past the tipping point
This slow-motion collapse of the planet leaves us with the bitterest kind of awakening. For parents of young children, it provokes the most intimate kind of despair. For people whose happiness derives from a fulfilling sense of achievement in their work, this realization feels like a sudden, violent mugging. For those who feel a debt to all those past generations who worked so hard to create this civilization we have enjoyed, it feels like the ultimate trashing of history and tradition. For anyone anywhere who truly absorbs this reality and all that it implies, this realization leads into the deepest center of grief.
There needs to be another kind of thinking that centers neither on the profoundly dishonest denial promoted by the coal and oil industries, nor the misleading optimism of the environmental movement, nor the fatalistic indifference of the majority of people who just don’t want to know.
There needs to be a vision that accommodates both the truth of the coming cataclysm and the profoundly human need for a sense of future.
That vision needs to be framed by the truly global nature of the problem. It starts with the recognition that this historical era of nationalism has become a stubborn, increasingly toxic impediment to our collective future. We all…
Legume Sam:
About that Hornborg book: I reviewed it here…
13 December 2007, 8:18 pmGuy Montag:
Stan,
I’m glad you enjoyed a poem I brought to your attention a while back, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front.” Here’s another poem by Wendell Berry, from his book “Farming: A Handbook”(1970):
A Discipline
Turn toward the holocaust, it approaches
On every side, there is no other place
To turn.
Dawning in your veins
Is the light of the blast.
That will print your shadow on stone
In a last antic of despair
To survive you in the dark.
Man has put his history to sleep
In the engine of our doom.
It flies
Over his dreams in the night,
A blazing cocoon.
O gaze into the fire
And be consumed by man’s despair,
And be still, and wait, and then see
The world go on with the patient work
Of season, embroidering birdsong
Upon itself as for a wedding, and feel
Your heart set out in the morning
Like a young traveler, arguing the world
From the kiss of a pretty girl.
It is the time’s discipline to think
Of the death of all living, and yet live.
Wendell Berry is now around 70 years old. When he wrote this poem, he was about my age, with small children. … My boy Nathan is 3, Claire is 6. I’ve been a “prophet of doom” for a long time, but until a few years ago, I expected the hard times from climate change, etc. to come, but in a time frame of decades, not years. I haven’t had that cold comfort for several years now. Now, I’m just hoping my kids get older before …
P.S. Another poet for our times is Robinson Jeffers. Famous in the 20′s and 30′s, his poetry has been neglected by academics. But, he has a respectable following among amateurs. Robert Frost, Wendell Berry, Joseph Campbell,and Edward Abbey were among his admirers. I’ll pass on some of his poetry later.
14 December 2007, 12:30 pmld:
Sure, the enormity of the unfolding climate crisis spawns a nagging sense of fatalism, but for me not nearly so much as the harebrained analyses one sees proferred in the comments section at sites such as the one where this article was originally posted. Since the culprits are invariably either vacuous abstractions (“human greed,” “loss of community,” etc.) or narrowly technical (“the private automobile,” “coal-fired power plants”), you can imagine how brilliant the solutions are. It is quite astonishing that run-of-the-mill green “thought” has advanced not one iota since the late 1960′s/early 1970′s. (You’ll find a heaping serving of Malthusian crapola, too.)
Recognizing the coming reality of climate catastrophe — and demanding action, now! — has become as uncontroversial as singing paeans to apple pie. Al fucking Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, after all. Taking notice of the looming disaster is simply acknowledging an empirical fact, entirely different from staking a particular theoretical position or favoring a specific political strategy. Intensifying global warming is just part of the landscape, like wealth polarization, imperialist domination, and so on. Contending social forces do not dissolve away before this “mutual predicament” like no other. Rather, their antagonistic interests are articulated and fought through this issue, like any other.
