It wasn’t too long ago that the death of socialism, the triumph of capitalism and the end of history were being widely hailed.
What a difference a few years and a few fractions of a degree in world temperature change makes!
We may still be contemplating the end of history, but of a different sort. It is suddenly becoming painfully obvious that the pursuit of profit and the philosophy of growth for growth’s sake and of dog eat dog is about to kill us all off.
Now that it has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the earth is headed for a global heat wave the likes of which hasn’t been seen in hundreds of thousands and perhaps tens of millions of years–the kind of killing heat that in the past has led to mass extinctions–it is ludicrous to talk about things like carbon trading and raising vehicle mileage standards.
We need a revolution in the way we human beings live and the way we treat each other.
There is no way that the world’s 6.5 billion people–and especially the 2 billion of them who live in wealthier societies–can continue to consume energy at even close to the level that we have been consuming it. There is no way we in the developed world can continue to live the way we have been living, in oversized houses, heated in winter and cooled in summer. There is no way in the northern hemisphere we can continue to have teakwood or mahogany-floored living rooms and eat strawberries in December.
There is no way that we can continue to squander trillions of dollars on war and military spending every year.
No way, that is, if we plan on leaving a livable world for our children and grandchildren.
The so-called “green” politicians who talk about instituting carbon-trading schemes, about driving hybrid automobiles, about buying fluorescent light bulbs, and about turning down the thermostat and wearing sweaters, are deceiving us or themselves.
None of this is going to save us.
What will save us is recognizing that the age of consumer-driven capitalism is over.
We either come up with a new way to organize society, in which production is based upon real needs, not upon manufactured needs, and in which scarce resources are made available to those who need them, not just to those who can afford them, or we will all be doomed–or at least our progeny.
The peoples of the world–especially of the developed world, but really everywhere–need to recognize that unless our expectations are changed, unless our selfish desire for more is curbed, unless wasteful production is ended, we are all likely to be on that extinction list.
So where are the leaders of boldness and vision in politics, media and academia who are ready to tell the truth? Where are the people who are willing to listen to, and reward that truthtelling?
This is not an “inconvenient” truth we need to confront. It’s a terrifying truth.
We need to change everything, and we need to do it quickly, too.
Here in America, that means an end to subsidies for suburban sprawl. There should be no more federal or state funds for road building and road repair. If people want to live miles away from where they work, let them pave their own roads. That’s the only way to get people to realize they’re going to have to start supporting funding for mass transit, and to start thinking about living near where they work. We need to end subsidies for agribusiness, which has virtually decimated local agriculture to the point that prime farm states like Pennsylvania and New Jersey now import all their food from the West Coast. Ridiculous!
We need to levy a massive tax on gasoline, so that no one will buy cars, and so that those who have them will drive them only rarely. Large, heavy vehicles for personal use should be outright banned. Trucks too should be heavily taxed, so that products will reflect the true cost of the environmental damage that shipping them around causes.
Electricity and home heating fuels should also be heavily taxed, with some kind of a rebate program for low-income families, so that people will stop heating and cooling large homes.
As these things are done, there clearly will be massive dislocation. People who live in hot climes like Florida or Arizona will no doubt decide they can’t afford to cool their homes, and will move north. People in cold regions may decide it’s too expensive to heat their homes and will move to more temperate zones. Companies like the Detroit automakers will go bust or shrink enormously. Power plants will be shut down. Oil companies will go bankrupt.
That all has to happen, but it doesn’t mean people have to starve. We as a society need to demand a government that will help those who are displaced by the crisis to relocate and to find new productive ways to earn a living. A huge government program of investment in alternative energy systems would be able to hire many of those whose jobs are lost by the shutdown of the carbon economy.
A new ethos needs to be developed. Conspicuous consumption, egoism and the so-called “American Dream” of having it all for one’s self and one’s family need to be replaced with a new-actually a very old-concept: communalism.
Instead of thinking of ourselves as consumers and competitive free agents, we need to start thinking of ourselves as passengers on a boat that is sinking. If we all run for the lifeboats and life preservers and fight to see who can be saved, the life vests will be torn and ruined and the lifeboats will fall into the sea and sink. In the end, we’ll all go down. If, on the other hand, we change tack, recognize that we’re all in this together, and make orderly plans to save ourselves collectively, we may all be able to get away.
To succeed, we need to acknowledge that everyone is at risk, everyone is contributing to the common goal of survival, and everyone will be taken care of.
The same approach needs to be taken in the larger world. If the poorer nations believe that they are going to be abandoned to catastrophe and famine, they will do two things: continue to try and survive by the old strategies of wasteful energy use and environmental destruction, and of mass migration to safer havens. The first response–for example the continued destruction and burning down of rainforests for wood and cropland and ethanol feedstocks–will threaten us all with ever worsening global warming. The second will lead to overcrowding of more fortunately situated nations, and a drain on their resources.
The only answer is again for all the wealthy nations, and those that are better situated by geography to survive climate change, to commit themselves to helping the more threatened nations and societies. This is not a matter of altruism; it is the simple logic of survival.
But before we can start making the huge changes that are called for–really the dismantling of the whole capitalist system and the freemarket ethos–we need to start hearing, and demanding to hear, the truth–from scientists, from politicians, from business leaders, from the media, and ultimately from ourselves.
For starters, let’s stop kidding ourselves that the latest UN report on climate change is the real story. That report, ominous as it sounds, doesn’t tell the half of it. The report was first watered down by the scientists who reviewed it, and then it was censored by the governments that feared its findings. For one thing, it didn’t even mention that all the projections for warming during this century don’t even take into consideration the role that hundreds of billions of tons of methane gas underlying the Arctic and Antarctic permafrost and trillions of tons of methane lying in the form of frozen hydrates deep under the ocean could play if that super global warming gas should start pouring out into the atmosphere.
We are in a situation where it is wholly inappropriate to act on optimistic assumptions. Rather, we need to consider worst-case scenarios, and start planning and acting with those in mind. That means, for example, that to keep that methane fiasco from occurring, we don’t want the permafrost to go away in the polar regions, we don’t want the oceans to warm precipitously and we don’t want the ice caps to melt away. That means we have to act much more dramatically than just worrying about coastal erosion and lowered crop yields might lead us to do.
This is a crisis that isn’t going away. It is a crisis that isn’t going to be solved with band-aids. It is a crisis that isn’t going to be solved by smooth talk. And it is a crisis that will get worse the longer we take to recognize its true gravity, and the longer we take to face up to the revolution that needs to take place if we are to prevent it.
And that is the truth.
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and columnist whose work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net and www.counterpunch.org. His latest book, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is “The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His home will be submerged when the Greenland icecap melts.
A massive gasoline tax will bring our economy to a standstill. Lidorf is right when he says, “We need a revolution in the way we human beings live and the way we treat each other.” It requires Socialism. This is an emergency situaltion far beyond anything we have experienced and social control of resources, pubic transportation, shipping and the building of a sustainable system are really our only hope. How we do that is up to us.
I’m 67, recently retired, having a wonderful time finally doing the things I love. The only fly in the ointment is the increasing awareness that in another twenty short years, regardless of anything I might do with my time, I will be gone from the bio-political sphere, i.e. dead. If Mssrs. Gore and Lindorff are correct, as they likely are, the human race has also reached a kind of old age. Worse than discovering that we have a terminal illness, we have discovered that we are ourselves a planetary disease.
I am no more optimistic about the human prognosis than I am of my own natural immortality. There are millions of us, severely habituated to our collective routines and our bad habits, and we ain’t gonna change. What the human race needs to do is what intelligent elderly people do. Listen to more music. Read some philosophy. Pet the cat. Enjoy a glass of good wine. Come to some kind of peace with the idea that the goal is not length of years but height of awareness, depth of insight, profundity of love, best use of our aesthetic and intellectual faculties while the sun yet shines.
