Boundaries of Executive Power (4) - Climate Change & Peak Oil
I’m linking two articles here, one emphasizing the secular trends themselves, and one that links those trends to the kinds of activism that each issue demands. The reason this falls into the category of boundaries of executive power is fairly obvious, but I’ll reiterate what they have in common in this regard. (1) No matter what any executive does (and Obama is already constrained by what we comonly call “political reality”), many of the worst effects of climate change asre already irreversible and inevitable. (2) No matter how far any political-reality-constrained executive is willing or able to go in the most essential and inescapable option to deal with peak oil — dramatic, legally-mandated conservation — we are already decades behind technologically to retool for a post-peak world, and we are a century out of step with the demands of this emergency when we look at the constraints imposed on us by culture. At best, Obama may be able to rearrrange a few of the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The Fusion of Peak Oil & Climate Change
by James HowardPeak Oil and Climate Change are two historic events for humans and life on earth. The first threatens modern industrial ways of living and the latter threatens the climatic systems that are an integral part of our world and the way we live and survive.
A quick recap on both. Peak Oil is the point of historic maximum global oil flow, Climate Change is the alteration of established climate systems due to (in this case, anthropogenic) global warming. The onset of both will affect food & water supplies, mortality rates, conflict, migration and much more. The evidence that climate change is underway and almost past the point of no return is very strong and Peak Oil day by day gathers more credence as many studies point to an imminent peak.How do these two events affect each other though?
The decline of global oil supply and the increasing cost of everything as a consequence means we will see our ability to deal with the consequences of Climate Change reduced.
Let us take a look at Britain. The decline of oil and gas will of its own accord make it harder to keep Britain warm but if the Gulf Stream does switch off as a result of Global Warming, the gap between what is needed and what will be available will get wider. The change to a colder climate would have a negative affect on crop growing, at a time when declining oil and gas supplies make the agriculture business more expensive. Warming sea temperatures are pushing fish stocks further afield, out of traditional (and already over-fished) fishing waters. Fishermen, so dependent on oil for their boats, will have to pay more for their fuel to go after these already dwindling and increasingly distant fish stocks. The insurance industry is already facing increasing pressures from Climate Change, but when the economy nose-dives past the oil peak, this double whammy could knock out the insurance industry. Will those in increasingly flood prone areas be able to pay the insurance costs during the recessions brought…
Bridging Peak Oil and Climate Change Activism
The problems of Climate Change and Peak Oil both result from societal dependence on fossil fuels. But just how the impacts of these two problems relate to one another, and how policies to address them should differ or overlap, are questions that have so far not been adequately discussed.
Despite the fact that they are closely related, the two issues are in many respects dissimilar. Climate Change has to do with carbon emissions and their effects—including the impacts on human societies from rising sea levels, widespread and prolonged droughts, habitat loss, extreme weather events, and so on. Peak Oil, on the other hand, has to do with coming shortfalls in the supply of fuels on which society has become overwhelmingly dependent—leading certainly to higher prices for oil and its many products, and perhaps to massive economic disruption and more oil wars. Thus the first has more directly to do with the environment, the second with human society and its dependencies and vulnerabilities. At the most superficial level, we could say that Climate Change is an end-of-tailpipe problem, while Peak Oil is an into-fuel-tank problem.
Because of this crucial divergence, the training and priorities of people who study one problem often differ from those of people who study the other. Most advocates for the Peak Oil concept—sometimes known as “depletionists”—are energy experts, economists, journalists, urban planners, or workers retired from the oil industry (usually geologists or petroleum engineers). Among climate analysts and activists there are more environmentalists, fewer energy experts, and far fewer retired oil industry employees. It is my experience that, when placed in the same room together, the two groups often talk past one another.
My own background is primarily as an environmentalist: I teach a college course on human ecology and have been writing about ecological issues for 15 years or so; at the same time, I find myself identified primarily as a Peak Oil activist, having written three books about the subject and having given something like 300 lectures on it. To me, head-butting arguments between the two groups as to which problem is more serious constitute a peculiar kind of hell, in that such arguments can only hamper the efforts of both groups in doing what we all agree is essential—averting environmental and human catastrophe. Nevertheless, disagreements and misunderstandings are already emerging for the simple…
Legume Sam:
1) “Peak Oil” cannot be granted a simple bell-curve analysis as we would do if oil were a uniform resource. Not all oil is the same, and so what we will see with the passage of time is the general degradation of oil, as the clean, easily processed oils are used up and as the dirty, tough-to-process oils are all that remain. The exploitation of tar sands is a byproduct of this. The exploitation of tar sands does some rather unsavory things to the land, it should be added here.
