Category Archives: Predators and the environment

15,000 scientists warn of scientifically predictable global destruction

This is one of those bad-news—worse-news stories. The bad news is that the science on climate change in 1992 was damn near flawless already. And we have gotten a LOT better at it in 25 years. And the science says that without a radical alteration in business-as-usual, we are doomed on this planet. No ifs, ands, or buts.

The worse news is that the brightest minds of the species seem to believe that warnings lead to action. Not without a plan they don't. Preachers have been warning about hell-fire and brimstone for thousands of years and I have yet to see how all that fear-mongering has ever led to a better society. Why is it any better when our best scientists believe that if only their warnings are dire enough, someone in the greater audience will somehow come up with a solution?

We get the point. Climate change is dangerous. Now, oh bright ones, lay out some reasonable possibilities for remediation. I don't want to get all worked up about a problem unless there is something I can do to help. Otherwise, screaming headlines about the world coming to an end is just meaningless motivation.

Also, I am not at all certain it actually requires 15,000 scientists to tell us we are in deep shit. It seems like 500 could monitor our ride in the handbasket so that 14,500 could work on what to do next. Just a thought.

15,000 scientists just signed the largest-ever warning about Earth’s destruction
Scientists worldwide are getting heated over global warming.

Ephrat Livni, 11/14/17

There’s no place like home, our warm and watery planet Earth. But we won’t be living here long if humans don’t change their ways, say 15,365 scientists from 185 countries who want your attention.

On Nov. 13, the journal BioScience published the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice” in four languages—English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. The first warning was issued in 1992 when 1,700 members of the Union of Concerned Scientists argued that humans are “on a collision course with nature.” That group, which included numerous Nobel laureates, urged the world to save the Earth from extreme climate change by burning fewer fossil fuels, preserving forests, limiting population growth, and improving food production.

“On the twenty-fifth anniversary of their call, we look back at their warning and evaluate the human response,” contemporary scientists write.

Brace yourselves—we didn’t respond well, the scientists find.
Since 1992, with the exception of stabilizing the stratospheric ozone layer, humanity has “failed to make sufficient progress in generally solving foreseen environmental challenges, and alarmingly, most of them are getting far worse,” the paper states. Its authors say they are especially troubled by “the current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate change…from burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and agricultural production—particularly from farming ruminants for meat consumption.

They also point out that this rapid heating has “unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years.” Scientists predict many current life forms could be annihilated or near extinction by the end of this century.

Still, there’s some hope. Humans have shown that, with concerted effort, we’re able to make positive and sustainable changes. The global decline in use of ozone-depleting substances shows progress is possible and destruction isn’t inevitable, the scientists argue. Overall, humans have made advancements in reducing extreme poverty and hunger, declines in deforestation in some regions, and rapid growth in the renewable-energy sector.

But more must be done. The paper calls on all to help by being informed consumers and voters, lest we find ourselves homeless. Time is running out, the scientists remind us:

To prevent widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss, humanity must practice a more environmentally sustainable alternative to business as usual. This prescription was well articulated by the world’s leading scientists 25 years ago, but in most respects, we have not heeded their warning…We must recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that Earth with all its life is our only home. more

Oh goody—another dirty climate conference

Someday soon, humanity must make organizing and attending climate conferences a capital crime. These things are worse than useless but they grind on because the folks who like these sorts of things are convention planners. It's what they do. This year's climate extravaganza is being held in Bonn Germany. No one knows why or what they hope to accomplish. An estimated 23,000 people are descending on a tiny little backwater that is obvious ill-equipped to handle them—belching thousands of tons of CO2 on their sacred journeys of self-importance.

If anyone suggests that anything important could be accomplished with video-conferencing, the face-to-face crowd reacts in horror. According to them, those who would eliminate these conferences are the worms of humanity—the introverts. Since the only legitimate way to call these conferences a success would be the ability to point at falling CO2 levels, and that clearly has not happened after 23 years of conferencing, a sane person would try something else. But these folks cannot even progress to video conferencing. And since few or none of them seem willing to grapple with the problems of progressing from legislating outcomes to funding outcomes, we can assure ourselves that no meaningful progress will happen anytime soon.

Climate change is a Producer Class problem that will only respond to Producer Class solutions. Climate conferences are extreme manifestations of Leisure Class behavior. Pretty much explains why they are useless. After all, useless is the primary goal, the heaven, of the Leisure Class.

COP23: Is the Bonn summit worth the trouble?
Dave Keating (Bonn, Germany) 08.11.2017

In the first part of our COP Secret series, we take a look at how UN climate summits have become mammoth events with high carbon emissions - which is why there's some grumbling that the yearly ritual has become a circus.

In 1995, at the first UN climate ‘conference of the parties' (COP) in Berlin, about 4,000 people gathered in a small venue to begin hashing out the rules of the Kyoto Protocol, which would be agreed two years later.

This week, 23,000 people are flooding into the small city of Bonn, Germany for what has become an incredibly complex, expensive and emissions-intensive yearly event. It's costing Germany €117 million ($135.5 million). Bonn has built two tent cities along the river Rhine the size of eight football fields. Participants must take a shuttle bus to travel between them.

"It's so confusing!" gasps one delegate as she rushes by with a rolling suitcase. "And nobody can tell me where to go!"

Two days in, the city's infrastructure is already under strain – and most people haven't even arrived yet. Bonn's public transport system was overwhelmed on Tuesday, with trams becoming so packed some people were forced to get off. Bonn's 9,000 hotel beds have been booked out for months, motivating many to stay in the nearby - and bigger - city of Cologne. But construction work on the tracks between the two cities has made traveling between them a nightmare.

