How Science Is Telling Us All To Revolt

www.commondreams.org...

by Naomi Klein

In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco.

Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less."

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”.

This is laudable, but what Werner is doing with his modelling is different. He isn’t saying that his research drove him to take action to stop a particular policy; he is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability. And indeed that challenging this economic paradigm – through mass-movement counter-pressure – is humanity’s best shot at avoiding catastrophe.

and finally - a quote of quote from an article in Nature Climate Change by England's Anderson & Bows accusing other climate scientists of softening reality:

. . . in developing emission scenarios scientists repeatedly and severely underplay the implications of their analyses. When it comes to avoiding a 2°C rise, “impossible” is translated into “difficult but doable”, whereas “urgent and radical” emerge as “challenging” – all to appease the god of economics (or, more precisely, finance). For example, to avoid exceeding the maximum rate of emission reduction dictated by economists, “impossibly” early peaks in emissions are assumed, together with naive notions about “big” engineering and the deployment rates of low-carbon infrastructure. More disturbingly, as emissions budgets dwindle, so geoengineering is increasingly proposed to ensure that the diktat of economists remains unquestioned.

This is a lot of reading and the article is a tad challenging, but I encourage you to read it if you have any interest in the subject at all.

Business as usual is going to kill us all.

I've had discussions with friends about how "Growth", the constant growth required by Capitalism is unsustainable, and they look at me like I'm from another planet. To me, it's very simple to see how in a continual growth model to are going to run out of resources. What will you do then, I ask? They shake their heads and mutter something about 'it'll never happen' or 'technology' or 'something incomprehensible'.

Those are the educated, reasoning friends that bycycle to work, recycle all their trash, and are generally 'aware' people - but still slaves to the Capitalism is the only system that will work people.

Then there are the Christians - "God will fix it bunch" - and part of me agrees in the sense that Mother Nature will get rid of what's causing the problems (US).

Then there are others - that say their is no climate change (and they are well funded).

Didn't know whether to put this in economics or fragile earth forums, it belongs in both....

reply to post by FyreByrd


I wanted to add a quote from Nevil Shute's "On the Beach"

"It's not the end of the world at all," he said. "It's only the end for us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us."

Very interesting and makes common sense. The planet is being squeezed for every resource possible in the interest of profit and the capitalist greed monsters.

Its being polluted and poisoned like we dont need it for long as is its protective atmosphere.

Only a paradigm shift away from capitalist mentalities to a more shared and conservationistic mindset could begin to reverse the current path of self destruction.

The truth is that the planet is being looted for the short term benefit of less than 5% and their obsessive pursuit of a selfish and lavish lifestyle at the expense of the planet and its future occupants.

Change is needed and only the people can make that happen!!

reply to post by FyreByrd


Mixing politics with every facet of life now, even science.
All it does is breed division and disharmony.

What a shame.

redoubt
reply to post by FyreByrd

 

Mixing politics with every facet of life now, even science.
All it does is breed division and disharmony.

What a shame.

Where three or more are gathered ---- you have politics.

And politics doesn't have to divide it can bind together - see the Quakers who've been doing it for 350 years with a lot of success and little 'divide'.

You need divisions and strife to stimulate collective political and spiritual growth (not the right words, because I don't been growth in the physical sense but in a more esoteric sense - don't have the words).

But wherever you have people you have politics. Nice, dirty; honest, dishonest; compassionate, selfish; it's all politics.

reply to post by FyreByrd


No... we don't have to pack politics wherever we go. All we have to do is to say, 'no, they ain't coming' and we leave it behind for a spell. We don't have to judge people and stereotype nations based on the shallowest of all human endeavors.

We merely have to choose NOT to carry the negativity with us. We only need to work for a common good rather than against some politically inspired ee-ville.

Not that hard.

reply to post by RP2SticksOfDynamite


Make that a .005% of the population and you got it. The others who share in the depletion of resources are only there as cogs to extract the wealth for the upper crust. Enticement if you will. The elite rely on those below them to defend the status quo they created, each layer getting less and less the farther removed you are from them.

