomberg Businessweek for its Monday morning quarterbacking diagnosis that “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.” We all then dutifully salute, applaud, and go on our merry way living the high life. It is the same strategy exercised by all the new green companies now peopling our airwaves, including those clean-coal and other energy strategies touting safe ways of extending the parade.
Let super storms wash away the continental shorelines, let tidal waves engulf our cities as well as the placid island holdouts, let fault lines cringe and crack against our drilling and horizontal fracking, let the indigenous and the poor vanish into the black-hole of rapacious commerce; as long as we civilized ones get our stuff! Let the glaciers melt, the oceans rise, homes disappear, and fires rage – so long as we have our way! There seems to be nothing to deflect us from the current path of planetary annihilation. In a world now peopled with purely profane ‘objects’ for manipulation and control, nothing sacred remains to be cherished except acquisitiveness. All is expendable in the incessant drive for progress and prosperity in the refined atmosphere of the elite first world.
Yet, this project of constant advancement and the unrestrained expansion of our Western hegemony has become a farce – a fantastical caricature of itself. The clowns in business suits have taken control of the bus and are driving it straight into oblivion with all of us onboard. Why, even the latest “terrorist” plots are seeming rather farcical, like cartoon characters cobbled together by the hands of our own militaristic propaganda machine. Even an old and pathetic Osama, gunned down by a crew of professional military SEALS, was memorialized in a fantastic story told by one of the fools, and then sold as a book for self-enriching profit while the going was good. But what good does such a spectacle achieve? Of course we had to do it, because the only just alternative was unacceptable – get out of the Middle East. So, we kill, and we stay, and we kill some more so we can keep up our lifestyle with more oil, markets and commercial successes. A chicken in every pot has now become a McDonalds, a Subway, or a Cinnabon shop in every city and village across the globe, and armed drones to protect their profit margins and labor costs.
Meanwhile, the mass of the industrialized West stands idly by, even cheering the militarists on, as the aggressive and apparently psychotic Israeli’s decimate the more traditional populations of Palestine, unwittingly accepting as purely objectified ‘collateral damage’ the lives of innocents. Yet, we continue to justify our own acts of aggression and death-dealing among the innocents in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere, while severely chastising the similar fate of innocents in Syria. Will the hypocrisy of this empire never cease? Our policies would be comical if they were not so very tragic. Somebody should consider placing Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama together in a rubber-padded cell to contemplate the depth of their own depravity and inhumanity. Why not try members of the Israeli government for crimes against humanity… along with Obama, Clinton, Petraeus, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush and the rest of the cadre? And we have not even touched on the crimes of the corporate elite, the 0.1%
The dissimulation, the sickness, indeed, the wickedness of this charade – this race to the bottom – is as frightening as it is demonic; destructive to the earth and its diverse inhabitants, including ourselves. OK! So, we are lost in this labyrinth, my friends. And what are we to do? As Derrick Jensen once pronounced: taking shorter showers is not the solution. Nor is implementation of new salvific technologies. This will only serve to extend the reign of terror loosed by our Western curriculum. As long as the politics of salvation, the myth of infinite progress, and a futuristic vision of global expansion continue to permeate our souls, the endgame is already lost amidst the propaganda and the promises.
The only “hope” is to hope-against-hope that the intellectual scaffolding and epistemological underpinning of the system will implode from greed-laden-overload and overly enlightened self-interest. I understand that my position may seem irrational, indeed inhuman from a certain majority perspective, but majority rule is not equivalent to egalitarian democracy. The irrationality and inhumanity of the system itself dictates that reason may only be the crutch enabling us to forge ahead blindly and happily into the future. On this view, un-reason may be a fundamental requirement to correcting our fatal and fateful course. But, of this, I am uncertain. Why? Because it is a fundamentally irrational position. And I, too, am Homo sapiens sapiens, a twice wise and hyper-rational animal.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
SC113-14
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/11/epic-disappointment.html
Epic Disappointment
Those inhabiting the economic wish-space got a case of the vapors last week when the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) published an annual report stating that the USA would overtake Saudi Arabia as the world's leading oil producer and reach the long-touted nirvana of "energy independence." The news was greeted in this country with jubilation. Thus, peak credulity meets peak bullshit.
It's been clear for a while that authorities in many realms of endeavor - politics, economics, business, media - are very eager to sustain the illusion that we can keep our way of life chugging along. But under the management of these elites, the divorce between truth and reality is nearly complete. The financial system now runs entirely on accounting fraud. Government runs on the fumes of statistical fraud. The business of oil and gas runs on public relations fraud. And the media runs on the understandable wish of the masses to believe that all the foregoing illusions still work to maintain the familiar comforts of modern life (minus Hostess Ho-Hos and Twinkies, alas).
And so the story has developed that the shale oil plays of North Dakota and Texas, which started ramping up around 2005 - the same year the world hit the wall of peak conventional oil - and the shale gas plays in Texas, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio would enable American "consumers" to drive to WalMart effectively forever.
Now, it happens that the particulars of oil and gas production are so abstruse that the editors of The New York Times, The Bloomberg News Service, CNN, and a score of other mass media giants swallowed the IEA report whole, with fanfares and fireworks, and a nation afflicted with doubt about its future swooned into the first week of the holidays in celebration mode - we're soon to be number 1 again, and the future is secure! Have a nice Thanksgiving and Christmas and prepare to sober up in 2013. When the truth finally emerges from this morass of dissimulation, the disappointment will be epic.
Here's why the shale oil story is not the "game changer" that the wishful claim it is: the price required to get it out of the ground (between $80-90 a barrel) will crush the US economy. Since prices are already in that range, the economy is already being crushed. The result is an economy in more-or-less permanent contraction. As demand for oil falls with declining economic activity the price of oil falls - below the level that makes it worthwhile to conduct expensive shale oil drilling and fracking operations.
Meanwhile, in the background, as economies contract and economic "growth" of the type our system requires no longer happens, the problems in finance and banking get a lot worse. This is largely because interest on borrowed money can no longer be paid back. Loans are defaulted on. As this happens, banks become insolvent. Governments play games with public money - including "money" they "create" out of thin air - to prop up the banks. None of it alters the sad fact that there is not enough real money in the system. The result of all these desperate monkeyshines is the impairment of capital formation. That is, the failure to accumulate new wealth. The lack of new wealth, along with declining prospects for the repayment of loans, leads to a shortage of credit, especially to businesses that require large supplies of it to keep gigantic complex operations like shale oil and gas going
Shale oil (and shale gas) share some problematical properties. The cost of drilling each well is a big number, $6-8 million. The wells deplete very rapidly, over 40 percent after one year in the Bakken formation of North Dakota. The oil is not distributed equally over the whole play but exists in "sweet spots." The sweetest sweet spots were drilled the earliest and the quality of the remaining potential drill sites is already in decline. The current trend shows declining first-year productivity in new wells drilled since 2010 running at 25 percent.