2) The same deal can be said to be true for coal. The degradation of coal supplies will mean a deeper fouling of Earth’s air, land, and water. To say even that we have a thirty-years’ supply of coal left on this Earth (never mind the two-hundred-year figure) is to give the ruling class a lot of time to waste on phony “solutions” to peak oil/ abrupt climate change while assuring that the resultant environmental holocaust will be far worse after it’s all been burned up.
3) “Alternative energy” can be said to fall prey to the same limitation that dirty coal and oil have: energy return on energy investment. If alternative sources of energy were as easy to extract as their advertisers claim, we’d be doing it now. The problem is not that there is so little energy out there: it’s that the energy out there is relatively difficult to extract and use when measured by the criteria of a capitalist system that’s addicted to the burning of 85 million bbls./day (about a billion gallons or four billion liters per day) of cheap oil. The question needs to be asked of ALL advocates of “alternative energy”: do you want to provide energy for basic human needs, or are you looking to duplicate the existing energy-consumption system and save capitalism?
4) The conditions for an abrupt climate change of vast and uncertain proportions have already been met. The past 420,000 years were characterized by atmospheric carbon dioxide levels which varied from 180 ppm during the ice ages to about 310 ppm during the hot ages — we are now at 385 ppm and increasing by 2 ppm per year. The only thing that keeps planet Earth from feeling the full effects of its new CO2 endowment is the slowness of the feedback effect. So the idea that we are going to “cut emissions” and that this will solve the problem is like the recommendation of an applied bandage when faced with a cancer.
5) Eventually, then, technological schemes will be applied in attempts to mitigate abrupt climate change. Once it is realized that CO2 burning has already reached a number of important ecosystem thresholds (thus making ecological simplifications practically inevitable) last-minute measures will be applied. The oceans will be salted with iron filings to encourage the growth of plankton. How much good this will do (especially with the rest of world society heedlessly bent upon increasing Earth’s CO2 endowment by 2 ppm/year and accelerating) is still something no accurate source is even willing to talk about.
6) Our politics and economics are still stuck in a general denial of ecological facts. This can be especially said to be true about the real urgency and the practical nonexistence of adaptive preparations for abrupt climate change. It’s already quite easy to foresee that the Rockies and the Sierras will lose their icecaps, leading to severe water shortages across California, yet no plans for vast expansion of coastal desalination plants have even been suggested. On a civilization-wide level, Sing C. Chew writes about this in his most recent book “Ecological Futures” — the relevant passage is on p. 130:
In short, the existing world society will probably persist until it collapses of its own accord, because social forms such as the one we currently struggle to change are typically incapable of learning from the historical disasters suffered by previous social forms. Our problem, of course, is that our entire society is stuck in the religious thinking which centers around the worship of money, and that the few at the top of the hierarchy created by this rule-through-money system are separated from the possibility of proactive, adaptive solutions for world society by the perceived need to retain power within the existing structure.
7) Revolutionary solutions to the environmental dysfunction of the existing social structure have been considerably hampered by the immersion of popular culture in a “culture industry” which formed the central sociological complaint of the “Frankfurt School” during its mid 20th-century tenure on this Earth. The “culture industry” can be said to have imposed the commodity stamp and corporate form upon those “off hours” in which relief from the pressures of working class life are sought. This, of course, is the product of an expanding capitalist system, which brings with it the expansion of capitalist discipline into all sectors of life.
9) Thus within environmentalist debates one can read the repeated recurrence of the same old struggle, pitting political “realism” (i.e. what is perceived to be possible with the reactionary political structure currently in place) against environmental “realism” (motivated by knowledge of the increasing possibility of a structural crash and positioning itself to achieve some degree of power after sad crash occurs). Neither option can really bring the existing civilization into a form that will adapt to the environmental transformations to come.
10) Revolutionary efforts may be served best by investigation into the potentials of a “revolutionary critical pedagogy,” which would seek to discover and develop revolutionary potentials “between the cracks” in existing frameworks of capitalist discipline, ahead of any war of position or actual attempt to seize power.