This isn't the first time the former German capital, home to the UN's climate secretariat, has hosted a COP. In 1999, delegates worked together in Bonn to devise the rules of the already-agreed upon Kyoto Protocol. But just 4,188 people came to town for that summit – much more manageable.

The fact that so many delegates are attending this conference, in an interim year where no major decisions will be taken, shows just how important these summits have become. It's nowhere near the record 38,000 that came to Paris two years ago, but it is strikingly close to the 27,000 people who came to Copenhagen for the previous attempt to clinch a deal in 2009.

Too big?

Some are concerned about how enormous the climate summits have grown to become, saying they are too polluting and too expensive – requiring too much sponsorship by big corporations.

According to the UN, the 2009 Copenhagen summit emitted the equivalent of about 26,000 tons of CO2. But this does not include travel. According to an analysis by Wired Magazine, transportation for the Paris delegates emitted 300,000 tons of CO2. If the emissions can be avoided, wouldn't it be better to do a virtual conference?

The hosts are sensitive to these concerns. Germany held a press conference this morning explaining that the summit is "the greenest UN climate conference ever."

"The emissions have been really managed down, from the food that is served…right to the emissions that are coming from travelers all around the world coming to Bonn," UN climate spokesperson Nick Nuttall told DW.

A consultancy has been hired to calculate how much emissions were produced by the summit, and the result will be published afterwards. Those emissions will then be offset through climate financing from Germany, something undertaken by all hosts in recent years.

Still, wouldn't it be better to keep emissions down and not spend all of this money in the first place?

'We need the face-to-face'

Delegates at the summit told DW that although the logistics of attending such a huge summit can be difficult, it's worth it. "Nothing beats face-to-face time," said Hannah McKinnon from the NGO Oil Change International. "This is my tenth COP, and there's something very familiar about them at this point. You come and it's a nice reunion, you see a lot of your colleagues and friends that you really only see once a year."

But McKinnon didn't have to come far. She lives 400 kilometers up the Rhine in Freiburg, Germany, just two hours away by train. Her roundtrip journey will produce just 0.04 tons of carbon.

For Seydun Kane from Senegal, the journey was much longer and more stressful. He flew from Dakar to Paris, then to Dusseldorf – a journey which will emit two tons of carbon.

"We had some problems when we arrived in Dusseldorf, there was no translation, only German, and we cannot speak German," he said, adding that they then had train problems getting from Dusseldorf to Bonn. "We lost a lot of time."

He says the set-up of the enormous tent city, with two different locations separated by a shuttle bus, has been inconvenient.

"Everything is nice when you're inside the pavilion, but the problem is the transportation between the Bonn Zone and the Bula Zone," he said. "You need to leave the other side to come here, and sometimes you miss important events."

The organizers have said the event's massive size necessitates two separate zones for the negotiators and for the NGOs and businesses. But McKinnon says this can create symbolic difficulties, compared to previous smaller COPs where the two sides were closer and interacted more.

"With the Bonn and Bula zones being quite a ways apart, what does that mean for the interaction of the different constituencies?" she asked. "Will negotiators ever be over here? Those are questions that are not unique to Bonn."

A clean COP

McKinnon is an experienced COP attendee. For 20-year-old Kiran Ooman, a student at Seattle University, this is the first climate summit. His journey will emit 3.3 tons of CO2. He is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against President Trump and the US government for its inaction on climate change. He sees no problem with the fact that the summits have grown to such a huge size.

"I think it's a great thing, the more people are talking about this the more people might actually do something," he said. "I have been very impressed, meeting all of these incredible people from all over the world."

Savitree Srisuk, a specialist on environmental education from Thailand, says she thinks her German hosts are making an effort to mollify the environmental effects of the summit. A roundtrip flight from Bangkok to Bonn emits four tons of carbon.

"I feel like the German organizers are really concerned about the environment, and how people at this event can show their action in protecting the climate," she said.

"They're very concerned about the garbage, and how we use products in the pavilion. Anything that we use every day, like water and food, these things have to be eco products."

Hans Naome with the campaign group Nuclear for Climate had a much shorter journey. He drove from neighboring Belgium, a trip that will emit 0.17 tons of carbon. He had to take vacation days off work to come for the summit to advocate for the place of nuclear power as part of a zero-emissions energy mix. But he says it's worth it, especially for a cause like his which can encounter skepticism.

"If I wouldn't come to the COP, I wouldn't talk to the people I talk to – and most people have very little knowledge about nuclear," he said. "In general most of the people are willing to listen, and in the end it sometimes happens that we say, ok let's just agree to disagree. But most people are friendly. They've come here to talk and learn, and to broaden their horizons." more

The economics of waste

There is no particular reason to believe that Charles H. Smith is a Veblen scholar or that he has even read The Theory of the Leisure Class (TOLC). Nevertheless, if someone had been assigned to summarize TOLC, the following would rate an A+ because these are exactly the points Veblen was trying to make. For example, Veblen includes a whole chapter on why the Leisure Classes believe that waste enhances their status, entitled Conspicuous Waste.

This essay is short and sweet, and the reader isn't required to learn a bunch of arcane terms as is the case with a reading of TOLC. Several times in my life I have been asked to "translate" TOLC into modern English. Because I am terrible at such tasks, I have begged off. But I DO think it is a good idea. And however Smith came to write the following, it will be an excellent substitute until someone actually reworks Veblen's classic.

EARTH'S ECONOMY GLORIFIES WASTE, EXPLOITATION, DEBT, EXPEDIENCY AND MAGICAL THINKING

CHARLES HUGH SMITH, July 16, 2017

Humanity appears to default to magical thinking when faced with untenable situations that demand systemic change.

How would extraterrestrial anthropologists characterize Earth's dominant socio-economic system? It's not difficult to imagine their dismaying report:

"Earth's economy glorifies waste. Its economists rejoice when a product is disposed as waste and replaced with a new product. This waste is perversely labeled 'growth.'

