The Flavor of Fear
All of us have out own way of describing it predicated on our own experience with it.
My own memory is the taste of copper, like having a penny in your mouth. But that is more the species of fear that goes with the sudden awareness that one is no longer in control in a situation with a high likelihood of dying… pretty much right now.
For those situations where criminality is about to be exposed, the flavor of fear might be more metaphorical… and it is more protracted. At a loss for the moment, I invite other commentators to suggest their own analogs.
Whatever it is, I suspect there is a lot of it in Washington these days. They have shown the maturity of the average acid-popping, alienated, suburban adolescent over the last five years… no capacity to imagine the emergence of Dire Consequence when things seem hunky-dory for the moment.
But then our whole society is like that in many ways. A pampered adolescent society, still thinking the earth revolves around MeMeMe, still tuning out any mention of consequence, still fantasizing about futures that are not possible, still treating the earth like it is not finite, still homogenizing and objectifying everyone else on the planet as if they don’t matter… and will never get mad.
So the crash that will come in Washington if the 2008-motivated Democrats capture one of the Congressional redoubts — and with it, the weapon of the subpeona — is a foretaste, if you’ll forgive my sensory pun, of what we will all eventually experience when the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics shows up to arrrest us for our energy profligacy, and our vicious Energy Wars to delay the inevitable.
The fear of the Republicans right now, as their wanton criminality is subject to exposure (if the Dems have the sand in their craw… a real question), is not the last act, but the first. It is the Preface, and every act afterward will star that acquisitive Piper.
Now the news is full of Panglossian drivel about “carbon trading” as a way our of our energy impasse, as if financial derivatives — like the belief in a technological fix before it — can operate outside the boundaries of the physical universe. All these carbon trading scams will accomplish is to further immiserate and disempower the Global South to extend our party a few hours, and we’ll never see — until it is too late — the actualization of all that ocean of latent fury outside the ‘burbs.
Carbon trading is an attempt to finally commodify and privatize the very atmosphere, and it is proof, for anyone who wants to see, of the hellish decadence to which we have all become — like the proverbial frog in the boiling pot — accustomed.
The curtain will fall, in any case, decisively on Hydrocarbon Homo Sapien in my own lifetime, in all probability, and I’ll be 57 when Al Gore makes his next run at the White House.
Meanwhile, we’ll spend a third of our lives in our cars or working to pay for them, maintain them, and feed them gasoline, never understanding that these machines… this vast agglomeration of technomass in the overdeveloped West is the greatest parasitism in history.
Better, it seems, we taste that copper-tongued variety of fear in risking the end of this system, in the leap of faith required to relocalize, expropriate the rich, and begin the process very very soon of de-industrialization and banish the Almighty Market to museums alongside medieval war artifacts.
If the current regime loses this election, and I sincerely hope they do, it will not be time to rest on our laurels. When the Democrats crawl back into the light, it will not be time to throw them flowers. It will be time to build alternatives on the ground as the basis for divorcing them… unless we want to blithely accept, not for ourselves, but for our children, a future in which everything, including the air we breathe, is for sale… until the Second Law comes a’callin’.
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In addition, I have permission from Jim Davis to link his superlative paper called “Speculative capital and the ecosystem of globalization”. This paper pulls together two important threads that I’ve been flogging from Hornborg and Gowan in the past (both linked on this blog), and Harvey’s theses on privatization of the commons (in this case, the atmosphere!!!). _SG
(excerpt from Speculative capital and the ecosystem of globalization)
Carbon financial instruments
Emissions markets are probably the best known experiments in environmental financial speculation. Emissions trading involves the creation of a fixed number of pollution credits or “rights”, typically by a governmental body, and the formation of a market to trade these rights. The government body sets a desired pollution target level for a particular pollutant (the “cap”), e.g., sulfur dioxide (SO2) or carbon dioxide (CO2), creates permits (or “allowances”) to generate the target pollutant, and allocates the allowances to polluters. In theory, an enterprise cannot emit the pollutant without a corresponding “permit” to do so, and faces fines (e.g., in Europe, currently 40 euros/metric ton for CO2) if emissions exceed permits. Enterprises that reduce emissions may sell their unused permits to an enterprise that would rather purchase permits than reduce emissions. The emissions trading markets enable pollution to acquire a price. Or looked at from a different point of view, the government body has created a title to the use of the air, thereby commodifying, and privatizing, the atmosphere.