We need to face the reality that we have made irrevokable bad choices, like a 30 year smoker. No sense blaming it on the tobacco company at this late stage. Life is still a great miracle and the human race remains a noble experiment. It isn’t our fault if, like feral chickens, we just weren’t quite smart enough to survive.
The problem with this dismal view is that we have kids, and grandchildren, and we cannot simply dismiss their futures the way we might shrug off our own self-induced lung cancer. We need to act with dispatch and with a willingness to make the big, disruptive changes that need to be made, so that they don’t die off too because of our mistakes.
I completely agree that the current flow of human activity is unsustainable in many different ways, however it seems unlikely that the US will be part of the solution.
The US, with its values, institutions, and mainstream culture, has an incredible amount of inertia as it moves in the direction of consuming as many resources as possible as quickly as possible. This ocean liner will not easily change course. However, Captain Bush has steered the ship into the iceberg of Iraq, while taking on massive doses of debt, and the US may sink within a decade or two.
And hopefully the demise of the US will be of some value in serving as an example to all others, making it easier to avoid the allure of exciting, and temporarily comfortable, corporate capitalism and to choose a more healthy and sustainable course.
I’d already nominated Francis Fukuyama’s “the end of history” as the biggest joke of the early 21st century.
Unfortunately an end of human history may actually be about to overtake us.
Agreed. Steps must be taken, but politics as usual won’t solve anything. I can just imagine a California politician campaigning on a “stop building and fixing roads” platform.
These steps will be taken in the future but only after the wreckage of the current system is cleared away.
Mr. Lindorff, you’ve framed the situation well, the cause, the effect, the cure. I’m highly supportive of the view, and proposals. I think we could benefit from more detail of various potential catastrophes. I think we could use a whole lot more media attention on the work that’s actually being done toward building an alternate future. When awareness is raised, people start watching the thing grow, they get involved, they participate. It’s a great opportunity for each individual. We can actually build this world we only dreamed about before. People are eager to apply their creativity in the new pursuit. We just need to establish the new boundaries.
6.5 billion people is unsustainable. Period.
The earth may have reached its capacity to sustain the current population, especially when the Western consumer model cannibalizes the very resources required for long-term sustainability. Just as the tsunami took 250,000 in the blink of an eye, another weather event took Katrina, the belief in “End Times” may be happening in a slow stream of events that is clearing the planet, place by place. Pockets of light and life will likely remain, and in those zones, the natural spirit of innovation, intelligence and hopefully communalism will begin anew. This will not be mankind’s first time at this. Whether we understand the Bible story of a great flood to speak of earlier civilizations, or similar accounts of Atlantis. Human nature has become so thoroughly hypnotized and programmed by commercial culture (particularly in the Western world) that unless catastrophe/collapse knock right at people’s doors, change will be unlikely to happen. IF Al Gore succeeded in galvanizing leaders of government and industry to set better markers, some progress might be made to hold off the degree to which massive cleansing otherwise has become inevitable. Someone wrote about a “selfish gene,” a concept I don’t think has anything to do with genes; but it does mark this latter portion of the 20th century, and the way media put forth the purveyors of conspicuous consumption to normalize insane shopping choices like giant SUVS and huge homes and as the recent study revealed, a burgeoning population of the morbidly obese. Yep. Morbid, indeed.
Amen!
This prognosis is unnecessarily pessimistic. I agree that human beings need to make adjustments and use resources more efficiently, but I don’t see the end of the carbon age equalling the end of civilization. I can forsee a future, for example, where deserts are seeded with a kind of “silicon tree” that requires no water and positions its photovoltaic “leaves” to maximally harvest solar energy. Part of the harvested energy is used to grow new “trees” and service the existing ones, while the remainder is available for human consumption. And there’s a whopping amount of desert on four continents.
Capitalism has its ills, but regulated capitalism can work as well as any other system. I do not want to live in a world that is extreme in either the capitalistic or the socialistic direction. Both systems have their strengths and weaknesses. For me, the question is not one or the other, but which aspects of community life are best served by which approach, and how can the systems be regulated, administered, and meshed efficiently.
Sadly, I do agree that some serious dislocation will be necessary before we are willing to make adjustments. There are those for whom the present system works very well, and those people have both the vested interest and the financial clout to see to it that this system is perpetuated as long as possible. We will probably be well beyond some sort of precipice by the time people at large recognize that there are some serious problems here and those problems have been allowed to fester because someone stood to profit thereby. This transitional period could well be a hard age to live in.
Alternatively, someone of great vision and political skill may yet step forward and lead us into a new age. I think it is very sad that, on one hand, thinking people know what must be done, while on the other hand knowing why it will not be done until our backs are against the wall. Nevertheless, this is the price of a free society. We want to be able to live where we want to live, work where we want to work, and eat what we want to eat, and entrepreneurs want to provide us with what wee need to do that. A government must tread somewhat carefully in these areas. But it is always possible that someone of great skill can inspire most of us to make the needed adjustments, while thwarting those who through prejudice, greed, or honest disagreement are reluctant to adjust.
The twin pillars of a liveable future are population control and clean energy. Get those two right, and all other problems are manageable. Get them wrong, and all other problems are irrelevant.
All we really need is a visit from the Cosmos by an alien space ship, right in the middle of DC, for all television cameras to get a look at, after which Religion can die quickly and peacefully!
Dave: AS much as I too would like to believe that “big disruptive change” brought on by a world citizenry suddenly enlightened enough to understand that only radical immediate change will PERHAPS limit climate change enough to save parts of the world that are merely an abstraction to most people, I have to agree with voxclamantis.
I will continue to fight the good fight and will try not to miss opportunities to act to stop global warming (write to my corporately-bought and paid for congressman and senators, be vegan, ride a bicycle, try to buy locally produced food, buy only used stuff, etc), I don’t see the kind of sea change in consciousness that you write about as possible. As vox points, out, too many bad choices for too long.
I see a bleak future ahead, and I mourn for the animals and plants and the earth nore than I do for a species that is simply a cancer on the planet. Perhaps after a great die-off, another species will arise who does a better job at understanding that we are all a part of planet earth, not apart from it.
Not to rub salt in the wound but feral chickens are smarter than humans. There is no other species that could be as self-destructively stupid as humans have been. Human arrogance and excessive brain activity led to this situation. Its ironic but its the case. Humans think they are outside Nature–that they are better than the world they were created in(that’s why they either think they will ascend through spirit to another realm, or through science–i.e. rocketships. Whether its Secular Evolution or the Theistic Great Chain of Being, too many humans think the same way).
“Beware the beast-man for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he would murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers. For he will make a desert of his home, and yours.”
The Lawgiver in Planet of the Apes.
I excel at morbid!
The US seems to be resolutely marching in the wrong direction.
The average size of US cars and trucks have become are noticably bigger over the past few months of stable fuel prices.
If an American visits the carbon-footprint calculator on the British site: http://www.carbonfootprint.com/ ,they find it is not usable, because it doesn’t even list sort of cars Americans drive. A “family car” there is only 1.8 liter, the largest engine one can select is only 3.0L.
I recently found that refrigerators with an “energy star” rating have become hard to find.
My city is facing massive cuts in public transit service -at the hands of state legislators who would like to abolish it altogether because it is “socialist”.
Meanwhile the city is pursuing a second “rennaissance” based on parking garage construction - but they will have a couple bike racks and will have energy efficient lighting.
Downtown redevelopers threatened to back out of their projects unless the transit authority removed all bus service from the streets near their projects. Fortunately, they seem to have backed off for now; it was explained that 50-60% of downtown workers - even many well-paid ones the developers were trying to attract, use the bus every day to get to work.
A major employer has desided to move to a far-out exurb, because they need space for more parking for their anticipated hiring expansion.
Probably 50% of my co-workers commute at least 50 miles, each way, in large pickups or SUV’s - but lay all the blame for hemmoraging household budgets on gasoline being too expensive.
