Comments LegumeSam has made

Washing clothes...

is only boring because we've been conditioned to expect immediate gratification.  See Teresa Brennan, Exhausting Modernity...

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G

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Next, the "technology issue"

New energy technologies will, in themselves, do nothing to deal with the problem of abrupt climate change.

The only way that anything will be done is if the wells are capped and the mines are abandoned.  It's that or nothing.

New energy technology may make life a little more convenient for the privileged few who can afford it.  Period.  New energy technology will do nothing for the bottom 40% of humanity who live on less than $2/day.

The debate about abrupt climate change is a debate about the ecosystem resilience of planet Earth in the face of increasing atmospheric CO2 levels, the melting of the polar ice caps, the death of coral reefs, and so on.  It's a debate about the role of the human race as a species of care-takers of Earth's ecosystems.  It has nothing to do with whether the privileged classes will be able to run their toasters when the oil wells are capped.

The "energy technology" people start from the assumption that world-society is pumping and burning 85 million barrels of oil every day (accounting for a mere 36% of greenhouse gas emissions) to satisfy human energy needs.  Wrong.  Production under the conditions of capitalist world society is production for effective demand, demand backed by money.  The energy production sector is damaging ecosystem integrity in order to make a buck.  If we want to be ecosystem stewards, we need to move away from an economy that makes stuff to make a buck, toward an economy that does otherwise.

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End global capitalism!

Localities will have to ADAPT to abrupt climate change; but the problem will really only be resolved with the end of the global capitalist system.

Yeah, let's cut "emissions" 5% per year.  (It's a hallmark of capitalist ideology that even its so-called "environmentalism" cannot distinguish between out-of-control fossil fuel burning and respiration, both of which count as "emissions.")  Then some other economy can use the fossil-fuels we're not using!

Big contradiction: infinitely-hungry growth economics, finite planet.

From Paul Prew's "The 21st Century World Ecosystem":

The question to be asked, really, is whether we proceed with capitalism until we reach an ecological bifurcation point that leaves the habitability of the earth in question for the vast majority of the population, or we reach a social bifurcation point that leads us to a social system of production that is dissipative, nonetheless, but does not threaten the flowing balance of nature.

Sorry!  Them's the breaks!  

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What's in a name?

I would say that short term monopoly capitalism is really corporate feudalism.  under that regime short term bottomline considerations rule.

Any name will do, I suppose.  The thing is that it's not really a monopoly; it's more like an oligopoly, where the competitors all take an interest in having everyone believe in the same "free market" ideology while they game the system for their own greater profits.

Under competitive capitalism where the future of your small business, like your fishing business, passed on to the next generation, is the ultimate consideration.  Just as in a family, where giving the next generations the best chance at happiness and success is the ultimate consideration, the health of the resource, in this case the salmon assumes primary importance.

The first part is a sentence fragment -- but I fail to understand how the "ultimate consideration" under any sort of capitalism can be a concern for the long-term future.  Bills are all payable in the short term; if they're not paid, bankruptcy becomes the result of repeated failure to pay attention to the short term.

The "free market" isn't free -- it requires quite a bit of social co-ordination to bring it into being -- and the main purpose of all this social co-ordination is to assure that businesses are all focused on profit, all the time.  Profit to pay off debts; profit to maintain market share; profit to achieve personal security for the owners.

Moreover, "market" production is production for effective demand, demand backed by money.  This enforces the requirement that one must have money in order to participate in the market system.  This, and not merely corporate bigness, explains why capitalism is so dangerous to Earth's ecosystems.  Earth's resources must be plundered in order to produce for effective demand, so that businesses can produce like crazy in order to game the system for all the money it will surrender.

For smaller local businesses only a sustainable future works.  This is sane capitalism.

Actually, it's just small business.  A system in which there are only small businesses, in which businesses are prohibited from becoming corporate monoliths, would be something rather different from the capitalism we know.  Large businesses outperform small ones because they can survive on smaller margins, and thus small business want to become large ones.  What do you want to do about that?

At any rate, if you would like to create an economic system which allows only small business, you will be faced with plenty of ethical dilemmas.  What about the small businesses which have become successful enough to become big businesses?  Are you going to take away their bigness, and punish them for success?  And if you insure small businesses against bankruptcy, what kind of growth opportunities will there be for people with no businesses at all?  By insuring the small businesses, you've guaranteed them a market share.  Where is the market share for the start-ups?

There really isn't anything "unethical" about small business, or about any business per se, large or small.  The problem, as suggested by Harry Shutt in The Trouble With Capitalism, is that there is too much capital out there in proportion to the real investment opportunities in existence.  Moreover, the more successful this capital is, the more the capital creates more capital, and thus the problem compounds itself.

Let me suggest a distinction that may clear things up.  Who makes the economic decisions?  Economic oligarchy is a system where a few rich people make the economic decisions.  That's what we have now.  Economic democracy is a system where the public as a whole (or at least its qualified representatives; say, for instance, you have a minimum voting age) makes economic decisions for the whole.  

Economic democracy is something I'm suggesting we try.  Everyone should be put in positions of responsibility for the economic life of the whole, starting with education but continuing with the sharing of democratic power over economic decisions, because everyone will then be responsible for the mitigation of abrupt climate change.  And then we'll get somewhere.

We can have businesses under economic democracy; but the money system which these businesses use must be under the effective control of the people, exercising their will democratically.  Please see Hutchinson, Mellor, and Olsen's The Politics of Money for further details.

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Opportunity costs

Still think efforts to shift human activity to cooperate with nature, rather than fight it, are too expensive?

For capitalists, not being able to exploit the natural world to depletion and death is an opportunity cost.

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"Max" says:

We are both waiting patiently.

Why wait when you can publish your findings in a peer-reviewed journal?

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You're such a great comic foil!

Grant Williams said:

I don't know squat about the environment.

What was that again?

I don't know squat about the environment.

Yeah, I thought so.  LOL!  And then he said:

I merely claimed that I lacked adequate knowledge to determine that human activity is the vital cause of ecological destruction.

Which brings up my earlier question: "Why would I want to talk about it with you?"

Do you think I'd learn anything?

The issue I raised is the one which you wish not to discuss: why "eco-harmony" is preferable to unbridled industrial civilization.

Since you "don't know squat about the environment," it stands to reason that you don't know what "eco-harmony" is, either.  We're back to the last question: why would I want to discuss it with you?

Here are some books that might start you out:

Mark Lynas, Six Degrees
Miller and Westra (eds.), Just Ecological Integrity
Jared Diamond, Collapse
Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction

well, that's enough for now...

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Yes, fun.

Spurious, intentionally confounding claims aren't fun.  You knew exactly what I meant by my use of the term "environment."

I don't think I do know what you mean.  Is this the Humpty Dumpty theory of word meaning: "`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'"

Or are you arguing that we don't spend 100% of our time in the environment?  You did say that my claim was "spurious," did you not?