Capitalism I don't think is the problem per se, it's unfettered crony capitalism that parades itself as "the free market" when in reality it is skewed heavily in favor of the wealthy. Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics are the intellectual underpinning to this current system of rape and pillage.

Perhaps it's time the scientists figured out what we need to do to prevent killing the planet and ourselves in the process and we reverse engineer our societies and economics to fit their model. I see no other way to change the current paradigm without massive bloodshed and attendant carnage. Technology is not going to save us, nor will policies coming from the right of left as we know them in America.

On our collective tombstone we should put:
R.I.P. Humanity
A victim of it's own success.

Eta: The brunt of the article implicates climate change and C02 emissions as the source of our future destruction. I still don't buy it myself and even if it were true it needs to be handled differently than by making C02 another source of revenues. I believe that nuclear, chemical and biological waste will cause enough harm to destroy essential links in the ecosystem to endanger human life on a massive scale like the decline in honeybees for instance.
Even if there were no sea level rise we're facing danger from a thousand fronts - all of our own making. If we fail to address these other areas by only concentrating on carbon emissions I think we'll still end up going extinct. If not extinct then those surviving will be living in the new bronze age.

Asktheanimals
reply to post by RP2SticksOfDynamite

 

Make that a .005% of the population and you got it. The others who share in the depletion of resources are only there as cogs to extract the wealth for the upper crust. Enticement if you will. The elite rely on those below them to defend the status quo they created, each layer getting less and less the farther removed you are from them.

Capitalism I don't think is the problem per se, it's unfettered crony capitalism that parades itself as "the free market" when in reality it is skewed heavily in favor of the wealthy. Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics are the intellectual underpinning to this current system of rape and pillage.

Perhaps it's time the scientists figured out what we need to do to prevent killing the planet and ourselves in the process and we reverse engineer our societies and economics to fit their model. I see no other way to change the current paradigm without massive bloodshed and attendant carnage. Technology is not going to save us, nor will policies coming from the right of left as we know them in America.

On our collective tombstone we should put:
R.I.P. Humanity
A victim of it's own success.

Eta: The brunt of the article implicates climate change and C02 emissions as the source of our future destruction. I still don't buy it myself and even if it were true it needs to be handled differently than by making C02 another source of revenues. I believe that nuclear, chemical and biological waste will cause enough harm to destroy essential links in the ecosystem to endanger human life on a massive scale like the decline in honeybees for instance.
Even if there were no sea level rise we're facing danger from a thousand fronts - all of our own making. If we fail to address these other areas by only concentrating on carbon emissions I think we'll still end up going extinct. If not extinct then those surviving will be living in the new bronze age.

edit on 29-10-2013 by Asktheanimals because: added comment

Actually, it's about 8% of the world population that own 83% of the wealth of the world. The top .7% own 41.0% according to the 2013 Credit Suisse Wealth Pyramid (Page 22, Golbal Wealth Report 2013)

images.smh.com.au...

Also, your so called "Unfettered Crony Capitalism" is Capitalism. Period. ...and unfettered meaning UNREGULATED.

I do agree that other forms of pollution are also causes for humanity's demise, and the SYSTEMS SCIENTIST advocating for economic revolution is well aware of it. It is you, who are pivoting to an argument on CO2 emissions. Global warming has many causes - primary - in fact - is the increased CO2 density made by human activity within (within) the context of cyclilical climate changes.

Regardless of causes and conditions - the matter needs to be addressed and as long as Business As Usual prevails, we are doomed, are children are doomed, and there may be no great-great-grand-children at all.

Well in order to get to what you suggest, a large portion of the humans currently on the planet will need to be given their pink slips from this life.

Which ones are you advocating receive them? Because the sustainable practices you advocate will not support anything near to the population you currently have.

