Capitalism’s Failures, Part III

Far from halting all carbon dioxide emissions, the world’s major states and corporations are pumping out ever-increasing amounts with little sign of any meaningful cuts. The potential consequences are almost unthinkable – but all too real.

The only conclusion possible is that those at the head of the US state have no serious intention to take action to tackle climate change.

In a world already riven with imperialist war, and by economic and military tensions, the potential for such upheaval to spark armed conflict, including the ultimate spectre of nuclear annihilation, is not a morbid fantasy, but all too likely.

Global warming has the ultimate potential to cause such a social collapse on a world scale, and to throw into question anything deserving the name human civilization.

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No serious attempt to cut carbon dioxide emissions can work without a serious reduction in the amount of road traffic. We need to move away from cars and towards public transit.

We should not be conned by the fake populist arguments… Whichever aspect of climate change policy you look at, a picture emerges of a government habitually bowing to the demands of business.

The Transnational Institute and Carbon Trade Watch argue in a definitive report on emissions trading: ” Trading programs in effect privatize the problem of air-pollution. Government and communities lose control over environmental protections, placing it in the hands of the polluters. When the incentive to reduce emissions is profit and cost-effectiveness, there is incredible pressure to cheat by overestimating reductions, while underestimating emissions.”

Solutions

The only realistic way to cut emissions from power generation is to stop burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) and use modes of generating power that do not contribute to global warming. We need a major shift to what is called renewable energy-electricity generation driven by wind, wave, tidal and solar power.

One serious study puts the fossil fuel subsidy figure at $235 billion a year globally– If this money was switched instead to investment and subsidy for renewable energy very dramatic shifts in patterns of power generation would happen within just a few years.

Another area which could make a major contribution to tackling climate change is very simple-energy efficiency. Governments insisting (not persuading, or cajoling, or relying on some market mechanism, but insisting, backed up with severe penalties for those firms which do not comply) on proper insulation and better energy efficiency in every area of society could make a significant contribution to tackling climate change. Among these measures are obvious things like proper insulation on all new buildings and bringing older buildings up to that standard too.

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The evidence so far is that, left to their own devices, those who dominate society today, in government or at the head of the world’s giant corporations, will not push through such changes–even if they are relatively straightforward in principle.

Behind the greenwash it is business as usual.

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It may be argued that the measures needed to tackle climate change are not somehow fundamentally incompatible with capitalist society.

For historical reasons we have a capitalist society where the fossil fuel corporations lie at the heart of the production for profit on which the whole system depends. This fact has shaped everything about the world we live in, including the very ideologies and policies of the political parties and politicians who run most of the world’s governments and global institutions.

Capitalism has an immense inertia at its heart. Once patterns of production become established and with them great concentrations of wealth and power established, they are hugely resistant to change. The people who head the giant corporations, and who embody the logic they must follow to survive and expand as profit-seeking beasts, will resist with all their power anything which fundamentally threatens their current basis of profit and power-the fossil fuel based economy.

The record of human history is that those who control societies have often been prepared see the whole of society plunge into disastrous chaos and collapse rather than accept change which undermined their power. I see no reason to suppose the most powerful ruling class in human history, those who today head the giant global corporations at whose centre stand the fossil fuel corporations, will behave any differently to their predecessors whose societies’ fate is witnessed only by ruined monuments.

Might some dramatic shift happen among even a section of elites? I think it would be foolish to gamble the future of human civilization on such imaginings or potentialities becoming realities. A surer path to change is needed.

A strategy to win real action on climate change starts with maintaining and intensifying popular mobilization and pressure. The rich tapestry of coalitions against climate change that have begun to emerge and need to be developed and broadened.