As for your admonitions that my appraisal of industrial civilization is selfish:  Yes, it is.  Proudly so.  I do not feel one iota of responsibility towards all of those people in the 3rd World

Selfishness and irresponsibility woven into his banner!  Wave it HIGH!

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Nice graph!

If it sounds like I'm repeating myself, well, maybe I'm waiting for a rational response: there are fractions of capital with a vested interest in destroying planetary ecosystem resilience.  The coal industry is one of them.  They've given big bucks to all the big candidates.  This is what we get for the high-school practice of voting for the candidates which are most "electable": policy becomes a commodity, to be sold to the highest bidder who can donate to all the "electable" candidates.

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to make it clear --

two guys can hug each other as long as they want, as long as it's called a "tackle"...

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We get raises too --

tho' the money will be worthless...

This is the whirlwind reaped from dollar hegemony.

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An economy based on something

They didn't always use that debt for capital improvements or to improve their financial position.  Too often they used it to fund short-term consumption.

And this is what kept the economy afloat, according to Robert Brenner.  Stupid fools!

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LOL!

But I still see most of you unwilling to tell the other half of the story.  This credit-driven crisis simply could not have happened if people had not borrowed to such unsafe levels.

Sorry, dad.  As for the rest of us, if we wanted to buy housing in the first seven years of the "zeros," and pay mortgages instead of rents, we would either have to purchase abandoned homes in western North Dakota, or we would have to "borrow to such unsafe levels."

Meanwhile, you have Dick "deficits don't matter" Cheney running the roost in DC against a spineless (and probably powerless) Congress.  Both elections were rigged.  Is that the people's fault?

And that economy run on dollar hegemony.  It must be the public's fault.  Yeah, blame the average guy.

Too bad such bail-outs leave so much of the real problem unstated.

The real problem, at this point, is capitalism, in which it's still too profitable to pump, refine, and burn the oil while fishing the oceans dry, ripping down the forests, etc.  Under capitalism, those who poach the commons are rewarded with profit.

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Masculinity complex

Actually, Valens was a nervous wimp of little self-confidence and talent, who was pained by the envy of other prominent leaders which frequently afflicted Roman emperors.

Indeed, and so, also, was George Herbert Walker Bush, who mercilessly bombed hundreds of thousands of surrendering Iraqi troops...

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I like my history better

In other words, empire over industry, the very industry that made empire possible.

Let's see -- Alexander, the Romans, the Muslims, the Mongols, the Chinese... industry makes empire possible?

The discovery of fossil fuels advanced the disintegration of slavery

The first for-profit American oil well: 1859, Pennsylvania.  The de facto end of most slavery in the US: 1863, Pennsylvania again.  Did it really happen in only four years?

Just food for thought.  Have fun, Jon.

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world-systems theory

Jon Rynn says:

First, one "quibble" -- maybe the USSR collapsed because of the loss of confidence of the elites, but they lost confidence because the production system was collapsing, and it was collapsing because they had poured most of the output of the means of production -- remember that phrase? -- into the military.

I thought the USSR was collapsing because its economy was being privatized.  Remember, Moscow "adopted G-7 and IMF recommendations for a withdrawal of the state from the economy," as van der Pijl's "Global Rivalries" book tells us.  It states further that (246):

... the state class abandoned the state-socialist form of the contender effort, switching to a free-for-all in the race for private enrichment

And if "militarization" is supposed to collapse an economy, then how was it so that "militarization" led to US and Soviet expansion after World War II, and to the US recovery from the economic downturn of 1982?  So, no, I don't think so.

I notice we haven't discussed Wallerstein, and if anybody else is still reading this, kudos to ya!  But capitalism was commodifying to the extent of a large-scale system of slavery at that point; even the Romans had commodified humans.  So I don't know if I buy the idea that more and more is commodified, although Polanyi makes a big deal of it, at least in the 19th century.

IMHO it's good we haven't discussed Wallerstein.  Much as I respect the guy, he writes a lot of stuff that is way too dull and abstract.  

Early modern slavery was a short-term response to the absence of labor-power on the frontiers of expanding capitalist society in the early history of the Americas.  If you read Crevecoeur, giving out advice in the 18th century to foreigners moving to the Thirteen Colonies, he tells them: "Come to America!  But get yourself a slave."  At some point it became more expensive to hold people as slaves; the security costs were too high, as they tended to escape, and it was cheaper for the slaveholders just to pay for the hours of their workers' lives via "wage labor contracts" rather than buying the entire worker as a slave.  The commodification of labor became more efficient, more refined, as a result of the abandonment of slavery.

Other, later advances in commodification were also good for working people.  In order to create a consumer society, the ruling classes eventually found themselves obliged to adopt Keynesian economics, because only with the Keynesian endorsement of "circulation" did the capitalist economy create a consumer class, an "American middle class," capable of buying the products produced in the factories.  Thus the post-World War II boom, in which the economy sought consumption guarantees through increased government spending, the creation of "suburbs" for consumer housing, and the explosion of mass media, in which an environment of omnipresent advertising was to coerce people into the adoption of consumer "lifestyles" designed around the purchase of market products.

However, at some point in the 1970s the elites found it more profitable to "downsize" the American middle class than to prop up the Keynesian economy as a whole.  There was also a political revulsion against the growing "people power" trend of the 1960s -- read, for instance, Samuel Huntington's piece in a 1975 collection called The Crisis of Democracy, in a book written for the Trilateral Commission, in which the replacement of democratic power with elite power is openly advocated.  Thus the birth of neoliberalism.

Certainly, the exploitation of the environment has been going on for very long, in various guises -- if you want to call all of them capitalist, fine,

Actually, I don't -- it's just that the exploitation of the environment has only achieved world-threatening proportions with late capitalist exploitation, whereas with precapitalist exploitation natural ecosystems always had a chance to come back.  Even with the early capitalist destruction of, say, the forests of the Northeast, the forests could come back eventually with the help of protectionist legislation.

but it all seems to lead to 1) the need to distribute power as widely as possible, including embedding democracy into ecosystems (through rights to indigenous peoples?), and to inculcate a different set of morals or culture -- perhaps an "ecological discipline", part of a system of economic democracy.

Right!

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We're closer

There will then be 2 choices: techno-crackpot quick fixes like lofting billions of Mylar umbrellas into geostationary orbit, or a global mobilization on world war-level footing, which pairs a cap and phase down on extractions of oil, gas and coal with a massive, US led and and financed, global rollout of renewables.

The first option is probably unfeasible, as there is doubtless so much space junk already in geostationary orbit that the umbrella network would be smashed.

The second option is leagues above the rest, because at least a "phase down on extractions" is in some way a manner of leaving the fossil fuels in the ground, rather than just making the consumers jump through hoops and pretending that all is well, which is what everyone else is recommending.