There are over 4300 shale oil wells in the Bakken formation of North Dakota producing about 610,000 barrels a day. In order to keep production up, the number of wells will have to continue increasing at a faster rate than previously. This is referred to as "the Red Queen syndrome" which alludes to the character in Alice in Wonderland who famously declared that she had to run faster and faster just to stay where she is. The catch to all this is that the impairments of capital formation are working insidiously in the background to guarantee that the money will not be there to set up the necessary wells to keep production at current levels. In other words, shale oil (and shale gas) are Ponzi schemes. The story in the Eagle Ford play in Texas is very similar.
I haven't even mentioned the concerns about fracking and its effect on ground water, and won't go into it here, except to acknowledge that it presents an additional range of concerns.
The current price situation in shale gas is different than shale oil. The drilling frenzy in shale gas produced a glut, which drove down prices from a $13 a unit (thousand cubic feet or mcf) to around $2 at its low point earlier this year. That's way below the price that is economically rational to drill and frack for it. The price collapse has played havoc among the companies engaged in shale gas, though it has been a boon to customers. A lot of the drilling equipment has moved to the North Dakota oil fields. There will be less shale gas in the period ahead and the price will go up. It has got to go above about $8 a unit or there will be no reason for any company to be in the shale gas business. But as is always the case in such a correction, the price will surely overshoot $8, at which point it will become unaffordable to its customers. The volatility alone will make the business of shale gas drilling impossible to maintain. Forget about the USA becoming a major gas exporter.
You probably get the point by now, so I will only add a couple of out-of-the-box considerations vis-Ã -vis the prospect of the USA becoming energy independent.
-- Production is getting so low in the Prudhoe Bay fields of Alaska that the famous pipeline may not be able to operate. If the flow of oil reaches a certain low volume, it takes longer to make the long journey. The oil cools down and gets sludgy and some of the water that travels with it will freeze. This could destroy the pipeline. The capital is not there to retrofit the pipeline for a depleting oil field in a region that is difficult and expensive to work in.
-- Exporting countries (the ones that send us oil) are depleting their reserves and using more of their own oil, resulting in annually declining export rates. China, India, and other still-modernizing nations compete for a growing share of that declining export flow.
-- I have barely hinted at the geopolitical forces roiling behind the sheer business dynamics. But here's an interesting one: the time will come when the US will invoke the Monroe Doctrine to prevent Canada from sending its oil and tar-sand byproducts to nations other than ourselves. Just wait.
Finally, I have one flat-out prediction, one I have made before but deserves repeating: Japan will be the first society to consciously opt out of being an advanced industrial economy. They have no other apparent choice really, having next-to-zero oil, gas, or coal reserves of their own, and having lost faith in nuclear power. They will be the first country to enter a world made by hand. They were very good at it before about 1850 and had a pre-industrial culture of high artistry and grace - though, granted, all the defects of human psychology.
I don't think the US can make that transition in an orderly way. We're too stricken with techno-narcissism and grandiosity. What troubles me is how we will greet the epic disappointment that waits for us when we discover that the journey to WalMart is over. My guess is that being predisposed to superstition and religious fanaticism, the American public will violently reject science and rationality and retreat into a world of shadows. We're already well on our way. The IEA report will just accelerate things.
Epic Disappointment
Those inhabiting the economic wish-space got a case of the vapors last week when the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) published an annual report stating that the USA would overtake Saudi Arabia as the world's leading oil producer and reach the long-touted nirvana of "energy independence." The news was greeted in this country with jubilation. Thus, peak credulity meets peak bullshit.
It's been clear for a while that authorities in many realms of endeavor - politics, economics, business, media - are very eager to sustain the illusion that we can keep our way of life chugging along. But under the management of these elites, the divorce between truth and reality is nearly complete. The financial system now runs entirely on accounting fraud. Government runs on the fumes of statistical fraud. The business of oil and gas runs on public relations fraud. And the media runs on the understandable wish of the masses to believe that all the foregoing illusions still work to maintain the familiar comforts of modern life (minus Hostess Ho-Hos and Twinkies, alas).
And so the story has developed that the shale oil plays of North Dakota and Texas, which started ramping up around 2005 - the same year the world hit the wall of peak conventional oil - and the shale gas plays in Texas, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio would enable American "consumers" to drive to WalMart effectively forever.
Now, it happens that the particulars of oil and gas production are so abstruse that the editors of The New York Times, The Bloomberg News Service, CNN, and a score of other mass media giants swallowed the IEA report whole, with fanfares and fireworks, and a nation afflicted with doubt about its future swooned into the first week of the holidays in celebration mode - we're soon to be number 1 again, and the future is secure! Have a nice Thanksgiving and Christmas and prepare to sober up in 2013. When the truth finally emerges from this morass of dissimulation, the disappointment will be epic.
Here's why the shale oil story is not the "game changer" that the wishful claim it is: the price required to get it out of the ground (between $80-90 a barrel) will crush the US economy. Since prices are already in that range, the economy is already being crushed. The result is an economy in more-or-less permanent contraction. As demand for oil falls with declining economic activity the price of oil falls - below the level that makes it worthwhile to conduct expensive shale oil drilling and fracking operations.
Meanwhile, in the background, as economies contract and economic "growth" of the type our system requires no longer happens, the problems in finance and banking get a lot worse. This is largely because interest on borrowed money can no longer be paid back. Loans are defaulted on. As this happens, banks become insolvent. Governments play games with public money - including "money" they "create" out of thin air - to prop up the banks. None of it alters the sad fact that there is not enough real money in the system. The result of all these desperate monkeyshines is the impairment of capital formation. That is, the failure to accumulate new wealth. The lack of new wealth, along with declining prospects for the repayment of loans, leads to a shortage of credit, especially to businesses that require large supplies of it to keep gigantic complex operations like shale oil and gas going
Shale oil (and shale gas) share some problematical properties. The cost of drilling each well is a big number, $6-8 million. The wells deplete very rapidly, over 40 percent after one year in the Bakken formation of North Dakota. The oil is not distributed equally over the whole play but exists in "sweet spots." The sweetest sweet spots were drilled the earliest and the quality of the remaining potential drill sites is already in decline. The current trend shows declining first-year productivity in new wells drilled since 2010 running at 25 percent.