Of course, you understand that the global elites all have their tickets punched. They're many of the same scientists urging this revolution on you, so they have to administer things "for your own good" of course.

So out of the remaining tickets (they do need laborers after all), how do you propose we:

1. Decide which of us get to stay alive and which don't.

2. Decide how to off the rest of the population and who gets to carry that one out.

Oh, and somehow I doubt you've placed yourself in the #2 category. People who advocate this sort of thing rarely do.

I am wondering if socialism, semi socialism, true socialism, progressive socialism, or special double secret socialism would be the cure all for this horrible end. The problem in this is the level of population, depletion of resources is due directly to demand in a capitolist arena, and demand is more than this machine called Earth can maintain. There are conciderable resources untapped on this rock, but the level of demand must decline for any chance of a future here and beyond. There has to be a fair and civil way to stabilize the population, and this is the only answer as we are 40 years behind where we should be on interplanetary travel. simple supply and demand...

reply to post by teslahowitzer


Well, look at China to see how well pseudo socialism works. You can see what a mess they are making of their environment. And don't tell me they don't have a top down centralized socialist/communist system. They do.

Gandi also implemented a system where every man was supposed to be an agrarian self-supporting person in a socialist state. You can also see how well that turned out environmentally for India.

Russia also made an all-fired mess of itself during its communist years, too.

It's a myth that socialist/communist systems are better for the environment.

Now, I'm not claiming that capitalist societies are pure either, but we aren't swimming in the smog of China or the open sewer rivers of India.

Asktheanimals
reply to post by RP2SticksOfDynamite

 

...I think we'll still end up going extinct. If not extinct then those surviving will be living in the new bronze age.

edit on 29-10-2013 by Asktheanimals because: added comment

Lucky ducks!

reply to post by FyreByrd

Also, your so called "Unfettered Crony Capitalism" is Capitalism. Period. ...and unfettered meaning UNREGULATED.

PLEASE Get it through your heads CAPITALISM DOES NOT EXIST! It has been dead for a hundred years or more. The Banksters KILLED IT! Fiat money being made of fairy dust ALWAYS trumps REAL WEALTH accumulated via actual labor.

Captialism is an unrestricted competitive market. It is re-investing REAL WEALTH (your labor) to create useful products. It is trading things YOU made FREELY for things someone else made without the government getting into the act.

Where everone goes wrong is thinking corporations are PRO-capitalism. It is the biggest scam in the modern world. It is how bankers and corporations get away with killing the competition from the serfs.

Realize that the corporate CEOs urge is not toward a competitive market or capitalism. It’s the very LAST thing any CEO wants. Even in Adam Smith’s “The Wealth Of Nations” he recognizes that "Rairly do men of means gather, even for merryment but that the conversation turns to ways to [restrict competition and raise prices]".

What a CEO wants is a monopoly where they can achieve the profit maximizing price point. Not competition. No “market” with many sellers. (Think Obamacare)

So watch what GE does, as an example. It is always on the hunt for a market it can “dominate”. It uses political leverage to get its products mandated and the competition banned. It doesn’t want a market, it wants a ‘company store’.

Internalize that, and a lot of things “fit” better.

Monsanto pushing legislation to ban private traditional seeds and seed sharing, and promoting GMO products. (Why would a seed company want to ‘destroy’ a seed market? So you must come to the company store…)

EPA is used to forbid all sorts of things that can be done easily and cheaply, and where the alternative is very expensive (and available from very few, or one, supplier). So, want to make your own “trash to fuel FT machine”? Well, better check out all the “regulations” on fuel refining and production … if you don’t have a few full time lawyers to fill out the paperwork and a few more to defend against the EPA suing you, it’s a no-go. And who DOES have those lawyers? AND the already established refineries? Oh yeah…

Once corporations figure out that it is cheaper and easier to get the competition banned and them mandated, than to create new products; and that they can make lots of money as the sole provider of a crappy product but not that much making good products in a competitive market; well, lets just say that the campaign contributions flow. Mother Jones has a great example.