There is no guarantee, of course, that alternative energy will substitute in any adequate way for the fossil fuels we'll not be using.  Nor is there any guarantee that governments will voluntarily restrict oil output to the extent needed, since oil production is bound to be immensely profitable in the (capitalist) future.  Why should the biggest beneficiaries of the profits system give up on it, even if to avoid certain disaster?  So I see two possible outcomes:

1. The people of the world are put on energy "starvation diets" while the government doles out huge privileges to its corporate connections in order to pretend that the capitalist system is still functioning.

2. Economic decisions devolve to a local level so that average people can at least get air conditioning in the summer/ heat energy in the winter, as corporations and governments are vastly downsized to meet the new energy and climate realities.

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The main "close together"

will be in food production -- growing food where you live makes the global fossil-fuel-dependent network of food transport less necessary, while at the same time we all become farmers & get a bite to eat...

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Do read the argument as phrased!

sam is negative on everything

Go back and read my comments on "economic democracy" carefully.

The proudly socialist sam, shunning all capitalism, says only government can do it.

Capitalist government cannot do it.  Neither can a "socialism" which is merely a state capitalism, a means of competing with the capitalists.

because capitalism is inherently corrupt.

Since capitalism is the force which got us in this mess, the common faith that capitalism will get us out appears to me as a product of capitalist discipline, a mode of being that is already thoroughly commodified.  If anything, we ought to be getting away from that, as environmental values are not something that can just be "bought off" because they're not reducible to monetary values.  The right to breathe, for instance; how many dollars is that worth?

Then there are those who say let real capitalism work, small business, homeoners, farmers with subsidies to install solar panels, wind, biogas, geo heat exchange all working through a distributed smart grid charging plugin hybrids.

I have placed two main arguments against this "real capitalism," neither of which has been recognized (much less disputed) by the community of pro-capitalists here.  But let me add another one to the mix: if this is "real capitalism," how is it that said "capitalism" depends upon "subsidies," and how is that any different from the "only government can do it" approach (which I, fyi, DON"T subscribe to)?

At any rate, the two arguments:

1.  In a market economy, new energy sources will only supplement old ones; thus "alternative energy" will in itself do nothing to deal with the problem of abrupt climate change, for it will not stop one barrel of oil from being pumped, refined, and consumed.  If you really want to do something about that, you've got to cap the oil and natural gas wells, and close down the coal mines.  Oil follows Say's Law: what is produced will be consumed.  All of the world's "alternative energy" will only push the oil-consumption sphere outward, toward those huddled masses (that 40% that currently makes less than $2/day, for instance) who are waiting for entry into the capitalist economy as high-energy consumers.  Want to get rid of that gas guzzler for a hybrid?  Wonderful -- but then someone else gets to run your gas guzzler over the rest of its lifetime.  It behooves me to wonder why the same folks who are panicking over the IPCC's reports can't be bothered to address this argument.  

2.  All of this wonderful alternative energy will not produce energy on the scale of the 85 million barrels per day currently used by the global capitalist system; so even if you did cap all the wells and shut down the mines, you'd still have to create some sort of social transformation to enact the low-energy society I have been recommending.

And big business dragged kicking and screaming, digging in their gucci heals, to prevent small business from restoring prosperity to our economy.

Since under capitalism the biggest businesses can survive for longer on smaller margins, the capitalist economy favors them for built-in structural reasons.  A re-structuring of the global economy to favor small business (with subsidies in credit-based money to insure a minimum standard of living for all) would be something I'd thoroughly endorse.  But that wouldn't be capitalism; it would require the replacement of the entire money system, from debt-based money to credit-based money.  As a possibility, it's described in detail in Hutchinson, Mellor, and Olsen's book on money, reviewed here by me.

Eventually realizing that by cooperating and supplying capital and mass production facilities for this energy revolution, they will see a boom like never before.

Then the small businesses become big ones, and we're back to capitalism.  I'm more interested in ecological discipline, i.e. in modes of living that support, without ignorance, an ongoing ecosystem resilience.

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Thanks Spaceshaper

I just wish David Roberts would respond to me in substance.

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More questions for Bill

LS, you answered your own question. We need this "very inexpensive" (compared to Jon's plan) R&D program to maximize the probability that we will discover it first

I think you missed the irony in my question.  If this hypothetical energy source (that is going to come down from the sky and save us like Superman) is so cheap, why is it so expensive to discover?

Your answer, however, provokes a second question: why assume a framework of international competition?  Hasn't the owning class been internationalized by globalization?  Don't we have international organizations such as NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, the UN, NATO, and so on, standing guard over global political economy?

Remember, our dollars are not worth much these days because we do not have as much to sell as we used to when we were the most innovative and productive nation on the planet.

But since the US Dollar is the world's reserve currency now, can we operate under the assumption that dollars merely buy US goods?

" Who is the "we" who needs those huge sources, "

The human race.

Is it really the whole human race that needs scads and scads of energy, or is it just that portion of the human race that has become addicted to high-energy consumer lifestyles?

Specifically this: if you're living off of the land, would you need as much energy (in a sum-total ecological footprint) as someone in Ohio who gets her vegetables and fruits from Washington, California, and Florida, her cheese from Wisconsin, and her beef from Nebraska?

Abundant energy can be used to reduce the environmental impact of each human

If this is true, then how is it so, that humans lived low-impact lifestyles for thousands of years without abundant sources of energy?

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Jon Rynn's salutary contribution

..do you need to change to a ...well, not a different political system, trock, but a different economic one.  I'm not sure -- I may have forgotten -- the outlines of what Sam sees as a superior economic system, but for instance, I recently proposed that workplace democracy could be a prerequisite of a truly sustainable society.

Workplace democracy would indeed be a start -- economic democracy would broaden the concept to include democracy between workplaces as well as democracy within each workplace.

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Gee, David --

Trust me, friend, you're wasting your breath. LegumeSam has his beloved hammer and everything -- in particular, every post, and every comment, on this blog -- looks like a nail to him. You're not going to break through. If you're bored with the One-Trick Pony Show, just skip past it. Trust me, it's easy.

Don't you think this is a little bit unfair, dismissing me as some kind of troll?

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Oh yeah, and...

Capitulating before the forces of capital accumulation, and refusing to discuss alternatives to capitalism, will give us more of the same, more of the empty parade that we read on Gristmill and elsewhere: huckster after huckster, selling us that one Magic Gadget which, if manufactured and distributed to every sacred American consumer home, will solve all of our environmental problems.  Just send me $29.95, MasterCard or Visa, and it'll all go away.

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Saving capitalism for a dying planet

Sacrifice and a personal accounting is needed for sure.  But calling for a radical shift to communism or anarchy in the face of global warming is not helpful now, but rather, turns middle America off and makes them less likely to adopt, adapt, and understand.

Nonsense.  Getting off of the capitalist path is the only solution.  Paul Prew, who analyzes the dynamics of the capitalist system in detail, concludes thusly:

The question to be asked, really, is whether we proceed with capitalism until we reach an ecological bifurcation point that leaves the habitability of the earth in question for the vast majority of the population, or we reach a social bifurcation point that leads us to a social system of production that is dissipative, nonetheless, but does not threaten the flowing balance of nature.