(I know, I know… Feral Scholar partisans agree, and there are intelligent and mobilized climate justice activists out there… I guess I am just exasperated by the pwog-liberal handwringing that surrounds the Bali Conference, where pious self-promoters expect a gold star for coming to terms with the cloyingly obvious: “there’s a problem out there and we gotta do something about it!”)
14 December 2007, 1:17 pmCharles:
> http://www.storyofstuff.com/index.html
26 December 2007, 11:58 amLegume Sam:
What kind of persuasive demonstration would implicate capital itself, and not merely our refusal to buy “alternative technology,” as the enemy of nature?
28 December 2007, 2:24 amCharles:
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10278703
Hunter-gatherers
Noble or savage?
Dec 19th 2007
The era of the hunter-gatherer was not the social and environmental Eden that some suggest
Hemis.fr
HUMAN beings have spent most of their time on the planet as hunter-gatherers. From at least 85,000 years ago to the birth of agriculture around 73,000 years later, they combined hunted meat with gathered veg. Some people, such as those on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Sea, still do. The Sentinelese are the only hunter-gatherers who still resist contact with the outside world. Fine-looking specimens—strong, slim, fit, black and stark naked except for a small plant-fibre belt round the waist—they are the very model of the noble savage. Genetics suggests that indigenous Andaman islanders have been isolated since the very first expansion out of Africa more than 60,000 years ago.
About 12,000 years ago people embarked on an experiment called agriculture and some say that they, and their planet, have never recovered. Farming brought a population explosion, protein and vitamin deficiency, new diseases and deforestation. Human height actually shrank by nearly six inches after the first adoption of crops in the Near East. So was agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”, as Jared Diamond, evolutionary biologist and professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, once called it?
Take a snapshot of the old world 15,000 years ago. Except for bits of Siberia, it was full of a new and clever kind of people who had originated in Africa and had colonised first their own continent, then Asia, Australia and Europe, and were on the brink of populating the Americas. They had spear throwers, boats, needles, adzes, nets. They painted pictures, decorated their bodies and believed in spirits. They traded foods, shells, raw materials and ideas. They sang songs, told stories and prepared herbal medicines.
31 December 2007, 2:21 pmCharles:
What kind of persuasive demonstration would implicate capital itself, and not merely our refusal to buy “alternative technology,” as the enemy of nature?
^^^^^
Capital _must_ have an ever growing GDP, must have “growth”, like cancer.
Other modes of production don’t have to grow always, continually
31 December 2007, 2:23 pmLegume Sam:
Charles says:
Unfortunately, capital accumulation today is not based on “growing GDP,” but on an ever-expanding pack of lies. Read, for instance, the prediction at the end of Robert Brenner’s The Economics of Global Turbulence:
The demand for “growth,” in other words, has so far outstripped the supply that imaginary growth had to be invented to fill the gap; imaginary growth has been in the saddle, now, for thirty years.
The argumentative task we must now perform, then, is that capitalism cannot indefinitely lie to itself about what it is, and that there is some sort of necessary ecosystem comeuppance for its perfidies to nature.
31 December 2007, 11:41 pmStan:
This imaginary growth has been general — that is, the valorization of total capital is being done by fewer and fewer people worldwide. But the expansion that consumes inputs continues even more feverishly. albeit in newer and newer sectors of commodification… with countriues like the US providing the markets for those commodities.
So the paradox is that there is more and less “abundance” than ever; and the movement of money-capital (with more money being printed in the US) into ROE schemes (speculation… and the “imaginary growth” — fictional value — of financial bubbles) instead of surplus-value schemes (marxian profit).
There is absolutely and inexorably an eco-comeuppance; and in the interim, there is also the terrible social toll of this trend of fewer and fewer proletarians worldwide against the still inertial trend of more people. More people are becoming n ot the “reserve army of labor,” but “excess” human beings who constitute a competitive threat. This is the phenom that sets the stage for exterminism — the calculation of ultra-mass death as last stage of imperialism, and not as merely the collateral damage of business.