However, for such pressure to be really effective it needs to go further. The movements need a perspective of overturning governments whose commitment to the capitalist system means bowing down to the corporations that pump out greenhouse gases. Only state action can fully implement a programme of changes such as I have sketched. But any government that tries to do so will face determined opposition from those with real power today-the corporations linked into the fossil fuel economy and from business and the rich more generally. They would fight with all means at their disposal to block the assault on their wealth and privilege which is needed to finance the necessary transformation of society. They could only be beaten by mobilizing the power of millions of ordinary people, above all those workers who produce the wealth and profit on which the whole edifice of today’s capitalist society sits. But that means connecting the struggle against those who create the greenhouse effect with struggles against poverty, poor housing, unemployment, war, racism and all the other issues that afflict the great mass of people and will get worse as the climatic changes take place.

In short, the struggle over climate change raises the question of wresting power and wealth out of the hands of those who have it now. It points to the desperate need for a society run in a fundamentally different and democratic way, one in which not profit but the needs of ordinary people and the future of the planet we live on are at the heart of all action and policy. Such a transformation is what I mean by a revolution, and is an aim I call socialism.

Of course such action needs to be international in scope, and ultimately involve the US, if it is to be successful in heading off climate disaster. But to wait on international agreement would be a recipe for no effective action at all. What is needed is for one or a group of countries to begin taking radical action and use that to mobilise social forces in other countries to demand, or enforce, similar action there.

We have to mobilise as widely as possible for protest and action. But we also have to see that the fight to halt climate change also has an inherent logic that goes beyond mere reforms within the existing structures of economic and political power.

SOURCE: International Socialism

Climate Change & Capitalism, Part II

Climate change is a product of a ‘profit first, look after number one’ system headed mostly by a patriarchy of men.

Climate change will result in a massive reduction in land mass, destructive weather and climatic change, panic, refugees, poverty and death–this scenario cannot be prevented unless the whole world STOPS burning fossil fuels NOW (‘60% cuts now, 90% cuts pretty damn soon’).

HOWEVER that is a future, an abstract picture of chaos which most people in the West cannot truly imagine. Sadly, that future is an everyday reality right now and has been so for many years. The very system which has created this future of climate chaos has been practicing destruction of the environment, livelihoods, homes and lives of millions, to produce a global market of cheap labour and maximum profits for the corporations, their owners and shareholders.

Multinational corporations and private corruption each establish themselves in positions of power and wealth through violence and oppression, condoned by governments through multilateral and bilateral trade agreements allowing profit and production to be valued well above life.

We have been witnessing an overwhelmingly corporate influence on policies to implement carbon dioxide reduction. The consequences of real effective legislation on economic growth is not in the corporate interest (profit), but in the private interest (i.e. to really slow climate change would radically change the current system).

Around the world, industrial infrastructure continues to be constructed in the name of growth despite scientific evidence and advice that such things are seriously detrimental to the future of the planet as well as the present inhabitants.

A prerequisite for capitalism is market expansion which requires the constant turnout of more goods and services whether needed or not. Even if produce is made in a more environmentally friendly way, the sheer level of consumption and transportation negates all efforts to curb negative effects. It’s not just about emissions it’s also about over-consumption!

There is no doubting that industrialization is the cause of climate change (along with the many other abuses it has created and furthered).

Capitalism is the cause of climate change and must be dismantled if we have any hopes of slowing the environmental meltdown.

Only when there is a return to small scale communities living with the land rather than abusing it can these issues be rectified. With a global peak in fossil fuels upon us and the means to fuel mass industry lessening with every coming year, eventually there will undoubtedly be very little choice. Why wait until we are forced into living in way we have not prepared for.

The world leaders wish to continue economic growth (the kind that grows into the pockets of a comparatively tiny elite with enormous power) regardless of its effects on our present and future ability to survive.

Government and corporate structures cannot be trusted (as the record shows) to find or implement solutions to the escalating destruction and “climate apartheid” facing everyday people and the natural world.

SOURCE (PDF)

Solar Stats

Chris Fox, Namaste Solar.

2kW system: $18k to $7k with a 60% rebate.: $4.50/watt plus $2/watt REC plus $2k Fed rebate.

1kW = 120 kW/month, takes up 55-83 feet squared.

Avg. Home: 750-900 kWh/month

Payback with 5% is 15 years; 25-30 year lifespan… Bad w/Golf ball sized hail… (insurance!)