19 November 2008, 11:49 amMichael Anderson:
And the other leg of this 3-legged stool (both in literal and scatological terms) from hell is; how do you accomplish positive change and synthesis for an equitable and convivial future against a financial system that is attempting to consolidate power globally for the elite, while destroying any movement from below?
http://solari.com/blog/?p=1823
19 November 2008, 3:22 pmStan:
Whether “they” have the capacity to destroy any movement from below depends on a couple of things. Is there a movement from below? Is it a movement that attracts the attention of the powers and that alarms them? How stretched are the powers by their current efforts (a lot, now, I suspect, with wars and recessions and geopolitical chess).
I’m not sure we’ve answered that first question in North America. Movements will arise around a broadly felt need or grievance… not an ideological platform, even if the platforms are designed to address needs, eg, we need universal health care. If the public perception is that those who propose these programs are absolutely powerless to implement them, then the grouplet that publishes its manifesto will be ignored. The more I mull this over, the more I am convinced that it is a very rational, as well as inevitable, mass decision. The movement-character of the O-campaign contained many grievances and needs (though the sources of those grievances were not well-understood, and so the public was manipulable); but the key was “we can do it.” “It” being put someone into the Oval Office… a position of genuine, albeit structurally constrained, power. On the left, those who critiqued Obama (rightly, in my view), never had the capacity to form any alternative at all… because they remain completely politically toothless… and everyone except a few self-deluding grouplets knows it.
This is the drawback of scale, and grand scale can’t function without (1) tangible, legitimated, and coercive power and (2) ideological hegemony.
Needs are very idosyncratic and local, but by the time we repackage these needs as program points that apply to the broadest number of people, the proposed solutions have become generalized and abstracted (part of a bureaucratizing process), and far less relevant or effective at solving the issues that objectively emerge in highly localized circumstances. This presents a lot of local, practical opportunities to proponents of a different system, in the establishent of new practices that anticipate the needs that are about to emerge (debt, for example, or food security).
Needs will be felt first as the abandonment of various realms by government and civil society, as the mismatch increases between the ideas and practices of power and emergent reality. Katrina gave us a dramatic foretaste of this… not merely incompetence (though this is symptomatic of what is happening), but government incapacity to cope. State governments all over the country are in the deepest financial shit imaginable right now. Our schools are being diected to return money to the state government to address huge shortfalls.
Visualize a government at every level that is running out of money and influence. Then visualize what they will abandon that will create crises for people at the local level. Then come up with some practical solutions to those problems, and be the nature that abhors a vacuum. The game of Go is one of strategically occupying space… one space at a time, to establish contiguous claimed space. Check it out.
20 November 2008, 6:23 amRev. José M. Tirado:
Hi Stan,
Another recent, albeit more humorous, call for the kind of engagement you just mentioned is Joe Bageant´s latest, “The Sucker Bait Called Hope” which can be found here:http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/11/the-sucker-bait-called-hope/
I would also link that article to Lance Selfa´s most recent in CounterPunch (http://www.counterpunch.org/selfa11202008.html)
What these two very different articles have in common is the emphasis placed on from-the-bottom human solutions. It should be pointed out that the scale of control for most of us begins first within our hearts and then spreads out to our loved ones and community and outward. None of which alone can achieve what I suspect we all want: a more just and compassionate world. But recognizing that within each scale there are some things we can do can be an inspiring message.
While I tend to agree with Joe that the situation is terrible and getting worse, I also believe that lots of small victories give people a hope that´s rooted in practical life rather than wistful idealism. Not that I´m against idealism, only I have witnessed more compassion and justice within the smaller scales of my life circles than I ever witnessed on larger scales whose directions and ultimate outcomes I have little influence over.
Your own committment to Christianity (a discussion I hope you launch again, perhaps tying it to why we all seek what we seek here) is, I think, an example of revisioning the scale and the terms of one´s perspective and reinvigorating the personal struggle in a new way. I´m not recommending we all get religion, but I think what´s missing (for me, anyway) from a whole series of discussions on the Left, particularly now after the Obama election, is the carving out of our desires in platforms that are positively sketched and not negatively framed.
I know I need to hear from people whay what they want is good more than why what is presently the reality around us is wrong. I know how shitty and racist, sexist, and brutal the powers that run the world are–but they always have been, and I think, always will be. But I want to know what inside one´s heart pulls one towards the goal we want and a positively enunciated goal that will inspire rather than depress me more. Any takers?
21 November 2008, 10:05 amcharles:
The problem is not that there is so little energy out there: it’s that the energy out there is relatively difficult to extract and use when measured by the criteria of a capitalist
^^^^
21 November 2008, 12:35 pmIs there another point on this ?
“difficult to extract” means it takes a lot of energy expended to extract, so the net energy had is relatively low, does not add up to replace existing levels of energy had.