So, what'll it be?  Pledge allegiance to the transnational capitalist class until Earth is incapable of supporting most human populations?  Or a better way of life?

Survival cannot be compromised for fear of bad public relations.  Frame it any way you want; since the key issue here is that of how the economic decisions are made, do keep in mind that in a system based on capital accumulation the decisions are made by those most successful at accumulating.  Money and property are forms of power.

So what we have here is a choice between economic democracy, in which decisions as to basic need (who gets to eat and who gets to starve, who gets medical care and who gets to die alone) are made by communities for communities; and economic oligarchy, in which economic decisions are made by elites in order to stay on top of the economic pecking order.

Phrase it that way, to the sacred American Public; then come back to us and show your data.  When America knows the truth, will it still vote for economic oligarchy?

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Much as I agree with Russ --

I must suggest that there's something wrong with this conception of life:

2.Many in the developing world are still in the state of -need-, and therefore must increase their impacts.

First off, "many in the developing world" start to look like ideological pawns, first off, when we recall that this "development" that we once thought was such a good thing for the "developing world" is actually that force which is wiping out their ecosystems.

Secondly, "the state of -need-" was in fact imposed upon the incipient working classes in China, India, Africa, South America and elsewhere.  They were cut off from their traditional means of subsistence and obliged to live in slums adjoining big cities where their actual means of subsistence vary from slim to none.  Manila, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, you name it -- check out Jeremy Seabrook's ethnographic gloss titled Victims of Development or Mike Davis' Planet of Slums if you want this presented in human terms.

The vast bulk of present-day increases in human population goes on in these slums.  Future societies will have to transition quickly back to  a subsistence perspective befitting a subsistence way of life.  This will mean less, and not more, impact, and this will apply to practically everyone.  There's a whole ton of "impact" in having UNICEF feed people that can be reduced by granting them the resources to feed themselves.

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Suicide is the most eco-friendly option

Your "ecological footprint" (Rees & Wackernagel) goes to zero -- what better outcome is there?

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Just some immediate reactions --

to ideas, nothing personal --

The POSSIBILITY that so-called environmentalists torched a couple houses has set people who generally agree we have to find ways to preserve biodiversity and live in harmony with the rest of nature against one another. Intelligent people are wasting their energy arguing about strategies none of them would actually carry out themselves. They should be discussing viable solutions.

How is time wasted on debate about the environment?  It seems to me that, given the general nature of the global capitalist system (especially in its most pernicious, neoliberal stage) that getting people to debate strategy is getting them to reflect further upon the ineffectiveness of current strategies for "saving the Earth."  Have we "saved the Earth" yet?  Are we really "saving the Earth" at present?  Perhaps the real waste of time is in debates which end with the conclusion of, "we should sell everyone a  magic environment-saving device, and then the environment will be saved."

Others are observing this conversation and, probably, frightened by the fact that there are environmentalist defending the use of arson as a tool. This further undermines the work of the majority of environmentalists, who work peacefully to educate and motivate people to adopt environmentally friendly views and habits.

Now, arsonists are, arguably, asking for it.  They should expect the full weight of the US military-capitalist juggernaut to come down upon them, to be tried under Bush's vast expansion of "anti-terrorist" law and sentenced to prison for a few decades, or maybe just to be sent to the CIA's global gulag of prisons.  The thing of it is this: from their perspective, the violence of the system is always expanding.  Perhaps these arsonists wish to feel, for one brief moment (and as the rest of us are looking 24/7 for ways to avoid getting screwed), to "fight back."  Whatever.  To quote Jimi Hendrix, "I got my own world to live through/ And I ain't gonna copy you."

And this is just one case where someone thinks their ideas are so important and so ignored by the rest of humanity that they must resort to violence. What if we ALL, when ignored by those around us, resorted to violence?

Indeed it is easy in this world to worry about how to avoid being the victims of violence.  What are the statistics, again, on sexual rape?  Spousal battery?  Police abuse?  And how about those realities of war?  The question that remains, then, is one of what counts as "violence."

Why didn't the ELF activists, if they exist, chain themselves to the construction equipment or to the houses to get publicity and show people how much they truly value living in harmony with the rest of nature?

This is a good practical question, and it deserves to be asked of those who would contemplate arson.  I suppose the answers you'd get would vary with each situation.On 'Eco-terrorism' suspected in Seattle-area arson posted 1 year, 8 months ago 80 Responses

"nonviolent" propertarians

You're not going to find anyone in here who supports felling 1000 acres of forest.

Nobody needs "support" to fell 1000 acres of forest.  All they really need is to have the property laws on their side.  This, I presume, is how MAXXAM corporation did it.

Your also not going to find a majority of environmentalists who support wanton destruction of property.

Easy recipe for environmental destruction: divide the environment into "property"; it's gone.

The whole gestalt of "you are either a radical with us or your a poser and a fake environmentalist" is just absurd.

So is environmentalism about the identities and egos of the environmentalists, or is it about what happens in an actual, real-life, environment out there?
On 'Eco-terrorism' suspected in Seattle-area arson posted 1 year, 8 months ago 80 Responses

All-knowing, and non-listening

Your radicalism sounds like a dark corner of the 1990's that has somehow popped up here.

Why have a dialogue with them when you can dismiss them out of hand?

We understand Gaia theory but we also understand smart grids.  This is the 21st Century.

Yep, a little minor tinkering with the system, and everything will be OK!  Sure, the world-society will still consume 85 million bbls./day of crude oil, leading at some point to the destruction of all of the wild ecosystems, leading then (after abrupt climate change raises the average temperature a few degrees) to uncontrollable famine, which at some point will result in the collapse of world-society itself amidst increased competition for the remains of "natural resources" after the current economic system has picked planet Earth clean...  but, hey, why worry about the ecological unsustainability of capitalist world-society when you can score debating points on the Internet and walk away with a clear feeling of mental superiority!

Btw, to say that something is "21st century" is not exactly a mark of praise.  Bush's invasion of Iraq and the collapse of the housing bubble are "21st century."

Mud huts and horses aren't the goal anymore.

Mud huts and horses are inevitable -- it's the route by which we get to them that matters.  Some folks would prefer cob building; others close their eyes, stopper their ears, and wait for the default path that lies ahead when abrupt climate change controls the agenda.

Now the emphasis is:

    * Modern

    * Light Impact

    * Sustainable

    * Carbon Free

 And I would add: fun and popular

Right!  And I might add that anything can be advertised that way.  If you don't understand ecology, "sustainable" can be held to mean "sustainable profits for our corporation."  And what's "carbon free"?  Nothing is "carbon free."

Those who really want to understand anarcho-primitivism might take the time to read Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan's comic novel As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Stay In Denial.  I don't think "christophersj" will be among their number.  See, the "nonviolent humanist rationalist" crowd on this thread has shown too much of its hand already.  It's basically uninterested in dialogue, and it really doesn't want to understand why people would burn down unoccupied housing developments in the middle of Cascadian rainforests.  Now, it's a real question to ask "why would people do such a thing?" -- but not from people who have shown that they are uninterested in the answer.