Aimless wandering that consumes fossil fuels is likewise rejoiced as 'growth.'

The stripping of the planet's oceans for a few favored species of edible fish is also considered 'growth' as the process of destroying the ocean ecosystem generates sales of the desired seafood.

Even more perversely, the resulting shortages are also causes of rejoicing by the planet's elites, as their ability to purchase the now-scarce resources boosts their social status and grandiose sense of self-worth.

This glorification of waste is the same dynamic that destroyed the civilization on Zork.

Earth's economy also glorifies exploitation, as this maximizes profits, which appears to be the planetary equivalent of a secular religion that everyone believes as a Natural Law.

Thus slavery and monopoly are highly valued as the most reliable sources of profits. If ethical concerns limit the actual ownership of humans, Earth's economy incentivizes feudal arrangements that share characteristics of servitude and bondage. In the current era, the favored mechanisms are over-indebtedness (debt-serfdom) and taxation by the state, which extracts approximately 40% of all labor via threat of imprisonment.

Earth's elites exhibit a pathological preference for micro-managing the commoners via criminalizing much of everyday life and imposing extremely harsh punishments for any dissent or resistance to elite domination.

This is the same dynamic that doomed planetary civilizations in the Blug system.

Earth's economy is currently dependent on depleting fossil fuels and borrowing from the future to fund consumption in the present, i.e. debt. Rather than face the reality that this is not sustainable and pursue other arrangements, Earth's elites have chosen expediency, responding to the inevitable crises caused by depletion and dependence on debt with expedient but ultimately destructive policies that paper over the crises but at the cost of generating greater crises in the next iteration.

Humanity appears to default to magical thinking when faced with untenable situations that demand systemic change. This is eerily parallel to the now-lost civilization of Frum.

It seems Earth's dominant species has selected the most destructive policies and mindsets to glorify and worship. Earth's current civilization is doomed, with near-zero prospects for the necessary transition to a more sustainable, less exploitive arrangement.

Earth's decline is a tragi-comedy, much like the one on Ononon that entertained our home planet audiences for a time." more

Summer Sacrilege

Paul Street is rapidly becoming the most interesting contributor to Counterpunch. As the USA stalls out politically over the partisan arguments concerning the legitimacy of the 2016 election, Street is suggesting that reasonable folks rethink the usefulness of all this squabbling. And maybe get back to thinking about the incredibly serious problem of climate change.

So far so good. But the one "blasphemous" thought Street has that I cannot agree with is entitled "Think Capitalogenic, not Anthropogenic Climate Change." Street wants us to believe that the root cause of climate change is, ta da, Capitalism. Well, no. The cause of climate change is too many people burning too many fires. If anything, the "cause" of climate change CAN be ascribed to Industrialization BUT Capitalism and Industrialization are two VERY different things. The confusion between the two pretty well explains why even though socialism can talk a good talk when it comes to environmental problems, it has a dismal track record when it comes to performance.

For example, when I first became concerned about environmental problems, one of the more articulate spokesmen was this guy named Barry Commoner. He had written a book called The Closing Circle. One of his brilliant insights he called the Iron Law of Non-renewable Resources—every barrel of oil (etc.) discovered and extracted only makes the next barrel harder to find and more expensive to recover. Anyone who wants to know why fracking is so expensive need only refer back to this law. But for all his genius, Commoner stumbled because of his willingness to believe that Capitalism and Industrialization were the same thing. He was an avowed Marxist and believed that Socialism would yield far superior results when it came to environmental matters. When the Wall came down and "socialist" industrialization was revealed as the utter catastrophe it was, poor Commoner, for all his genius, was tossed on the ash heap of history. Which is unfortunate, because his Iron Law of Non-renewable Resources is still perfectly valid.

One thing the "left" should keep in mind is that the "capitalism" of stock markets, monetary policy and central banks, and the rest of the activities associated with the movements of money, did NOT cause industrialization in the first place and if the past 40 years are any guide, is the leading cause of de-industrialization. This is MOST unfortunate because for all the rapacious damage that Capitalism has inflicted on industrial activity, it staggers forward in its crippled state because industrialization fills real human needs.

Twelve Blasphemous Thoughts: Some Summer Sacrilege
by PAUL STREET, JUNE 13, 2017

Summer’s here and the time is right for sacrilege in the streets. Here are twelve blasphemous thoughts for the current Russo-phobic season, likely to be a real carbon- and (see below) capital-cooked scorcher.

Wouldn’t That Have Been Russia’s Job?

Forget for now the question of whether the Kremlin intervened to any significant degree against Hillary Clinton in “our great democratic process and elections” last year. I’ve been consistently skeptical about the claim, which continues to be made in the absence of any smoking gun. At the same time, I’ve always harbored the following question in the back of my mind: if the Russian did do what they are accused of, wouldn’t that have been the Russian foreign policy intelligence apparatus doing its very basic job of patriotic national self-defense? Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the broader Russo-phobic U.S.-imperial foreign policy establishment she represented seemed Hellbent on provoking a potentially deadly conflict with Russia over Ukraine, Crimea, and/or Syria. Hello?

What Democratic Process and Elections?

The Big Money-run United States is a damn near openly plutocratic oligarchy where the wealthy Few get what they want again and again regardless of majority working class sentiment. There’s a strong body of solid academic research demonstrating what Joe and Jane Six Pack already know about U.S. politics and policy: “money talks, bullshit walks.” You can’t have meaningful “democracy” in a nation where the top tenth of the upper 1 Percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.

Eighty-six years ago, the great American philosopher John Dewey observed that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.” Dewey rightly prophesized that U.S. politics would stay that way for as long as power resided in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda.” Ten years later, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis made the very basic and elementary observation that Americans “must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Why all this nonsensical talk about “American democracy”? It’s a childish fantasy.