Michael Anderson:
Point taken, Stan. I have never been much of a person for playing games…guess I better start. It will, at the very least, be something to do when the power goes off!
Back to an earlier point you made during the election, about the futility of “main thrust” strategy as a mechanism for change. There was an article this A.M. in the WSJ about Peak Oil advocate Robert Hirsch sending a memo to prominent Peak Oilers, telling the Peak Oil community to “temporarily pipe down” during this present financial mess, because it may exacerbate the situation. Given the article appeared in the WSJ (!), but my feelings are that those of us who are advocates of P.O. should continue to keep it in public view, keep talking about it, because it will help to facilitate changes, both on the local level and nationally. Here’s the link:
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/11/14/peak-oil-prominent-peaker-tells-allies-to-temporarily-pipe-down/
I think temporarily keeping your mouth shut is part of the chain of behavior that leads to silence. The connection between P.O. and the present mess needs to be emphasised.
21 November 2008, 1:45 pmClifford J. Wirth, Ph.D.:
We will be toasted by Peak Oil long before global warming toasts us.
According to most independent scientific studies, global oil production will now decline from 74 million barrels per day to 60 million barrels per day by 2015. During the same time demand will increase 9%.
No one can reverse this trend, nor can we conserve our way out of this catastrophe. Because the demand for oil is so high, it will always exceed production levels; thus oil depletion will continue steadily until all recoverable oil is extracted.
Alternatives will not even begin to fill the gap. And most alternatives yield electric power, but we need liquid fuels for tractors/combines, 18 wheel trucks, trains, ships, and mining equipment. The Energy Watch Group (funded by the German Parliament) concludes in a current report titled: “Peak Oil Could Trigger Meltdown of Society:”
“By 2020, and even more by 2030, global oil supply will be dramatically lower. This will create a supply gap which can hardly be closed by growing contributions from other fossil, nuclear or alternative energy sources in this time frame.”
http://www.globaliamagazine.com/?id=482
We are facing the collapse of the highways that depend on diesel trucks for maintenance of bridges, cleaning culverts to avoid road washouts, snow plowing, roadbed and surface repair. When the highways fail, so will the power grid, as highways carry the parts, transformers, steel for pylons, and high tension cables, all from far away. With the highways out, there will be no food coming in from “outside,” and without the power grid virtually nothing works, including home heating, pumping of gasoline and diesel, airports, communications, and automated systems.
This is documented in a free 48 page report that can be downloaded, website posted, distributed, and emailed: http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnalysis.html
I used to live in NH-USA, but moved to a sustainable place. Anyone interested in relocating to a nice, pretty, sustainable area with a good climate and good soil? Email: clifford dot wirth at yahoo dot com or give me a phone call which operates here as my old USA-NH number 603-668-4207. http://survivingpeakoil.blogspot.com/
21 November 2008, 4:58 pmsusan/catlady:
Rev. Tirado: “I know I need to hear from people why what they want is good…I want to know what inside one´s heart pulls one towards the goal we want and a positively enunciated goal that will inspire rather than depress me more. Any takers?”
Thank you for this reminder, perhaps Stan would grant us a thread for “what inside one’s heart pulls”? I find myself, over and over, succumbing to my addictions to outrage and self-righteousness, rather than focusing on right livelihood. The recent gathering of Portland area readers of this blog was like a drink of strong clean water for me.
I have recently moved to this city. I am beginning to find work, good work, but not enough yet to keep me from dipping deeply into my savings. (I thank my conservative father for teaching me to save and pay off my credit card every month.) This is my chance to examine every aspect of my life and make new choices, from what I eat (moving toward vegetarianism) to how I get around town (still drive far too much, but exploring foot, bike, and bus options). I am making new friends who inspire me (B who sold her car and bikes everywhere in the rain, K who lives simply but has incredibly rich work and art, S who is growing food and getting into goats, S & J who care so deeply about a young boy, D & M who are tradition bearers).
One thing that pulls my heart towards the goal we want: sharing food drink talk and music music music with people from different places. I need that sharing to grow into _working_ with people from different places: learning to grow food up close, in every neighborhood, pulls me. I am lucky; I live in an ecosystem where the sky and earth give us great help.
21 November 2008, 8:37 pmRev. José M. Tirado:
Hi Susan,
And thanks so much. This is exactly what I meant.