It goes on and on…
Humans will only make it if they are more emotionally connected to the human race than to their own small groups (e.g. Bush and Cheney to their fellow wealthy elites) or to the planet, which is a big rock 8,000 miles in diameter with a very superficial covering of life, or to other animal species or other forms of life.
Humans survived this long by evolving into creatures that had great potential to become connected to their own small human groups. But then with civilization, humans banded together into gigantic groups, where it became impossible to be emotionally connected to each member in the group. However, humans coped by forming an abstraction of a tribe and then a nation that they felt emotionally connnected to. And then, as humans interacted across the globe, some humans began abstracting to a connection with their whole species, the human race, as they recognized that humans were all closely related and had a great deal in common.
But against this emotional connection is all the pain and disappointment from interactions with others acting insensitively, with greed and ruthlessness. And there is a battle, within each of us, to maintain this connection and to foster it in others, for it becomes more clear every year that our children’s welfare is inextricably tied to the welfare of the entire human race and it is unlikely the future of the human race will ever become secure unless a great many people become committed to securing it.
For Dave Lindorf and all others looking for an interesting take on the crisis described see the website:
http://www.kunstler.com/
James Howard Kunstler is a writer of prototypical obnoxious New Yorker demeanor– think Senator Up-Chuck(ie) Schummer in full blaze–but (like Schummer)once you get beyond his natural obnoxiousness and actually listen to what he is saying for its content it has a lot of value.
Good stuff. I’ve been seeing this coming since I moved to the LA Basin in 1965. I had never lived in such a city before, and was horrified at the congestion and god-awful air quality. I escaped after college, but was “scarred” for life. For one thing, I decided to remain childless — a decision that I don’t regret. I’m a mechanical engineer, and see no practical way for technology to keep us in this neverland state. India & China are not the most populous countries on Earth — the U.S. is! That is, in the only metric that makes sense — resource use per capita. We are only too willing to be conditioned to keep on being pigs. Population reduction is the only answer. We MUST stop having babies! To satisfy our parental urge, consider adopting the almost unlimited numbers of unloved children in the world. Of course, even this approach is wrong in that the adopted child is converted from a low-consuming 3rd world being into into a high-consuming U.S. citizen. The point is, each of us has to take personal responsibilty for our footprint on the Earth. We must stop waiting for a Leader to tell us what to do. Educate ourselves and act in a sane manner. Of course, I doubt that enough of us will do any of this. There’s too much societal, economic, and emotional pressure to keep growing the population.
kivals has got the crux of the problem. The duality of self and other is not a recent or even a human development. Among the first skills evolved by one celled organisms is to recognize “alien” particles and to repel or oust them from the boundaries of the self. This is also a picture of animal aggression and tribal society, a fairly intractable source of alienation and belligerence.
Our collective survival has depended on our counterintuitive ability to respect the widest possible boundaries - the community of America, the community of nations, the community of nature - and to come to a Kantian recognition that our own welfare is contingent on the welfare of the whole. We have had some success historically at this, but as the current state of affairs reveals, not nearly enough.
I live in a place where people shoot coyotes and fear Mexicans, and though I would welcome it I don’t notice a sea change in human consciousness. 95 percent of us still take the kneejerk response of blaming some “other” for our woes. I hope you are right, Mr. Lindorff, that the reality of climate degradation will shock the great, torpid central mass of humankind into corrective activity. Maybe it is just cynicism from 6.5 years living in Bushville and reading Robert Fisk, but given the extreme denial of which we are capable I would not expect any saving intelligence to emerge until water no longer flows from our taps and our hair has begun to catch fire.
So, bottom line… we’re all doomed.
Folks, there ain’t no way to fix it now. Malthus was right, but he didn’t consider (or even know about) petroleum or natural gas. WE are made of fossil fuels. Yes we are! Think of all that fertilizer made from natural gas. There is nothing we can do to mop it all up and put it back where it came from, not even if “we” could plant rainforests from here to kingdom come. Let’s find some ways to make what lies before us meaningful, cuz that’s all we’ve got!!
The way we carry on with our society will eventually change. What remains to be seen is whether we change voluntarily and have a say in the outcome or whether we encounter the change against our will and get what we deserve in the end.
Everything Lindorff says makes perfectly good sense, and so, of course, is not remotely likely to happen.
Dear frank1569
Basically, yes.
It has been thus for years. Thirty seven years ago I was expecting civilization to crash in an ecological crisis — many of us so-called “hippies” believed that. We wanted to create a new culture and transform society (the plan was to create new culture and seduce the baby boomers (then acutal babies)out from under what we then called “the establishment” — good plan; didn’t work, obviously), but only the dreamiest flower children among us believed we had a real big chance of succeeding. We had to give it a try because it was the only thing we could think of to do. In those days, when I was young, I expected the big crash to happen any second — that was the source of my hippiethink: “the future is just a fantasy trip in your head, man; now is the only reality.” Well, the big crash went on for decades without ever happening and I began to suspect I had been wrong. Maybe I should have planned for the future like all those believer-consumers who believed there was going to be one. Now I’m about to turn 62 and am a few years away from retiring with a pension that may or may not be there (see the many articles on Common Dreams about oncoming financial catatrophe), into a world where everyone who is surviving will be so busy scrambling to hang on with no time or place for compassion for “the elderly” — i.e., me and my wife.
Kurt Vonnegut, many years ago, said “Things are going to get worse and never get better again” and that’s obviously what’s happening. That doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t try to do what they can to reverse the situation. To give up and say, “Screw it; we’re doomed” ensures that the day can’t be saved. My tagline as Paranoid Pessimist is “I hope I’m wrong, but … ” And I do. I take no joy in what’s happening (some who think along my lines seem to, seem to have a “serves humanity right” attitude). I hope that everyone gets their act together, starts working for the common human good, uses the entirety of human imagination and innovative abilities to devise exciting solutions to all these problems, that a wave of compassion for the less fortunate (an essential component of “saving the day”) sweeps through humanity leading to a golden age. I’ll do what little I can to guide things in that direction, though no one ever listens to me (I’m a voice laughing in the wilderness).
What I can do is try to face the future with as cheerful an attitude as I can manage and try to be a pessimistic positivist, face reality without being done in by it, have hope for the future despite all the evidence that there isn’t going to be one. A challenge, but, hey, that’s what they say being human is all about. So I restart up my blog
http://www.paranoidpessimist.blogspot.com/
even though, when it was active, no one ever sent me a comment.
So I shall issue a challenge to humanity (like it needs one from me, or cares: Prove me wrong! Turn things around! Find solutions!
If all you folks who literally think these are the solutions and claim there is a majority supporting them actually chose to live them, you’d change the entire system from the inside out simply by living what you claim to value.
I have read and appreciated all of the truly eloquent comments above. Out of everything, however, this was the most marvelous understatement:
“This transitional period could well be a hard age to live in.”
I think I’ll frame that and hang it on the wall above my computer.
Thanks
Boy, I wish the Progressive camp would get that nauseating poetry-of-our-demise out of our systems.
Yes, most humans are perambulating wood. We all get that by now. The question is whether or not any of us can make that terrifying trek from blithe ignorance, through terror, to decisive action.
People who wring their hands are no good to have around during an emergency. The situation is dire, and it demands people that can zero in on the problem, and actually do something about it.
If poxClematis wants to cash in his chips and sip wine, OK, he’s another incarnation of the couch potato we’ve all come to love so much.
But I want to live. I want to learn, and adapt, and survive.
Don’t you?
Lindorff does not appear to be supporting any ideology, he is just stating we need to drop the subsidies for those endeavors that are destroying the earth and impoverishing humanity.
