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Collapse or Survive: The Stark Choice Facing Our Species
We all know what has to happen. But are we too primitive and irrational to do it?
We are - at the same time - thrillingly close and sickeningly far from solving our planetary fever. The world's leaders huddled in New York City yesterday to discuss man-made global warming, in a United Nations building that will soon be underwater if they fail. They all know what has to happen: their scientists have told them, plainly and urgently.
As man-made warming rises by up to 2.4C, all sorts of awful things happen - whole island-states in the South Pacific will drown, for example - but we can stop it. If we turn off the warming gases, the temperature will stabilise. But if we go beyond 2.4C, global warming will run away from us, and we will have lost the "Stop" button. The Amazon rainforest will dry out and burn down, releasing all the carbon stored in the trees; the vast amounts of warming gases stored in the Arctic will be belched into the atmosphere; and so 3C will turn ineluctably to 4C, which will turn to 5C, and the planet will rapidly become a place we do not recognise.
To stay the right side of this climatic Point of No Return, global emissions need to start falling by 2015 - just six years from now - and drop by 85 per cent by 2050. Our leaders need to agree this at the climate talks in Copenhagen in December. The scientific debate is over. The answer is in sight. Indeed, each one of the leaders could feel the solution on their skin and in their hair yesterday: it lies in the awesome power of the sun.
Each day, the sun bombards our planet with 9,000 times more power than we need to run every car, warm every home, and power every electrical appliance on earth. If we can capture just a sliver of one per cent of it, we can kick fossil fuels into the melting dustbin of history. The technology exists. It is there, waiting for us. Professor Anthony Patt has shown that all the energy Europe needs could be provided by lining 0.3 per cent of the Sahara desert - an area the size of Belgium - with concentrating solar power technology. A consortium of Germany's leading corporations is raring to go. They just need the money. It costs a lot up front - $50bn - but this is nothing like as much we would spend chasing the last dribbles of oil into warzones, and defending ourselves as the planet goes into meltdown.
Every continent has the same option. The entire energy needs of the US could be met by covering 200 square kilometres of its empty deserts with solar plants: it would cost about 10 years' worth of oil purchases, with none of the wars, tyrannies, or blowback Islamism. China and India have similar options. It is achievable, with the kind of great effort we made to defeat the Nazis. We too could be a great generation - one that came close to the brink, but then came together in a great collective effort to change course. We would leave a lean, green civilisation that will run for millennia.
But instead, our leaders are fiddling with the old dirty technologies, too addicted and too addled to move us on and up. In Britain, we are actually turning back to coal, mining 15 per cent more this year than last. Professor Jim Hansen, the head of Nasa and the world's leading climatologist, calls coal power stations "death factories" that condemn millions to drown, or starve, or burn. Across Europe, solar power is being allowed to wither: Germany's biggest solar company, Q-Cells, has seen its stock fall from €100 to €10 in a year. The other market-leader, Spain, has seen a similarly disastrous fallback.
The World Bank, which receives £400m of your taxes every year, is promoting this soot-streaked vision across the planet. They have just spent $5bn helping poor countries to build power plants that will destroy them. Indeed, it just bankrolled the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in earth - a coal plant in Gujarat, Western India.
How can this possibly be defended? US and European governments are engaged in the collective fantasy that coal can be rendered "clean" by "scrubbing" its carbon emissions from the chimney-stacks, and storing them somewhere forever. In the real world, one of the largest "clean coal" pilot plants in operation, Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley, catches just 0.05 per cent of its carbon emissions. Professor Howard Herzog, the renowned expert on this technology, was recently asked what the chances of the technology achieving the cuts we need is. He replied: "Zero."
But a small number of people make a lot of money on coal and oil and gas. A shift to reaping power from the sun and the wind and the waves would render the rocks and barrels they have spent a fortune mining worthless - so they are prepared to pay politicians to keep the system working in their favour, and lavish billions on misinformation campaigns to keep us confused.
You can see this process working most clearly in the United States. Barack Obama is a highly intelligent man who has appointed some of the best scientists in the world to explain to him what needs to happen now. But he is trapped in a political system soaked in petrol. The lackey-filled House of Representatives has passed a woefully inadequate "Cap and Trade" bill, which - if it worked perfectly - would cut emissions by six per cent below 1990 levels. Even that won't happen: many of the permits oil companies are supposed to pay for will now be given away for nothing, producing no reductions at all. And even this feeble, sickly bill may not make it through Congress.
Meanwhile, China has hinted it would agree to more substantial restraint at Copenhagen if the rich world - responsible for 90 per cent of all the warming gases belched into the atmosphere so far - agrees to give one per cent of its GDP annually to poor countries to adjust to clean fuels. There's a lot to criticise the Chinese dictatorship for, but this isn't one of them. It's a reasonable request for simple justice. Poor countries have done very little to cause this crisis, but they will feel the worst, first. They deserve our reparations. Yet both the EU and US have damned this sane proposal as "totally unrealistic".