As you said, Stan can (or not) create a separate space for us who wish to explore this a bit more in depth but my reasons are selfish to be honest. I am often lost in the minutiae of economic, Marxist, dialectical(Hegelian or otherwise), or theretcial discussions here which intimidate me from participating. I certainly don´t need intellectual coddling and am not asking for wishy-washy self-piteous ramblings either. I want a community of sorts.
I think I am more pained by the way the impersonal approaches we choose to problems further alienate us from each other. It´s really simple and probably will not win me any intellectual “points” but I can´t kill the people I know and care about, thus the more I learn about the people who share my spaces (cyber or other) the less a-part they become. (We must reflect on why it requires so much intimidation, mind-training, physical and spiritual bluster and the grinding down of dissent to get a typical person to become a soldier, willing to kill another. Why is that? Could it be that maybe, just maybe, most of us want a community and killing is just not a major part of our natural ways towards creating one? I don´t know but I do think about this alot)
While this medium is way too impersonal for my taste, the more I personalize the opinions I read about; the more I know people as people, the better able I am to feel a part of a community–which I think is the only way out for us all. A community. Or a series of interlocking communities. Some cyber, some physical. But either way, by removing the impersonalist lense I look out at the world I become closer to it and it becomes less alien to me. ANd I become more open to understanding what I normally might not ever attempt to understand.
Look, I have a friend, a Col. in the Army, someone whom in past years I might never have associated with. This person too regards the friendship with me as also quite anomalous. But we have, over the past 3 years, overcome a slew of inner obstacles and prejudices to honestly enjoying each others company and sharing life stories. We have become friends. This closes the distance between two people who have some pretty variant opinions on issues of war, capitalism, imperialism, etc. I´m not trying to be sappy here but this is the kind of effort I am far more optimistic about than any of the grander approaches I may undertake. (I was a union president with 700+ workers many years back and while my efforts were successful I know I made a bigger difference with the handful of friends who considered my passion for the issues as less important than my passionate concern for the quality of their lives. I leanrd a big lesson then.)
Anyway, I have little kids. That someone would allow their deaths to occur (or actively seek such) over some ideal like “war on terror” terrifies me. I am a socialist because I care about people, not because I read a ton of socialist lit when I was between 13-35. And as I get older I realize what I want, what tugs my heart towards these things I want, is that there is no reason we need put up with the killing of people in our names for any reason. I can think of a few resons I would fight to protect my kids, but otherwise creating a community of care that embraces justice and fairness is why I am here. And Stan remains for me an inspiring figure, one whosed approach suggests similarly defined goals. I don´t know. And I´m sorry if I distracted this discussion. Thanks though!
22 November 2008, 9:34 amStan:
Working on that thread. Started to work on it this morning; but it’s been a very long day. I’m bushed right now, but tomorrow in the PM I’ll try to get the new thread up. Jose and Catlady, I’m grateful for the push. You both say true things.
22 November 2008, 6:56 pmcharles:
Premature Triumphalism
by John Michael Greer
The Archdruid Report (November 19 2008)
In last week’s post, I mentioned in passing that a presentation at the
5th Annual Peak Oil and Community Solutions Conference at the beginning
of the month had left me with hard questions about the Transition Town
movement. A good fraction of the comments I received in response to that
post centered on that one brief reference. This probably shouldn’t have
surprised me; these days, the Transition Town movement has become one of
the more popular responses to the emerging crisis of the industrial
world, and its spread has generated both a great deal of enthusiasm and
a rather smaller amount of criticism….
…The core idea of the movement is
23 November 2008, 2:01 pmthat a small geographical area - a town, a village, an urban
neighborhood, or the like - can make the transition to a postpetroleum
world by harnessing the ideas and efforts of local people.
,,,
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2008w46/msg00077.htm
charles:
Furthermore, with energy shortages it is very likely that certain places in the world would become more isolated. By no means should this be seen as negative.
^^^
23 November 2008, 2:13 pmThis should be debated. More isolation may very well lead to new types of racism and ethnocentrism. Somehow we must preserve the rational kernel of capitalist “globalism” ( while overcoming its anti-humanism) which is our entire species being in “touch” and communication with each other. Holism is a critical concept for where humanity goes next. The winding down of burning _must_ not be done in such a way as to set the stage for some future racism, imperialism, colonialism, and ethnic supermacism. We must not repeat the error of our ancestors in scattering themselves away from each other. ” It’s a small world afterall”
James:
We only really have one global problem, which is too many people. Both climate change and peak oil are symptoms of this inalienable ecological restriction. There are no more than a few hundred thousand members of any other similar species of large omnivore on the planet, and there is no more reason for human exceptionalism to be any more removed from the fundamentals of ecology than US financial exceptionalism is exempt from basic economics.