The implication of this, from the point of view of revolutionaries, is that we have to abandon the religious belief that the imperial-core proletariat will be the vehicle of revolution. It is those sectors who have been de-classed (in the cores at least) who are in the best position to effect political challenges… and moreso when they have learned to survive as far as possible outside the classic capital-relation.
The bright side is that the solutions to the ecological problem may also be — in practice — the way to escape our current political impasses.
il faut cultiver notre jardin
1 January 2008, 6:37 amLegume Sam:
It’s great to see Stan work through the definition of what the problem is, to wit: to show that capital, and not really the absence of “alternative technology,” is the enemy of nature. Here I’m going to try to push a little further.
My reading of Stan’s above post is that Stan can show that 1) there’s still a continuing valorisation of capital, 2) there’s “imaginary growth,” and 3) there’s an ecological comeuppance. Indeed all of this is true. The argumentative task before us, i.e. what we need to prove to the eco-capitalists, is that there is a necessary, logical connection between 1) and 2) and 3), that you can’t have one without the others. Let’s start here, with the “paradox” part:
I think the way to address the problem of the “expansion that consumes inputs” is in the matter of the REALIZATION of profit. (The opposite of “imaginary” is “real,” right?) If everyone “cashed in” on all the imaginary capital that has been created so far, there would be a general deflation of assets to balance out the asset inflation that has marked the Era of Finance Capital so far. This is in fact what’s happening in the housing market right now.
So with the broad increase in paper profits, and thus of imaginary capital, there is a broad decrease in the ability to realize such profits because imaginary capital is not real in the sense in which capital is constituted by productive facilities. The profits must stay “on paper” if they are to “increase” — of course, what decreases is the “paper profits” of that vast majority which is out of the loop of the financialization process: working folk living from paycheck to paycheck. Thus the general dispossession Stan suggested, above.
Thus I suppose the main solution to the “imaginary capital” problem is to explain how (and not merely that) financial bubbles can’t just expand forever, and that there must be some sort of catastrophic realization shakedown eventually, thus leading us back to the failure of capitalism to “grow” sufficiently in an era in which “growth” has prohibitively high environmental comeuppances.
But that isn’t the whole of the problem IMHO. I was just responding to the simple capitalism-must-grow argument, the one you see in Kovel’s book and indeed here in this blog. I think the biggest challenge to the exposure of capital, per se, is posed by the advocates of eco-capitalism. Eco-capitalism is all the rage now, and was that way through most of the 2007 era of solemn IPCC pronouncements. Eco-ignorance is “so 2006″ by comparison, and now we’re in 2008. Eco-capitalism is likely to become even more popular this year.
Ehat the eco-capitalists want to do is, they want to reduce the ecological problem to an energy problem, and then they want to claim that there is some source of “cheap, plentiful, and eco-friendly” energy source that will power-up the capitalist system for the rest of our lives. Problem solved, at least in their imaginations.
Now, the most concise attempt I’ve read so far, on how to show that “eco-capitalism” is impossible, is Saral Sarkar’s “Eco-socialism or eco-capitalism?”. But certainly the debate has proceeded far beyond what Sarkar had to contend with, back in 1999. For instance, there was a report released just last year by MIT that promised that incredible amounts of energy, enough to supply global capitalism with its current needs, could be dredged out of the recesses of the Earth using “deep hot rock geothermal” technology. This sort of techno-optimism dovetails with the eco-capitalist reduction of ecological crisis to an energy problem. Couldn’t they just switch everything to “clean energy” as such, and capital would no longer be the enemy of nature?
Now, I’m not quite familiar with all of the technical problems with such technology; my degrees were in the humanities (although I suppose “communication studies” counts as a social science). But I’ve heard rather little about “deep hot rock geothermal” power since the MIT report made its media splash, keeping the hopes of the eco-capitalists alive. So I’d imagine that the real costs of “deep hot rock geothermal” power are still pretty prohibitively high for most of planet Earth, and will stay that way for some time.