So are we, as a species, condemned to fall into the historical crack between a world powered by fossil fuels, and one powered by the sun? Will the fossil record discovered millions of years from now show we were just too irrational and too primitive to make that leap?
If we despair and wait glumly for the meltdown, we will make it so. Then we will have little choice but to try to survive as best we can in a radically altered landscape. But there is still a slim window in which sanity can prevail - and I believe, perhaps madly, that it can. It will require a global mass movement of extraordinary tenacity, pressuring governments everywhere, and overpowering the fossil fools. We can still change the tale of the 21st century from one of collapse to one of a species finding a way to live with its ecosystem, rather than against it.
It can be done. It must be done. Copenhagen is in three months. There, and in the years after when the deal must be implemented, we will learn something profound about ourselves. Are we a great generation - or the worst of all?
- Posted in
64 Comments so far
Show AllMr. Hari has fallen into the solar/renewables trap. Which is unfortunate, because technically he is right.
The reality is that solar panels need maintenance, and over time they degrade and must be replaced. That means more mining of already depleting resources, using machines and fuel that are also vulnerable to the same depletion.
He talks of maintaining a lifestyle which has crippled the economy with it's excesses, as if we can pull the required resources out of thin air.
The fossil fuels he talks of saving are used for so much more than *just* fuel. Oil depletion will soon affect production of thousands of everyday products, from aspirin to asphalt, that modern technological society depends on.
An article published yesterday suggests that the oil supertankers may soon be joining the 'ghost fleet' off Singapore for the same reason ie: shipping rates are so low that there is no profit in the business. ( http://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=63611&Itemid=93 )
The fact that we MUST drastically curb our output of greenhouse gases is not in argument. What is causing the impasse is the unwillingness of the First (Western) World to adopt a lower technology lifestyle with lower impacts and fewer material goods.
But it is very likely that we will not have a choice. Economic circumstances are already forcing many into homelessness in the US alone, and the rest of the world will rapidly follow. China is said to be building a new coal fired powerplant every week to keep it's domestic economy afloat, as that country races to adopt a Western consumerist lifestyle. All that means is they will hit peak resources that much sooner.
The leaders of the world should be discussing ways to make the coming economic collapse as survivable as possible for the largest possible number of people. Instead they are worrying about re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
That a drastic loss of human life due to the collapse is inevitable due to starvation and deprivation. Let's not add war and invasion for a dwindling pool of resources to our woes.
Walk in peace.
thank you, Galenwainwright, for your powerful words...you say:
"What is causing the impasse is the unwillingness of the First (Western) World to adopt a lower technology lifestyle with lower impacts and fewer material goods."
yes, and I believe the options we need to explore are largely denied us by our requiring money for title to land and shelter...money in the form of outright purchase, or, much more commonly, in the form of regular, uninterrupted monthly payments toward either a rent\lease arrangement, or a decades-long mortgage, featuring front-loaded ratios favoring interest over principal, that interest might wane and equity build as slowly as possible, ensuring maximum profit to the lender, and an indentured worker to the community...
your point about energy is very important...no matter how energy is generated, we cannot afford to manufacture, maintain, and dispose of the required infrastructure, and the same could be said, with greater emphasis, for the innumerable, and frequently toxic, products that would run on such energy...products already overflowing our landfills...our planet's living systems cannot tolerate this behavior, though our economic systems might wish it to be so...
the psychological aspects of consumption are another matter, but a dramatic increase in knowledge and appreciation of our intimate relationship with, it sounds weird to say it, LIFE, needs to occur...many social structures and expectations must also be altered to a large degree...
Global Start Date: September 22, 2012...acoustic, agrarian life...let's get those gardens growing!
jbentham
if we were not figthing constant wars, or producing and marketing weaponry to the world 24/7, or running our vehicles on fuels we must burn, or working at long distances from our homes, or requiring two wage earners per nuclear family unit (with in many cases three or even four jobs)....
yes, solar power holds tremendous answers for us, but not uniquely. It's time we started itemizing them.
Glad I'm 63 but feel sorry for my 27 year old son and I hope he never has children.
i'm 51 my son is 20
i urged him not to have kids
Two possibilities are available for "saving" the planet.
1- humans try to correct their abusive behavior towards the planet. a theoretically smoother ride.
2- do nothing and let nature do it. A VERY bumpy and messy ride.
PS There are no historical examples to support the first scenario.
Buckle up, it's going to get bumpy!
Reminds me of the line delivered by Cypher in The Matrix:
"...buckle your seat-belt, Dorothy, 'cause Kansas is going bye-bye."
Au contraire, sirios;
Your first point is a tautology. There are no examples of getting out of a situation exactly like this because we have never BEEN in a situation exactly like this. But people working selflessly to improve the situation of others? More examples than all the humans who have ever lived.