We have vastly over-multiplied, aided and supported by millions of years of captured sunlight released to us in the form of fossil fuels. In doing so, we have altered the composition of the atmosphere. The big question we need to ask is: How will the majority of the world’s human population cease to eat (and subsequently, to be) over the next century?
There simply are not enough fossil fuel resources left to feed everyone, and the problem is compounded by the impact of climate change. Above all, climate change will force us to consume more fossil fuels to compensate for rapid ecological changes that outpace infrastructure that relies on stable ecosystems for efficiency and profitability.
Until we can figure a way to get the human population back into a stable and sustainable-with-limited-fossil-fuels level, we must contend with the specter of a catastrophic ecologically-mandated reduction in population. It happens to every other species that overshoots its carrying capacity - why shouldn’t it happen to us? If somebody can give me a good reason I will be much reassured. Thanks in advance.
24 November 2008, 9:52 pmBuddhalovesPaine:
James,
25 November 2008, 7:46 pmThis may not be the good reason that you were looking for but I will throw this out for discussion anyways.
Necessity is the mother of invention. I suspect that the Pentagon solution to the worlds over population and global warming is to bring on a nuclear winter. My solution would be to try to turn the worlds desert regions
(Sahara, Australia, Gobi….) into breadbaskets. Of course that is easier said than done. Developing nuclear fusion power would be an enormous help in that reguard. Also perhaps the oceans can be used more effectively.
How to stop global warming is also going to require a technical solution that humans do not currently possess.
If one were a betting man, I guess betting that humans will not last through the 21st century would be a good bet. If I were capable only of thinking rationally I would also bet against their long term survival. I hope that there is someone smarter than humans are looking out for them. Some people would use the word God and Angles, others Buddhas and Boddhisattvas, others Ancesteral Spirits, or Aliens from another dimension, or humans from the future traveling backwards in time. (Yes I am aware that with our current understanding of space-time if humans from the future traveled back in time that would change the very future that they came from and that would mean………..)
However “they” work, they ultimately get the blame for everything that goes wrong and “we” ultimately get the credit for everything that goes right. “They” are used to that and they should be. We humans have every right to pray to them one minute and curse them and rebel against them the next minute. It is no different than if we petition a government for redress of grievances and at the same time prepare to overthrow the government if it does not take action on those grievances. Although we are totally defenseless against them they know everything that we think. Because of that they know when we have caught them red handed and express our justifiable anger.
For example in the 2nd world war a bomb was placed on Hitler’s plane by officers in the German military and that bomb failed to explode. When it was later inspected it was found that acid in the bomb that was supposed to eat though a led wire failed to complete the job and the detinator did not go off. Now some people will claim that I can not scientifically prove that this coincidence was the work of a higher power. It is true I can not scientifically know that I am right but I know that they know that I am right. Their only possible defense is that it was necessary that Hitler not die at that point in time because if he had there was a great chance it would have had a negative side effect at some future point even worse that letting him live.
It is OK if you do not believe in them. They do not care. They know and I know that human survival would be an extreme long shot without them. They guide our evolution. Yet we should not take them for granted. They may decide to go home in disgust.
BuddhalovesPaine:
Point of clarification: In the comments above I wrote that I HOPE that there is someone smarter than humans looking out for them. As I wrote that sentence it was not my intention to write about my belief that there is.
25 November 2008, 7:53 pmI guess the effects of to much speed led me to have a lapse in judgment and prematurely write about my belief that there is such an intelligence.
Stan:
Now I finally have a chance to address the Malthusian remarks of James (above). This is like the porn debate, where one can lay out the arguments again and again, but the dominant ways of knowing are so consistently and thoroughly entrenched in our culture that one finds oneself repeating the exact same arguments (albeit still with no adequate rebuttal) again and again and again.
…sigh… apologies for my frustration…
The Hanson die-off narrative of niche-maximization, overshoot, etc. is plausible only if one restricts oneself to broad numerical averages and tendencies. It is purely quantitative, and that bias closes the gates against any qualitative understanding of the system (attempting to reduce human history to just another bit of evolutionary biology). For the record, I like evolutionary biology. I also like the big numbers; and I believe absolutely that overshoot is possible and becoming more probable by the day. But to jump from this acknowledgement to the claim that The Problem is population is a dramatic and wrong-headed non sequitur. The conclusion that population is The Problem does not follow from the premises apparent in restatement of the numbers, unless you weed out all the other variables (each with another set of premises).