At any rate, this is the sort of stuff we will have to contend with, if we wish to show that capital is the enemy of nature and that captialism’s time will therefore “be up” rather soon, as the general ecological crisis worsens.
1 January 2008, 12:22 pmStan:
D’accord.
I think we very much agree about how to define the problem. I wish we had the same clarity about how to “show” this, and to whom we show it first, and what kind of showing will lead to some form of efficacious political action (I’m enough of a marxist still to know that it’s always politics at the end of the road). This is our conundrum. It’s always the conundrum of revolutionaries; and by the time we figure it out, if we do, we’ve usually beaten ourselves senseless hitting our heads on walls.
Who is the “we” for that matter? Most of us are familiar with the old dicho that when the left organizes a firing squad, we form a circle.
Then there is that business of waiting for the crises to manifest solidly enough to shock enough people out of their inertia to do something… and hoping that when we see how things form, we aren’t too late to avoid some hideous reactionary epoch.
Makes one’s head (and heart) hurt.
1 January 2008, 6:58 pmartur:
Patience, grasshopper. The Grand Canyon was not carved in a single spring flood.
The approach is termed “Enhanced Geothermal Systems,” or “Engineered Geothermal Systems,” and not “deep hot rock geothermal.”
Yes, the cost of this power is currently pretty high, but the MIT report does’t shy away from this fact. Nor does it claim to be a silver bullet capable of solving all the world”s woes.
Rather, it lays out a pragmatic, five-decade program for dropping EGS costs to fossil-fuel-fired levels and lower, ramping to 100,000 megawatts of capacity, about a quarter of the current US load. The break-even price could be achieved in the first decade, and bring 180 MW of the low-hanging fruit on line.
(You can find the report here as a single file, and here broken into chapters.)
This isn’t as effective as the “radical economic transformation” you favor, and which may be the only real road out of this nightmare, but could be one of several arrows in the quiver to help slay the carbon beast while we try to solve the underlying foundation rot.
This goal is based on incremental improvements in existing technology (some of it gained by experience), and doesn’t require blue-sky breakthroughs.
The first commercial EGS project entered operations last month, in Landau, Germany. A first step, it combines a conventional low-temperature hydrothermal resource (fairly shallow, adequate flow rates naturally) with enhanced injector wells used to return heat-mined fluids to the ground for reheating.
An Austrialian EGS project under development that involves artificially fractured source rocks, as well as injectors, will likely enter commercial operation in 2010.
Dozens of other similar projects are in the pipelines in Europe and Australia, efforts the governments underwrite with grants, low-interest loans, tax breaks, and favorable policies.
In the US, where EGS was invented, we have only one company pursuing this, with help from venture capital only and no federal help of any kind, so far. Renewable energy standards on the West Coast are helping, though.
The Bush administration cancelled the government’s geothermal technology research program two years ago, and left only enough funding for caretakers to turn out the lights and lock the doors. But the just-passed, execrable energy bill, which Bush signed into law, includes at least five years of funding for EGS research, probably mostly because it has bipartisan pork.
But some good may come of this, too.
2 January 2008, 3:26 ampeggy:
The article cited by Charles reminds me of an old article by Marvin Harris called “Murders in Eden” in which Harris points to infanticide among hunter-gatherers pre-12,000 BC in the mid-East as a way of keeping the population down when the supply of wild food dwindled. After this, they got serious about agriculture. The lesson I draw from this article is that human beings *chose* a life of greater hardship (agriculture) over a life of ease (living entirely off abundant wild food) that could only be maintained by killing other human beings.
2 January 2008, 5:51 amLegume Sam:
artur says:
Perhaps the audience here needs reminding: under capitalism, “alternative energy” will, in itself, do nothing to “slay the carbon beast.” Alternative energy serves as a supplement to fossil-fuel energy; the system which in 2005 consumed 85 million barrels of crude oil each and every day will not consume one barrel less on behalf of “alternative energy” unless the wells are deliberately shut down and the coal mines abandoned; and to do that would run contrary to the profit motive that drives for-profit corporations.