Oddly, you can look at Communism as the “limit case” where there is ONE corporation and it IS the government. At the other extreme is “laissez faire” with huge numbers of competitors. As you move toward Communism you pass through stages of ever more “concentration” of control...

To put it bluntly Bankers and Corporate CEOs ARE SOCIALISTS!

Finally, someone with degrees says what we all were thinking anyway.

reply to post by FyreByrd


Thank you for this. Had to copy, paste and file the article unread - but I WILL get back to it.

S&F& 2nd line.

Happy to, mostly, agree with your Ketsuko,

ketsuko
Well in order to get to what you suggest, a large portion of the humans currently on the planet will need to be given their pink slips from this life.Which ones are you advocating receive them? Because the sustainable practices you advocate will not support anything near to the population you currently have.

The non sustainable practices we are currently practicing creates a massive excess of food ( perhaps feed double or triple current population number depending on what you believe) and sustainable practices could certainly emulate that without changing eating habits.

Of course, you understand that the global elites all have their tickets punched. They're many of the same scientists urging this revolution on you, so they have to administer things "for your own good" of course.

No doubts about that. The talk of climate catastrophe's and how 'we' ( even if it was it would be them and not us) are destroying the environment or polluting this or that can in fact be easily dismissed based on the information used as evidence.

So out of the remaining tickets (they do need laborers after all), how do you propose we:
1. Decide which of us get to stay alive and which don't.
2. Decide how to off the rest of the population and who gets to carry that one out.
Oh, and somehow I doubt you've placed yourself in the #2 category. People who advocate this sort of thing rarely do.

The reason the elites like this sort of talk is that the world has already been developed to such an extent that they simply no longer need a significant proportion of the labor they once did or even all of the administrating ( western middle classes) group they once needed to staff the imperial ground armies to keep the poor of the world in line and in the mines. Talking about population reduction and allowing them to justify this in your consciousness is perhaps the next step so that the remaining administrators and laborers will not be too shocked when suddenly a new strait of this or that flu suddenly starts killing of people of certain income groups and certain skin colors....

I have in the past tried to show why there could not possibly be a 'natural' problem ( you could however stimulate it by preventing societies from becoming educated or self sufficient in economic terms) related to overpopulation as a mouth comes with two hands and a big brain that if allowed even modest access to a small parcel of arable land , of which there is more than enough for tens of billions of mouths) could easily sustain his family.

If you however force them off the land and into cities where they must work in the mines and must be kept from rioting with bread and circus while the fantastically enrich your corporation well then things become problematic and suddenly it looks like there is too many angry&unhappy people...

Stellar

ketsuko
Well, look at China to see how well pseudo socialism works. You can see what a mess they are making of their environment. And don't tell me they don't have a top down centralized socialist/communist system. They do.

Since the wealth is not distributed anything like equally it clearly can't be very socialist and since the people have practically no say in who represents them it can not be called communist or socialist and since the workers in China do not in fact gain directly from the common ownership of industry it must have taken much propaganda to fool western people into associating China with it... Europe is closer to socialism/communism than China is, by virtue of people actually having the power to select representatives that could at least in theory change things, and Europe is more capitalistic than it is socialist ( since the workers do not own significant interests in the companies they work for) so one really wonders if we should even bother with labels that in practice almost never fully apply. Perhaps i should stop too....

Gandi also implemented a system where every man was supposed to be an agrarian self-supporting person in a socialist state. You can also see how well that turned out environmentally for India.

Oh the theory is sound but only insofar as you can prevent foreign countries from subsiding their grain production with billions of dollars and thus being able to dump it into your market place at such low prices that your own self sufficient small farmers can not sell the few extra tons they produce for the cash that they require to pay taxes and the few other modest bills they may have. The same thing happened to the American family farm ( there are hundreds of thousands of abandoned family farm homes, or more, all over the US) as it become less and less profitable to sell excess food into a market completely controlled by agri business that gets the subsidy which essentially allows them to buy grain from you very cheaply, in a consolidated marketplace, and sell it in another country for the same or less than they charged you!