So long as the ecological footprint of the average American is 1000 times that of the average Haitian (or whatever it actually is), then consumption as well as spatial flows of capital, energy, etc, is at least as relevant — I would argue far more relevant than a simple global headcount. I’ve written a fair amount on this, so I’ll just ask you to read Spatial Patterns of Capital for a few other indices aside from birth and death rates. I would also suggest you look at Food and Finance, which historicizes the way we do “agriculture,” which is far more than a mere population problem, and which began not with accelerated birth rates, but with dispossession of small landholders that jammed them into high-entropy urban environments.
The dangers of this approach include one big danger that I will reiterate here. Once “population” is The Problem, then the question is already raised: What is to be done? It’s the answers that reveal not some scientific “objectivity,” but the prespectives of privilege. I hear plenty about wanting to reduce birth rates among the poor of the world (now, see, it’s THEIR problem); but I hear far less about reducing consumption or reproduction rates among those segments of the population that actually consume the most. My humble opinion is that anyone in the “first world” whose each child consumes hundreds of times more than a “third-world” child has a lot of gall to preach the virtues of population “control” (gotta love that word) among the latter.
29 November 2008, 9:34 amLegume Sam:
Just to continue from my previous thought, Chew, as I explained in my review of his book on DailyKos.com, explains how climate change has, in the past, caused the collapse of civilizations. This is important because Chew’s understanding of this powerfully counteracts the liberal illusion of abrupt climate change as a problem-in-itself. According to Chew, forms of civilization (e.g. Sumerian, Roman) tend to weaken ecosystem resilience in their own, specific way, and climate change tends to deliver a knock-out blow. Political/ economic chaos and cultural/ technological inability finished off these civilizations.
Thus, the problem with abrupt climate change is not just abrupt climate change; it’s that our techno-mania has allowed us to weaken, quite significantly, the natural environment’s ability to bounce back from what we’ve been throwing at it, and that abrupt climate change will make this existing situation readily apparent.
Therefore abrupt climate change is not a mere “issue” to stand equally aside gun control, health care, tax policy, or gay marriage, as the liberals would imagine. (The dividing-up of politics into mere “issues,” in my opinion, is the mechanism by which the liberals can be married to the neoliberal policymakers of the Democratic Leadership Council, so avoiding this perspective is important.) The real issue about abrupt climate cuts to the core of our civilization’s environmental dysfunction; how are we to square our mechanisms for meeting economic need with our need for some degree of ecosystem resilience (ultimately leading to stable equilibrium). Our economic organizations, all the way down to the individual “person,” are at this point reduced to the pandering after effective demand, demand backed by money, under conditions of capitalist competition, with states functioning as mere chaperons of hyper-exploitation, and without anything but a cosmetic consideration of realities as defined and measured by ecologists. We are trashing ecosystems even more severely than did the civilizations of old, and climate change will deliver the coup de grace to world society and send us into the next Dark Age unless we can learn from all this at some point before the end.
Without a real attempt to square the technologies of economic life with goals of ecosystem resilience, then, all complaints of “too many people” and “overpopulation” miss the point. Even a smaller population would fall into the same trap, unless the civilization itself can have some sort of built-in eco-technics. In our case, this means creating a post-capitalist environmental design that would provide the grounds for an ecological disciplining of world society. Without this, all complaints about population are meaningless. There is no point in doing the population numbers if the populations themselves cannot make a real effort toward the preservation of ecosystem resilience.
29 November 2008, 11:02 amLegume Sam:
And just to get at Charles’ remark against isolationism: “More isolation may very well lead to new types of racism and ethnocentrism.” All of which would be true, but rather beside the point in a world which was experiencing endemic ecosystem and civilization-wide collapse. Chew’s point, made ironically to be sure, is that at least such a collapse would also be the collapse of globalization, which today ties individual fortunes to a monstrous (capitalist) system of planetary overconsumption and degradation. The idea that this is a “good” thing can only be taken ironically, of course, in light of the five or six billion deaths that will happen before it is to become possible.
2 December 2008, 8:00 amCraig:
“We only really have one global problem, which is too many people.”
Fine. You first.