There are over 4300 shale oil wells in the Bakken formation of North Dakota producing about 610,000 barrels a day. In order to keep production up, the number of wells will have to continue increasing at a faster rate than previously. This is referred to as "the Red Queen syndrome" which alludes to the character in Alice in Wonderland who famously declared that she had to run faster and faster just to stay where she is. The catch to all this is that the impairments of capital formation are working insidiously in the background to guarantee that the money will not be there to set up the necessary wells to keep production at current levels. In other words, shale oil (and shale gas) are Ponzi schemes. The story in the Eagle Ford play in Texas is very similar.
I haven't even mentioned the concerns about fracking and its effect on ground water, and won't go into it here, except to acknowledge that it presents an additional range of concerns.
The current price situation in shale gas is different than shale oil. The drilling frenzy in shale gas produced a glut, which drove down prices from a $13 a unit (thousand cubic feet or mcf) to around $2 at its low point earlier this year. That's way below the price that is economically rational to drill and frack for it. The price collapse has played havoc among the companies engaged in shale gas, though it has been a boon to customers. A lot of the drilling equipment has moved to the North Dakota oil fields. There will be less shale gas in the period ahead and the price will go up. It has got to go above about $8 a unit or there will be no reason for any company to be in the shale gas business. But as is always the case in such a correction, the price will surely overshoot $8, at which point it will become unaffordable to its customers. The volatility alone will make the business of shale gas drilling impossible to maintain. Forget about the USA becoming a major gas exporter.
You probably get the point by now, so I will only add a couple of out-of-the-box considerations vis-Ã -vis the prospect of the USA becoming energy independent.
-- Production is getting so low in the Prudhoe Bay fields of Alaska that the famous pipeline may not be able to operate. If the flow of oil reaches a certain low volume, it takes longer to make the long journey. The oil cools down and gets sludgy and some of the water that travels with it will freeze. This could destroy the pipeline. The capital is not there to retrofit the pipeline for a depleting oil field in a region that is difficult and expensive to work in.
-- Exporting countries (the ones that send us oil) are depleting their reserves and using more of their own oil, resulting in annually declining export rates. China, India, and other still-modernizing nations compete for a growing share of that declining export flow.
-- I have barely hinted at the geopolitical forces roiling behind the sheer business dynamics. But here's an interesting one: the time will come when the US will invoke the Monroe Doctrine to prevent Canada from sending its oil and tar-sand byproducts to nations other than ourselves. Just wait.
Finally, I have one flat-out prediction, one I have made before but deserves repeating: Japan will be the first society to consciously opt out of being an advanced industrial economy. They have no other apparent choice really, having next-to-zero oil, gas, or coal reserves of their own, and having lost faith in nuclear power. They will be the first country to enter a world made by hand. They were very good at it before about 1850 and had a pre-industrial culture of high artistry and grace - though, granted, all the defects of human psychology.
I don't think the US can make that transition in an orderly way. We're too stricken with techno-narcissism and grandiosity. What troubles me is how we will greet the epic disappointment that waits for us when we discover that the journey to WalMart is over. My guess is that being predisposed to superstition and religious fanaticism, the American public will violently reject science and rationality and retreat into a world of shadows. We're already well on our way. The IEA report will just accelerate things.
SC113-13
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/once_again_--_death_of_the_liberal_class_20121112/
Once Again—Death of the Liberal Class
The presidential election exposed the liberal class as a corpse. It fights for nothing. It stands for nothing. It is a useless appendage to the corporate state. It exists not to make possible incremental or piecemeal reform, as it originally did in a functional capitalist democracy; instead it has devolved into an instrument of personal vanity, burnishing the hollow morality of its adherents. Liberals, by voting for Barack Obama, betrayed the core values they use to define themselves—the rule of law, the safeguarding of civil liberties, the protection of unions, the preservation of social welfare programs, environmental accords, financial regulation, a defiance of unjust war and torture, and the abolition of drone wars. The liberal class clung desperately during the long nightmare of this political campaign to one or two issues, such as protecting a woman’s right to choose and gender equality, to justify its complicity in a monstrous evil. This moral fragmentation—using an isolated act of justice to define one’s self while ignoring the vast corporate assault on the nation and the ecosystem along with the pre-emptive violence of the imperial state—is moral and political capitulation. It fails to confront the evil we have become.
“The American Dream has run out of gas,” wrote the novelist J.G. Ballard. “The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now. …”
Liberals have assured us that after the election they will build a movement to hold the president accountable—although how or when or what this movement will look like they cannot say. They didn’t hold him accountable during his first term. They won’t during his second. They have played their appointed roles in the bankrupt political theater that passes for electoral politics. They have wrung their hands, sung like a Greek chorus about the evils of the perfidious opponent, assured us that there is no other viable option, and now they will exit the stage. They will carp and whine in the wings until they are trotted out again to assume their role in the next political propaganda campaign of disempowerment and fear. They will, in the meantime, become the butt of ridicule and derision by the very politicians they supported.
The ineffectiveness of the liberal class, as I saw in the former Yugoslavia and as was true in Weimar Germany, perpetuates a dangerous political paralysis. The longer the paralysis continues, the longer systems of power are unable to address the suffering and grievances of the masses, the more the formal mechanisms of power are reviled. The liberal establishment’s inability to defy corporate power, to stand up for its supposed liberal beliefs, means its inevitable disappearance, along with the disappearance of traditional liberal values. This, as history has amply pointed out, is the road to despotism. And we are further down that road than many care to admit.
Any mass movement that arises—and I believe one is coming—will be fueled, like the Occupy movement, by radicals who have as deep a revulsion for Democrats as they do for Republicans. The radicals who triumph, however, may not be progressive. Populist movements, from labor unions to an independent press to socialist third parties, have been destroyed in the United States. A protofascist movement that coalesces around a mystical nationalism, that fuses the symbols of the country with those of Christianity, that denigrates reason and elevates mass emotions will have broad appeal. It will offer to followers a leap from the deep pit of despair and frustration to the heights of utopia. It will speak in the language of violence and demonize the vulnerable, from undocumented workers to homosexuals to people of color to liberals to the poor. And this force, financed by the most retrograde elements of corporate capitalism, could usher in a species of corporate fascism in a period of economic or environmental instability.