Try reading 'Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879'. Look at the abolition of slavery, the invention of national parks, the EPA, the establishment of intentional communities, and ten trillion other examples of people acting not in their narrowly-defined material interests but in other, larger and and deeper and more connected interests. However imperfect those are (and of course they're imperfect, they're done by humans) they represent uncountable lifetimes dedicated to good work and improvement of self and society.
Look at the Transition Town movement. No, seriously, sirios! LOOK at the Transition Town movement. Get on board. Or at least get into therapy and stop spreading your destructive despair. It's as bad a denialist's lies.
I do not think there is any doubt about which of these futures - collapse or survive - is coming. The very wealthy people in the Western World truly believe that their power and money will protect them in the coming disaster years from the encroachment of their neighbors, so they don't care that the rest of the world will face such horror. Whether this is the end result of western descent into uncaring greed, or that the uncaring greed is a function of human nature gone wild, is truly irrelevant at this point. There is no hope whatsoever that the politicians of the world will have the courage or the power to make the decisions which need to be made - not in 2020, but this hear - for the temperature IS rising, and so is the one great ocean that encompasses 70% of the surface of this planet. We are about to become - again - a water world. When the antarctic ice sheet slides inexorably into the sea, the sea levels around the world will rise 300 feet to the levels they were before the last ice age began. Check your world atlas. That is the living space of over half the world's population. If we are to stop this from happening, action must be taken today, not in a decade. It will hurt everybody in the western world. I have 2 children and four grandchildren. I will fight to find a space where they will have access to food, clean water and enough oxygen to breath [this latter is hardly ever discussed, but will also be a serious problem for several years after those ice sheets slide into the sea]. The promises being made by world leaders are whistling in the dark and everybody knows it. There is no point at this time in pointing fingers of blame. Besides, in the final analysis, the blame is in our garages, our living rooms, our closets and our kitchens .... and most of all, in our garbage cans.
MichaelC
I tend to think the extremely wealthy, the corporate elites, and other high-placed fiends are cold-hearted bastards but are not really stupid. The multiple levels of propaganda and disinformation generated and disseminated (generally with the purpose of confusing, distracting, or misleading the public) sometimes make it appear that these fiends must really be dense, but I somehow doubt it. I suspect that there are plans being formed, mostly ill-defined at this stage but being shaped universally by the same pressures towards the same ends by people with similar positions and interests, to basically provide the masses with a Hobson's choice -- either the masses accept that access to the dwindling energy supplies and other nonrenewable resources will be mostly restricted to the elites (probably by pricing) or civilization as we know it will collapse. The wealthy and corporate elites will only allow for the survival of civilization on their terms, ensuring further consolidation of their power and position at the top of the heap. At least I suspect that would be the plan, but we all know how well grand plans usually work out.
So Many Words
So many words that people use. Most of the time, words just confuse meanings. They become the basis of wars. They are confused utterances from deluded minds that are fearful and infinitely distracted. Sometimes, at rare moments, there is lucidity- usually this occurs in a period of crisis where finally- compassion is the only option left. Anything short of this fails.
The world is approaching a holocaust. The United States, China, India and Europe will suffer the most because, not unlike the dinosaurs of old, they have become the most dependent on a finite resource that is evaporating- oil. Mankind's propensity for war has increased, not decreased in the last two centuries. This war will be brought about by the scarcity of oil. The industrialized world is like an addict or junkie. Once the oil goes away, the industrial structure will collapse. The food and water supplies will collapse. Out of desperation, powerful nations will war against each other. Once the level of conflict reaches a certain point, the logic of mutually assured destruction will become the inevitable conclusion. You cannot kill people, children, mothers, fathers, families- you cannot destroy beauty on the planet- plants, animals, mountains, air, water- you cannot do this without destroying the desire to live, the reason to live. Then destruction becomes the only option.
Climate change is a blessing to the planet. The earth is sacrificing herself. In her love for us, she is allowing innocent life to gradually die so that we may realize that the greatest risk to this oil dependency is that through war we will destroy ourselves. The Great Destruction. The Great Holocaust.
You probably think- more words. Just words- intellectualization. Just an issue- like abortion, gay rights, labor equality, the war in whatever country... Just words. Got to sleep. Close the light. Play the music and wait.
Or perhaps- wake up. Protest in the streets. End the dead slumber of your leaders. Pray to the earth. Show compassion to others. Form a community of like minds committed to ending the madness. It is true- I cannot lie- if there is only one being- one human being on this planet that cares- that understands- that acts- there is hope. But that hope may be for a world after this one- for this one is slipping through our hands.
Sioux Rose
LJB: Beautifully related and powerfully stated. For what it's worth, I resonate with your words.
What Obama Should Say to the UN
When Obama speaks to the UN on September 22nd, he should commit the United States to an 80% reduction in global warming gases from 1990 levels by 2050. He should end subsidies to oil companies for oil exploration. He should tell the world that the United States will now lead the world's effort on halting climate change. He should talk about the loss of life- human, animal and plant that will take place without concerted world action. He should talk about the need for a global currency that ends the externalization of costs by corporations and that holds corporations and their shareholders directly accountable for irresponsible acts against the environment. He should address the world's water shortage crisis and the perils of the privatization of water. He should condemn the cruelty and damage caused by industrial farming.