Uncle Sam Interferes Abroad Like Crazy

Who on Earth is the United States to get enraged about Russia or anyone else’s real or possible interference in other nation’s political processes and elections? Uncle Sam has long and regularly undertaken such interference across the planet. It still does. Just for starters, ask the people of Latin America about U.S. political interference past and present. “We” interfered like crazy in Russian politics during the 1990s and certainly continue to conduct covert political operations there as in countless other sovereign nations. “We” have acted to topple and overthrow dozens of foreign governments since World War Two.

Why shouldn’t other nations try to impact U.S. politics by any means possible? Washington and Wall Street exercise powerful influence on life and politics in other nations whose people never have a say in U.S. policy. The United States’ outsized and deadly Superpower role (responsible for many millions of deaths around the world since 1945) means that other nations (Russia is certainly no exception) have a vested interest in the U.S. political process.

Hello Mike Pence?

But let’s ask another unpleasant question. If it were ever shown that the Orange-Tinted Beast treasonously colluded with Russia, do we really want Mike Pence in the White House? Impeachment and removal would put a vicious right-wing Christian white-nationalist zealot (Pence) in the Oval Office and probably speed the passage of the full right wing Republican agenda through Washington. That’s what the Constitution says. It lets Trump use Pence as a kind of deadly insurance policy against removal.

What’s so Great About the Holy Constitution?

This suggests another and truly sacrilegious question: what’s so damn great about the widely fetishized and damn-near deified U.S. Constitution? I won’t elaborate on this as I have recently published a Truthdig report on why we should hold a Constituent Assembly to go beyond that absurdly glorified and hideously anti-democratic charter, which was crafted with expressly classist intent and consequences by the early republic’s propertied masters near the end of the 18th century. Read that essay, titled “Impeach the Constitution,” here. Certainly, it’s absurd to think that a document crafted by wealthy slave-owners, opulent merchants, and other vast property-holders with the explicit purpose of keeping the “wicked” popular majority and its “secret sigh for a more equal distribution” of wealth (James Madison’s lovely phrase) at bay (see my essay if you think I’m lying) can function in meaningful service to popular self-rule in the 21st (or any other) century.

Questions Not Posed to Comey

Speaking of class rule, notice how none of James Comey’s examiners during the nationally televised hearings of the Senate Intelligence Committee last Thursday asked the former FBI Director any of the following questions suggested by Amy Goodman and Dennis Moynihan:
“How far-reaching is the FBI’s surveillance of journalists?…Why did the FBI label nonviolent water protectors at Standing Rock, North Dakota, possible domestic terrorists? What about the FBI’s similar infiltration of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter?…Regarding the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO suppression of dissent in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, how many of those targeted who are still incarcerated, such as American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier, and the many imprisoned former Black Panthers, were imprisoned based on FBI misconduct?….Finally, where do you think we would be, as a country, if the FBI hadn’t targeted Martin Luther King Jr., with its unrelenting campaign of surveillance, intimidation and harassment, which very likely contributed to the climate of hate that led to his assassination?”
Of course these queries were not posed. Russiagate is following in the footsteps of the Watergate hearings, which focused on Richard Nixon’s cover-up of an amateurish break-in of the headquarters of one of the nation’s leading capitalist parties but ignored the Nixon White House and FBI’s egregious violation of basic civil liberties in the domestic police state war on the New Left and the Black Freedom struggle. The small potatoes Watergate investigation also steered clear of Nixon’s arch-criminal invasion and bombing of Cambodia. See Noam Chomsky

Weapons of Mass Distraction: The Biggest Issue of Our or Any Time is Not a News Story

Here’s a scandalous observation: the news is a constant maddening distraction from the issues and problems that matter most, especially the deepening environmental crisis generated by the profits system. Nothing that Anderson Cooper and the rest of his Trump- and Comey- and Russia-obsessed panels have been jabbering about on CNN these days is remotely significant compared to the chilling (no irony originally intended) fact that atmospheric carbon parts per million (ppm) is now at a shocking 409.21, nearly full 10 points above just four years ago. We are now heading to 500 ppm by 2050. As Steven Newton wrote on Huffington Post almost one year ago:
“That’s only 35 years away. A child born today will barely have moved out of Mom’s basement (at least, judging by some millennials) by the time CO2 reaches 500 ppm. The hundred-point rise between 300 to 400 ppm took about a century; the rise between 400 to 500 ppm will take only about 35 years, and with accelerating rates, the rise to 600 ppm will happen even faster.”
Newton left something out: that is not survivable for the species. As the Australian Earth and paleoclimate scientist, Andrew Gliskon explained seven years ago:
“The consequences of open ended rise in atmospheric CO2 are manifest in the geological record (Frontispiece). The world is in a lag period, when increasing atmospheric energy is expressed by intense hurricanes, increased pressure at mid-latitude high pressure zones and shift of climate zones toward the poles. With ensuing desertification of temperate zones, i.e. southern Europe , southern Australia , southern Africa , the desiccated forests become prey to firestorms….There is nowhere the 6.5 billion of contemporary humans can go, not even the barren planets into the study of which space agencies have been pouring more funding than governments allocate for environmental mitigation to date. At 460 ppm CO2-equivalent, the climate is tracking close to the upper stability limit of the Antarctic ice sheet, defined at approximately 500 ppm [5,7]. Once transcended, mitigation measures would hardly be able to re-form the cryosphere. According to Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Climate Impacts Institute and advisor to the German government: ‘We’re simply talking about the very life support system of this planet.’”
“Humans can not argue with the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere. What is needed are urgent measures including: Deep cuts in carbon emissions; Parallel Fast track transformation to non-polluting energy utilities – solar, solar-thermal, wind, tide, geothermal, hot rocks; Global reforestation and re-vegetation campaigns, including application of biochar. The alternative does not bear contemplation.”
As the left philosopher John Sanbonmatsu told me years ago, global warming “is the biggest issue of our or any time.” (Though correspondent Richard Matthews recently reminded me to worry about “the 400 nuke power plants that will melt down as industrial civilization collapses if nuke war doesn’t come first.”).