The historian Fritz Stern in “The Politics of Cultural Despair,” his book on the rise of fascism in Germany, warns repeatedly of the danger of a bankrupt liberalism. Stern, who sees the same dark, irrational forces at work today that he watched as a boy in Nazi Germany, argues that the spiritually and politically alienated are the prime recruits for a politics centered around cultural hatreds and personal resentments.
“They attacked liberalism,” Stern writes of the fascists emerging at the time in Germany, “because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism, materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sense in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.”
I am not sure when I severed myself irrevocably from the myth of America. It began when I was a seminarian, living for more than two years in Boston’s inner city on a street that had more homicides than any other in the city. I had to confront in the public housing projects the cruelty of white supremacy, the myriad institutional mechanisms that kept poor people of color trapped, broken and impoverished, the tragic squandering of young lives and the fatuous liberals who spoke in lofty language about empowering people they never met. The ties unraveled further during the five years I spent as a war correspondent in El Salvador and Nicaragua. I stood in too many mud-walled villages looking at the mutilated bodies of men, women and children, murdered by U.S.-backed soldiers, death squads and paramilitary units. I heard too many lies spewed out by Ronald Reagan and the State Department to justify these killings. And by the time I was in Gaza, looking at the twisted limbs of dead women and children and listening to Israeli and U.S. officials describe an Israeli airstrike as a “surgical” hit on Islamic militants, it was over. I knew the dark heart of America. I knew who we were, what we did, what we actually stood for and the terrifying and willful innocence that permits most Americans to think of themselves as good and virtuous when they are, in reality, members of an efficient race of killers and ruthless profiteers.
I was sickened and repulsed. My loyalty shifted from the state, from any state, to the powerless, to the landless peasants in Latin America, the Palestinians in Gaza or the terrified families in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those who suffer on the outer reaches of empire, as well as in our internal colonies and sacrifice zones, constitute my country. And any action, including voting, that does not unequivocally condemn and denounce their oppressors is a personal as well as a moral betrayal.
“We talk of the Turks and abhor the cannibals; but may not some of them go to heaven before some of us?” Herman Melville wrote. “We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls. We are blind to the real sights of this world; deaf to its voices; and dead to its death.”
For a poor family in Camden, N.J., impoverished residents in the abandoned coal camps in southern West Virginia, the undocumented workers that toil in our nation’s produce fields, Native Americans trapped on reservations, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, those killed by drones in Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, or those in the squalid urban slums in Africa, it makes no difference if Mitt Romney or Obama is president. And since it makes no difference to them, it makes no difference to me. I seek only to defy the powers that orchestrate and profit from their misery.
The oppressed, the more than half of the world’s population who survive on less than $2 a day, will be the first to be sacrificed because of our refusal to halt fossil fuel’s degradation of the natural world and the assault of globalization. They already hate us with a righteous fury. They see us for who we are. They also grasp that for power to be threatened it must be confronted by another form of power. They know that the only way to effect change is to make the powerful fear their ability to retaliate. And the oppressed, inside and outside empire, are methodically building that power. We saw it at work on 9/11. We see it every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we will see it, although I pray it will be nonviolent, on our own city streets.
The corporate state, faced with rebellion from within and without, does not know how to define or control this rising power, from the Arab Spring to the street protests in Greece and Spain to the Occupy movement. Rebellion always mystifies the oppressor. It appears irrational. It does not make sense. The establishment asks: What are their demands? Why do they hate us? What do they want? The oppressor can never hear the answer, for the answer is always the same—we seek to destroy your power. The oppressor, blind to the brutality and injustice meted out to sustain dominance and prosperity, escalates the levels of force employed to protect privilege. The crimes of the oppressor are seen among the elite as the administering of justice—law and order, the war on terror, the natural law of globalization, the right granted by privilege and power to shape and govern the world. The oppressor cannot see the West’s false humanism. The oppressor cannot, as James Baldwin wrote, understand that our “history has no moral justification, and the West has no moral authority.” The oppressor, able to speak only in the language of force and increasingly lashing out like a wounded animal, will be consumed in the inferno.
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction,” Baldwin wrote, “and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
Once Again—Death of the Liberal Class
The presidential election exposed the liberal class as a corpse. It fights for nothing. It stands for nothing. It is a useless appendage to the corporate state. It exists not to make possible incremental or piecemeal reform, as it originally did in a functional capitalist democracy; instead it has devolved into an instrument of personal vanity, burnishing the hollow morality of its adherents. Liberals, by voting for Barack Obama, betrayed the core values they use to define themselves—the rule of law, the safeguarding of civil liberties, the protection of unions, the preservation of social welfare programs, environmental accords, financial regulation, a defiance of unjust war and torture, and the abolition of drone wars. The liberal class clung desperately during the long nightmare of this political campaign to one or two issues, such as protecting a woman’s right to choose and gender equality, to justify its complicity in a monstrous evil. This moral fragmentation—using an isolated act of justice to define one’s self while ignoring the vast corporate assault on the nation and the ecosystem along with the pre-emptive violence of the imperial state—is moral and political capitulation. It fails to confront the evil we have become.
“The American Dream has run out of gas,” wrote the novelist J.G. Ballard. “The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now. …”
Liberals have assured us that after the election they will build a movement to hold the president accountable—although how or when or what this movement will look like they cannot say. They didn’t hold him accountable during his first term. They won’t during his second. They have played their appointed roles in the bankrupt political theater that passes for electoral politics. They have wrung their hands, sung like a Greek chorus about the evils of the perfidious opponent, assured us that there is no other viable option, and now they will exit the stage. They will carp and whine in the wings until they are trotted out again to assume their role in the next political propaganda campaign of disempowerment and fear. They will, in the meantime, become the butt of ridicule and derision by the very politicians they supported.
The ineffectiveness of the liberal class, as I saw in the former Yugoslavia and as was true in Weimar Germany, perpetuates a dangerous political paralysis. The longer the paralysis continues, the longer systems of power are unable to address the suffering and grievances of the masses, the more the formal mechanisms of power are reviled. The liberal establishment’s inability to defy corporate power, to stand up for its supposed liberal beliefs, means its inevitable disappearance, along with the disappearance of traditional liberal values. This, as history has amply pointed out, is the road to despotism. And we are further down that road than many care to admit.