He should pledge that the changes needed to address the above problems will not result in the loss of one American job- and that his administration will transform the American economy in such a way that there will be a much fairer distribution of wealth and that the new energy economy will result in the creation of more jobs and more prosperity.
In summary- he should lead. Instead of meekly going before the G20 and proclaiming he is a died in the wool capitalist- he should clearly and plainly talk about the mess that capitalism has caused and recommend strong corrective actions. He should address the creation of a new economic order- not based on consumption, but based on creating human happiness and balance with the earth.
The worlds needs transformational figures now- not apologists and anachronistic thinking that tries to preserve the best of the worst. We need to build the foundation of a new world order that is based on equality and equity- not scarcity, and that values all life. He should say that the life of a Russian, of a Palestinian, of an Afghan, of a Sudanese is not more or less valuable that the life of on an American or a European. He should say that we must value the beauty of this earth and treat as precious and sacred the mountains, the trees, the rivers, the animals, the plants, the water, the air, the earth.
I dare Mr. Obama to give this speech....
Comment: Mr. Obama did of course not say this to the UN. He spoke of urgency- the needs for action- but there were no specifics. It was a more a sermon that a call to action from the nation that is most responsible for environmental devastation. Who are we to sermonize?
When I read the title of the article I thought it was going to be the need to collapse our population. IMHO this is what really has to happen, and IS going to happen one way or an other.
If you look at world population it grew very slowly over the last several thousand years, until around the time we discovered Oil. Then things changed big time. Why? Because a barrel of oil contains roughly 24,000 man hours of work energy in it. Read that line again and think about it. That is the equivalent of the work a man can do working every minute of every day for more than 2.7 years. Calculate that energy against a standard 8 hour work day, 5 days a week and it works out to over 11.5 years. That is simply staggering.
Being an industrious species we exploited that energy bonanza and our population exploded.
Unfortunately oil like most limited resources follow a bell curve in their extraction. There are some indications that we are currently bumping along at the top of that bell curve right now. We won't know that for sure for another 10 years or so. Only then will we have enough data to plot what the curve is actually doing.
It does not take a genius to realize that if ever increasing use of oil allowed our population to grow at an ever increasing rate, what happens when those supplies increasingly can no longer support that population.
So are we smart enough to collapse our population in an orderly, thoughtful, humane fashion, or is it going to be nature exercising it's usual ruthless population control techniques, like it does when any species uses up its vital resource(s)?
I think we all know what the answer to that question is going to be.
Ironic, isn't it that at the point where there needs to be population control by the people, the crazy satanist christians are pouring tons of money into the effort, that if successful, will criminalize birth control, and force women to bear children even if they already have more than they can care for, children they don't want, children they can't afford. Looks like nature will just have to do its dirty work to solve the problem.
I'm sorry, NC-Tom, I love reading your comments, but the idea that we must somehow 'collapse our population' in order to survive seems misguided.
First of all, we ARE Nature. Our technological prowess has made it seem that we are somehow 'above' nature...that we can 'conquer' nature. But deep down, we all know this is absurd. But what is Nature? Well, we know it consists of matter and energy that can never be destroyed (e=mc2). This implies that the Universe is an infinitely regenerative system. If we believe that we evolved naturally from within this system, does it not follow that we naturally belong to it?
If we humans devoted more time and effort toward the concept of 'livingry' as opposed to 'weaponry' we could easily work with the (as yet) bountiful resources on this planet to end poverty and provide a comfortable existence for all living things. The technology is here right now. It's been here for years. The problem is not 'too many people.' It's that too many people work at jobs that do nothing toward making life better for all. And the specter of overpopulation just adds to the greed-seducing, fear-driven notion of a me-first survival-of-the-fittest World.
While the discovery of evolution is perhaps the most important scientific advancement in the past 200 years, to reduce all that this theory implies to a game of survival-of-the-fittest is to succumb to the meme submitted by the moneyed, powerful interests that seek to divide, confuse, and thereby, control the masses as a way to retain their money and power.
Sioux Rose
OLD PECULIAR: Interesting, enlightened post. Thanks for thinking outside of the box! I would add to "livingry" the implementation of far different economic models than those currently in use which foster a consistent pattern that organizes society into a small, privileged pharaoh caste with the vast majority of citizens compelled into either genuine or equivalent slave status.
Indeed. I think we can all agree that Capitalism or Free Market Fundamentalism is unsustainable.
Hi,
Agreed to that.
However, whether we all agree or not, under any economic or political system, 7,000,000,000 humans is NOT sustainable within the evolved natural system of the living Earth.
The truth that humans "are nature" does NOT change the truth about the balance of this living system.
We have grown to this number by abusing the Earth, and if we are to regain balance, our number WILL grow smaller. One way or another.