Please note the deafening silence in the reigning media and politics culture on “the biggest issue of our or any time.” Of all the maddening and insane things about the malignant narcissist Donald Trump, the most dangerous of all and is his climate change-denialist promise to “deregulate energy” – a pledge that amounts to what Noam Chomsky considers a potential “death-knell for the species.”

The corporate media-politics system is deadening the citizenry to the most significant existential threats the species has ever faced. It’s insane.

BDS the USA?

Now that Trump has pulled the world’s top cumulative carbon contributor (USA, USA! being far in the historical lead) out of even the painfully modest and inadequate Paris Climate Accord, I am moved to ask another sacrilegious and not-entirely tongue-in-cheek question: Given U.S. leadership of geocidal climate destruction, the unparalleled and racist U.S. incarceration rate, the mass-murderous U.S. military Empire (which accounts for more than 40 percent of world military spending, eats up more than half of U.S. federal discretionary spending, maintains more than 1000 military installation across more than 100 “sovereign” nations, and has the largest carbon footprint of any institution on Earth), and the extreme inequality and plutocracy prevalent in the U.S….given all these and other problems (including rampant hedonistic idiocy and indifference), should we now issue a call to the international community for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) targeting the United States and its institutions engaged in the destruction of the common good?

Think Capitalogenic, not Anthropogenic Climate Change

Now for some sacrilege on our holy “free market” profits system. We should follow the lead of the brilliant Marxist environmental historian and sociologist Jason Moore and replace the term “anthropogenic global warming” with “capitalogenic global warming.” The currently popular scientific concept of “the Anthropocene” – an era in which Earth systems are now for the first time decisively influenced by human activity – has rich geological validity and holds welcome political relevance in countering the carbon-industrial complex’s denial of humanity’s responsibility for contemporary climate change. Still, we must guard against lapsing into the historically unspecific and class-blind uses of “anthros,” projecting the currently and historically recent age of capital onto the broad 100,000-year swath of human activity on and in nature. As Moore told the left interviewer Sasha Lilley two years ago, “It was not humanity as whole that created …large-scale industry and the massive textile factories of Manchester in the 19th century or Detroit in the last century or Shenzen today. It was capital.” Read those two sentences again and commit them to memory. It is only during a relatively small slice of human history – roughly the last half-millennium - give or take a century or so – that humanity has been socially and institutionally wired from the top down to wreck livable ecology. Moore and other left analysts argue with good reason that it is more appropriate to understand humanity’s Earth-altering assault on livable ecology as “Capitalocene.” After all, it is only during the relatively brief period of history when capitalism has existed and ruled the world system (since 1600 or thereabouts by some academic calculations, earlier and later by others) that human social organization has developed the capacity and inner accumulation- and commodification – and “productivity” – and growth-mad compulsion to transform Earth systems – with profitability and “productivity” dependent upon on the relentless appropriation of “cheap nature” (cheap food, cheap energy, cheap raw materials and cheap human labor power or cheap human nature). Moore maintains that human destruction of livable ecology is best explained by changes that capitalism’s addictive and interrelated pursuits of profit and empire imposed on humanity’s relationships with “the web of life” since “the long sixteenth century” starting in 1450.

One of the great and tragic consequences of contemporary class (capitalist) rule and mass consent manufacture is that most U.S. Americans can now more readily imagine the end of life itself than they can envision the end of the relatively recent and very specific historical phenomenon known as capitalism.

No More Children Until We Fix This

Now for some real blasphemy. I really cannot recommend anyone having children at this juncture. I know that’s a terrible thing to say but we are currently on track for 500 ppm, by 2050 (that’s 33 years away) and 500 ppm is the dissolution of the cryosphere. Antarctica is gone at that level. That’s game over. The “very life support of the system of this planet” is now in epic crisis and the most powerful nation on earth and in history (the U.S.) is also the leading cumulative carbon emission contributor by far and is ruled by a soulless, socio-pathological capitalist class that is shockingly ready to lead the world over the cliff. Talk about “The End of History.” Fukuyama may have been right but not in quite the way he thought. The only thing that can save chances for a decent future worthy of new life is a massive popular upheaval leading to a full conversion from fossil fuels to renewable energy along with giant programs of global re-forestation and re-vegetation.

I see young adults with 1-2-year old babies and toddlers in strollers and car seats and I have three blasphemous thoughts these days: (1) are they aware that those strollers and car seats (posture nightmares) are destroying the structure and development of their child’s backs and necks? (2) did they look at the Earth science before they brought new life into this world? (3) They’d better figure out how to focus their lives on bringing about an eco-socialist revolution if they want their kids to have any shot at a decent life.

Bernie is Who We Said He Was

Let me re-state some especially irritating sacrilege to my “progressive” friends: we “perfectionist” radicals told you so and not just about Obama, but also about Bernie F-35 Sanders. It’s considered rude to gloat about having gotten things right while others didn’t. But I don’t really mean to gloat. I wish instead to instead to suggest that the progressive and liberal left (think The Nation, AlterNet, In These Times and the like) might want to pay more attention to its more serious “hard radical” voices (think Black Agenda Report, Counterpunch, John Pilger) when we issue serious and deeply considered warnings about Democratic Party politicos posing as populist champions of peace, equality, and the common good. I won’t belabor the point about Obama, who Dr. Adolph Reed, Jr. all too easily and accurately identified as a “vacuous to repressive neoliberal” as early as January of 1996. That’s old news though now with the added proof of the Dollar Obomber’s great and highly distasteful post-presidential cash-in (since nothing says “show me the money” like POTUS on your resume).