Any mass movement that arises—and I believe one is coming—will be fueled, like the Occupy movement, by radicals who have as deep a revulsion for Democrats as they do for Republicans. The radicals who triumph, however, may not be progressive. Populist movements, from labor unions to an independent press to socialist third parties, have been destroyed in the United States. A protofascist movement that coalesces around a mystical nationalism, that fuses the symbols of the country with those of Christianity, that denigrates reason and elevates mass emotions will have broad appeal. It will offer to followers a leap from the deep pit of despair and frustration to the heights of utopia. It will speak in the language of violence and demonize the vulnerable, from undocumented workers to homosexuals to people of color to liberals to the poor. And this force, financed by the most retrograde elements of corporate capitalism, could usher in a species of corporate fascism in a period of economic or environmental instability.
The historian Fritz Stern in “The Politics of Cultural Despair,” his book on the rise of fascism in Germany, warns repeatedly of the danger of a bankrupt liberalism. Stern, who sees the same dark, irrational forces at work today that he watched as a boy in Nazi Germany, argues that the spiritually and politically alienated are the prime recruits for a politics centered around cultural hatreds and personal resentments.
“They attacked liberalism,” Stern writes of the fascists emerging at the time in Germany, “because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism, materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sense in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.”
I am not sure when I severed myself irrevocably from the myth of America. It began when I was a seminarian, living for more than two years in Boston’s inner city on a street that had more homicides than any other in the city. I had to confront in the public housing projects the cruelty of white supremacy, the myriad institutional mechanisms that kept poor people of color trapped, broken and impoverished, the tragic squandering of young lives and the fatuous liberals who spoke in lofty language about empowering people they never met. The ties unraveled further during the five years I spent as a war correspondent in El Salvador and Nicaragua. I stood in too many mud-walled villages looking at the mutilated bodies of men, women and children, murdered by U.S.-backed soldiers, death squads and paramilitary units. I heard too many lies spewed out by Ronald Reagan and the State Department to justify these killings. And by the time I was in Gaza, looking at the twisted limbs of dead women and children and listening to Israeli and U.S. officials describe an Israeli airstrike as a “surgical” hit on Islamic militants, it was over. I knew the dark heart of America. I knew who we were, what we did, what we actually stood for and the terrifying and willful innocence that permits most Americans to think of themselves as good and virtuous when they are, in reality, members of an efficient race of killers and ruthless profiteers.
I was sickened and repulsed. My loyalty shifted from the state, from any state, to the powerless, to the landless peasants in Latin America, the Palestinians in Gaza or the terrified families in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those who suffer on the outer reaches of empire, as well as in our internal colonies and sacrifice zones, constitute my country. And any action, including voting, that does not unequivocally condemn and denounce their oppressors is a personal as well as a moral betrayal.
“We talk of the Turks and abhor the cannibals; but may not some of them go to heaven before some of us?” Herman Melville wrote. “We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls. We are blind to the real sights of this world; deaf to its voices; and dead to its death.”
For a poor family in Camden, N.J., impoverished residents in the abandoned coal camps in southern West Virginia, the undocumented workers that toil in our nation’s produce fields, Native Americans trapped on reservations, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, those killed by drones in Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, or those in the squalid urban slums in Africa, it makes no difference if Mitt Romney or Obama is president. And since it makes no difference to them, it makes no difference to me. I seek only to defy the powers that orchestrate and profit from their misery.
The oppressed, the more than half of the world’s population who survive on less than $2 a day, will be the first to be sacrificed because of our refusal to halt fossil fuel’s degradation of the natural world and the assault of globalization. They already hate us with a righteous fury. They see us for who we are. They also grasp that for power to be threatened it must be confronted by another form of power. They know that the only way to effect change is to make the powerful fear their ability to retaliate. And the oppressed, inside and outside empire, are methodically building that power. We saw it at work on 9/11. We see it every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we will see it, although I pray it will be nonviolent, on our own city streets.
The corporate state, faced with rebellion from within and without, does not know how to define or control this rising power, from the Arab Spring to the street protests in Greece and Spain to the Occupy movement. Rebellion always mystifies the oppressor. It appears irrational. It does not make sense. The establishment asks: What are their demands? Why do they hate us? What do they want? The oppressor can never hear the answer, for the answer is always the same—we seek to destroy your power. The oppressor, blind to the brutality and injustice meted out to sustain dominance and prosperity, escalates the levels of force employed to protect privilege. The crimes of the oppressor are seen among the elite as the administering of justice—law and order, the war on terror, the natural law of globalization, the right granted by privilege and power to shape and govern the world. The oppressor cannot see the West’s false humanism. The oppressor cannot, as James Baldwin wrote, understand that our “history has no moral justification, and the West has no moral authority.” The oppressor, able to speak only in the language of force and increasingly lashing out like a wounded animal, will be consumed in the inferno.
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction,” Baldwin wrote, “and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
Saturday, November 24, 2012
SC113-12
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/elites_will_make_gazans_of_us_all_20121119/
Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All
Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world’s elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the economic cliff, are beginning to resemble Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians live in the planet’s largest internment camp. These sacrifice zones, filled with seas of pitifully poor people trapped in squalid slums or mud-walled villages, are increasingly hemmed in by electronic fences, monitored by surveillance cameras and drones and surrounded by border guards or military units that shoot to kill. These nightmarish dystopias extend from sub-Saharan Africa to Pakistan to China. They are places where targeted assassinations are carried out, where brutal military assaults are pressed against peoples left defenseless, without an army, navy or air force. All attempts at resistance, however ineffective, are met with the indiscriminate slaughter that characterizes modern industrial warfare.
In the new global landscape, as in Israel’s occupied territories and the United States’ own imperial projects in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan, massacres of thousands of defenseless innocents are labeled wars. Resistance is called a provocation, terrorism or a crime against humanity. The rule of law, as well as respect for the most basic civil liberties and the right of self-determination, is a public relations fiction used to placate the consciences of those who live in the zones of privilege. Prisoners are routinely tortured and “disappeared.” The severance of food and medical supplies is an accepted tactic of control. Lies permeate the airwaves. Religious, racial and ethnic groups are demonized. Missiles rain down on concrete hovels, mechanized units fire on unarmed villagers, gunboats pound refugee camps with heavy shells, and the dead, including children, line the corridors of hospitals that lack electricity and medicine.
The impending collapse of the international economy, the assaults on the climate, the resulting droughts, flooding, precipitous decline in crop yields and rising food prices are creating a universe where power is divided between the narrow elites, who hold in their hands sophisticated instruments of death, and the enraged masses. The crises are fostering a class war that will dwarf anything imagined by Karl Marx. They are establishing a world where most will be hungry and live in fear, while a few will gorge themselves on delicacies in protected compounds. And more and more people will have to be sacrificed to keep this imbalance in place.