Most people work like slaves in a capitalistic frenzy to produce unneeded products, with the fruits of their labor being taken by the ruling class. Let’s discourage consumption, reduce production, and allow people to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
To accomplish this we first must get a free press, change our system to a democracy, and make tax laws fair. The change will then come naturally and the transition will be painless and liberating.
all the handwringing cracks me up. every single person here could stop driving their car, today. stop buying wasteful products today. strive to move closer to work, today. stop eating lettuce from CA and strawberries from mexico, today. refuse to ever climb aboard another jet, today.
and of course all these things will have consequences…which will be consequences just the same later. it will cost more to move where everyone wants to live..no matter what. you will have to get used to a much more locally limited diet…no matter what. you will need to adjust to your horizons being those of peasants who do not waste energy traveling hundreds or thousands of miles for the selfish pursuit of personal pleasure…no matter what. you will have to give up the low cost of imports…no matter what.
Face it today, and do it today, and stop complaining about waiting to find someone who will make you and everyone else do what you claim to already want………but most refuse to act on radically and decisively in your own life. 50% of the population never buying fuel again after today would decimate big oil profits. 50% of people never ever setting foot on an airliner or eating another mexican strawberry would slash these industries to the bone..and create new ones.
quit bleating about why no one will make you do these things and prove you are not a sheep but a factor…take action now and be a factor, not a whiner
“Let’s discourage consumption, reduce production, and allow people to enjoy the fruits of their labor. ”
Where will these people labor when production is reduced, and how will they enjoy the fruits of their labor when their opportunities for labor are downgraded to living like peasants?
Look…your congress is owned by the mega billionaires and the corporations….neither ipso facto have a conscience larger than a pea….you are talking about INFORMING the public about the destructiveness of the consumer society….how do you do that if your media and pols are BOUGHT???
Mtn Goat ~ I applaud your attempts to hold back this stampede of ignorance and doom, but I think you’re being a bit too logical for their tastes. Just offer them an alternative; perhaps by giving all THEIR assets to the poor and signing over THEIR pink slips for the SUV to the local food bank they will feel better about themselves. All these opponents of capitalism need to look at their own lives before they start directing the lives of others. I’m glad these fringe-thinking lunatics aren’t lucid enough to actually promote these ideas, as somebody might actually think they’re serious!
if you expect a specific outcome from ‘education’ or ‘informing’ people on matters of subjective desire…what you are asking for is not education or information..it is indoctrination.
perhaps it should occur people are already bombarded with your ideas..and they simply do not agree because you refuse to accept your ideals are not objective..they are akin to religious values others will not share simply because you ‘educate’ them.
PFDee, the promotion IS their problem..instead of *acting* today to demonstrate their intense commitment and acceptance of the consequences which would result in massive and immediate change they say they want…
they promote these ideas, complain they are not listened to, and wait for someone to lead them…in spite of the fact they claim to already be convinced of these horrors, certain that these acts are destroying the earth, and refuse to act immediately in service of these commonly held ideas they don’t need leaders for in the first place. the promotion instead of action eats up all their energy
Such is the plight of the wayward leftist. So convinced they are of their vast unerring intellect that boring, mundane things like facts and history are trivial to them. You read the above posts like 2,000 years of human progress means nothing, that life expectancies doubling in the last 100 years is blase, and that we have nothing what-so-ever to look forward to. Myself, I have a more positive and forward-thinking approach to life. It’s as good as we make it, and we should start with our own economic self-sufficiency and clean up our own lives, before we start making demands and dictates to the rest of the community.
A new way to live and a new way to treat one another…
http://www.gpln.com
http://www.gpln.com/onwork.htm
MtnGoat, your rhetoric is lovely, but some of us don’t realistically have the ability to do all those things you suggest. I would LOVE not to have the commute that I do, 66 miles each way. But my alternatives are to either quit my job (there are no jobs in my field that are physically closer) or to not live with my husband (who is in a similar situation with regard to his job). Neither is very acceptable. The best I have managed is to have a car which gets at least 30 mpg, and to carpool.
Hey Paranoid Pessimist:
Don’t worry about it. Nobody likes doomsayers. But you are a kindred soul. The progressive in you hopes Dave Lindorff becomes President. The honest guy in you says it looks like we’re screwed. It’s the times we live in. Hang in there, pal. They need us.
Here are a couple of hopeful crumbs. Back when we were fish, according to the evolutionists, we didn’t grow lungs until the puddles starting drying up. So it isn’t beyond the pale of science that eleventh hour remedies are built into the stuff of nature. We might get one. Or failing that, it looks like the immediate future will contain either mankind’s breakthrough into a wonderful new level of awareness or our apocalyptic demise, and either way we are privileged to witness the event.
Outerbeltway:
When I look at the scattering of creative, intelligent, positive responses to my whining defeatism (including yours), I don’t feel too bad about tossing out my thoughts. I registered 30 democrats before the 2003 elections. I do what I do, but I think what I think.
Pax, Vox
Cel, the problem is that people will support forcing you to make these changes wether you choose them or not. This the point.
The consequences of requiring people to live where others want them will create these problems. Look at what you are saying…that in your judgement, there are no other acceptable alternatives. People here are pushing for actions that will not allow you to make these judgements except at extreme cost..which will require an even better job just to stay even.
my arguments as presented are not arguments I believe should be imposed. they are the distillation of all the complaints here and calls for action in restrictions and restructurings. though they are extreme and carry huge consequences doesn’t matter, because it is what is being pushed for.
read all the literatue and arguments here. restricted travel and forced mass transit use by restricting housing locations, or by making you pay every penny for roads. making flight incredibly expensive. trade barriers to non local foods and products and high taxes on all imports. ending of ‘overproduction’ as seen by pseudoreligious ascetics. reorganization of society to support these things. it doesn’t matter these consequences will limit your choices…that is the INTENT. To end the ability to choose what they do not like, or raise the cost so high they can prevent these choices because the average person can no longer afford them.
If you have a gripe with these ideas, it’s not a gripe with me…it’s with those who push them but will not live them on their own.
Look at the arguments…the value decisions you are making are part of what is killing the planet, and you make them for what *you* want…to live with your husband or where you can afford too. it is your commute, it is your lifestyle because the only thing which will work is incredibly radical action to impose vast restrictions or high costs in the hopes of achieving vast changes. these are argued for in many posts here. achievement of what these people want will eliminate the ability for you to choose the compromise you have chosen for you.
We needn’t necessarily rush to socialism as we discard capitalism. My own readings (about 20 year’s worth, a degree in anthropology & history and some life’s experiences) on the matter suggest to me that the crux of the problem is not -ism, -ology, etc. but rather the concentration and centralization of power coupled with basic human dynamics. The more carnivorous (perhaps pathologically so) members of our species gravitate to the top of these power structures and it may not, in the end, matter what sort of system you have.
I’m fairly convinced that the alternative is decentralization, a return to localized/self-determined power. Far, far smaller districts that any single politician can command — perhaps no more than 1,000 people, and no geographical displacement of their office more than a 10 mile radius. We have at least two magnitudes larger of a population than in 1776, and yet 2 senators per state, and one president. The ratio of representative:citizen has shrunk immensely, become even abstract.
This is a call for a new political backdrop. The economic backdrop would be similar, imagine a return somewhat to local economies. How much consumption is involved before you even buy something? In other words, how in the heck can it be cheaper to get something made in Asia, shipped across the Pacific, loaded onto a train, and put into a Big Box? The handling, the fuel costs, etc. There’s a supply-side consumption that needs to be addressed first.
You people all make me feel dumb.
Really.
I am TRYING not to fall into some sort of end-of-the-world ennui, but it’s hard. Too many people just don’t get it, or they do and just don’t care.
A lot of us have this dominion philosophy that says that the world is dying anyway, so we might as well live it up. We’re acting like a terminally ill millionaire that doesn’t want anyone getting her money when she dies. So she spends it.