Old Peculiar
I used "collapse" our population to stick with the title of the article. If it were not for that I would have used shrink. As in people having 0 or 1 child each for the next few generations for example. I was not talking about us voluntarily culling our human population. (I hope I don't come across as being that mean spirited! ;-)
I completely agree we ARE nature. But what our technology has allowed us to do is to create an "unnatural balance". Through technology we have used the stored sunlight energy that Oil is, to use vastly more energy than what is naturally available from the Sun. For better than a century we have used Oil energy to give us an invisible army of phantom workers, (machines), to grow more food, build vast cities, allow large populations to live in cold climates, to fly through the air, and move huge quantities of stuff all over the planet. We could have never done these things with our own physical labor. This has temporarily given us an an incredible "unnatural" advantage that we have built our society and infrastructure on.
Once Oil starts to decline the our phantom army starts to disappear. We will begin to return to a more natural balance where we will have to, on an ever increasing rate, to do the work our oil fired army once did. If gas/diesel starts hitting $10, $15, $20 or more a gallon it is going to become too expensive to ship food to population centers like New York or L.A. or very rural communities. It will become too expensive to heat the vast numbers of homes in northern climates, and there just wont be enough trees in the forests for firewood to heat them as an alternative. This would probably result in huge painful populations shifts. (We got a glimpse of this future when the Ruskies turned off the natural gas supplies to Europe last winter, Burr!)
There was a reason our population grew so slowly for thousands of years. Our population grew only has fast has the physical labor of us and our animals, and natural sunlight would allow. We were in a natural balance with nature, we were nature. What is going on now is unnatural. At some point in the future we are going to begin to return to that natural balance and unfortunately I think things are going to be painful as we do.
You made a comment about the bountiful resources of the planet. Those resources were just fine for less than a billion people living simple farming lives in smaller cities. The 6 billion, and growing population is just too much for the planet. If you do some research you'll see that besides oil, fresh water supplies are getting tight because aquifers are being drained faster than they can naturally fill up, and glaciers that supply large quantities of fresh water to some large population centers are melting away, due to global climate change. There are also food shortages. Note that all these issues at one time or another have been written about on CD.
In addition to the shortages of the basics of life, we are also seeing issues with the supplies of some rare earth metals that we need to have for things like electric cars. Things aren't real pretty out there.
I like to use the analogy of yeast and sugar in a wine making Demijohn. The yeast eat their finite supply of sugar at an ever increasing rate, and their population explodes. They never think about the consequences of doing this in a closed system and end up exhausting their food supply, and dying in their own excrement. So the question is; Are we smarter than yeast? The harsh rules of nature apply equally to both humans and yeast, so I truly hope we are.
NC-Tom, back in the 90's, I read a book about the wasteful use of energy by developed nations and in it the author characterized that use in terms of energy slaves. One energy slave would be equivalent to the amount of energy that a single person would need to burn in order to sustain their life. He found that each of us in North America make use of 500 such energy slaves, mostly supplied by oil, where as in Indian, in contrast, the number stood at a meager 1.5 ES, mostly supplied by the efforts of farm animals. Amazingly, if we were to count the population of N. America by using this metric, our energy use could sustain a population of 100 billion. Now imagine, as some have, a world where every single person on it carries this burden, we would need to produce energy enough to sustain the lives of over 4 trillion. The crisis of overpopulation is immense and as you point out, its correlation to the growing use of a finite supply of oil can only lead to certain disaster and a collapse one way or the other. But will it just be a collapse of our slave population or will it include a large number of us as well?
BINGO! That book says what I was talking about just in different terms.
I think how things play out is going to depend how how fast the important resources like Water, food and Oil become scarcer, and scarcer. If it is slow enough and people are rational about dealing with it, maybe just maybe, we'll make it through to that different reality with between minimal to medium pain.
But will we play nice and volunteer to come together as a society/world and share what's left, and do with less? Will our leaders help us get to that new reality or will they exploit the situation, and will we let them?
I think we got a glimpse of how that future might play out when some of our fellow citizens just THOUGHT their health care benefits MIGHT be threatened, and they MIGHT, horror of horrors, HAVE to do something for the common good. Also look at how easily they were manipulated. That's some real cary stuff there.
So folks, strap yourselves in, and hang on, I think it might be one real bumpy ride ahead! >:-(
I don't remember the name of the book, which actually was published in the early 80's, but it was quite specific, being somewhat of a technical read, yet even back then, the authors, mostly power engineers from across various disciplines, realized how precarious the direction our civilization was headed.
Concerning your insightful observation about peoples reaction when threatened by the mere thought of losing their health care. People, when they recognize the true state of their own mortality, tend to appreciate theirs and the lives of other around them. We see it all the time, especially with women and their babies, older people and oddly enough during times of crisis, such as war. Instead of worshiping material gains and the toys of success, peoples lives take on a new form and a new meaning. It is a fact of life that in the darkest hours, when things seem bleakest, humans will tend to be at their best.