Because it has the power to do so, Israel—as does the United States—flouts international law to keep a subject population in misery. The continued presence of Israeli occupation forces defies nearly a hundred U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for them to withdraw. The Israeli blockade of Gaza, established in June 2007, is a brutal form of collective punishment that violates Article 33 of the Fourth 1949 Geneva Convention, which set up rules for the “Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.” The blockade has turned Gaza into a sliver of hell, an Israeli-administered ghetto where thousands have died, including the 1,400 civilians killed in the Israeli incursion of 2008. With 95 percent of factories shut down, Palestinian industry has virtually ceased functioning. The remaining 5 percent operate at 25 to 50 percent capacity. Even the fishing industry is moribund. Israel refuses to let fishermen travel more than three miles from the coastline, and within the fishing zone boats frequently come under Israeli fire. The Israeli border patrols have seized 35 percent of the agricultural land in Gaza for a buffer zone. The collapsing infrastructure and Israeli seizure of aquifers mean that in many refugee camps, such as Khan Yunis, there is no running water. UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) estimates that 80 percent of all Gazans now rely on food aid. And the claim of Israeli self-defense belies the fact that it is Israel that maintains an illegal occupation and violates international law by carrying out collective punishment of Palestinians. It is Israel that chose to escalate the violence when during an incursion into Gaza earlier this month its forces fatally shot a 13-year-old boy. As the world breaks down, this becomes the new paradigm—modern warlords awash in terrifying technologies and weapons murdering whole peoples. We do the same in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Market forces and the military mechanisms that protect these forces are the sole ideology that governs industrial states and humans’ relationship to the natural world. It is an ideology that results in millions of dead and millions more displaced from their homes in the developing world. And the awful algebra of this ideology means that these forces will eventually be unleashed on us, too. Those who cannot be of use to market forces are considered expendable. They have no rights and legitimacy. Their existence, whether in Gaza or blighted postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., is considered a drain on efficiency and progress. They are viewed as refuse. And as refuse they not only have no voice and no freedom; they can be and are extinguished or imprisoned at will. This is a world where only corporate power and profit are sacred. It is a world of barbarism.
“In disposing of man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag,” Karl Polanyi wrote in “The Great Transformation.” “Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organization was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill.”
There are 47.1 million Americans who depend on food stamps to eat. The elites are plotting to take these food stamps away, along with other “entitlement” programs that keep the poor from destitution. The slashing of trillions of dollars from Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs, given the political impasse in Washington and the looming “fiscal cliff,” now seems certain. There are 50 million people considered to be living below the poverty line, but because the poverty line is so low—$22,350 for a family of four—this figure means nothing. Add the tens of millions of Americans who live in a category called “near poverty,” including all those families attempting to live on less than $45,000 a year, and you have at least 30 percent of the country living in poverty. Once these people figure out that there is no economic recovery, that their standard of living is going to continue to drop, that they are trapped, that hope in the future is an illusion, they will become as angry as protesters in Greece and Spain or the militants in Gaza or Afghanistan. Banks and other financial corporations, handed trillions in interest-free money from the Federal Reserve, meanwhile hoard $5 trillion, much of it looted from the U.S. Treasury. The longer this worldwide disparity and inequality is perpetuated, the more the masses will revolt and the faster we will internally replicate the Israeli model of domestic control—drones overhead, all dissent criminalized, SWAT teams busting through doors, deadly force as an acceptable form of subjugation, food used as a weapon, and constant surveillance.
In Gaza and other blighted parts of the globe we see this new configuration of power. What is happening in Gaza, like what is happening to people of color in marginal communities in the United States, is the model. The techniques of control, whether carried out by the Israelis or militarized police units in our inner-city drug wars, whether employed by military special forces or mercenaries in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq, are tested first and perfected on the weak and the powerless. Our callous indifference to the plight of the Palestinians, and the hundreds of millions of poor packed into urban slums in Asia or Africa, as well as our own underclass, means that the injustices visited on them will be visited on us. In failing them we fail ourselves.
As the U.S. empire implodes, the harsher forms of violence employed on the outer reaches of empire are steadily migrating back to the homeland. At the same time, the internal systems of democratic governance have calcified. Centralized authority has devolved into the hands of an executive branch that slavishly serves global corporate interests. The press and the government’s judiciary and legislative branches have become toothless and decorative. The specter of terrorism, as in Israel, is used by the state to divert gargantuan expenditures to homeland security, the military and internal surveillance. Privacy is abolished. Dissent is treason. The military with its mantra of blind obedience and force characterizes the dark ethic of the wider culture. Beauty and truth are abolished. Culture is degraded into kitsch. The emotional and intellectual life of the citizenry is ravaged by spectacle, the tawdry and salacious, as well as by handfuls of painkillers and narcotics. Blind ambition, a lust for power and a grotesque personal vanity—exemplified by David Petraeus and his former mistress—are the engines of advancement. The concept of the common good is no longer part of the lexicon of power. This, as the novelist J.M. Coetzee writes, is “the black flower of civilization.” It is Rome under Diocletian. It is us. Empires, in the end, decay into despotic, murderous and corrupt regimes that finally consume themselves. And we, like Israel, are now coughing up blood.
Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All
Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world’s elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the economic cliff, are beginning to resemble Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians live in the planet’s largest internment camp. These sacrifice zones, filled with seas of pitifully poor people trapped in squalid slums or mud-walled villages, are increasingly hemmed in by electronic fences, monitored by surveillance cameras and drones and surrounded by border guards or military units that shoot to kill. These nightmarish dystopias extend from sub-Saharan Africa to Pakistan to China. They are places where targeted assassinations are carried out, where brutal military assaults are pressed against peoples left defenseless, without an army, navy or air force. All attempts at resistance, however ineffective, are met with the indiscriminate slaughter that characterizes modern industrial warfare.
In the new global landscape, as in Israel’s occupied territories and the United States’ own imperial projects in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan, massacres of thousands of defenseless innocents are labeled wars. Resistance is called a provocation, terrorism or a crime against humanity. The rule of law, as well as respect for the most basic civil liberties and the right of self-determination, is a public relations fiction used to placate the consciences of those who live in the zones of privilege. Prisoners are routinely tortured and “disappeared.” The severance of food and medical supplies is an accepted tactic of control. Lies permeate the airwaves. Religious, racial and ethnic groups are demonized. Missiles rain down on concrete hovels, mechanized units fire on unarmed villagers, gunboats pound refugee camps with heavy shells, and the dead, including children, line the corridors of hospitals that lack electricity and medicine.
