Massive overkill of Capitalist Economy

Climate Change, Anthropogenic Global Warming, or whatever you want to call it, is but one aspect of an already existing and ongoing environmental catastrophe. 

Rob Urie (Hank Paulson does Global Warming) blames the incentives of our capitalist system, and its engineered dependency on fossil fuels. Production of goods and services means production of massive quantities of waste. Waste is produced by industrial agriculture even to grow our food. The result is large oceanic dead zones surround the major coastal cities of the world. Industrial capitalism uses rivers, streams and oceans as industrial toilets. The margins of continents  normally have the most abundant ocean life.

All the garbage tossed into the ocean most go somewhere. The 'Vortex' of garbage in the Pacific Ocean contains 'patches' of garbage so large that it takes ships days to get around them.

Carbon emissions are tide to economic production. We have spent the last century and a half engineering our dependence to industrial production. So to resolve global warming, the methods and location of production need to be radically restructured.  We have vested dependencies such as low and medium density suburbs vs high density cities, and private car transport vs mass transit. All of our infrastructure requires energy consumption, the results built over decades of cumulative GDP.

Capitalism concentrates profits in the hands of a few, while the wastes of the economy get spread everywhere. Rob Urie notes that efforts to incrementally 'reform' this production have a century or more of demonstrated failure behind them, and the eternal solutions of more capitalism, such as Emissions Trading Schemes, will be so demonstrably ineffective that it can rightly be considered a cynical diversion.

Conservative politics is bound to fail at their limited attempts at resolution. They are explicitly concerned with maintaining the status quo. We are undergoing a time of massive change, and status quo is no longer possible. The solution of conservative politics is to inflict economic pain on their populations, and suppress challengers to current industrial production. For conservative politics, the industrialization of the Earth must be speeded up.

Global industrial production is so large that its cumulative emissions and wastes are changing Nature. Thresholds of atmosphere and hydrosphere carbon dioxide are being breached. Other 'planetary boundaries', the limits of safety of global cycles and systems that we know about are also overwhelmed. 

Our biosphere depends on circular flows between reservoirs and states of materials. The reservoirs are the atmosphere, oceans, soil, underground crust of land masses, slow moving tectonic plates on top of interior mantle.

Burial of plant matter over hundreds of millions of years, has helped sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and so reduced the greenhouse effect, to cool the earth against the slight increases in solar energy output as our Sun has aged over the same time period. Our burning of the sequestered carbon over a few hundred years (undoing the work a million times faster), has predictable consequences to greenhouse warming.

All agricultural production depends upon the phosphorus content of soil. Phosphorous is required for all life, for the molecules of metabolism and structure. World supply sources are running out in decades, as most of what we use ends up in the oceans, because applications of excess phosphorus tend to wash out of agricultural fields, and human waste excreta goes into the oceans. Algal blooms and oceanic dead zones are just one of the results.

The crossing of the planetary boundaries are all linked by human activity. Takeover of ecosystems for human agricultural production leads to species extinctions. Deforestation and burning contributes greatly to global carbon emissions. The loss of the last tropical forests and the burning of their layers peat soils, to create palm oil plantations in Indonesia are a current example.

Source: http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2011/08/05/have-we-crossed-the-9-planetary-boundaries/

Planetary Boundary Parameters Boundary Current Status Pre-Industrial
Climate change CO2 parts per million (ppm) 350 400 280
  Radiative forcing: watts per meter squared 1 1.5 0
Ocean acidification Saturation state of aragonite in water 2.75 2.90 3.44
Stratospheric ozone Dobson Units 276 283 290
Nitrogen cycle Millions of tonnes/yr removed from atmosphere 35 121 0
Phosphorus cycle Millions of tones/yr entering ocean 11 8.5-9.5 -1
Freshwater use Km3/yr human consumption 4,000 2,600 415
Land use change % of global land converted to cropland 15 11.7 low
Biodiversity loss Species per million/yr extinct 10 >100 0.1-1
Aerosol loading Particulate concentration in atmosphere To be determined    
Chemical pollution Several possibilities To be determined  
 


The capitalism vs climate theme is also taken up by Naomi Klein. She notes that "Our problem is that the climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude—that moment being the tail end of the go-go ’80s, the blastoff point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world. Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the collective sphere." - The Change Within : The Obstacles we face are not just External.

With overkill and overshoot, it seem likely that the momentum of capitalism, or unnatural industrialism, whatever the human organisational term, is radically changing this planet. It doesn't really matter about which end of the political spectrum dominates and controls industrial production. That in turn, will radically change humans, but only after the damage is done. We suffer from a malaise of ignorance or uncaring, and are trapped in our world of maximizing industrial production.