100% efficiency: 40 degree tilt, South, cold & sunny

5 Reasons Civilizations Collapse

Jared Diamond in his recent book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed“ suggests five major reasons for the collapse of 41 studied cultures.

• Environmental damage, such as deforestation and soil erosion
• Climate change
• Dependence upon long-distance trade for needed resources
• Increasing levels of internal and external violence, such as war or invasion
• Societal responses to internal and environmental problems

Given the current problems with the sustainability of industrial civilization, some, like Derrick Jensen, who posits civilization to be inherently unsustainable, argue that we need to develop a social form of “post-civilization” as different from civilization as the latter was with pre-civilized peoples.

Comment to “Peak Oil: Bring it on!”

I rarely reply to blog posts online, but I couldn’t resist this one on peak oil, from Climate Progress:

“We have the two primary solutions to peak oil at hand: fuel efficiency and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles run on zero-carbon electricity.”

No offense, but this is the first statement of delusion I have read from this website.

There are a number of problems with this solution: manufacturing the cars, and also the implied solar and wind and battery materials and pavement maintenance, etc, with a “zero-carbon” footprint is just not feasible. I might agree if you specified that these vehicles are only for public transit but this is obviously not what you have in mind based on your article Plug-in hybrids and electric cars–a core cliamte solution, nationally and globally …but it’s still only a very temporary solution on the scale of decades, not centuries.

The only convincing solution I have seen is a drastic reduction in population, a much more agrarian lifestyle (considering our food to fossil fuel ratio is 1:45), and a reduction in complexity, i.e. technology.

Unlike what we are being told, our solution is not more research and technology, but embracing our Sainthood/Buddha-hood, making sacrifices, a change in culture (embracing compassion and veganism–one in the same), significantly reduced consumption, and a reconnection with our local community.

The pendulum is about to take a hard swing from Empire to Local, and it’s hard for me to imagine cars playing a large part in our society more than 100 years from now.

Sea Ice in Context

February 2008: Climate Tipping Points: The Threat to the Planet (5.6 MB PDF)

Source: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/ James Hansen’s website

Kunstler: Expect Destablization & Disorder Soon

James Howard Kunstler, (author of The Long Emergency) speaking today in Boulder, warned of impending disorder. He reiterated self-evident truths: we and our country is broke–our money is quickly evaporating–there is a comprehensive failure in leadership–not only in politics and business and the media, but in academia too; we have become an irresponsible nation.

To update us all on what the news is not reporting in the “Oil Story,” Mexico is the second or third largest oil importer to the U.S. (with Saudi Arabia, and Canada #1), and their oil field Cantarell (the 2nd largest in the world) is depleting at 15% per year. This is a desperate fact with an enormous effect.

We should expect spot shortages and destabilization, sooner rather than later.

Kunstler’s blog: ClusterFuckNation

Sources:

Cantarell, The Second Largest Oil Field in the World Is Dying

Peak Everything: So, What now?

Peak Everything
Waking up to the Century of Declines
Richard Heinberg © 2007

Thesis: many problems rightly deserve attention, but the problem of our dependence on fossil fuels is central to human survival, and so as long as that dependence continues to any significant extent we must make its reduction the centerpiece of all our collective efforts — whether they are efforts to feed ourselves, resolve conflicts, or maintain a functioning economy.

Premise: There is an overwhelming likelihood of a crash of titanic proportions.

Societies need to contract and simplify intelligently.
The primary goal is a reduction in fossil fuel consumption.

Befenfits: Community, personal autonomy, satisfaction from honest work well done, intergenerational solidarity, cooperation, leisure time, happiness, ingenuity, artistry, beauty of the build environment

A need for dramatic, rapid reform in our global food system.

The Key: More Farmers!
In America in 1900, nearly 40% of the population farmed; the current proportion is close to one percent. This implies the need for a minimum of 40 to 50 million additional farmers in the next 20 to 30 years.

Develop programs in small-scale ecological farming methods.