“Here are a couple of hopeful crumbs. Back when we were fish, according to the evolutionists, we didn’t grow lungs until the puddles starting drying up. So it isn’t beyond the pale of science that eleventh hour remedies are built into the stuff of nature. We might get one. Or failing that, it looks like the immediate future will contain either mankind’s breakthrough into a wonderful new level of awareness or our apocalyptic demise, and either way we are privileged to witness the event.”
So maybe Mother Nature has some surprise in store for us? Maybe our skin will become resistant to ultraviolet rays? Perhaps we’ll grow gills and fins? I hope so.
I do what I can. I don’t drive. I live relatively close to work. I carpool and use public transportation. I hoof it.
The author’s view on saving Mother Earth is one that isn’t going to be popular. He’s come up with the solution that no one wants to hear. People will have to stop driving or eating kiwis or hamburgers (cows produce a good bit of methane). It’s going to be a real fight to save us from ourselves.
to cel, and mtngoat and all others too
lovely rhetoric is a necessary thing - i re-read malcolm x regularly - he reminds me what courage is - and courage is a necessary thing -
these things that a ‘modern’ life demands - gasoline, imported grain - etc etc etc - dinner hour on the 405 - i’ve met a lot of nice cars there - these are expensive right now - and most people in the world cannot afford them - and neither can we - we just have not been presented with the bill yet - raising the dollar amount is only the beginning - wait until los angeles is buying its water from canada - wait until san francisco needs 250 billion to protect its waterfront from rising seas - and not just san francisco but san diego, la, seattle vancouver qand every small coastal city and town between - just wait until someone in a last ditch try to own some foreign sand and its oil sets of a bomb that obliterates tehran - these are the kinds of consequences that will come - and with it a kind of suffering that we’ve not seen or felt - it is the sixth great extinction and we brought this on, not ourselves, but the whole of earthly wonder. drive 66 miles to work - or dont - quit your job and dont drive at all
humans dont have to live like this and we dont have to live like peasants, either unless by peasant you mean people of the area and yes - we must becomepeople of our area - just like we dont generally, throw beer cans on the kitchen floor , we need to regain citizenship in the actual world where what we do has actual consequences and what we say is actually heard and what we think is actually thought under the sky that covers us all - the world that will come at least will do this - it will clear the air of the foul stench oil and its money
Here’s something I was just thinking of. I’m certainly no scientist, but is there some way to dissipate these methane gases? Is there some way to cool the Earth via artificial means? We’ve used science to manipulate nature for as long as recorded time. Just getting people to stop eating, driving, and buying may not be enough. It seems like we’re just trying to do this through economic and political means.
We are all one with our beautiful planet, we are part of her just as we are one with the universe.
The darkness has tricked us for too long with their lies but now we are beginning to know the truth about who we are and what we are the lies the darkness has forced onto us are being seen clearly everywhere we look, from the politicians to the corporate leaders and bankers, the monarchies, the religious leaders all are in league with the darkness who tell us lie after lie, shower us with fear after fear to control us and enslave us into the darkness too. The time of the global elite is almost over, they have no right to govern us or play their sick nefarious games with us, we are all one and we will through our own will heal our mother Earth and restore this world to the paradise it should be by living in peace, equality and harmony with everyone and everything on this planet, we are all one and it is love which connects us to everything.
peace and love
And just imagine what it will be like in 50 years when the worlds population will be 18 to 20 billion instead of the 6.5 billion we have now. Or how about at the turn of the next century when it will be approaching 6o billion. Population control has to be part of the approach, however that is eventually arrived at.
Everyone also talks about how everyone needs to move closer to work. Why? Instead of forcing mass population and economic dislocations wouldn’t it be easier and better to move work closer to where people live. This is supposedly the information age. Why are people commuting to work when much of that work could be done at home by computer via the internet. Even small assembly work could be done at home and sent by truck or train to the main plant for major assembly. The government could easily encourage this through tax incentives/disincentives.
I’ve only mentioned a couple of items, there are many more. What we need is “out of the box thinking” to come up with creative solutions before we jump off the cliff into massive economic disruption and population dislocation.
Lobo Gris
Too bad we have the Bush admin when all of this is really starting to hit the fan. It’s like you’re late to get out of the house and discover a flat tire. Even with an executive that was alarmed we’d have to be pushing things, but with this chump in office…
I can commiserate with VoxClamantis, whose views are wholly consistent with his Wikipedia listing. I love your prose, but we don’t all want to be peasants crying out. And I wager you don’t either. (Psst, 67 ain’t that old — you could live to 120, that’s 50 more years of struggle, big guy.)
Vox Clemantis-
If you’re still on this thread - Pax. It’s easy to tell you’re a good one. I was after your goat, not you.
Best,
OB
For all the Amory Lovens types posting here, your’re wrong. As some have correctly pointed out this planet simply can’t continue to support 6.5 billion people. The modern industrial age is the result of abundant cheap fossil fuels. It can’t be sustained and it won’t. The Bush regime is just the opening act in a world struggle for vanishing resources. I suspect many who vent their spleen, desperation, pessimism, here have begun to do some of things that need to be done. I have, and I do, and though I’m not ready to slit my wrists I can’t help but think that it’s too little, too late.
It’s difficult to disagree with most of what Mr. Lindorff suggests. I am wondering what will be done with all of those massive new tax revenues. If there is no revolution in our political system, do you think those who run our country (and, indeed, the world) will use that treasure for the benefit of the masses? Government imposition of new stringent rules and taxes will only serve to enrich the already rich and kill-off the poor and middle classes. I think this is the plan “they” - the elitists - have had all along.
Political realities aside, I’m sure the climatologists are on to something here and our oceans will rise and Earth will change in ways that may make it impossible for life as we know it to survive. This may happen in the next century or two. In the meantime, there’s to be another ecological problem that can kill all of us in the next few years, whether we give up our suv’s or not, and not related to
nu-cu-lar bombs. It seems the pollinating bee population is disappearing at an extremely rapid rate - up to 50% or more in the US and Europe -up to 80% in some localized areas. No one really knows if they died from some toxin introduced into the farming fields, or if they just sensed the rising oceans and moved on to another planet. Either way - if we don’t fix that problem - and soon - we won’t have to worry about staying home or swimming to higher ground. Without bees, the whole food chain will go bust in less than a decade or so. So, Mr. Lindorff, it does seem that people will have to starve.
I do not agree with some posters that Lindorff is wasting his time, merely whining to the whining choir. Human activity can be represented as a set of positive feedback loops, and Lindorff spreads the message that the positive feedback for behavior inconsistent with long-term human welfare must be disrupted while new positive feedback loops must be constructed. By doing so, he adds to the discussion that is essential to build the momentum necessary to engage in such disruption and construction.
Dear Paranoid Pessimist, You did not get old in vain, you inspired hundreds of people to QUESTION AUTHORITY ALWAYS, sure maybe not enough, but just think how bad it could have been if the hundreds you did affect were never affected?
I have thought of that and guess what, be proud you did your part. People did follow, and it made a difference because we could be worse off already, however, we are still going there!
Maybe hope is all there is, but it is all we have left, or have truly ever had.
Wow, the comments on this list cause me to me wonder why people as incredibly ignorant as the bushes and cheneys continue to exist. It is obvious there are a lot of ethical and very concerned citizens in this country. In a way what the people have to say here is the real news.
Cel,
Please consider that your current arangement exists only BECAUSE of the automobile and excessively cheap fuel. If the price gasoiline ever goes up to an appropriate level for it’s impact and scarcity, that 66-mile commute is goint to become cost-prohibitive anyway.
I don’t want to sound hard or anything, but you or your spouse might have to change careers. I’ve had to change careers three times myself in response to economic conditions, and recently, I changed homes along with my job change, in response to my desire to minimize my carbon footprint.
“And just imagine what it will be like in 50 years when the worlds population will be 18 to 20 billion instead of the 6.5 billion we have now.”
No one is predicting such population growth. Birth rates are generlly declining worldwide. UN projections are for a population peak of 9 to 11 billion between 2050 and 2100.