To withstand the whirlwind coming our way, I believe it shall be determined through the choices we make between the things we accumulate or the only lives we have. I hope we all come together in common cause and choose our lives.
The Death Wish that has always afflicted the human race is apparent in this article and today's Robert Scheer offering which comes off as a cry of desperation by someone who still retains some last vestiges of belief in Obama and the Democrats to save us from self-extinction. There is something, some urge, within the anxiety ridden human being to get it all over with, to end all the uncertainties and pain of life. And as it has innumerable times in the past, that urge is once again gaining momentum. In this era, however, the means to accomplish the Death Wish are at our disposal.
Sioux Rose
MORDECHAI: I am still awaiting that session I thought I'd gift myself with (birthday back in August like yours) with a trance medium. My last encounter took place in 2004 and the voice said, "Many want an end to it all, oblivion." I thought about that quote, and how it applies both to the military geniuses whose best use of grotesque amounts of tax dollars is witnessed in their faith in M.A.D, added to their religious extremist counterparts who believe End Times constitutes "God's" will. In either case the collective human anguish at life and its challenges is projected either onto an enemy (basis for the "strategy" of M.A.D) or "God." In these instances individuals need not own their own disappointment with what life has offered them, or as response to the choices they made, or reconcile their own lack of grace for the bankrupt way they behold all that has been given to them. Much easier to blame THE END on "God" or that "the enemy made me do it." My experience with the medium, added to these examples supports the observation you articulated above.
Sioux
thanks, i think some or many americans see the bomb as a solution? that way they don't have to take any responsibility? this life is a such gift but it's a choice. i choose life.
Peace
International petition with excellent broad based coalition to press USDA not to approve mass monoculture planting of genetically modified trees for cellulose for paper. tinderbox trees, green desert, very thirsty, very negative... believe it or not these plantations also figure into REDD proposals for carbon offsets and are being planted all over the world
http://globaljusticeecology.org/petition.php
Oh i believe it, i believe that humans are capable of ANY foolish program to "control" nature and avoid reality.
Thanks for the link.
Populations in nature are limited by the carrying capacity of the environment. Humans don't believe these rules apply to them. They believe that technology and 'intelligence' render the notion of carrying capacity moot. Human populations, since the advent of civilization, have grown (essentially) exponentially. There will be a correction, it's on the horizon now and we have a choice - it can either be controlled and painful or it can be uncontrolled and catastrophic. Given human nature, my money is on the latter.
You're right on all counts. It could even be argued that the event horizon into this black hole was passed when Reagan the actor became president of the US.
I was 17 when Ronnie stepped up and started spouting his trickle-down, 'morning' crap...even at that young age, I was astounded at how many adults around me were enthusiastically supporting this hogwash...
More nihilistic hyperbole from this character.......
Then again, I would not be exactly crestfallen if the Johann Haris of the world would go extinct....
Oh, come on - a global mass movement all focused on the same goal? On Earth?
Sadly, there is only one real way to do what has to be done:
The vast majority of humans need to be forced. Period.
'Democracy' is designed as a slow, deliberative process - just not gonna cut it during an emergency when decisions and actions need to happen fast.
A dictatorship/kingdom etc, on the other hand, can decree 'No More This' and 'No More That' or else. "From now on, our country is dedicated to 100% greeness! So let it be written, so let it be done."
If us stupid humans aren't lead to the water and forced to drink, we'll watch ourselves dehydrate while rasping, "Why didn't someone do something..."
Not true.
Read 'A Paradise Built in Hell' by Rebecca Solnit. It's about-------spoiler warning-------people helping each other in disasters. By far the norm, despite media lies and the contrary, stupid and destructive fear-based actions of the rich and their governments.
"The world's leaders huddled in New York City yesterday"
They are not the world's leaders. They don't lead the world. Most of the world leads itself. These so-called "leaders" are wannabes. Too bad these authors continue to drink the elite koolaid.
"Professor Anthony Patt has shown that all the energy Europe needs could be provided by lining 0.3 per cent of the Sahara desert - an area the size of Belgium"
Granted, the same author who spews dangerous propaganda lies that somehow this world has leaders who huddle in NYC, also can spew something relevant such as the second quote above. Yes, an area the size of Belgium can convert enough solar energy to cover all of Europe's energy needs.
But the Sahara desert isn't European property and the cabling to carry those electrons under the sea is not feasible. Instead, Europe should allocate 1% of its own land, near points of cconsumption, to solar energy conversion. It only takes 1%. By comparison, the USA has allocated between 30 and 50% of its land to food production. Most of this is for meat production.
Lovelock says that if we don't take it away from the politicians *SOON* and pull it together ourselves, we'll have an 80% die-off by 2100. That prospect should be keeping us awake at night.