On the other hand, it's easy to understand the arguments of the "nonviolent humanist rationalist" crowd as regards all that horrible destruction of property.  It's the whole John Locke trip.  It's OK to destroy nature; but once nature has become property, then it's no longer OK.  This, of course, was the rationale for destroying the native populations of this continent -- since they didn't have "our" notions of property, they were mere nature, and could then be wiped out for the sake of "taming the land" and imposing "civilized" notions of property upon the "frontier."  Our history books are full of unquestioned reiterations of this ideology.

"Nonviolence" has an ambiguous legacy.  It works when empowered publics are there to support nonviolent demonstrators, as when Martin Luther King Jr. tried it in the mid-1960s.  It doesn't work when it has to confront forces which are committed to violence no matter what.  The Nicaraguan revolution of 1979 started out along a nonviolent path, but it turned to violence after the Somoza regime responded to protests by killing 50,000 civilians in cold blood.  And from there, it won, and liberated Nicaragua from the Somozas.

This is not to say that violence is always justifiable in the right cause; it is to say that there are no absolute single principles and that everything is to be decided on a case-by-case basis.  Sometimes "nonviolence" is a mere form of domestication; in other cases it's the one true revolutionary path.

As for "ending the cycle of violence," are we suggesting, here, that nature itself commits acts of violence upon its conquerors, thus justifying the violence of the conquest of nature?

Tricking the ignorant into green living will be much more fun than burning down their houses.

I'm sure that the ignorant can be sold any bill of goods one cares to name if a "green living" label is slapped on it.On 'Eco-terrorism' suspected in Seattle-area arson posted 1 year, 8 months ago 80 Responses

Then why even bother?

No need to answer your questions.

No need for dialogue?On 'Eco-terrorism' suspected in Seattle-area arson posted 1 year, 9 months ago 80 Responses

How are those ad hominems workin'

for ya?

How old are you?  Isn't this a school day?

Didn't you just call another group of people "emotionally immature"?On 'Eco-terrorism' suspected in Seattle-area arson posted 1 year, 9 months ago 80 Responses

It's all about you, CHRISTOPHERSJ

Oh, I QUOTED you!  You're so special!

Oh, and you're the ONE PERSON HERE who has an open mind!  You're so special!On 'Eco-terrorism' suspected in Seattle-area arson posted 1 year, 9 months ago 80 Responses

Through the looking glass

Now here's a question for the record books:

Where can we find reliable info on the lack of a real ELF organization?

Question for the readers: where can we find reliable info on the nonexistence of Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny?

Remember, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so we can never be totally sure there's no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny.

The "ELF" is an urban legend spread by people who want to believe that the technocratic nightmare currently dismantling Earth's ecosystems can be stopped by direct action tactics and that there's some kind of organization, "ELF," which somehow magically commands a number of disparate actors (with no real material connections to each other) to take part in such direct action tactics.

Remember, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so just because we can't find a material organization out there called "ELF" (not that the participants in such action would need one) doesn't mean it doesn't exist.  We can't find material evidence for a jolly overweight guy who lives at the North Pole and hires elves to make everyone's Christmas presents, either, but what are you, some kind of Grinch who would ruin the spirit of Christmas?  Parents tell their kids about Santa Claus all the time -- how do you know it's not some kind of conspiracy?

Some believers in the "ELF" urban legend, however, have concocted an urban legend of their own: "eco-terrorism."  The burning of unoccupied houses is, of course, mere arson, but "eco-terrorism" is a special category requiring more than a criminal prosecution -- why, "eco-terrorism," like any "terrorism," requires a witch-hunt!

Of course, "terrorists," like witches, fall into a category of their own, and so any action deemed necessary against "terrorists" is to be thoroughly endorsed.  This is why our government operates, with our consent, a "war on terror" (never mind the illogic of declaring war on a tactic) which operates a global gulag of secret prisons in which APA-designed tortures are applied to people for whom, in real life, no criminal convictions are being obtained.

So here we are, through the looking glass, in a world where burning down an unoccupied building or three counts as "terrorism" but destroying the psyches of people in the mode publicized of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay is something we all consent to, just like we consent to the steady destruction of Earth's ecosystems by enforcing the urbanization of wild habitats with the force of law.
On 'Eco-terrorism' suspected in Seattle-area arson posted 1 year, 9 months ago 80 Responses

Sam Wells' great "risk assessment" post

I didn't read it completely but the argument was that the more people are educated about Climate Change, the less they do about it.  This a something of a paradox because in theory, education should motivate people to do more about the situation.

I'd be interested in what the article had to say.  "Education" about climate change usually limits itself to depictions of the problem.  The solution, of course, is to burn less carbon; the problem is that privileged world-society (and to a much MUCH lesser extent that 40% of the human race that lives on less than $2 per day) is locked into CAPITALIST world-society.  To that privileged stratum of capitalist world-society, energy, specifically fossil-fuel energy, is power, economic and political power.  Its individual members compete for that power when they compete for good jobs, when they compete for power within those jobs, and so on.  

To consume less energy means, in practical terms, dropping out, and (ultimately) joining the 40% with no stake in the system.  But doing such a thing is the complete opposite of what most students desire when they sign up with educational systems to take courses of study.  People go to educational systems so that they may acquire privileges and power within the capitalist system.  Employers, conversely, hire people to well-paying jobs based upon their having received academic degrees.

The problem of abrupt climate change will NEVER be solved unless world-society can make some sort of commitment to getting off of the capitalist track.  Think that's impossible?  Kill yourselves NOW -- avoid the mass rush that will occur when your self-fulfilling prophesy becomes true, and capitalist "development" DOES destroy the Earth's ecosystems to breaking.

To the eco-capitalists: good luck with your alternative path of saying "pretty please" to the representatives of the rich and powerful.  In fact, if you believed your own words you wouldn't be wasting time talking with the likes of us.

The post continues:

After reading that article I came across all these nice goals that we just stop all CO2 emissions at once and thought "gee, dream on teenage queen."

Indeed, world-society will not stop all CO2 emissions at once; but this is because world-society is not organized collectively to do that, or to do anything but to compete for status, money, power.  The abrupt climate change literature is shot through with fatuous assumptions that the problem of collective organization will just solve itself.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

I know this is off-topic --

but...

all this "return to the cave man days" regarding the environment would not have happened as it has under the Bush administration.

If Earth's environment were to "return to the cave man days," it would be the sort of incredible victory for biodiversity that none of us can even begin to imagine.  

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Let Hitler divide the vote!

"Maybe all we can hope for at this point is that someone like Ted Savage or Russ Limbaugh runs and takes a percentage of the red vote."

RUN RUSS RUN!   I love it!  Great post.