Just a few more thoughts after reading some of the many thoughtful responses to this article. To critics who claim that global warming “leftists” are basically a bunch of hypocrites who need to practice what they are preach, I must say that many of us do, at least as best we can while continuing to live in a society that automatically implicates us all as contributors to the problem. As some have mentioned, in order to live, work, and raise children in a highly developed industrial society, we are automatically part of the problem, no matter how conscientious we may be in terms of trying to live in a way that minimizes the damage we do. I
think we are all searching for ways to live that are consonant with a desire to make a difference, contribute to the solution, but this is clearly a case when the personal choices of a few are just not enough. Too little too late is the common theme.
And as to the argument that the steps necessary to even retard the increase in greenhouse gasses would require a degree of restrictions on personal freedoms that is unacceptable to most, I would have to reply that restriictions on our “freedoms” will come anyway when people are forced to move to more hospitable areas until those places become overpopulated and uninhabitable.
This is not a “left” versus “right” issue, and to frame it in this way evidences the success with which the current inept administration has succeeded in undermining efforts to even acknowledge let alone address it.
Check out “Peak Oil: A Primer on remaining human” at http://www.hydrocarbonman.com
I have lost all faith in the sort of collective action Dave proposes. It now comes down to what individuals and small “tribes” can do for themselves and each other.
I have drawn a circle on the map around my home with a radius of ten miles. That’s how far I can walk and back in a day. Very shortly that will be the size of my world. I’ve started an inventory of what’s here. It’s scary, but also encouraging.
There’s freedom and personal empowerment in ceasing to think outside that circle.
Thanks for the stampede of ideas….
How can we work with one another and nature to again create a viable way of living on our planet? It does’nt do any good to philosophize unto doom….Humans are tenacious, life is tenacious, whats the next step is always with us…….we have to reinvent ourselves and we are! Imagine how fast the world would change if for even one month the primary ideas being fed into our global media nervous system-centered on working with one another and nature to heal the planet.You might respond- ‘Aint gonna happen Vern’ and to this I might answer- that is yet another idea… it is within the realm of possibilty.The same intelligence which brings forth and sustains life is capable of resolving our problems if we attune ourselves with-it.
We can and are making the needed changes right this very moment.
I’ve been living on a small island on the west coast of Canada for 30 years now. We have a home business making a food product from ancient Japan that requires no refrigeration. We use firewood from our land to cook the ingredients, don’t heat the building, follow a labour intensive process, stayed small, walked to work, etc. So far, so good. BUT the rice, salt, barley, and soybeans have to come from somewhere else–usually far away. The only practical packages are plastic. Our customers are all over the country and it’s geographically huge. We tried to get away from the petroleum treadmill but we didn’t. Maybe now the local farmers can start thinking about growning barley and soybeans. It won’t be easy but it IS possible.
I guess we all need to dare to look crazy. At my age (57) I have not too much to lose by washing my hair with bar soap and rinsing it with vinegar so that I don’t let the crap that’s in shampoo pollute the local oysters and salmon. Some of my friends live off the grid, but we all drive cars. We we car pool often but we could use mopeds to get to our yoga classes–there is so much anyone can do if we are really committed to geting out of our comfortable habits and don’t care what the neighbours think. I don’t for one minute think it will be easy.
The other day at the general store I heard a cattle farmer ask the owner if they would buy vegetables from him if he grew them. They said yes. Sounds like progress to me.
Mr. E,
If everyone on the planet, particularly everyone in the USA, were like most of the posters on this board, there would be little worry. We could all go back to bicycles and minimal energy use in ones’ house and it would not be that bad at all.
My wife is from China and I traveled some in China before the economic boom and I found the Chinese urban world of bicycles and generally low energy use to be quite refreshing and healthy. I am saddened to see the Chinese go through this change, but I think they realized that if they did not join the global game they would be crushed by it, and that is a virtual certainty. Large-scale industrialization would have come sooner or later, and later would have been under the boot of Western capitalists who would most likely have created a nightmare scenario making the current China seem like paradise by comparison. Of course as it is the Western capitalists are making it difficult for the Chinese to pass pro-labor legislation, but that is another story.
The obstacle we all face is a set of powerful elites, especially US elites, who will tenaciously hold onto, and try to increase, their advantage over the rest of us. When they see a world of diminishing resources they do not think “Hey, we need to all work together to make a smooth transition to using less energy for the common good of humanity.” Instead, they think “How are we going to take control of the diminishing resources. What propaganda is necessary, what measures are necessary, which information channels will we need to control, what wars should we start, and which people can we put into power to follow our orders?”
And these elites are very willing to crush any opposition by any means necessary, and they could not care less if it means endless misery (ending only with death) and suffering for 99% of the world’s population, including the great majority of Americans. I will bet you that many of them, certainly Mr. Cheney, would be willing to accept a 10% or more probability of human extinction through the use of threats of worldwide thermonuclear war in order to solidify and increase their advantage. That is the problem.
I’d rather take my chances that you guys are wrong than live like you are suggesting.
Nothing about global climate change has been proven to be caused by man. This is the height of human arrogance, that we can affect something so powerful like planet earth. That we can single-handedly destroy in 100 years what has existed for hundreds of millions of years. And that by reversing course in the next several years will somehow make it all better.
The blind ignorance (or worse, willful ignorance) of real data that shows that the sun has been giving off more heat in the past century is beyond dangerous, it’s terrifying. Also, you ignore the fact that the sunspots that exist today were not detected during the last mini-ice age a few hundred years ago. This data could lead to the conclusion that the hotter sunspots are causing warming, no? I’m sure you’ll have some half-baked response (if you bother to respond at all) that appears to refute this evidence but really doesn’t.
Own up to it - you have an agenda and you won’t let little things like facts get your way. Making statements like, “Now that it has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the earth is headed for a global heat wave…” is laughable and makes your arguments moot. Show me the prove that removes any reasonable doubt. The science that I referenced above, in my mind, qualifies as reasonable doubt. Not that you will bother to educate yourself by researching it.
“Leaders” that you are looking for are on par with David Koresh and Jim Jones and others that have lead thousands of people to unnecessary deaths by spreading lies and ignorance. I hope you don’t find the “leader” like them that will take the rest of us down too.
good morning iwarrior:
The big amazing thing the human species has contributed to nature is thought - what Teillard de Chardin called the noosphere. We are conversing right now in a spaceless dimension where it doesn’t matter that you are in Pittsburg and I’m in Arizona and Alan Wartes thinks he is not empowered outside his ten mile circle even though hundreds of people are right now checking out his web page. Maybe the surprise mother nature has in store for us is not physical. Thought, the stuff of human social reality, is capable of quantum change. Maybe Dave Lindorff and Al Gore and the rest of us will reach critical mass and some combination of science information philosophizing fearmongering brainstorming whining rage and zucchini recipes will wake everybody up quickly and we’ll stop putting garbage in the sky. Once the IDEA is clear to enough people that the environment is in fact an urgent priority (which actually seems to be trying to happen), the daunting repair tasks and lifestyle changes will follow naturally and perhaps get us through. For me the target is human dumbness, the dense torpor that inhibits the transmission of that idea into the new universal paradigm that is needed.
Dear voxclamantis,
Wonderful! You are right.
My point with my ten mile circle is that in the near future in order to continuing ejoying and profiting by this conversation, I need to find a way to feed, clothe and house myself HERE. A tomato grown in Pittsburg won’t do me much good.
Maslov told us (with his famous hierarchy) that unless the basics are covered, higher evolution is impossible. First things first.
Plant a garden. Catch water off the roof. Get a bike, learn to walk farther than from the parking lot to the grocery store. Life will be better and you’ll still be around for what comes next in human history.
Be well!