The idea of building solar panels on the scale proposed in this article is ridiculous. Solar panels are made of actual materials that must be mined and processed, using very energy-intensive processes. Many of the exotic elements needed for high tech applications are in China, and China is making noises about restricting exports of them. Good luck trying to blanket an area the size of Belgium with materials that are in short supply. Even if obtaining the raw materials wasn't a problem, it still takes an enormous amount of energy to turn sand into the high grade silicon materials used in solar panels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#Silicon_processing
In a sense, "renewable energy" technologies are derivatives of fossil fuels, not alternatives to them. Fossil fuels power the plants that process the raw materials, and fossil fuels power the heavy equipment that digs the materials out of the ground.
It's true that the sun provides an enormous amount of energy. That's where fossil fuels come from in the first place. Fossil fuels are gigantic reserves of stored sunlight. There's no way to match the energy in fossil fuels merely by making us of the sun's input, directly or indirectly. If you found yourself in a house with enormous water tanks and drank all the water, you wouldn't be able to maintain your rate of water use by installing rain collectors.
It's nice living with the best quality of life in the history of humankind. Nobody's going to give it up without kicking and screaming and procrastinating. As a result, we're going to heat the planet...a lot. It's our moral responsibility to try to mitigate this problem, but preventing it is all but impossible.
No amount of solar panels is going to prevent the ugly crash that's coming.
I have argued and articulated exactly this point many times on CD.
And there are still those (the majority) who believe the techno-fetishist wet dream that 'technology' and 'alternative energy' in the form of marijuana and algae derived petroleum replacements (among others) will fulfill the entire spectrum of production dependent upon fossil fuels and their derivatives.
To them I say: Good Luck. You're gonna need it.
To those of us like you and I, I say: See you out in the fields.
Walk in peace.
Hey, technology is OK. Check fast breeders ... or stop breeding yourself. It's that simple. This is what I think the original poster meant.
So you have the fast breeder reactor. It provides electricity for a few years and then needs to be refueled.
Now, tell me where the fuel rods come from. What process do they go through to be created and shipped to the various reactors? Where do the machines that extract the ore and the processing facilities come from? How are they powered? And what do you do to safely store the thousands of used fuel rods for the next fifty thousand years, minimum?
The problem is not the availability of the technology. The problem is the amount of resource input required for a diminishing output.
Have you ever encountered the term 'Energy Returned On Energy Invested' (otherwise known as EROEI)? There is *always* a net loss of energy, no matter what the intended output is.
To go back to the original point of the article, to make a solar panel you have to extract the materials and minerals that make up the solar panel using machines and technology that they themselves require energy and resources to build and operate. That's a loss of energy.
You must transport the raw materials to a processing facility for refining into a usable form. More loss of energy.
Then you have the facility that makes the solar panels, which takes a certain amount of energy to operate the processes that are used to create the product. Another energy loss.
Once the solar panels are made then they need to be packaged for transport to the end user, again using more materials that have to be extracted, processed and transported themselves. There's that pesky energy loss again.
Now the solar panels are finally ready to be installed, right? Nope. They have to be transported to the retailer or warehouse (more energy loss), then transported to the installation (more loss), and finally installed, all using machines and energy (even more net energy loss).
And we haven't even got into the energy used, in the form of food and fuel for the workers used to go to their jobs to make and install the solar panels, let alone the energy used to extract, process and install the transmission lines and converters/inverters so the solar power can be utilized by the end recipient.
Using just this one example, we have just begun to scratch the surface of why we are in such deep, deep trouble when we fall into the 'technology' trap.
Walk in peace.
While there's no hope of eliminating entropic losses, we *can* reduce them greatly by carefully choosing where to spend energy.
The biggest difference would be to eliminate what even Lincoln saw as "useless labour": stop moving things just to make money. Grow food locally. Make goods locally (something Jane Jacobs was on about for the last 50 years of her life, remarkable woman). Never do with fossil-fuel power what can be done with muscle or renewable power. Never do with power what need not be done at all. Create a terabit fiber-optic computer network that reaches everyone in the world so that travel can be minimised. Re-invent sailing ships. Heavily insulate houses. Create systems that store solar energy and are long-lasting (e.g., low-albedo covers on water tanks). Use Bucky Fuller's "fog gun" to reduce water use. Define a system of modular publicly-owned vehicles for moving everything from a single person up to multiple tonnes of freight. Make the tadpole trike the standard for privately-owned vehicles. Restore the desirability of quality rather than quantity (i.e., delegitimise the "consumer culture").
To paraphrase Helen Keller: our abilities are limited by physical law, but the possibilities for applying them to make desirable changes are still endless.
OK chose for yourself! Either find a solution that provides enough energy, or "conserve" yourself. Don't tell others what to do. Easy.
You've lost me. WHat do you mean by "don't tell others what to do"?
I mean that you will not really understand the meaning of conservation until you try it on yourself. Even if we saved some energy here and there, the problem would not be solved, in the best case, it would be delayed for year or two, max. Then the political cost of conservation is way too high, in terms of bureaucracy, red tape, meddling, etc. For what? To get one more year before starvation starts? Why not develop energy sources instead. They are there, waiting, or even being developed outside of the US.