With Bernie of late, we have gotten yet more evidence that he is in fact the imperialist and sheep-dogging fake-socialist Democratic Party company man that some of us the “hard radical” Left said he was. “Bomber Bernie” (as he was quite properly nicknamed by Vermont peace activists when he jumped on board Bill Clinton’s criminal attack on Serbia in 1999) let his imperialist colors fly regarding Donald Trump’s ridiculous, dog-wagging missile-launch into Syria this last spring. Behold this reflection from Young Turk Michael Tracy last April 11th:
“Sanders’ initial statement on the strikes contained nothing that could be reasonably construed as a declaration of opposition…misleadingly, the statement was then excerpted into individual tweets, which falsely gave the impression that Sanders opposed the strikes, when all he had done was signal his “deep concern” as to the potential ramifications of the strikes. That’s a crucial distinction….’Raising concerns’ is not tantamount to an expression of clear, articulable opposition. One can support the Syria strikes, and yet be ‘concerned’ about the second-order effect of them, and the escalated conflict that might result. (See Schumer, Chuck, who rushed to endorse Trump’s attack within hours, only to then follow-up later with expressions of “worry” as to the long-term consequences).”

“Similarly, Sanders expressed ‘concern’ about the potential consequences of Trump’s attack, but not opposition to the act itself. Unlike Schatz, Paul, and Gabbard, he has not rejected on principle the utility of American military force in this circumstance. He merely wants Trump to ‘explain to the American people’ what is to be achieved by the strikes, and to put forward a plan for a ‘political solution.’ Neither of these demands constitutes first-order opposition to the strikes: They are second-order worries. Even Sanders’ procedural complaints don’t signify opposition — unlike [even] Kaine, he doesn’t declare the strikes ‘unlawful,’ he merely says that ‘Congress has a responsibility to weigh in,’ which virtually no one in that body would disagree with.”

“Then, on Meet the Press this past Sunday, Sanders went further: ‘We eventually have got to get rid of Assad,’ he told Chuck Todd, thereby endorsing the underlying logic of regime change. His only apparent recommendation is that this particular regime change be effectuated multi-laterally, i.e, the US should enlist some Middle Eastern autocrats to help out.” (emphasis added).
How’s was that for Left Resistance, Bernie-style? That’s war socialism for you, as in Kautsky, Karl (who was, however, actually a Marxist and socialist, unlike the New Deal liberal Sanders). One is not a “perfectionist” just because they can’t get behind a politician who claims to a social democrat – even a democratic socialist – but who can’t seem to grasp the elementary moral and practical (fiscal and programmatic) contradiction between (a) calling for progressive policy and (b) backing the giant Pentagon System and the historically unmatched global empire it equips and staffs. If one is a left “perfectionist” because they expect post-Vietnam era progressives to honor the basic anti-imperial wisdom of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 4th 1967 “A Time to Break the Silence” speech, then I plead guilty.

It’s true that Bernie recently gave a rousing Chicago speech in which he properly bellowed that “Trump didn’t win the election, the [neoliberal Clinton-Obama – P.S.] Democratic Party lost the election” and that “the current model and the current strategy of the Democratic Party is an absolute failure.” Sanders’ criticism of the Democratic party as out-of-touch and elitist resonated with activists at the People’s Summit. Audience members roared their approval when Sanders said that “the Democratic Party needs fundamental change [and to] understand what side it is on. And that cannot be the side of Wall Street, or the fossil fuel industry, or the drug companies.”

I won’t bother to criticize the notion that significant revolutionary change will or even can take place within and through the Democratic Party (it can’t and won’t). That’s an ancient, never-ending progressive fantasy. The main things that struck me were (a) that Sanders’ oration indicated no movement left (Dr. King-ward) on U.S. foreign policy (imperialism) and (b) that he repeated the establishment claim that Vladimir Putin has been trying to “destabilize democracy” (listen the speech hyperlinked above from 38:45 to 39:10) in the U.S. What democracy, Bernie?

(There was also this strange and repellent line in Sanders speech: “Even a very conservative Republican president like George W. Bush understood that one of the important functions of a leader in a democratic society is to bring people together, not separate them.” That statement, which must be some kind of reference to Dubya rallying the nation [in nationalistic hatred] after the 9/11 jetliner attacks [the hatred was then exploited for the arch-criminal U.S. invasion of Iraq], is so stupid and reactionary it almost defies belief.)

Something Rotten in the State of Independent Left Media

My final blasphemy: there’s something wrong with what passes for independent “left” media in the U.S. today. In an interview concerning David J. Garrow’s recent epic biography of Barack Obama on Dr. Jared Ball’s show imixwhatilike last week, I told the host the story of my last-minute cancellation at Democracy Now! (DN) in December of 2008. I had been scheduled to discuss my all-too sadly predictive book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm, June 2008). I was in New York, flown out there with assistance from my publisher to try to warn folks about the fake-progressive and arch-corporatist, Goldman Sachs-staffed, and imperialist Obama presidency to come. The then the call came to my cell phone on the morning of my scheduled interview as I walked out of midtown Manhattan’s Port Authority and started heading down to DN’s headquarters. The spot was off, cancelled. I had trekked out to the Big Apple for…nothing. Amy and Juan had other matters to which to attend. There was no hint of rescheduling or revisiting prior to the Inauguration. A very basic calculation took hold: nice middle-class DN viewers and contributors would have been put off by my all-too subsequently validated evidence- and history-based projections on the Obamanistic betrayals to come.