I think his name is "Rush," although a Russ Feingold candidacy might be fun...  Yeah, the more right-wingers, the better: that will set the agenda on, what, "self-destruct"?

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

The Green Party could work --

-- if it had a green movement (which was what was supposed to happen, as I understood it when I registered Green back in '92) that would have to be much larger than the electoral Green Party itself.  Then the green movement could actually educate people as to what the Ten Key Values are and why they are necessary to the formation of an honest political party.

As it stands, the electoral party has forged way ahead of any green movement (and look, as someone who attended the founding convention of the Green Alliance in New Orleans in January of '02, I know what a green movement is).  In most states, the Green Party exists on the strength of its candidates, and most voters for these candidates are not registered Green.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Let the system run its course

The traditional methods have provided us with slow and steady improvement for over 200 years -- except for the 2000 election.

Yeah, if you think Reagan was an improvement over Carter.

Why throw a wrench in the system now?

It depends upon what you want.  Do you want neoliberals running the White House until Earth's ecosystems can no longer take the stress?  Then the existing system is your ticket.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

No, that's emoting

and the fact that you can't tell the difference says plenty about you.

Actually, I am thinking...  I'm thinking that I don't want John McCain as our president.  Are you thinking?

I'm thinking about Nader-hating idiots who want to run elections based on conformity (thus bullying nonsense like "a vote for Nader is a vote for McCain"), who would silence the antiwar movement for the sake of prowar Democrats (thus this situation), who brook no criticism of self-seeking fools like John Kerry (thus the violence done to the First Amendment at Kerry's 2004 Boston convention -- "free speech zones" imply that the Constitution only applies in small portions of America), and who can't be bothered to contest elections rigged by the Republicans (both 2000 and 2004) because Ralph Nader is such a convenient scapegoat.

It's quite clear that Nader-haters who just continue to repeat falsehoods that have already been refuted are not doing anything that closely resembles thinking.  In fact, if anyone has brought "Republicanism" (what the rest of the world rightly calls "neoliberalism") to America, it's the Nader-haters.

At this point, Ralph Nader himself has been reduced to being a minor-party candidate with a sectarian cult following.  He isn't really all that relevant anymore; in 2004 he gained less than 0.4% of the vote.  The Nader-haters, however, remain as relevant as ever.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Actually,

this quote is a lot more rational than most of the infantile statements typical of the hate-Nader crowd.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Oh, and we know FER SHER

that Gore would NEVER have invaded Iraq, despite Gore's remarks about the urgency of removing Saddam Hussein, and despite the Clinton Administration's failure to do so through assassination...

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Nader controls the Supreme Court, too!

"His being on the Green Party [ballot] prevented Al Gore from being the greenest president we could have had,

Of course, Al Gore "became green" (or, really, became a greenwash sales rep -- Gore's high-stakes capitalism will do nothing to solve the abrupt climate change problem) only after his half-hearted, neoliberal Presidential campaign.  And then there's the problem of Gore actually winning Florida, despite the vast and illegal scrubbing of the Florida voter rolls of "suspected felons" as exposed by Greg Palast, which the Democrats did nothing to stop and nothing to prosecute after the fact.

Yeah, it's all Nader's fault.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

For a better movement structure

I keep waiting for some sort of strategy or plan. Instead we get "I'm mad as hell and not going to take it any more." Such an approach may feel good, but it is no way to approach social change.

Yeah, a strategy or plan would be nice.  Wouldn't it?

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

More Nader-obsession

But it does subtract from Democratic candidate's totals.

The vote-tabulators are also not subtracting Nader's vote totals from the Democrat vote totals.  Are there any more falsehoods on this matter I've forgotten to counter here?

Oh yeah, and then there's the "scandal" of Nader receiving money from his old Republican buddies from Princeton.  From Kevin Zeese on Democracy Now:

The Center for Responsive Politics looked at our support, found only 4% of it came from republican donors. They also found that John Kerry has received 100 times more support from republican donors than we have.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

This is getting silly.

A vote for Nader is a vote for McCain.

Message (11) to Nader-obsessives: The vote-counters do not add Nader's totals to the Republican candidate's totals.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Already covered

Al Gore would have been predident if Nader's 97,000 votes had not been pulled from the democrats.

We are in the "entitlement" theory of voting here once again.  See message #1 above.

Besides, Gore won the Florida vote.  The Nader-obsessives, though, think Ralph is to be blamed for a bad Supreme Court decision, a rigged Florida vote-counting apparatus, and their own failure to protest the outcome.  

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Let's put it simply

FACT: If Nader runs, he will not be elected in the general election.

This is a prediction.  Predictions are not facts.  

FACT: If Nader runs, the democratic candidate will get less votes.

This is a prediction, too, and an incomplete one at that.  Less votes than what?

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

In case it wasn't clear the first time --

Ralph Nader is the reason hundreds of thousands of people have died or been seriously injured in Iraq.

Message (10) to Nader-obsessives: Nader is not responsible for Bush's "election."  Bush was "elected" by the Supreme Court in 2000 with the blessings of Katherine Harris (who was rewarded for her deed with a seat on the Council on Foreign Relations), and Bush was "elected" by Ohio's hacked Diebold voting machines in 2004 with the blessings of Ken Blackwell.  Nader is also not responsible for Democratic Party complicity in 1) refusing to investigate or protest the 2000 Florida vote recount, or 2) pass Bush's initiatives in Congress.  Therefore, Nader is not responsible for Bush's misdeeds.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

One more thing --

What about family farms?  Different farming groups specializing in different skills, blacksmithing, lumber making, milling

At the beginning of the capitalist era many of these tasks were handled by the artisans, who formed a vanguard in opposition to capitalism at the beginning of the 19th c. in England.  See E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class...

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Thanks for the supportive comment

Just some thoughts here...

And our capitalist system that has been hijacked by money managers that are absconding with much needed capital for the sake of building huge personal fortune is threatening our future.

1. I have come around to the view that the money managers were in charge before the current, neoliberal economic order, but that only under the current neoliberal economic order is the economy as a whole turned to self-destructive ends for the sake of corporate profit.

2. Capital is not "much needed."  Rather, free labor could itself create the new, post-carbon world all by itself, were it not obliged by the capitalist system to work for capital.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Learn about political economy, environmentalists!

1.  The political/ economic status quo can do nothing about abrupt climate change, so forget the fear factor.  We are pleading before an Emperor whose privilege depends upon the continuing effort to destroy the planet.

2.  Solar power in Iraq will depend upon political stability, which won't happen until US troops leave.

3.  There's already "unity" in US political circles -- but it's called "vote for the neoliberal of your choice," you saw it in action in the 2004 Presidential election, and it won't help anyone who needs help, or save anything that needs saving.

4.  I agree that capping the wells is a start, but "market conditions" exist to make the wealthy wealthier.  No politician is going to go against that.

5.  We knew back in 2001 that New Orleans was in trouble, but after Katrina hit the "leadership" was only interested in how much profit could be made off of the exodus of Black populations.  How will abrupt climate change be any different?