Post-hydrocarbon Style:
1.    Incorporate no or minimal fossil fuels, either as raw material or as energy source, in production processes.
2.    Construction will depend on muscle power and handcraft.
3.    Pride in workmanship
4.    The use of natural materials, which will become more rare and expensive. Thus, workers will inevitably develop more respect for natural materials.
5.    Durability will be a required attribute of all products.
6.    Reparability will also be requisite. The average person will need to be able to fix anything that breaks.
7.    There will be an enduring artistic quality to all design rather than a nonsensical and counterproductive rapid changes of fashion and style. Incorporate themes from nature into products
8.    Incorporate occasional ironic or nostalgic comments into artistic output.
9.    There are universal principles of harmonty and proportion that perennially reappear.
10.    New aesthetic will by necessity emphasize leanness and simplicity, and will eschew superfluous decoration. (Zen)

Emissions activists appeal to an ethical impulse to avert future harm to the environment and human society , while the Peak Oil issue appeals to a more immediate concern for self-preservation—which is unquestionably the stronger motive, which will certainly be required in order for people to undertake the enormous personal and social sacrifices required in order to quickly and dramatically reduce their fossil fuel dependency.

We must lay the groundwork for collective survival. We must build lifeboats.
People need some basic commonsense information and advice, somebody to tell them the truth—our way of life is coming to an end—and to offer them some sensible collective survival strategies.
•    Learn how to grow our own food.
•    Collect high-quality seeds and know how to save seeds from one season to the next.
•    Treasure what’s important in life: good soil, viable seeds, clean water, unpolluted air, friends you can count on.

Chaos theory: small changes in initial conditions can lead to big changes in outcomes.

To be successful, an effort will require the enthusiastic participation of the advertising, public relations, and entertainment industries, as well as organized religions and all major political institutions.

Leaders will have to engage the non-rational aspects of mass consciousness by playing upon our shared needs for meaning and myth, using verbal voodoo to alter attitudes and behavior as rapidly as possible.

The most we can do  is to harness the thrill that comes when language hits its mark by dramatically aiding our understanding, by using language skillfully to describe and persuade; and meanwhile to act in ways that are congruent with the ethical content of our words.

WHO Report: Expect more viruses, crop failures

WHO officials confirmed that a major emphasis of the World Health Report will be (report to be published in April) on the increased range of disease vectors, animals and insects that carry viruses transmissible to humans. The report will link the expanding range of mosquitoes in Africa and Asia, believed to be caused by warmer weather, to the rapid spread of malaria.

“Climate change can affect health in many different ways,” said Gregory Härtl, an information officer and project leader at WHO in Geneva. “At the most basic level, when the quality of our air, the cleanliness and availability of our water and the security of our food supply are affected, then the health of us all will be affected.”

Extended summers mean more mosquitos, rodents and ticks.

For the United States, that means extended summers could be contributing to the spread of Lyme disease in the East and hantavirus and West Nile virus in the West.

WHO says heavy rainfall and flooding leads to a rapid spread of cholera, giardia, typhoid, hepatitis A and E. coli infection.

Malaria’s spread means more crops fail, food prices rise.

The main World Health Report is being drafted as a wakeup call, to gather more public attention to ways climate change is affecting human health.

SOURCE: EARTH NEWS (3/24/08)

6+ billion will die in this century

From Rolling Stone (1/1/07) (LINK)

The Prophet of Climate Change: James Lovelock. One of the most eminent scientists of our time says that global warming is irreversible — and that more than 6 billion people will perish by the end of the century. “But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting.” By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth’s population will be culled from today’s 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes — Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.

To Lovelock, cutting greenhouse-gas pollution won’t make much difference at this point, and much of what passes for sustainable development is little more than a scam to profit off disaster. “Green,” he tells me, only half-joking, “is the color of mold and corruption.”

“Jim is a brilliant scientist who has been right about many things in the past,” Richard Branson says. “If he’s feeling gloomy about the future, it’s important for mankind to pay attention.” ( It was Lovelock who inspired his friend Richard Branson to put up a $25 million prize for the Virgin Earth Challenge, which will be awarded to the first person who can figure out a commercially viable way of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.)