To “You Guys are Kooks”:
What’s to be said to your response. That you’d like to bait someone into lashing out? That people in line with the sentiments of this article are “brainwashing” others to their agenda? What agenda? The “I’d like mankind to not completely destroy nature and the planet” agenda? The “I don’t want society to devolve into tribal warfare for scraps of resources” agenda? Maybe the “less suffering, destruction and inequality in the world would be nice… just maybe” agenda. Militant harmony, is that what we’re pushing?
If cheeseburgers were an infinite resource that fell from the sky like rain, with no downside, perhaps everyone could happily eat them. If cars grew like trees in the forest, ran on acorn fuel, and could decompose after 200,000 miles to grow yet again, that’d be great, too. Since that’s not the case, civilization might have to make the smallest of concessions.
As per your skepticism on climate change, maybe you were one of the individuals pushing to water down everything documented in the latest IPCC report? You can read about man’s relationship with climate change here (http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/10/417/), there, or anywhere you like. But not under you rock. Some homeless nomad will need that for shelter soon.
Now I feel dirty for having responded. Sorry to everyone else who didn’t deign to such a post.
“The problem with this dismal view is that we have kids, and grandchildren, and we cannot simply dismiss their futures the way we might shrug off our own self-induced lung cancer. We need to act with dispatch and with a willingness to make the big, disruptive changes that need to be made, so that they don’t die off too because of our mistakes.”
‘
(That’s why I didn’t have kids)
Dave, you are assuming that we will voluntarily, pro-actively rise to meet this mortal threat. And that the window is still open. That is a bit of an optimistic view, doncha think? People resist change until their conditions are so intolerable…Look at the number of people in Iraq that are NOT refugees, what they contend with. We will get the massive change in our way of life, there’s no dodging that, but punkassbeeotch boiled it down to one sentence:
“6.5 billion people is unsustainable. Period.”
When a virus finds an obliging host, it replicates wildly. The more nutrients available, the more reproduction. At some point, the population curve goes exponential and the available nutrients collapse. The virea find less food and more excreta and, if they curtail reproduction quickly enough, the virus as a whole, can survive. If it overshoots and depletes the host, there is a dieback, maybe a total dieback including the host.
Years ago, my nephew refered to humans as a virus in sneakers. It’s a useful illustrator.
Certainly, we would be wise to take radical steps to mitigate our impact (since when have we ever been wise?), but what really HAS to happen will ONLY happen by Famine, Plague or War.
Not exactly the most popular campaign positions, I’m sorry to say.
You Guys Are Kooks: Aaahahahah! Boy, you must think we’re really stupid, as are the people who study these matters. The fact is, solar variation has been studied extensively for at least three centuries now, and almost continuously since the advent of satellite data gathering. Solar variation has been factored into all major climate models, as are other factors such as variations in the Earth’s orbit and wobble of its rotational axis. Even Wikipedia discusses these factors.
You make seek refuge if you like in the knowledge that the “proof” you demand is impossible to obtain. In a system as complex as the Earth’s climate, one can no more “prove” that man’s activity is causing climate change than one can “prove” that the lung cancer of a lifelong three-pack-a-day smoker was caused by cigarettes. Thus you may rest easy: your position is unassailable.
But the physics that underlies the theory of global warming and the weight of the evidence are against you. On thing that noone that holds your position seems to want to talk about is the underlying physics. Since I’m sure you know the theory, I won’t restate it here. Suffice it to say that the physics is convincing — convincing enough, for example, to prompt scientists to suggest that combustion of fossil fuels could lead to increased atmospheric temperatures more than 100 years ago. Convincing enough, to cause scientists to go out and look for evidence that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was indeed happening, that it did indeed absorb infrared radiation as predicted, and that the atmosphere was indeed warming in accordance with the theory. That carbon dioxide is increasing and that it absorbs infrared radiation according to the theory is now beyond question. That average global temperatures have been rising in general, subject to expected climatic variability, has also been conclusively demonstrated.
Is this due to man’s activities? Well, the average consumprion of gasoline in the US is 400 gallons per person. Multiply that by 300,000,000 people. Then multiply that by 4 to cover the rest of the world. That’s for one year. I haven’t even begun to factor in the burning of coal, which is a bigger contributor of carbon dioxide than is gasoline, nor burning of natural gas, which is becoming an ever-larger contributor.
You figure it out.
Despite this, I’m not particularly pessimistic. I really have no problem with a ready supply of energy. What I would like to see is clean energy, and I see no reason why sources of clean energy cannot be developed. I see deserts sprouting silicon trees or lawns, for example. I’m a little perturbed thet the US government has not funded a demonstration power plant of this type so that the technological issues can be defined and investigated, and so that mass production systms can be developed. While this technology is presently more expensive that fossil fuels, this is only because the staggering long term costs of fossil fuel combustion have not been tallied, or, like health problems caused by air pollution, have been foisted off onto other industries.
Here’s a parting thought. We’ve spend $500 billion and counting on wars in the middle east, where no one even bothers to deny that oil and who controls it is a major factor. Even at domestic retail prices for solar panels — currently about $100 per watt — we could have built fifty 100mW solar power plants with that money.
Just something to think about.
Kivals,
You are correct. The elites’ role is fully explained in A People’s History by Zinn, a book that I’m sure most of the wonderful posters here have read or know about.
PJD April 12th, 2007 10:46 am
“No one is predicting such population growth. Birth rates are generlly declining worldwide. UN projections are for a population peak of 9 to 11 billion between 2050 and 2100.”
Nobody predicted that the world population would triple in size over the last 50 years and that we would be at 6.5 billion right now either but here we are.
If birth rates are declining on their own worldwide that’s great. The only place that I know of where there is active concern is in China where couples are only allowed one child. I don’t necessarily believe that their solution is the right one for everyone but they are at least tackling the problem. Here in the U.S. the Religiuos right, aided and abetted by the Republicans, have discouraged birth control and a womans right to choose. They have also done their best to pull the rug out from under parental planning clinics in third world countries where the birth rate is not declining and done whatever else they could to discourage population control.
Lobo Gris
Lobo Gris: Re: Here in the U.S. the Religiuos right, aided and abetted by the Republicans, have discouraged birth control and a womans right to choose. They have also done their best to pull the rug out from under parental planning clinics in third world countries where the birth rate is not declining and done whatever else they could to discourage population control.
Of course. These people, despite their posturing, really believe in the law of the jungle rather than the rule of law. More people means more competition for the means of survival, creating a survival of the vicious situation.
Strange that these same people profess to disbelieve the theory of evolution…
BleedingHeartsClub:
You befriended a mountain lion? I’ve done that. Tell me about it.
Tell us what you really think, Dave.
And so he does … and well he should.
Regards
Doug
Questionable Content @ http://unlikelysource.greatestjournal.com
Hmmm… my cost per watt for photovoltaics seems to be outdated. Seems we’re currently running about $7 per peak watt. Assuming 1/2 day of sunshine, 50% of peak wattage on average during daylight hours, and 50% sun (probably low for a desert), we have… round about $50 per watt average.
OK, so our $500 billion for wars in the middle east could have built ten 1000MW solar power plants.
I suspect the economies of scale would reduce the cost significantly.
(Damn … neglected to rant. That’s not at all like me.)
Having obfuscated and prevaricated and stonewalled on the threat to our very survival for decades, the Powers That Be ™ now are trying to stage-manage the response.
You know we’re in deep doo-doo when Al (”America is the natural leader of the world”) Gore and Herr Gropenfuehrer are considered environmental gurus. That they are “out front” on this “issue” shows you just how goddamned screwed we are, unless we very quickly … like yesterday … understand the stakes and the steps vital to averting unnatural Armageddon.
Lindorff’s prescriptions may or may not be spot on … but he’s seeing the big picture. Too few others seem to have vision as acute.
“Row, row, row your boat…
Gently down the stream…
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily…
Life is but a dream….”