Ball then related how having “perfectionist” me on to speak candidly and seriously about the limits of candidate Sanders from a left perspective was a factor in his recent dismissal from another leading left media outlet.

DN’s Goodman has given some credence to the dismal dollar-drenched Dems’ cynical and distracting Russiagate narrative. So now has The Intercept, founded by the E-Bay and Pay Pal billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who pays the journal’s top and brilliant civil-libertarian writer Glenn Greenwald between $250K and $1 million per year. To his credit, the Rolling Stone’s also brilliant and left-liberal, Trump presidency-predicting writer Matt Taibbi ran away from Omidyar’s “independent journalism” scheme after a brief fling three years ago. But now comes depressing news from the left Canadian writer Joe Emersberger:
“In an op-ed for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi called Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro ‘the infamous left-wing dictator of Venezuela.’ To back up his case, Taibbi cited Julio Borges, president of the National Assembly and a leading opposition figure and Henrique Capriles, the opposition governor of the state of Miranda. Didn’t Taibbi notice a huge contradiction in his piece right there? How does the opposition win major elections in a dictatorship?…It gets worse. Julio Borges, as Taibbi also alludes to in his piece, has been using his position as head to the National Assembly to try to get economic sanctions implemented against Maduro’s government. Borges’ predecessor as president of the National Assembly, another opposition leader (Henry Ramos), boasted about having a lot of success scaring away investors – again by using his position as head of the National Assembly which the opposition won control over in December of 2015.”
Good grief. I like Matt Taibbi and have learned a lot about Goldman Sachs and Wall Street’s perversion of America from him, but now even he has lined up with the vicious U.S.-sponsored right-wing assault on Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela.

Is nothing sacred? more

What Exxon-Mobil knew

The story of what the oil companies once knew and promoted on the subject of climate change is deep and complex and for me, endlessly fascinating.

I find that the scientists at big oil knew a very great deal about climate change and their role in it as early the 1980s not the least bit surprising.
What I find less believable is the notion that big oil spent big money to broadcast their enlightened views on climate change. I know of no one, including me, who has any recollection of those efforts. Like most, I thought climate change was a theory discovered by the heavy hitters at NASA as a spin-off of the explorations of Venus and its CO2-rich atmosphere. My views are a lot more nuanced and complex since James Hanson's testimony in 1988 but the extent of the scientific understanding of big oil is still news to me.
The really big story (from my perspective) are the events that made the oil companies change course so dramatically. What happened in those momentous years of the late 1980s—the fall of USSR and the Berlin Wall and end of ideological competition to the most grotesque forms of Robber Baron capitalism? the ideological triumph of monetarism and neoliberalism? the examples of "problem-solving by mandate" in the automobile industry and against Dupont and their Freon?
What made their road from enlightened to irresponsible so short—was their institutional mandate for business-as-usual so powerful?
It is possible that even big oil, with all its resources, really did not know what to do about so massive a problem as climate change?

What? It's a damn shame the oil companies did not act to change the world as mandated by their own scientific research. It would have been most interesting to watch them try!

How Exxon went from leader to skeptic on climate change research
By KATIE JENNINGS, DINO GRANDONI AND SUSANNE RUST, OCT. 23, 2015

Throughout much of the 1980s, Exxon earned a public reputation as a pioneer in climate change research. It sponsored workshops, funded academic research and conducted its own high-tech experiments exploring the science behind global warming.

But by 1990, the company, in public, took a different posture.

While still funding select research, it poured millions into a campaign that questioned climate change. Over the next 15 years, it took out prominent ads in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, contending climate change science was murky and uncertain. And it argued regulations aimed at curbing global warming were ill-considered and premature.

How did one of the world’s largest oil companies, a leader in climate research, become one of its biggest public skeptics?

The answer, gleaned from a trove of archived company documents and the recollections of former employees, is that Exxon, now known as Exxon Mobil, feared a growing public consensus would lead to financially burdensome policies.

Duane LeVine, Exxon’s manager of science and strategy development, gave a primer to the company’s board of directors in 1989, noting that scientists generally agreed gases released by burning fossil fuels could raise global temperatures significantly by the middle of the 21st century — between 2.7 and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit — causing glaciers to melt and sea levels to rise, “with generally negative consequences.”

But he also made it clear the company was facing another threat as well — from public policymakers.

“Arguments that we can’t tolerate delay and must act now can lead to irreversible and costly Draconian steps,” LeVine said.

Heat waves and drought had scorched North America in 1988, fueling public concern that the planet was warming. Top government scientists testified in Congress that year, pushing for action.

Lawmakers at home and abroad began calling for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels — the lifeblood of Exxon’s business. And, in 1988, the United Nations established a panel of scientists to study the issue and make policy recommendations.

Brian Flannery, Exxon’s longtime in-house climate expert, outlined the threat in a note to his colleagues in an internal company newsletter in 1989.

Government and regulatory efforts to reduce the risk of climate change, Flannery wrote, would “alter profoundly the strategic direction of the energy industry.” And he warned that the impact on the company from those efforts “will come sooner … than from climate change itself.”

The company’s shift — from embracing the science of climate change to publicly questioning it — emerged from interviews with former and current Exxon Mobil employees, and a review of internal company documents by Columbia University’s Energy & Environmental Reporting Project and the Los Angeles Times.

The documents were obtained from the Exxon Mobil Historical Collection at the University of Texas at Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History. (Some of those documents have also been the subject of recent reports by InsideClimate News.)

In a recent interview, Flannery said the company was understandably concerned in the 1980s that government regulations being proposed were simplistic and drastic.

“I followed the climate negotiations, and they’d say things like, ‘We should reduce our emissions of CO2 by 10% by 1990.’ And you’re sitting there, and you say, ‘You guys haven’t a clue’” how difficult and disruptive that would be to global industry and the average consumer, he said.