6.  They will just build higher walls to protect the cities they want to protect.  More dealing with symptoms.

7.  For the millionth time, nobody will stop burning crude oil because of "renewables."

8.  You suggest:

   A global solution will only be acceptable to peoples and nations of the world if it is fair and does not quash dreams.

   -- this, however, never stopped the elites from imposing neoliberal economics upon the world.

9.  Retiring the light bulbs will do nothing unless we can face up to the fact that our environmental problems are rooted in our system of political economy.

10.  US leadership is about using military power to prop up the value of the US dollar.

11.  Make Earth Day every day.

12.  To become environnmentalists, we must abandon the current system, and invent a new system that will grant us the status of "human beings."  The current system thinks we are "labor power," or "votes," or "consumer dollars."

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

LOL!

JMG points out:

Jim Kunstler, speaking at the Oct. 2007 Assn. for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) conference in Houston noted an odd transformation --- noting that somehow, the main job of environmentalists has become figuring out how to keep everybody's car going.  Threads like this one just make Kunstler's point.

And if you point out that none of their "alternative energies" will stop the burning of even ONE barrel of oil, they just ignore you.  Enjoy the hot weather, fools!

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Promises, promises...

Bye for now

You'll be back...

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Nobody will feel obliged to impose a carbon cap

Capital flight would be accompanied by the stripping of America and the parting-out of its capital resources to foreign countries.  That would go over well.  Maybe there will be one for show, and they will impose a "carbon cap" that is easy to circumvent.

Want to cap carbon?  Cap the oil wells!

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Ecosystem resilience

What distinguishes human beings from other fellow DNA-sharers in the mammal field is their versatility.  One can find human beings in all climates, from the science stations of Antarctica to the slums of Mumbai.  Thus the problem of species survival against climatic variation has largely been solved by the human race.  This problem can be unsolved, however, if human beings mess with the climate to such an extent that they damage Earth's ecosystem resilience.

Does this bring "sustainability" into clearer focus?   One of the main points of using the jargon of "sustainability," despite routine denunciations of vagueness and excessive terminological plasticity, is to create "indexes of unsustainability" for cities.  Cities are not sustainable, and the way they aren't sustainable is interesting in terms of ecosystem resilience.  The unsustainability of present-day urban life is a large part of, for instance, the world-society's 85 million bbl./day crude oil consumption habit.  Various depletion phenomena have been predicted to come of this habit; for instance, "Peak Oil," a stage in which the world-civilization's ability to operate a civic society dominated by multinational corporations (and surrounded by rapidly growing slums) is dogged by high energy prices and lowering energy supplies, or "abrupt climate change," in which drastic changes in weather pattern kill off Planet Earth as an amplification of the various efforts to bulldoze Planet Earth into "civilization."

We need the word "sustainability," then, because we need to measure "unsustainability," to minimize the risk of bad environmental outcomes.  Don't you think?

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

No...

Is it correct for me to assume that your comment was addressed to Nolmahalo?

Take a look at "manacker's" last post, dismissing "birdbrainscan's" documentation... now take a look at "birdbrainscan's" last post, listing documents... now calculate the time difference between the post... did you get eleven minutes too?

Get it?

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Yeah yeah yeah

Localize production/ leave carbon in ground.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

There are obvious answers

Their implementation involves some form of what rednecks call "socialism."  Are you one of them?

This is my point exactly - we dont know what to do

No, the ruling elites know what to do:

1. Shift agricultural production toward local, small-scale agriculture.  They would rather promote "alcohol fuel" as the alternative to beat the "foreign oil" addiction.

2. End globalization.  They could do this themselves, by promoting local protectionism.  Nope: cheap labor is just too tempting, so the fossil fuel binge necessary to keep the multinationals in power continues.

3. Phase out the "car society."  We could go everywhere on subsidized mass transit, while "through streets" were replaced by "not a through streets."  Use the new land created by the emptying of roads to grow food.  Start near the elementary schools.  No, instead everyone is sold a a Prius and told their you-know-what doesn't stink.

4. abolish hunger and homelessness by feeding and housing everyone regardless of ability to pay

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

About schools/ climate change

Public schools?  US public schools?  First, abolish NCLB.  Test preparation is not the key to ecological knowledge; NCLB makes (or will make) the public schools into test-prep institutions.  Teaching climate change?  I suppose the high-school juniors should be required to learn about Arrhennius...

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Which "ecos" are these?

It's the eco's who demand that forest MUST burn, because it's "natural and beneficial".

Name some names, eh?  Who are you talking about?  Your "eco" readership should be given a chance to tell you who is, and who isn't, an "eco."

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

And this one's cute, too

Interesting how 1 year global whatever is going to cause more hurricanes and mankind is going to be wiped off the face of the earth because of it, then when there are fewer hurricanes immediatly global thingy is going to cause fewer hurricanes.  Whats up with that?

Abrupt climate change affects overall climate, not day-to-day (or even year-to-year) weather reports.  When the climatologists talk about how hurricanes will generally become more extreme, they don't mean that any specific year will contain more extreme hurricanes.

My guess is that you answered question 1 with "We aren't entirely sure what global climate change is going to do."  Ok based on that how do we know WHAT!!! to do?  I agree, we should reduce, reuse, recycle but beyond that do we know what cause and effect is for our actions.  Remember, if we mess something up horribly Mother Nature won't give us a participation award, kiss on the cheek and a "You'll get it next time" speech.

The suggestion implied in Kyoto is that we now know what NOT to do -- in short, DON'T burn 85 million barrels of oil every day, and DON'T burn a lot of coal, because of the (as of yet untold) HARM it could do to global ecosystems.

Also, in another article I saw that it is believed that rapid climate change caused mass extinctions before (appeared to be around the time of dinosaur extinctions)...I thought the scientific consensus was that an asteroid or meteor hit the earth thus plunging the entire world into nuclear winter.  That is just what was always force fed to me by scientists, I dunno, I guess you could say that the nuclear winter was dramatic climate change...

No scientist is force-feeding you anything.  The "rapid climate change" extinctions are the ones that occurred in the Permian-Triassic boundary, 251.4 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Your double standard

The attempts (no one has succeeded yet) to build a sustainable world that creates a reasonable standard of living for all are not "utopian" because they are based on real conditions and are existing on-going struggles.

And so is ecosocialism.

The problem with ecosocialism is that lacking a clear blueprint on how to get there, or clear definitions, it is impossible for most of use to discuss.

A global, ecologically sustainable society needs a clear definition?

The difference between "Utopian" and other ideas, is that "Utopian" ideas usually lack clear blueprints.  Perhaps that is the nature of the struggle.

Where are the blueprints of the powers-that-be, who fatuously claim to be building a "sustainable" world?

Only fools believe in political promises that "alternative energy" will solve the problem with abrupt climate change, for under capitalism "alternative energy" will merely form a supplement to the 85 million bbls./day of everyday global crude oil consumption.  And this is in fact what our politicians are promising us.  That's not utopian?