The impending collapse of the international economy, the assaults on the climate, the resulting droughts, flooding, precipitous decline in crop yields and rising food prices are creating a universe where power is divided between the narrow elites, who hold in their hands sophisticated instruments of death, and the enraged masses. The crises are fostering a class war that will dwarf anything imagined by Karl Marx. They are establishing a world where most will be hungry and live in fear, while a few will gorge themselves on delicacies in protected compounds. And more and more people will have to be sacrificed to keep this imbalance in place.
Because it has the power to do so, Israel—as does the United States—flouts international law to keep a subject population in misery. The continued presence of Israeli occupation forces defies nearly a hundred U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for them to withdraw. The Israeli blockade of Gaza, established in June 2007, is a brutal form of collective punishment that violates Article 33 of the Fourth 1949 Geneva Convention, which set up rules for the “Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.” The blockade has turned Gaza into a sliver of hell, an Israeli-administered ghetto where thousands have died, including the 1,400 civilians killed in the Israeli incursion of 2008. With 95 percent of factories shut down, Palestinian industry has virtually ceased functioning. The remaining 5 percent operate at 25 to 50 percent capacity. Even the fishing industry is moribund. Israel refuses to let fishermen travel more than three miles from the coastline, and within the fishing zone boats frequently come under Israeli fire. The Israeli border patrols have seized 35 percent of the agricultural land in Gaza for a buffer zone. The collapsing infrastructure and Israeli seizure of aquifers mean that in many refugee camps, such as Khan Yunis, there is no running water. UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) estimates that 80 percent of all Gazans now rely on food aid. And the claim of Israeli self-defense belies the fact that it is Israel that maintains an illegal occupation and violates international law by carrying out collective punishment of Palestinians. It is Israel that chose to escalate the violence when during an incursion into Gaza earlier this month its forces fatally shot a 13-year-old boy. As the world breaks down, this becomes the new paradigm—modern warlords awash in terrifying technologies and weapons murdering whole peoples. We do the same in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Market forces and the military mechanisms that protect these forces are the sole ideology that governs industrial states and humans’ relationship to the natural world. It is an ideology that results in millions of dead and millions more displaced from their homes in the developing world. And the awful algebra of this ideology means that these forces will eventually be unleashed on us, too. Those who cannot be of use to market forces are considered expendable. They have no rights and legitimacy. Their existence, whether in Gaza or blighted postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., is considered a drain on efficiency and progress. They are viewed as refuse. And as refuse they not only have no voice and no freedom; they can be and are extinguished or imprisoned at will. This is a world where only corporate power and profit are sacred. It is a world of barbarism.
“In disposing of man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag,” Karl Polanyi wrote in “The Great Transformation.” “Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organization was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill.”
There are 47.1 million Americans who depend on food stamps to eat. The elites are plotting to take these food stamps away, along with other “entitlement” programs that keep the poor from destitution. The slashing of trillions of dollars from Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs, given the political impasse in Washington and the looming “fiscal cliff,” now seems certain. There are 50 million people considered to be living below the poverty line, but because the poverty line is so low—$22,350 for a family of four—this figure means nothing. Add the tens of millions of Americans who live in a category called “near poverty,” including all those families attempting to live on less than $45,000 a year, and you have at least 30 percent of the country living in poverty. Once these people figure out that there is no economic recovery, that their standard of living is going to continue to drop, that they are trapped, that hope in the future is an illusion, they will become as angry as protesters in Greece and Spain or the militants in Gaza or Afghanistan. Banks and other financial corporations, handed trillions in interest-free money from the Federal Reserve, meanwhile hoard $5 trillion, much of it looted from the U.S. Treasury. The longer this worldwide disparity and inequality is perpetuated, the more the masses will revolt and the faster we will internally replicate the Israeli model of domestic control—drones overhead, all dissent criminalized, SWAT teams busting through doors, deadly force as an acceptable form of subjugation, food used as a weapon, and constant surveillance.
In Gaza and other blighted parts of the globe we see this new configuration of power. What is happening in Gaza, like what is happening to people of color in marginal communities in the United States, is the model. The techniques of control, whether carried out by the Israelis or militarized police units in our inner-city drug wars, whether employed by military special forces or mercenaries in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq, are tested first and perfected on the weak and the powerless. Our callous indifference to the plight of the Palestinians, and the hundreds of millions of poor packed into urban slums in Asia or Africa, as well as our own underclass, means that the injustices visited on them will be visited on us. In failing them we fail ourselves.
As the U.S. empire implodes, the harsher forms of violence employed on the outer reaches of empire are steadily migrating back to the homeland. At the same time, the internal systems of democratic governance have calcified. Centralized authority has devolved into the hands of an executive branch that slavishly serves global corporate interests. The press and the government’s judiciary and legislative branches have become toothless and decorative. The specter of terrorism, as in Israel, is used by the state to divert gargantuan expenditures to homeland security, the military and internal surveillance. Privacy is abolished. Dissent is treason. The military with its mantra of blind obedience and force characterizes the dark ethic of the wider culture. Beauty and truth are abolished. Culture is degraded into kitsch. The emotional and intellectual life of the citizenry is ravaged by spectacle, the tawdry and salacious, as well as by handfuls of painkillers and narcotics. Blind ambition, a lust for power and a grotesque personal vanity—exemplified by David Petraeus and his former mistress—are the engines of advancement. The concept of the common good is no longer part of the lexicon of power. This, as the novelist J.M. Coetzee writes, is “the black flower of civilization.” It is Rome under Diocletian. It is us. Empires, in the end, decay into despotic, murderous and corrupt regimes that finally consume themselves. And we, like Israel, are now coughing up blood.
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33093.htm
Puppet State America
The United States government and its subject peoples think of the US as “the world’s only superpower.” But how is a country a superpower when its entire government and a majority of the subjects, especially those members of evangelical churches, grovel at the feet of the Israeli Prime Minister? How is a country a superpower when it lacks the power to determine its own foreign policy in the Middle East? Such a country is not a superpower. It is a puppet state.
In the past few days we have witnessed, yet again, the “American superpower” groveling at Netanyahu’s feet. When Netanyahu decided to again murder the Palestinian women and children of Gaza, to further destroy what remains of the social infrastructure of the Gaza Ghetto, and to declare Israeli war crimes and Israeli crimes against humanity to be merely the exercise of “self-defense,” the US Senate, the US House of Representatives, the White House, and the US media all promptly declared their support for Netanyahu’s crimes.