Of the wide range of possible strategies for curbing GHGs, the Clinton administration pushed through emissions trading as the device of choice (Lohmann, 2005). From the point-of-view of speculative capital, this represents the perfect choice. It requires new trading markets to be established, and traders to facilitate the exchange of permits, and creates new opportunities for arbitrage, hedging and derivatives. Speculative capital is not just the capital sloshing around, but also the agents that promote and represent it, including trading firms, exchanges, accounting firms and consultants. These agents helped promote emissions trading as the climate change solution. E.g., Enron was an important corporate promoter of Kyoto, and while it stood to gain as a natural gas pipeline company (because natural gas releases fewer GHGs than coal), it also was transforming itself in the 1990s into a major trading firm in electricity and other commodities (Warner, 2002) that would benefit from the trading opportunities in GHGs. A small industry has developed to facilitate the trading of emissions, including the exchanges where the emissions are traded. With the beginning of implementation of Kyoto in 2005, a number of start-up exchanges competed in Europe, where emissions reductions are mandatory, to become the main site of emissions trading. Two main markets, the European Climate Exchange (ECX, owned by the Chicago Climate Exchange), and the French PowerNext have emerged as the main markets for “carbon financial instruments” or CFIs. The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) provides a trading system for U.S.-based carbon emissions.
Although the Bush administration subsequently refused to sign the agreement, the Kyoto Protocol provisions are moving forward in the 163 signatory countries. The Kyoto Protocol calls for industrialized countries to achieve an average 5.2% reduction from 1990 levels in six GHGs by 2012. Following Russia’s ratification in late 2004, the terms of the protocol went into effect for the treaty’s signers in early 2005. Countries are allocated a number of permits based on 1990 levels minus the agreed reduction. Countries then grant the permits to polluting industries, grandfathering existing pollution, so the biggest polluters get the most credits.
The Kyoto protocol adds a novel provision to emissions market in the form of “offsets”. By investing in pollution reduction efforts, a company can create offset credits that may be sold, or used to make up a permit shortfall. Under the “Clean Development Mechanism” (CDM) provision of Kyoto, these reduction projects are undertaken in countries that have no reduction targets, mostly developing countries. For example, by investing in a tree plantation in Uganda or Brazil, a company can gain pollution credits that allow them to avoid reductions in pollution at home. Companies can also invest in alternative energy production, or improve existing facilities, and create credits for the pollution that would have been created in what Bachram… …
Required:
The process of de-industrialisation?
I know more than a few Marxist-Leninists who are going to shit themselves when they realise that this will be necessary. It’s amazing how many believe that we will be saved by machines.
I remember having a discussion where Cuba’s urban community gardens were mentioned. People were very against the idea that this might be adopted as a general practice, outside of an isolated crisis’s. The thought of having to spend their time growing their own food was repugnant.
They seem to have this belief/dream that socialism means that everyone will live with first world middle class technologies. The fact that we’ve run out of resources to provide that for the few who have it now doesn’t seem to bother them. The revolution will solve all that.
I’m glad to see some people talking about carrying capacity as well. Most socialists I speak to about this dismiss the idea itself as being racist. It has no doubt sometimes been used for racist ends but that does not rule out the fact that it exists and that we may have exceeded it.
I’m wondering how or if people think that these ideas tie in with primitivist/neo-luddite ideas? A quick introduction into the ideas that I have found interesting are essentially the belief that all civilisation is unsustainable. Civilisation being living in cities. Cities being a people living in groups large enough to require the importation of resources. The reason being that if you require the importation of resources the means you have denuded the land base of that particular resource. The more your city grows the more you will continue to fuck up the planet.
31 October 2006, 5:28 pmBasically it is an assertion that the only way to live sustainabley is in hunter-gatherer type communities.
Stan:
Been there. Done that. That’s why I don’t cop to being Marxist-Leninist anymore, aside from it sounding like something to say to shock one’s parents. That term was invented by Stalin in order to claim an unbroken continuity from Marx to himself (having come directly after Lenin).
This is where we have to put on our critical thinking caps again, because its pretty hard to lay claim to the movement for scientific socialism when you ignore science. The earth certainly does have a carrying capacity. That is not the same as the claims inhering in racist Malthusianism, that we have a “population” problem. That inherent claim is that ths is a result of our genes (Dawkins, are you there?), which again naturalizes the processes we see, and lets the ruling stratum off the hook. The malthusian outbreak of population, which is easily seen on any world population chart is a result of capitalism (with its carcinomic growth imperative), and which always seeks to expand capital by any means necessary (which led directly to industrialization). Hornborg shows how industrialization is not innocent of social relations, how the claim that capital-expansive technology cannot become socialist by placing it in the hands of socialists. It is marked by its exploitative nature.
The emergence of socialist STATES that attempted to “build” socialism in 20C, inside a capitalist world system, using capitalist technology, which requires capitalist productive relations…. NEVER escaped, leapt over, transcended the fact that it was articulated firmly WITHIN a world capitalist system.
It’s adoption of “advanced” industrial technology was a survival necessity; but over time the socialist-state propagandists got caught up in their own dogwaggery… justifying the contingent necessity as the best of all possible worlds, and making the idiotic claim that socialist industrialism could outdo capitalist industrialism. But there was never any such thing as socialist industrialism… again, as Hornborg points out, this was the fetishization of machines. There were socialist states attempting to defend themselves from capitalist states with the master’s tools.
