Promises of Wealth and Protection

Politicians in all nations always seem to make the basest promises to provide the "daily bread" by tweaking national policy for economics. They also less directly promise to do something about annoyances of political convenience, those "others" , who are identified as "minorities".  Minorities are just any groups of people of differing culture and character heritage who are always present in any evolving mix and migrations of human species.  They just have to be different in some way. 

Minorities are defined by formal and informal processes as being seen as "less than our own peoples", and therefore given the onus of having to conform to blend into the dominant culture. This tasks is made more difficult when cultural origins are visibly different.  Nations practice "protective measures" of cleansing that go from restricting immigration, to confiscations and deportations, and a number of so-called modern industrial nations have even resorted to mass minority extermination, or suspension of existence in economic "gulags".

This forms the basis of the "Food and Protection" psychic projection of national power and leadership, put by ever more right-wing authoritarian styles of politics, with increasing crudeness around the world. Economic processes of nations in the longer run tend to produce inequality and impoverishment of the majority. Control over resources becomes centralised, benefits concentrated, capital accumulation always goes to a few, labour is cheapened or replaced by technology. Initial prosperity brings population growth and consumption of non-renewable resources. Rising population growth and natural resource declines mean less of everything for the working class majority, and so the promises of Economic Wealth for all become empty. Political power devolves to the ownership classes.   This is how large human societies behave, but the impacts have been terribly worsened by productive capacities of cheap fossil fuels in the last two and half centuries. What restrains global economic growth today, among other finite limitations, is that fossil fuels are no longer cheap. 

National Politicians are so frequently just the sponsored talking figure-heads employed by ownership elites. They are the puppets that direct the national bureaucracy that does the work of regulating or not,  the national economic systems, exploiting the natural environments  for the benefit of the accumulation classes. There is also a huge economic divide between resource taking nations and exploited resource supply nations.

National elites are those classes that define how to implement the nation protection racket, who the internal and external enemies are, who and what is ripe for exploitation, and how much to use dumb enforcement and violence to suppress dissent. Always with economic growth, the number of exploitation targets must increase. That is unavoidable, as we live by consuming. The unwritten proviso contract of nature is that consuming is fine, as long as impacts and wastes sustain rather the destroy the life supporting systems and food webs.

"Progress" in pictures

Jeremy Leggett is a successful and surviving solar energy company pioneer and director of "Solar Century". He has put together many visual presentations of global trends on various topics. Like stories, they are very descriptive, but not necessarily predictive of future results. This are in the form of shareable slides, and mostly each slide is self-explanatory. Altogether they tell crucial stories. Jeremy has lots of meaningful stories to tell on his personal web-site "Future Today".

Since over-consumption is global, nearly progress today, is about systems breakdown. Another description for it is "The Real Apocalypse".

Here is one on growth of authoritarian political power bent on keeping fossil-fuel power in the hands of a few.

The energy supplies that powers the economic activities of "Developed" nations comes largely from fossil fuels.  Wealth and political power is largely about who owns the sources and supply infrastructures of fossil fuels. The workings of the bureaucracies are dependent on energy and materials that fossil fuels play a large part in.

The biggest problem is that all the developed nations must cease using fossil fuels, or bring on relentlessly increasing global heating. This a climate emergency and global extinction crisis. The accompanying political crisis, is that current elites in political parties, bureaucracies, all hold privileged positions of power that are fully funded by fossil fuel industries.

Fossil fuels are uneconomic

Regardless of national governments denials of the global extinction crisis, we are running out of "Economic" fossil-fuels.
The effectiveness of oil supply is rapidly declining, in terms of future energy gain to be supplied as a function of capital investment. This is in stark energy supply competition to Solar and Wind energy resources. Oil would need to be priced at less than US $10.00 a barrel, to get the same energy return on capital value invested, as solar and wind technology. The practical example used is that of internal combustion engine (ICE) vs electric vehicles. There are still weight and performance limitations of battery and fuel-cell electric vehicles, and many non-renewable resource constraints in making them, also dependent on fossil-fuel supplied energy for extraction.  The bottom line for all concerned is that the oil industry is fast running out of cheap oil. 

In terms of economics, and water resources, the bitterly fought over Adani Coal Mine in the Queensland Galilee Basin has looked like a bad deal for a long time.  Add in the global heating and extinction crisis world-view frameworks, it looks like a suicidal catastrophe. The whole project is not possible without massive taxpayer subsidies and environmental costs.  All done to help stoush up an an India Billionaire's Tax Haven. This is a massive fossil-fuel government corruption industry. The two largest Australian major political parties and their top leadership are deeply stuck into it. There is no other possible conclusion on the politics.

The entire scene of Australian election politics is still driven by Fossil Fuel Companies and their money. Clive Palmer essentially bought enough Queensland votes in the 2019 federal election to preference the Coalition parties to have another 3-year lease on mining Australia. 

The Coalition parties are playing the blunt "Food and Protection" racket. The opposition "Labor" party essentially offered a more sophisticated but less popular version of the same.  In reality, fossil-fuel parties don't know any sort of other tune. 

In Australia, this translates into promises of a few hundreds of jobs in mining industries, with exaggerated statements of how this boosts the rest of the economy, and keeping out the "economic" migrants.  Australian transport lifestyle is desperately oil-dependent, as high economic energy intensity depends a lot on private motor vehicles, and supplies of nearly everything depend on large growing numbers of diesel powered trucking behemoths delivering goods over long distance road networks up and down the densely populated coastal regions.

Australian fossil fool political paradise isn't going to be supported by the rest of the global oil-dependent economy for too much longer.  The typical national fossil-fueled media monopolies keep the average Australian voter so manipulated with news as to be dumbed down as shit. The majority white-christian status-stragglers swallowed the full national "Food and Protection" lie while it lasts. 

Suicides of farmers are up everywhere. In the recent IPCC report : Stability of food supply is projected to decrease as the magnitude and frequency of extreme weather events that disrupt the food supply increases. Is that a fossil mobile phone in the slide-show below?

The following slides are the most scary, as global heating accelerates and intersects with soil erosion, so agriculture is failing globally. Did you know that US and Europe are already under "food stress". Sacrifice of water and agriculture for coal mining in Australia is a triple-stupid government fail.

Until the fossil-fuel political economies actually have a final global collapse for real, its standard operating modes are rapidly destroying the basis of ongoing civilisation, our food supply.

Have you seen enough yet? Fossil fuel powered nations are a setup for global civilisation collapse. A faster collapse of the national fossil-fuel political economy is better for global heating mitigation.
Our global fossil fuel political economy is taking the human species with it to hell. The Australian governments are among the world's worst fossil-fuel captured. In the long run this planet will be better off without fossil-fuels and their governments. If we don't get rid of them, it will be better off without the human species. We need to rid ourselves of the fossil-fuel national parasites that are cooking and sucking the world dry./p>