It’s easy to blame humans on this. But, language matters if we’re to get it right. Was it really humans…ALL humans who brought us to this dance? Or, was it a class of humans?
There have been humans who have lived in a sustainable manner for hundreds of thousands of years, and still do (albeit, in remote locations). Are they any less human? Or, are they just considered “savages” or “aboriginals” and dismissed? Can we learn anything from them, or should we just keep dismissing them and following our own plan? So…how’re we doing so far?
laudable. laudable.
still…..i’m more concerned about the mysterious and recent disappearance of the honey bees (the world over methinks) than i am about global warming. if the news reports about the bees are accurate, this global warming focus may be a wild goose chase, aka a massive diversion/distraction.
i’m not naysayin global warming either, but must add that Al Gore as a front man for The Inconvenient Truth is beyond specious
above all, i do feel that we (the entire human race) are in for a major “correction”. i keenly sense that there’s a revelation of global proportions coming our way. and it’s nothing like what the thumpers and the teevee evangelicals make it out to be. which, btw, is a good thang
“Temperatures are rising. Glaciers are melting. Droughts and floods are increasing. Hazardous and dramatic weather events have become more frequent” environmentalists say, pretending that they can do something to combat global warming, ignoring what is actually occurring and mainly ignoring that there in only one true enemy. It is humans’ fear.
We are just assisting the sunset of the Empire that is neither a man nor a group of men. The Empire is a software. It is dualism that has dominated most human brains and pretended to ignore the intelligent, moving “weak” force that makes all of us one. The “weak” force is the true Light all great poets and sages have sung praises to. It is love, consciousness and awareness that no enemies exist.
Environmentalists want to save the Earth. The Earth is already saved. Men have just to save themselves from their fears. No limits exist. Energy and time(s) are limitless for all the ones who feel and use the force so much as to realize that we are all immortal.”
from:
http://www.giulianaconforto.it/English/articles/Worlds_fusion.htm
Actually, capitalism isn’t second nature. It took many centuries of enforced cruelty and degradation of peoples’ inherent communal skills, commons land, and mutuality. It is likely that we are naturally bent in that direction, and the present frenzy of commodities is a fever not only of the earth but also within us. The remedies are all around us but so is the disease.
Good stuff here and sorry to be so late to the party. What you should first and foremost do is turn off that fricking TV. I haven’t watched in 15 years and I’d say that 90% of the posters on this topic obviously show that their thinking has been stunted by TV.
Wanna bring down the corporate controlled Congress? Turn off your TV and stop shopping at Wal-Mart. Stop driving your car. Start your own business. Everything is going small again. The only reason a recession is coming up is because for the large to extremely large corporations its the fastest way to have yet another massive transfer of wealth. So when you see recession, think of “for whom?”
The ultimate practice of democracy is to buy locally grown organic food. That’s food produced within 50 miles of where you live. By doing this you grgeatly decrease the amount of toxins in your air, land and water.
If you have yor TV on, all your arguments are based on illusions, deceptions and delusions. Consumerism was born in the 50s and was never sustainable to begin with. It is the beast that is devouring the planet.
Don’t want to make the change, then go kill yourself: wasting resources mortgages my kids’ future.
It really is up to each of you to make the changes, but you have got to turn off your TV!!
Dave Lindorf,
In all your long and passonate plea for change, not one word for reducung the human population through family planning clinics in every nation, not one word for giving women the right to decide when and if to birth how many children? Why? If we want to stop ecocidal economic growth
we must stop the growth of humanity that supports it. Otherwise, it’s all just a game of phony reform without effect. Why are people so reluctant to talk about this?!
What I see as a viable solution are small villages/towns were everyone has access to a centralized vegtable garden worked by the people, for the people. Same with fruit. We don’t need as much meat as the average family consumes. How about ponds within the towns so we can harvest fish. Chicken coops for the meat eaters. All within walking distance. The horse and buggy may become popular again. So much we can do if we start now! Crimes rates would go down because we will no longer have megalopolis’s as we do now. No over crowded cities where tempers flare.
Many people could also make a living from
the internet. There are so many ways that I personally see as a happier, healthier lifestyle. I could go on and on.
I live in Oregon and many, many people have vegetable gardens here. As I do.
This will be a great challage for us all. With many new opportunites.
Just a note about tv (ChristIsntComingBack) and bees (annemarie). All of our bees here in Southern Arizona are African. A beekeeper friend has a batch of hives near my home. He says they have not been affected by whatever is causing our native bees to vanish. It is not unlikely that to save agriculture we will have to purposely introduce African bees further north. They pollinate, make great honey and are somewhat more aggressive than natives, but selling the idea will be difficult given the sensationalized image that has been promoted by our demonic television sets (invasion of the Killer Bees, etc.). Its another example of the need to clear up conventional thinking before we can fix things in reality.
We have lots of honey bees in Oregon. And its because many people here grow “organic” gardens.
Lots of bumble bees too. Its “Achems Razer.” “All things being equal, the most simple explanation is probably the correct explanation.” All we have to do is give back what we take from our planet. Just as the Native in America taught us.
Peace
Oh! BTW, I don’t watch TV.
Discussions about if we can or if we can’t turn the world situation around don’t really get us anywhere. As E.F.Schumacher said in “A Guide for the Perplexed”…
“Can we rely on it that a “turning around” will be accomplished by enough people quickly enough to save the modern world? This question is often asked, but no matter what the answer, it will mislead. The answer “Yes” would lead to complacency, the answer “No” to despair. It is desirable to leave these perplexities behind us and get down to work.”
The heart of modernity lies in the threefold feed-back structure made of science, technology, and (the unlimited growth) economy (the triad, for short).
The three are inseparable: no modern science without technology, for modern science only believes what it can make, replicate, reproduce in experimental set-ups, which become ever more complex with the growth of science; and techno-science in turn teases and needs the growth economy (without technology and a certain economic organization, no giant telescopes or accelerators of particles, no satellites, no magnetic resonance imaging, etc.).
But the triad needs energy to perform its endless and measureless machinations (which, as we now know, include constant war making) and to exploit the earth and its creatures, which it treats as if they were stockpiles of stuffs that merely lie at its disposal and that it may use at its leisure.
In the first decades of the industrial era, coal quickly became the primary source of energy. It was replaced by petroleum and its derivatives at the beginning of the last century.
From the inception of the industrial era (late 1700s to 1800) to 1999, the world population has grown sixfold, increasing from one billion to six billion inhabitants. The bulk of this hypergrowth took place from 1927 onward, at which point the world population stood at two billion. In other words, as James Kunstler put it, “population hypergrowth was simply a side effect of the oil age” (”The Long Emergency” (2005), p. 8). To quote Kunstler again, “[f]ossil fuels had the effect of temporarily raising the carrying capacity of the earth” (12).
The modern economy or mode of production, whether of the capitalist or socialist variety, is a growth economy. It rests on the assumption that the planet is limitlessly endowed with the stuffs (organic or inorganic) needed by the triad and its ever expanding greedy hordes of consumers. Since the earth is clearly a finite body, the assumption of limitless growth is a piece of sheer ideology, a drug on which modern mankind has been leading its frenzied, novelty and entertainment seeking, distracted, murderous, and intoxicated existence.
For about a century now, we have been living in an artificial world of plenty, wherein we could wastefully produce and consume, as if there were no tomorrow to be worried about.
The Achilles’ heel of the triad is plainly its inexhaustible thirst for energy. Once the oil wells dry up, the triad will mercilessly collapse, and the carrying capacity of the earth will ruthlessly return to being a solar carrying capacity only.
If we do not deal with our present predicament, our predicament will deal with us.
Great article and more importantly some great comments - articles like this drum up discussions and that causes awareness so aslong as more people understand how important this is the better.
What we need to do is actually get the organisations to employ energy saving techniques and reduce their carbon emissions. If we can do this then we are half way there but at the moment it is still viewed as an avoidable cost.