Now, not to you personally, but it seems there are quite a few people on CD who are just dreaming. Just dreams even when common, aren't enough. Nothing happens before people get their hands dirty and see the problems up close. Then without risk, there is no reward.
I think Arktig meant breeding as in having offspring not breeder reactors. That was how I read it anyway. But I really did like you response anyway ;)
All your questions are answered, the tech is not new, there is nothing fundamentally unknown in it. It is very energy dense 1000s of years reserves. Material science and engineering are advanced enough to make it a piece of cake. If you can't come with something better DO IT! If not - CONSERVE YOURSELF
inverse__a, Galenwright,
Stop your silly straw person arguments. By your analysis the fossil fuel economy would also be impossible. But gosh! Here it is anyway! Your problem (the problem that shows up here, anyway) is that you talk about all this without actually doing the math. For that look at Rocky Mountain Institute, eg. The fossil fuel economy was started with animal power and became temporarily self-driving (never self-sustaining). The solar economy has started with fossil fuel power but there is no earthly reason why it can’t become self-sustaining. Given half a chance it will. Derrick Jensen and some Deep Ecologists may be right, that the only truly sustainable technology is stone age technology, but if we do this half right we can take many generations exploring the truth or falsity of that.
Any intelligent, educated argument for solar and wind will tell you conservation is always the first, last and most important step. Not just better light bulbs and recycling; lives will change. That’s one of the best things about this transition. Those who don’t change voluntarily and early will be dragged along being miserable eeyores later. it’s their choice. Only lack of imagination will stop people.
Putting huge concentrating solar arrays in the Sahara and Nevada is an techno-obsessed idiot’s version of solar. How many square miles of roofs, roads and parking lots have we already covered the earth with? Vast stretches of that will hold solar panels, which will continually get better as we produce them--in whatever way we push them. Conservation, then complementary wind and solar combined with electric vehicles functioning as batteries for the whole ecological system, and organic permaculture providing food, fiber and building materials are the inevitable eventual goals. A good use of the remaining (relatively) cheap oil we have will give us a basis for that new conserver society. If we let people like you delay us, we WILL make the same transition, just with more violence, coercion and horror, and end up destroying far more of our ecological resource base and so will end up with a much smaller carrying capacity. Only lack of imagination stops us. And good math skills.
And, oh, yeah, psychological health.
I recommend marijuana, not for the many industrial uses, but for the personal psychological and physiological benefits...psychological change is critical to survival, and this wonderful plant is perfectly suited to assist with such...health care as we know it is pinned to economic activity, so marijuana will also prove to be vitally important as traditional medicinal approaches fall to the coming economic collapse...
Another perspective:
http://www.counterpunch.org/neville09232009.html
Walk in peace.
Hmmmm. empty deserts? Not so sure about that.
Of course, by making poor countries still suffering the dire aftermath of invasions and wars staged by the most egregious perpetrators of climate change, of colonialism, resource carpet bagging and robbery, and even of the legacy of what is in a human time-line perspective a recent event, slavery, equally responsible for solutions to climate change we can keep those struggling nations subjugated, poor and lacking real opportunity for the development of their own autonomous equality on the world economic and political stage. So ripe for further exploitations! And politically weighted relief loans! Kinda like credit card relief for the poor! Pay the minimum amount back at 25 percent or let us use your water, oil, minerals and people duty free and you can be indebted to us for the next ten generations! Just think of the climate change-related diseases the pharmaceuticals firms will be able to take advantage of so their CEOs can continue to revel in their own carbon footprint pools! More slices of thousand dollar cucumber, please, for over my eyes.
And how has China escaped from being rapped on the knuckles more firmly for its carbon-based exponential growth in the last couple of decades?
I suggest that any "developing" country that wants to escape unequal treatment by the mega-wealthy czars of the plodding global climate change initiatives simply start lending money to the failing western neo-capitalist systems: you will soon have the world of western financial system cronyism and all persuasions of political servants to the financial, service and health care industry tycoons at your finger tips! Senators, Governors, Presidents, MPs, high level political advisors will be eating out of your hand to keep their various vacation homes and tropical junkets and plum post-electoral assignments as lobbyists and ambassadors to the next best underage sex tourist hot spot! You will do no wrong in their eyes... just keep the credit lines open and they can continue to put crisis capitalism tax money into the slot machines of their failing financial systems and you can start building new beach resorts on Greenland to replace the ones elsewhere that will rapidly become a kind of new Atlantis.
Beyond that... could Obama sound MORE like Bush II in his address on climate change? When the leader of a country that is well over fifty per cent responsible for the hoarding of non-renewable energy resources and the subsequent sullying of the environment to the point of catalysing climate change stands before a global audience and, instead of apologizing and taking responsibility to make up for the catastrophic lag in attention to this phenomenon by his predecessors, whines that too much blame has been directed at his poor country, we know we are in trouble... and he's the guy who has promised change?