We can certainly live sustainably without all reverting to hunting and gathering, but without some fairly drastic corrections, for which ther precondition is the acquisition of political power. If not, civilizaitonal collapse is the likely scenario, and sooner than many might think.
Cities, as currently constructed, are vast energy sinks. You got that right. But Cuba is showing that we can begin backing away from this abyss, one careful step at a time, if we can show the political will.
31 October 2006, 5:51 pmeoinmonkey:
Im not sure what the flavour of fear is. I always think of it as being a feeling, a gentle tightening churning in the bowels and an involuntary clenching of the jaw muscles.
As for the technological solution, my own favorite example, which would be laughable were it not the indicator of a mental blidspot so scary in its implications, is when people talk about planting colonies on Mars or the Moon for us humans to move to when we destroy the Earth. It was expressed to me recently by one guy in the form of “if we destroy the Earth we can just build a new one.” Really? So, having inherited the only planet and ecosphere that our species has ever known, a pretty damn nice place when it comes down to it, the occasional natural disaster aside, and having been unable to live in it or with it, we are somehow going to use the same technology that fucked it up to construct an alternative from scratch? That takes more faith than believing Jesus could turn water into wine.
31 October 2006, 9:01 pmpeggy:
What if one said that technology is masculine while gardening is feminine? In terms of cultural associations, I mean. Would one be stoned to death?
You know we have lived with the imminent apocalypse in one form or another since the fifties. Therefore, we really are like the frog in the pot of hot water that is getting hotter.
For a small community, or even a small country, to develop solutions and implement them is not impossible. It happens. Maybe Cuba is an example. New Zealand could be one, too, if it doesn’t get caught up in wanting to catch up with the rest of the OEDC.
The problem is that a small country or community is vulnerable to predation, and may be increasingly so as the global crisis deepens. Maybe the trick is to have nothing worth stealing, or capable of being stolen. They can steal the water from our aquifers, but can they steal our rain? They can ruin our lovely fresh air if they really want to, but can they steal it? Oxygen can be bought and sold, in relatively small quantities (relatively compare to all that is in the atmosphere, I mean) but can they steal the whole atmosphere? Can they steal the whole ocean? They can destroy it, but can they steal it?
Technology does not just mean things made of steel and plastic. It means invention and discovery. The development of gardening itself was a technological advance. As I understand it, it happened when the world could no longer support the burgeoning population of human foragers. So a few started working on cultivation of plants and domestication of animals, and it caught on. Now we in the North have to learn how to live on less. Make an art of it. Be proud of it. Let our neighbors come to our door and ask to know our secrets.
Lots of folks these days practice conservation. It is sort of catching on. In parts of the global South, conservation is a way of life. It’s not a prestigious way of life, but at least people know how to do it, really well. So we can solve part of the problem by practicing conservation.
The other part of the problem, dealing with the military and economic predators, is harder. And interestingly, it appears that the economic predators are harder to hold at bay than the military ones.
Just thinking out loud
1 November 2006, 5:14 pmpeggy:
Oops. I may have made a Malthusian slip up there. Sorry bout that. Didn’t mean it.
Concentration of resources by way of a community growing its own food made way for the development of cities with concentrations of people, and in the first cities was where class differentiation and stratification came into being, or so I have heard. So are cities the root of all evil? I don’t think so. A lot of our living can be done more efficiently in cities, plus cities have exciting mixes of people and all kinds of creative things happening, so I wouldn’t want to give them up altogether. If we could toss out (or recycle) the bathwater and save the baby, that would be really nice.
Anyway, I’m not sure there are many locations where people can get all they need to subsist right where they are. Certainly not enough such locations to go around. If we really want to feed all the people instead of letting most of them die of starvation, we cannot go back to earlier ways. And it goes without saying that we cannot continue our current ways either.
This is where our much-vaunted human intelligence comes in, or should. Outside the town where I live, up on the hills, there are beautiful, giant windmills. Not old-fashioned windmills, but windmills that took a lot of fancy engineering by very well-educated people to design. Probably foreigners to this country designed these things. But they work for this country. Beautiful windmills going up everywhere! God, I love technology. Now all we need are more bicycles, and more people on them. Bicycles are the best thing ever invented.
2 November 2006, 6:31 amRequired:
“Cities, as currently constructed, are vast energy sinks. You got that right. But Cuba is showing that we can begin backing away from this abyss, one careful step at a time, if we can show the political will.”
What Cuba is doing is very inspiring. However, it seems that the very idea of having that many people in one place is an energy sink. There just seems to be something wrong about covering kilometres of area in concrete and buildings or someother arangement that stops other life from using the area. Nomadic tribes are able to move from an area and allow it to regenerate. Cities kill an area. You can put farms on top of it, but you can’t really allow wild life access to it. Maybe we don’t need to.
4 November 2006, 7:16 ampeggy:
FWIW, there is wildlife in cities. Coyotes (real ones, not metaphorical ones) are moving into Manhattan. Chicago is a main rest stop for migrating birds of all kinds.
4 November 2006, 4:54 pm