Within capitalism, “slaying the carbon beast” may serve as a selling point for “alternative energy”; “alternative energy” may, in itself, postpone the moment of reckoning when Peak Oil pushes the price of fossil-fuel energy out of sight, thus prolonging the globalist version of capitalism some more; but it will do nothing to save us from the disaster predicted in Mark Lynas’ Six Degrees. Slowing down abrupt climate change means keeping the grease in the ground, a solution which requires no new technology, even for the sake of preserving the energy privileges of the residents of the core nations.
2 January 2008, 11:50 amLegume Sam:
thanks go, at any rate, to artur for giving us a gloss on new developments in geothermal energy.
2 January 2008, 11:51 amCharles:
The demand for “growth,” in other words, has so far outstripped the supply that imaginary growth had to be invented to fill the gap; imaginary growth has been in the saddle, now, for thirty years.
^^^^^
CB: It may be that fictional capital ( a term from Marx’s _Capital_, i.e. a Marxist concept) is a larger portion of total capital than real capital than in the past. There certainly is a lot of noise from Wall Street.
However, if the growth were mostly or only imaginary we wouldn’t have such a problem with industrial pollution , global warming, oil depletion, ecological catastrophe. It’s not imaginary growth that’s melting the ice caps , is it ?
We are not in post-industrial world society yet. There is more industrial production, durable goods, mass production of “stuff” than ever, unfortunately. That a large proportion of manufacturing , its points of production, have been scattered away from the US and imperial centers doesn’t mean that there isn’t too many material objects being made from our updated ecological standpoint, no ?
^^^^^
^^^^
The argumentative task we must now perform, then, is that capitalism cannot indefinitely lie to itself about what it is, and that there is some sort of necessary ecosystem comeuppance for its perfidies to nature.
3 January 2008, 5:20 pmLegume Sam:
Charles:
The world economy does indeed experience growth, yet there is less of it than in previous decades. From William Tabb:
Meanwhile, as Harry Shutt tells us in The Trouble With Capitalism, there has been an enormous surplus of capital in the world when compared to the relatively meager opportunities for profitable investment. Productive investment has, for the most part, run into the classic Marxian crisis of overproduction; that, then, is the origin of the propaganda notion of the capitalist “post-industrial” economy that has been around since Alvin Toffler put out “Future Shock” in 1970.
4 January 2008, 5:08 pmCharles:
Legume Sam:
The world economy does indeed experience growth, yet there is less of it than in previous decades. From William Tabb:
^^^^^
CB: From our standpoint, that’s good. Thank God for small favors (smile)
With respect to your earlier question :
“What kind of persuasive demonstration would implicate capital itself, and not merely our refusal to buy “alternative technology,” as the enemy of nature? “,
I don’t think you are saying that this slowing of capitalist “real” growth means that capital itself is not implicated, are you ?
6 January 2008, 3:09 pmLegume Sam:
Charles: What do you think of James O’Connor’s “Second Contradiction of Capitalism“?
6 January 2008, 4:39 pmCharles:
Legume,
I’ll take a look at O’Conner.
Below is a little exchange I had elsewhere on the same thing we are talking about.
Charles
^^^
Who was it here who was denying that US capitalism is in a long-term
crisis of stagnation, disguised by “schachermacher accounting” of the
National Account Books and financial looting masquerading as
“profitability?”
S
^^^^
CB: May we discuss your long term crisis of stagnation point ?
As to real production, isn’t there, now, more production of
7 January 2008, 3:44 pmuse-values consumed by the masses of the population, the working class
than there was at the beginning of the long term you refer to ? If the
long term is 35 years, weren’t there fewer use-values ( real products)
produced 35 years ago than now ?
Charles:
Can we define fictitious capital as exchange value not attached to use-value of any use to the masses of people ?