“This isn’t like making low-fat yogurt,” he said.

In an internal draft memo from August 1988 titled “The Greenhouse Effect,” a company public affairs manager laid out what he called the “Exxon Position.” Toward the end of the document, after an analysis that noted scientific consensus on the role fossil fuels play in global warming, he wrote that the company should “Emphasize the uncertainty.”

In 1989, Exxon scientists and managers began briefing employees at all levels of the company on the policy implications of climate change.

LeVine made his presentation to the Exxon board as part of that effort, describing the known science and outlining the company’s position.

Other documents in the archives indicate Exxon scientists had been researching the topic for more than a decade — outfitting an oil tanker with carbon dioxide detectors and analyzers and building models to project how a doubling of the gas in the atmosphere would affect global temperatures.

“Data confirm that greenhouse gases are increasing in the atmosphere,” LeVine told the board, according to a copy of his presentation in the Exxon Mobil archive. “Fossil fuels contribute most of the CO2.”

LeVine argued that the growing push by lawmakers to address the problem was “rooted in the evolution of the just-completed Montreal Protocol.”

Two years earlier, the Montreal Protocol, which was signed by the United States and other countries and went intro effect in 1989, had called for phasing out chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, a group of chemicals responsible for thinning the ozone layer, which protects Earth from harmful solar radiation.

LeVine pointed out that CFCs had been increasing in the atmosphere, just as carbon dioxide levels were increasing. And just as in the case of greenhouse gases, scientific models predicted that CFCs could have serious future environmental effects.

After years of resistance, chemical companies like DuPont were forced to develop alternatives to CFCs.

CFCs might never have been regulated, LeVine noted, had it not been for one crucial event: the discovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica. That discovery, he said, was just the evidence environmentalists needed to rally the public.

The greenhouse gas issue, LeVine explained, had now reached a similar “critical event”: the hot and dry summer of 1988, which caused one of the worst droughts in U.S. history.

At the time, a growing number of experts were “talking about what climate change could mean in the near-term and long-term future,” recalled Joseph Carlson, a now-retired public affairs manager for Exxon who helped draft the company’s position.

That summer, James Hansen, then a NASA climate scientist, told Congress global warming had already begun. His testimony, enhanced by the sweltering temperatures outside, prompted many Americans to begin taking the threat of a hotter planet seriously. Time magazine even put the Earth on its cover as “Planet of the Year.”

Climate scientists, then and now, note that isolated heat waves and droughts are not necessarily the direct result of planetary warming. But, coming in the midst of that debate, that heat wave, which caused more than 5,000 deaths in the United States and cost nearly $40 billion, had a big impact.

So LeVine laid out a plan for the “Exxon Position”: In order to stop the momentum behind the issue, LeVine said Exxon should emphasize that doubt. Tell the public that more science is needed before regulatory action is taken, he argued, and emphasize the “costs and economics” of restricting carbon dioxide emissions.

Banning CFCs “pales by comparison to the difficulties of applying similar approaches” to carbon dioxide, an unavoidable byproduct of burning fossil fuels, which produce most of the world’s electricity, he said.

The company recently declined to comment on the 1989 board meeting. LeVine declined to comment for this story as well. Of the six living members of that board of directors, one declined to comment and five could not be reached.

Alan Jeffers, an Exxon Mobil spokesman, said: “Exxon Mobil has always advocated for good public policy that is based on sound science” and the archived documents reflect “a balanced approach to communicating the risk of climate change.” And he provided a list of more than 50 peer-reviewed publications showing the company continued investigating climate change science throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

::

By the early 1990s, Exxon began putting its new public relations strategy into practice.

At the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting in 1990, the board of directors denounced a dissident shareholder proposal that called for Exxon to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, citing “great scientific uncertainties” about the environmental effects of global climate change. The board also criticized “drastic and precipitant proposals,” like those being considered by the United Nations.

In 1992, Exxon joined the Global Climate Coalition, an association of companies from industries linked to fossil fuels, which vigorously fought potential climate change regulations by emphasizing scientific uncertainty and underscoring the negative economic impact of such laws on consumers.

From 1998 to 2005, Exxon contributed almost $16 million to at least 43 organizations to wage a campaign raising questions about climate change, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental activist group. Greenpeace has estimated that Exxon spent more than $30 million in that effort.

Exxon’s executives also publicly questioned climate change science.

In 1997, Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, Lee Raymond, derided potential regulations on carbon emissions at a meeting of the World Petroleum Council in Beijing.

In the U.S., Exxon took out newspaper ads disparaging federal research into the effect of climate change on different areas of the U.S.

“Today’s global models simply don’t work at a regional level,” read an Exxon Mobil ad in an August 2000 edition of the Washington Post. It went on: “That is why we support emphasis on further climate research.”

::

In 1997, the U.S. Senate refused to ratify a U.N. treaty committing states to reduce greenhouse gases because restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions “could result in serious harm to the United States economy” — an argument Exxon used repeatedly in its public-relations campaign.

Today, the effect of climate change is widely accepted. Average global temperatures have risen approximately 1.5 degrees since 1880, and the sea level has risen at a rate of 0.06 of an inch per year and is accelerating. Moreover, Arctic sea ice coverage is shrinking so drastically that last August, National Geographic had to redraw its atlas maps.

In 2007, the company, for the first time since the early 1980s, publicly conceded that climate change was occurring and that it was in large part the result of the burning of fossil fuels.

“There was a fork in the road. They had the opportunity to make a decision to go one way or the other way,” said Martin Hoffert, an Exxon consultant in the 1980s and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. “If Exxon had listened to its scientists and endorsed our research — and not started that campaign — it would have had, in my opinion, an enormous impact.” more