The giant, inexpressibly subtle network of positive and negative feedbacks that keeps the Earth’s climate in balance is seriously out of whack, derailed by pollution and deforestation. Lovelock believes the planet itself will eventually recover its equilibrium, even if it takes millions of years. What’s at stake, he says, is civilization.

“The whole system,” he decided, “is in failure mode.” A few weeks later, he began work on his latest and gloomiest book, The Revenge of Gaia, which was published in the U.S. in 2006.

But evidence from the real world suggests that the IPCC is far too conservative. For one thing, scientists know from the geological record that 3 million years ago, when temperatures increased to five degrees above today’s level, the seas rose not by twenty-three inches but by more than eighty feet.

Here, in its oversimplified essence, is Lovelock’s doomsday scenario: Rising heat means more ice melting at the poles, which means more open water and land. That, in turn, increases the heat (ice reflects sunlight; open land and water absorb it), causing more ice to melt. The seas rise. More heat leads to more intense rainfall in some places, droughts in others. The Amazon rain forests and the great northern boreal forests –the belt of pine and spruce that covers Alaska, Canada and Siberia –undergo a growth spurt, then wither away. The permafrost in northern latitudes thaws, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas that is twenty times more potent than CO2 — and on and on it goes.

To Lovelock, the whole idea of sustainable development is wrongheaded: “We should be thinking about sustainable retreat.”

Retreat, in his view, means it’s time to start talking about changing where we live and how we get our food; about making plans for the migration of millions of people from low-lying regions like Bangladesh into Europe; about admitting that New Orleans is a goner and moving the people to cities better positioned for the future. Most of all, he says, it’s about everybody “absolutely doing their utmost to sustain civilization, so that it doesn’t degenerate into Dark Ages, with warlords running things, which is a real danger. We could lose everything that way.”

It’s terrifying. We have just exceeded all reasonable bounds in numbers. And from a purely biological view, any species that does that has a crash.”

“We need bold action,” Lovelock insists. “We have a tremendous amount to do.” In his view, we have two choices: We can return to a more primitive lifestyle and live in equilibrium with the planet as hunter-gatherers, or we can sequester ourselves in a very sophisticated, high-tech civilization. “There’s no question which path I’d prefer,” he says one morning in his cottage, grinning broadly and tapping the keyboard of his computer. “It’s really a question of how we organize society — where we will get our food, water. How we will generate energy.”

For water, the answer is pretty straightforward: desalination plants, which can turn ocean water into drinking water. Food supply is tougher: Heat and drought will devastate many of today’s food-growing regions. It will also push people north, where they will cluster in cities. In these areas, there will be no room for backyard gardens. As a result, Lovelock believes, we will have to synthesize food — to grow it in vats from tissue cultures of meats and vegetables. It sounds far out and deeply unappetizing, but from a technological standpoint, it wouldn’t be hard to do.

Nuclear Power Is the Only Green Solution.” Lovelock argued that we should “use the small input from renewables sensibly” but that “we have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilization is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear — the one safe, available energy source — now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet.”

Then, as now, the lack of political leadership is what’s most striking to Lovelock. Although he respects Al Gore’s efforts to raise people’s consciousness, he believes no politician has come close to preparing us for what’s coming. “We’ll be living in a desperate world in no time,” Lovelock says. He believes the time is right for a global-warming version of Winston Churchill’s famous “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech he gave to prepare Great Britain for World War II. “People are ready for this,” Lovelock says as we pass under the shadow of the castle. “They understand what’s happening far better than most politicians.”

“Our moral progress,” says Lovelock, “has not kept up with our technological progress.”

But maybe that’s exactly what the coming apocalypse is all about. One of the questions that fascinates Lovelock: Life has been evolving on Earth for more than 3 billion years — and to what purpose? “Like it or not, we are the brains and nervous system of Gaia,” he says. “We have now assumed responsibility for the welfare of the planet. How will we manage it?”

“Some people will sit in their seats and do nothing, frozen in panic. Others will move. They’ll see what’s about to happen, and they’ll take action, and they’ll survive. They’re the carriers of the civilization ahead.”