If there is one thing that makes me nervous about this site, it is the potential danger of misanthropy. (To be fair, Stan Goff fastidiously weeds his garden of this.) The point stands that you don’t explain exactly what you mean by “people.” It could mean billions of people living at or below subsistence levels, or it could mean white, middle class, progressives who think that recycling and carbon credits absolve them of their enormous privilege. Then again, it probably means white, middle class progressives whose privilege amounts to sitting in traffic two hours a day to work another ten at a soul crushing job in some ugly office park. The problem is when you say that America consumes too much, you’re telling Americans they now have to walk to their soul crushing job is some ugly office park to work ten hours a day under a fluorescent light that produces a sickly buzz. That is cruelty, the kind hawked by a phony like Al Gore, and a parody of socialism.
The world has changed, and now thatlambda is greater than 3 (or now that home prices are falling and the debt/dollar bubble is deflating), what used to be a stable equilibrium is now unstable. What will the new equilibrium be? Who knows, but whatever happens, the focus for any worthwhile social movement is striving for a better world, a focus on what the movement is for rather than against, and the one thing a social movement can’t be against is “people.” Put another way, ask yourself how less people makes people’s lives better.
“This is like the porn debate, where one can lay out the arguments again and again, but the dominant ways of knowing are so consistently and thoroughly entrenched in our culture that one finds oneself repeating the exact same arguments (albeit still with no adequate rebuttal) again and again and again.”
Sometimes, lambda is time. Other times, it is information. Bifurcations still happen.
“And just to get at Charles’ remark against isolationism: “More isolation may very well lead to new types of racism and ethnocentrism.” All of which would be true, but rather beside the point in a world which was experiencing endemic ecosystem and civilization-wide collapse.”
I disagree. “The problem is too many people” is not that far removed from “the problem is too many of those people.” It means we’re left with the same rotten world and the same rotten injustices.
2 December 2008, 10:42 pmLegume Sam:
At the end of his most recent book Nomads, Empires, States, Kees van der Pijl suggests that much of the world, under the pressures of a system of global governance which has lost its frontiers, is today regressing to new variants of tribalism, new attempts to attain group unity amidst the atomizing pressures of neoliberal capitalism (under which, by Michel Foucault’s now-famous phrase, everyone is an “entrepreneur of himself.”)
Thus it’s easy to imagine, with the future collapse of global governance in a world scarred by ecosystem simplification, famine, and plague, that a few disparate “tribes” of people will be what will be left of the human race, with billions of others left to die. Charles suggested that such “tribes” would be susceptible to narrow, ideological “tribalism” — which, of course, would be quite beside the point in a world of massive human die-off. We wouldn’t by any stretch be left with the “same rotten world”; we’d probably just die, of starvation if not of suicide.
The one sentence from Sing C. Chew’s book which I quoted in the long blockquote (above) which suggests this sort of outcome for the present-day world society is worth repeating:
Give me a hint here, so that I don’t feel like I’m losing my reading audience. What set of frames do I need to add to make this sort of prediction look plausible? In the standard college course in population biology, the notion of the “exponential growth of populations” is held liable to the phenomenon of “population crash,” in which (according to the link just cited) “If there is a sudden change which affects the amount of available resources (for instance, a drought or a frost) a population which is growing exponentially may experience a dramatic decrease in size.” How is it that abrupt climate change DOESN’T count one such “sudden change”? Chew suggests, indeed, that civilization crash has been facilitated by climate changes in the past, coming as they have on top of the environmental depredations of the civilizations themselves.
Will human beings, whose population growth under industrial capitalism has certainly conformed to the standard exponential growth model given in population biology, experience “population crash”? Well, on the one hand, human beings are far too intelligent and far too versatile to be regarded as typical examples of population biology. However, it must be added to this observation that, in the aggregate, actual human societies tend to take predictable forms, forms which conform (when stable) to models of political economy. And the current form of political economy which we share, neoliberal capitalism, is likely to induce human population crash if pursued far enough. Much of the standard “Worldwatch” report can be read as supplying the hard data for such an observation, without, however, having the courage to finger capitalism as the culprit. Paul Prew’s article on this topic summarizes the matter more concisely:
So the question at hand is one of whether human intelligence and human versatility can get to human systems of political economy before the human beings themselves are “done in” by catastrophic ecosystem simplification. Suggesting that die-off has to happen first before changes in political economy can happen is not the answer we want.
4 December 2008, 5:32 amSandy:
Amazing blog:
20 December 2008, 6:54 pmSurviving in Argentina
http://ferfal.blogspot.com/