Market economies may be destroying the planet more efficiently than "command" governance. Labelled as Jevon's economic paradox, efficiency allows for greater and faster consumption of the same or other resources. Our culture of industrial growth and energy consumption is not compatible with doing enough to stabilize global warming. Environmental regulation is equated with a "command" style economy by its critics. Commands and regulations are in fact necessary in large and complex systems which tend to have long time delays for signals to lead to dangerous consequences of failure to heed.  Artificial controls and limits need to be added so that safe long term operating limits are not exceeded. Some schemes to "control" carbon emissions by having elements of a marketplace for carbon price, have proved to be flimsy and ineffectual. The track record of the Kyoto Protocol, the UN Clean Development Mechanism, and the European Unions emission trading schemes have been impotent as carbon emissions have risen. Nations like Canada have dropped out of Kyoto Protocol when the corporate rewards proved too enticing.

There is in the human species a death wish. It is an unwillingness to submit to the silent demands and signals of Nature. We believe that we dominate and control all Nature, and at the same time believe that Nature can recover from everything we take from it, and everything that we dump into it.  Given the un-refutable evidence of Anthropogenic Global Warming, many still deny the human race could possibly change the global climate. That nature is collapsing fast can be ignored because the masters of the corporate world live in cities and their every need and whim can be purchased.

The industrial system is in itself a source of massive command and control over nature. It has a brutality to sacrifice large numbers of people, and large amounts of nature to continue to supply the human industrial and consumption economy. Examples are fossil fuel deposits vs nature, and tropical forests vs palm oil plantations.  These "disappearances" are seen as a side effect, as collateral damage. It is a moral choice, in not choosing to prevent it, in not choosing to set a limit on how much of non-renewable nature gets destroyed. (Jason Mark: Conversation with Naomi Klein)  The problem is humans are not blessed with an in-built morality module for limiting damage to nature and "others". Local indigenous peoples learn to do this in their culture, because they learn about their local environment which they depend on.  Modern city consumers who want jobs, income and stuff, fail to even know that it is happening.

One of the characteristics of how we "see" the world that is really fundamental, is how slowly human beings take on new knowledge.  Even in the visual system physiology, the rate at which our brain takes in and remembers new information is of the order of a measly 10 bits per second at best. I was informed of our "slow learner" characteristics by the book "Bottleneck : Our human interface with reality : The disturbing and exciting implications of its true nature"  by Richard Epworth.  The large expence of internal visual vista and sound world, and body knowledge that we hold in our heads, as a conscious experience, is in fact, just an illusion that we have slowly accumulated in our heads.  Our perceptional strategy is to scan the environment, and recognize what already matches the world illusion model that already exists in our head, and note signficant differences that indicate our viewpoint has changed, or our body has moved, or the external world has had a change. Recognition is a much more efficient process than taking in and storing really new information. We thus tend to see and hear the world as we imagine it is. Our limited information bandwidth, and storage capacity cannot possibly keep up with decoding and storing entire experiences afresh as new information.

Likewise with our institutions, and cultures, which rely on past learning, transmitted by prolonged training in cultural immersion, are slow to adapt to new circumstances, if they are not in the repertoire of past understanding and actions. Bigotry is not necessarily a moral failing, it is a physiological failure of the nature of our senses and intelligence. To overcome it, we have to pay extra special attention to information that tells us our world is changing, and we have to change our mental models of it. We have invested in our mental model of our industrial world, and capitalism for just as long as we have been building our dependency on fossil fuels to power it, and our mental models are just as invalid as our physical industrial systems. It takes a long time of review and reinvestment to abandon our former models and strategy. It is for good reasons, that older people, and especially older men, have an inability to understand the science of climate change, and that we are the main cause of it. Re-education and un-learning are the hardest of tasks. Denial is easier than working out exactly which parts of our mental models are wrong, and taking actions accordingly, especially if the old model still works for the well being of ourselves, and our social circles. Change works best amoungst those who are uncommitted and doubtful about the old order.  An exact and least harm solution, at this stage of rapid change, is unlikely to appear in time.

Governments which fail to look after their peoples, in the circumstances of massive climate change impacts, direct and indirect, may become the victims of popular uprising. This may fail, if sufficient armed forces still back the government, but civil war leads to even more failure. Syria is in civil war still, after millions of people have been effected by severe protracted drought, over several years, with a massive failure of agriculture. Syria happens to be in part of the Middle East region most affected by the predicted consequences of global warming.

In the south west USA, severe prolonged drought has dried up the beef cattle industry, and the associated businesses and towns that depended on it economically. People are leaving, abandoning their houses that cannot be sold. Extreme weather has struck large cities around the world. Climate change is having large impacts on people we know of right now. (Years of Living Dangerously)

Those in charge of the economic and war systems are deaf to our pleas, having been trained in the orthodox holy political script. A Point of View: And all shall worship money.  Concerned climate scientist Kevin Anderson still wants to avoid dangerous climate change. A new paradigm for climate change.

We must not forget that overlooked component of population growth. Global population is still increasing, currently projecting towards another 2 billion people by 2050. That is asking for a lot more of abuse for Nature to put up with.Human mortality rates can be expected to rise long before then, as our life support systems are failing now.

 

 

 

 

 


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