On November 16 the Congress of the “superpower,” both House and Senate, passed overwhelmingly the resolutions written for them by AIPAC, the Israel Lobby known as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the only foreign agent that is not required to register as a foreign agent. The Global News Service of the Jewish People reported their power over Washington with pride. Both Democrats and Republicans shared the dishonor of serving Israel and evil instead of America and justice for the Palestinians.
The White House quickly obeyed the summons from the Israel Lobby. President Obama announced that he is “fully supportive” of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national security adviser, told the media on November 17 that the White House “wants the same thing as the Israelis want.” This is an overstatement as many Israelis oppose the crimes of the Israeli government, which is not the government of Israel but the government of the “settlers,” that is, the crazed land-hungry immigrants who are illegally, with Netanyahu’s support, stealing the lands of the Palestinians.
Netanyahu’s Israel is the equivalent of the Lincoln Republicans 150 years ago. Then there was no international law to protect Southern states, who left the voluntary union, a right under the Constitution, in order to avoid being exploited by Northern business interests. Subsequently, the Union army, after devastating the South, turned on the American Indians, and there was no international law to protect American Indians from being murdered and dispossessed by Washington’s armies.
Washington claimed that its invasion forces were threatened by the Indian’s bows and arrows. Today there is international law to protect the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza. However, every time that the world tries to hold the Israeli government accountable for its crimes, Israel’s Washington puppet vetoes the UN decision.
The notion that Israel is threatened by Palestinians is as absurd as the notion that the US is threatened by Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, and Iran. No government of any of these countries has ever made a threatening statement against the US. Even had such a statement been made, it would be meaningless. If a Superpower can be threatened by such impotent and distant counties, then it is not a superpower.
Demonizing a victim is a way of hiding state crimes. The American print and TV media is useless as a check on state crimes. The only crimes reported by the media are assigned to “terrorists,” that is, those who resist US hegemony, and to Americans, such as Bradley Manning and Sibel Edmonds, who liberate truth from official secrecy. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks remains in danger despite the asylum granted to him by the President of Ecuador, as Washington has little regard for international law.
In the US the exercise of the First Amendment is coming to be regarded as a crime against the state. The purpose of the media is no longer to find the truth, but to protect official lies. Speaking the truth has essentially disappeared as it is too costly to journalist who dare to do so. To keep one’s job, one serves Washington and the private interest groups that Washington serves.
In his November 19 defense of Israel’s latest war crimes, President Obama said: “no country on earth would tolerate missiles raining down from outside its borders.” But, of course, numerous countries do tolerate missiles raining down from the US. The war criminal Obama is raining down missiles in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, and has rained missiles on Libya, Somalia, Iraq and Syria as well. Iran might be next.
The German assault on the Warsaw Ghetto is one of the horror stories of Jewish history. Such an event is happening again, only this time Jews are perpetrators instead of victims. No hand has been raised to stay Israel from the goal of the operation declared by Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai to be “to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages.”
Puppet State America
The United States government and its subject peoples think of the US as “the world’s only superpower.” But how is a country a superpower when its entire government and a majority of the subjects, especially those members of evangelical churches, grovel at the feet of the Israeli Prime Minister? How is a country a superpower when it lacks the power to determine its own foreign policy in the Middle East? Such a country is not a superpower. It is a puppet state.
In the past few days we have witnessed, yet again, the “American superpower” groveling at Netanyahu’s feet. When Netanyahu decided to again murder the Palestinian women and children of Gaza, to further destroy what remains of the social infrastructure of the Gaza Ghetto, and to declare Israeli war crimes and Israeli crimes against humanity to be merely the exercise of “self-defense,” the US Senate, the US House of Representatives, the White House, and the US media all promptly declared their support for Netanyahu’s crimes.
On November 16 the Congress of the “superpower,” both House and Senate, passed overwhelmingly the resolutions written for them by AIPAC, the Israel Lobby known as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the only foreign agent that is not required to register as a foreign agent. The Global News Service of the Jewish People reported their power over Washington with pride. Both Democrats and Republicans shared the dishonor of serving Israel and evil instead of America and justice for the Palestinians.
The White House quickly obeyed the summons from the Israel Lobby. President Obama announced that he is “fully supportive” of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national security adviser, told the media on November 17 that the White House “wants the same thing as the Israelis want.” This is an overstatement as many Israelis oppose the crimes of the Israeli government, which is not the government of Israel but the government of the “settlers,” that is, the crazed land-hungry immigrants who are illegally, with Netanyahu’s support, stealing the lands of the Palestinians.
Netanyahu’s Israel is the equivalent of the Lincoln Republicans 150 years ago. Then there was no international law to protect Southern states, who left the voluntary union, a right under the Constitution, in order to avoid being exploited by Northern business interests. Subsequently, the Union army, after devastating the South, turned on the American Indians, and there was no international law to protect American Indians from being murdered and dispossessed by Washington’s armies.
Washington claimed that its invasion forces were threatened by the Indian’s bows and arrows. Today there is international law to protect the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza. However, every time that the world tries to hold the Israeli government accountable for its crimes, Israel’s Washington puppet vetoes the UN decision.
The notion that Israel is threatened by Palestinians is as absurd as the notion that the US is threatened by Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, and Iran. No government of any of these countries has ever made a threatening statement against the US. Even had such a statement been made, it would be meaningless. If a Superpower can be threatened by such impotent and distant counties, then it is not a superpower.
Demonizing a victim is a way of hiding state crimes. The American print and TV media is useless as a check on state crimes. The only crimes reported by the media are assigned to “terrorists,” that is, those who resist US hegemony, and to Americans, such as Bradley Manning and Sibel Edmonds, who liberate truth from official secrecy. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks remains in danger despite the asylum granted to him by the President of Ecuador, as Washington has little regard for international law.
In the US the exercise of the First Amendment is coming to be regarded as a crime against the state. The purpose of the media is no longer to find the truth, but to protect official lies. Speaking the truth has essentially disappeared as it is too costly to journalist who dare to do so. To keep one’s job, one serves Washington and the private interest groups that Washington serves.
In his November 19 defense of Israel’s latest war crimes, President Obama said: “no country on earth would tolerate missiles raining down from outside its borders.” But, of course, numerous countries do tolerate missiles raining down from the US. The war criminal Obama is raining down missiles in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, and has rained missiles on Libya, Somalia, Iraq and Syria as well. Iran might be next.
The German assault on the Warsaw Ghetto is one of the horror stories of Jewish history. Such an event is happening again, only this time Jews are perpetrators instead of victims. No hand has been raised to stay Israel from the goal of the operation declared by Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai to be “to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages.”
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