The same is to some extent true in Europe as well and the combined food exporting power of these two forces have absolutely devastated small family farms all over the world as they once did in their own countries. This drives hundreds of millions of people into the cities all over the world and creates new wage slaves to fuel the hungry engines of industry with he lower wages also having the result that more and more jobs in the developed world can be off shored by it's disloyal/treasonous corporations.

Russia also made an all-fired mess of itself during its communist years, too.

The devastation you speak of is happens practically everywhere where the owners bought the land but do not expect to stay there to raise their kids or grand kids; at least Gandhi and ilk could see that the best way to protect it would be to make its caretakers dependent on it for their own survival. Corporations are not individuals and without massive oversight, and perhaps with it while the profit motive is preeminent, they can not and will not act sustainable. As for Russia the Nazi's ( read western imperialist) were bent on more than environmental destruction so what would you have done given Stalin's power when confronted with the post war devastation and enemies that were still practically at your gates? How can the Russian central government and people be expected to be excellent caretakers of their environment, while under threat of nuclear annihilation, while the west which had the overwhelming balance of power for decades into the cold war pretty much continued to lay waste to either their own environments or switched to draining redeveloping ( in the case of India which the British sucked so dry that it went from developed to underdeveloped; still recovering) or third world countries for ever more and more resources?

In fact the same can be said for most developing and poor countries today which are being strip mined and environmentally devastated by foreign corporations or foreign business practices being forced on them at aircraft carrier point. How can they be expected to risk their very economies and lives to save the environment by acting against international corporations that will be protected with either international financial action or, if that fails, actual military intervention?

It's a myth that socialist/communist systems are better for the environment.

The real myth is that we have had such systems of government in modern history. The closest approximation would be the native tribes of northern America.... They certainly had the population numbers and there could have been hundreds of millions of them when 'we' got there if they had not been artificially restricting their numbers by pretty severe birth control practices. The result was that they had just about as many people as could live off the land with practically zero impact and that was why Europeans found North American in basically pristine condition. The little i have read about the history of the nations there is pretty fascinating and it should be noted that they once had such population numbers that they had hunted the larger game and predators into extinction and then eventually changed their ways once it become widely understood that the practice was unsustainable. Well that is how i remember it but i am sure that's not half the story or perhaps the wrong half.

Now, I'm not claiming that capitalist societies are pure either, but we aren't swimming in the smog of China or the open sewer rivers of India.

edit on 29-10-2013 by ketsuko because: (no reason given)

At the end of the 19th century the USA was in good part to a third world slum which Europeans scorned as underdeveloped and uncivilized and they were not entirely wrong either. The programs that cleared away the smog and the then worse instances of pollution and environmental devastation were brought about by popular resistance to the corporate capitalistic practices of the robber Barron era which eventually resulted in the election of people like such as William McKinley&Theodore Roosevelt and others after them that basically , and with much popular support and activism against the excesses of capitalism, eventually resulted in programs such as the new deal and many of the other slightly less business friendly regulations you complained about elsewhere.

Many Americans believes that things have been going well for the American economy for a long time but the fact of the matter is that America have only had a "middle class" for three quarters of a century and this group have only had 'money' for two or three generations since the New deal/Gi-bill. If anyone ever wondered why Americans can seem brash&bombastic i do suggest that this is but a symptom of the 'new money' syndrome that you get with all people who are new to excess capitol; the newer they are the worse it gets which well explains the excesses of new minted celebrity's everywhere in the world.

Stellar

reply to post by StellarX

...one really wonders if we should even bother with labels that in practice almost never fully apply.

Those pesky labels really do get in the way of real communication, don't they? And their manipulation generally obscures the truth, doesn't it?

S& : up : for your post.