8 January 2008, 3:20 pmStan:
I would suggest that to get at the issue we go further than this. And that requires a theory that begins to describe the phenomenon of money. Calling it exchange-value only scratches the surface. Necessary but not sufficient.
Because what is going on now is one particular form of money has escaped the “market” constraints of all other moneys… that whole dollar hegemony problem.
Even more importantly, what is money? the original marxian description was still stuck on specie and paper-representation of specie… no account for the relations between currencies, et al.
It is important that one sum of money can be exchangeable for X+ one day, then X- the next. It is also important that money is simultaneously “legal tender” (political, requited to pay taxes with), an entitlement to labor and nature, and ecosemiotic.
The bubble phenomenon we are seeing now is a unique aspect of this period.
8 January 2008, 8:42 pmCharles:
Usually what happens when somebody says the Marxian concept of something is only such and such, I look around in the Capitals I ,II , III et al. and low and behold Marx actually has discussed it tucked away in some little section somewhere. I’m thinking he does discuss currency exchange or concepts underlying it somewhere, but maybe there was no currency exchange until , what post-Bretton Woods 1973 ?
Marx does attribute about six functions or so to money,and the first chapter of Capital is “Commodities and Money”. I don’t know if the elementary attributes and functions of money impinge on the currency exchange.
On bubbles, what was the Tulip thingy in 1600 or whatever ?
Then there’s Victor Perlo. It is likely he discussed currency exchange in his last book. _Crises and Superprofits_. The idea that Marxist economists of today don’t discuss some major aspect of the world economy of 2008 like exchange values is , uh….
The definition of “price” is exchange-value in money terms.
9 January 2008, 3:55 pmCharles:
See below on the tulip bubble of 1600.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Tulip mania
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Pamphlet from the Dutch tulipomania, printed in 1637The term tulip mania (alternatively tulipomania) is used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble. The term originally came from the period in the history of the Netherlands during which demand for tulip bulbs reached such a peak that enormous prices were charged for a single bulb. It took place in the first part of the 17th century, especially in 1636–37.
The event is remembered in part because of its extended discussion in the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written by popular British journalist Charles Mackay in 1843, more than two centuries after the event. Mackay omitted mentioning that during 1636-37, the Netherlands suffered from an epidemic of bubonic plague, and severe setbacks in the Thirty Years War. [1]. Modern scholars (e.g. Peter Garber) consider the event much less extraordinary than did Mackay.
9 January 2008, 3:57 pmCharles:
See also the South Sea economic bubble of 1720
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Bubble
The South Sea Company
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For the Noel Coward play, see: South Sea Bubble (play).
Hogarthian image of the South Sea Bubble, by Edward Matthew Ward, Tate GalleryThe South Sea Company (1711 – c1850s) was an English company granted a monopoly to trade with South America under a treaty with Spain. Following the South Sea Company Act of 1720, it became better known for the “South Sea Bubble”, an economic bubble that occurred through overheated speculation in the company shares. The stock price collapsed after reaching a peak in September 1720.
9 January 2008, 3:58 pmCharles:
Also, in M-C-M+, M is money.
11 January 2008, 12:45 pmCharles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_exchange
11 January 2008, 12:46 pmJosiah:
“West’s Pollution ‘Led to African Droughts’”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2042856.stm
Want to raise your blood pressure? Read this article. There is a big pile of evidence now that the Sahel famines that ravaged Ethiopia and the Sudan in the 1970s and 1980s (the source of those images of famished children that became a stereotype of Africa) were largely caused by sulfur dioxide from factories and power plants in Europe and the U.S.
If anyone is interested, here are links to two scientific papers providing evidence:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/102/50/17891?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=simulation+sahel+drought&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006…/2006GL026067.shtml
If yields from rainfed agriculture do fall by 50% in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia and Latin America by 2030 or so, as the IPCC projections say is quite possible even with moderate emissions cuts, people are going to be talking about a very different kind of genocide in the coming decades.
15 January 2008, 6:28 am