My problem (as always) is that I don't see either a roadmap nor a crowd heading in that direction, and I don't think we have time to wait for either to appear.

I answered this already.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

About the "realism" question

Ecosocialism to be meaningful would have to be a mass movement that arising from the working classes.  Don't hear any hue and cry for it.

The environmentalism of the poor and the environmental justice movement will be the seedbeds of ecosocialism.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

van der Pijl's point

there is no longer a world order characterized by a clash between "core" and "contender states."  My point about industrialization was meant to argue that.  Global, capitalist, economic integration has created a world of competing cores.

As for this idea that "the difficulties that developing nations are facing on the road to achieving a sustainable reasonably well off society for all of their peoples," how do you figure?  Capitalist government is, by and large, a compact of the wealthy for their own enrichment, no?  Which governments are "on the road to achieving a sustainable reasonably well off society for all of their peoples" today?

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

The global economy is dependent upon ecosystems

in that what capitalist economies do is to convert raw materials into consumer products.  The substrate of "raw materials" is (among other things) the Earth's ecosystems.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Money makes the world go 'round

Again, money creates nothing - what brings the workers in is what they can get with the money. The government can't just print however much they want (and get away with it indefinitely-case in point the US).

1. Money makes people go places they otherwise wouldn't go, so it LOOKS as if money is directing everyone around.  That, after all, is what for-profit business is about: directing people with money for profit.  

2. The rest of the world will prop up the US economy because the US still holds the world's reserve currency.

Do you make all of your stuff? Or pay for it in  yen or euros? If not, better act now: the dollar may not be the reserve for much longer(see #1).

The investor elites, even outside the US, will not want to "disappear" nine trillion dollars.  No, the Bank of China will want to make sure it gets something in return for the $1 trillion it owns.

Is anyone sending us anything (resource-wise)that we are not paying for?

Politicians must be getting cheaper. probably something to do with oversupply.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

One last falsecast comment

Money, in and of itself, is nothing more than a simpler way of exchanging what we have to offer for what we want.

From Marx, "The Power of Money" (1844):

That which is for me through the medium of money -- that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) -- that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money's properties are my -- the possessor's -- properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness -- its deterrent power -- is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has a power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?

I may be politically inept, sadistic, and ideologically-rigid, but money (about $400 million last time) will make me President.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Not only is sustainability incompatible

with empire, it's incompatible with capitalism as well.

The problem is in the growth of the distinction between the "core," meaning first of all the centers of wealth-exchange (Wall Street) and of capital-creation through money-printing (the President, the Congress), and the "peripheries," that 40% of humanity that survives on $2/day... can't go on indefinitely, thus not sustainable...

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Oh yes...

and don't forget New Mexico -- although I really don't know how deep New Mexico's Green Party is...

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A note for S5:

Patrick is right: there is no "left" in electoral politics anymore, neither here nor in most other countries, neither is the world's political marriage to the "right" anything more than a matter of convenience for the political class, which is too busy enabling the corporations to suck the marrow out of Planet Earth for the sake of profit.  See Kees van der Pijl's piece on this -- it was true in 1998, and it's true now.

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I suppose this is where the Green debate is now

I will get at the dynamics of the David Roberts piece in a separate post: for this post, I just wanted to respond to something Patrick said:

The national races are mostly a waste of time, since the party can't get included in the debates.

Actually, the national races aren't a waste of time, since they are a "stand-in" for electoral Green politics in places where there is no electoral Green politics to be had, i.e. in most of the US.  You might be able to find some serious local Green candidacy in three states (and if anyone here hasn't been counted, let them stand up now): 1) California, 2) New York, 3) Illinois.  For the other 47 states and DC, there are the national races, leading (hopefully, and despite some pretty onerous ballot access laws) to the possibility of local strength.

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Crime and Punishment

Would it not reduce crime terrificly

Yes, but the shadow government is in the crime business... it wouldn't be profitable for the CIA to deal the stuff if it were legal... of course, prohibition is one of the main vehicles for racism in mainstream society, as the punitive weight of the drug laws falls disproportionally upon nonwhites...

One of the ways in which the EZLN used to obtain weapons is through the drug trade -- the Zapatistas used to pose as drug dealers and buy them from the Mexican government.  They probably still get weapons this way.

Ending prohibition is probably the number one way in which the Right in America (the only active political faction) can be motivated to do something good.  Thanks for bringing this up.

Why the hell in American political discourse are "American" and "free" and "liberty" inevitably associated with capitalism, while anything that looks vaguely Marxist and socialist at once is brought under suspicion and considered "un-American"?

Probably because of the endless, and tiresome, invocation of the Soviet bogeyman.  Since we are all now advocating mere "economic democracy" under conditions of "radical decentralization" and identity politics, toward a global, ecologically sustainable society, this shouldn't matter, but the Right tars us all with the same brush nonetheless.  We are a bunch of evil Reds.  Their alternative, of course, is capitalist "two party" dictatorship, maintaining corporate hegemony until abrupt climate change wipes out our habitats.  

The Right on Gristmill, for instance, offers us endless sales pitches for "alternative energy," none of which will stop one barrel of oil from being pumped from the ground, refined, and burned.  But, see, this is their version of "freedom," never mind the children who will have to live, and die, through its blowback.  At some point it will be necessary to tell little Junior that he's toast, because Mommy and Daddy couldn't give up being bourgeois capitalists for anything.  Hey, they tried their best; they bought a Prius.

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I used to be a member of the Green Party

(and I may yet be one again)On U.S. Green Party holds its first presidential debate of the season posted 1 year, 10 months ago 20 Responses

*yawn*

Lorna Salzman is well-known in Green Party circles as a paranoid anti-Communist.  Nobody cares what the Green Party's ideals are, because the Green Party is widely regarded as not viable anywhere outside of, maybe, San Francisco, or maybe a couple of other nice places in northern California.  The Democrats will fight IRV tooth and nail everywhere, and so the Green Party's devotees can be expected to fight endlessly over the Green Party's "soul."  Another circular firing squad.

While our lovely global capitalist system integrates the peoples of the world into its lovely global market (while depriving their lives of all meaning), "green agendas" will do nothing.  Nobody cares about deep emissions cuts -- I need to get to work, and my fossil-fuel burning car is the only way for me to get there.  Capitalist government is a mere commodity, a profitable investment for campaign donors and lobbyists, and the Greens have nothing of value to sell to those members of the investor class who are buying.

We seem to have had this cycle -- Republicans rig the election, Democrats "lose" (while actually winning), Democrats blame Nader/ Greens -- installed to prevent people from understanding what precisely is so corrupt about American politics.  "If only the Democrats would win a Presidential election!" they tell us, as if Bill Clinton had been some great populist.  "If only Ralph Nader wouldn't spoil the election," the propagandists of the Democratic Party tell us.  Public opinion has been domesticated through a revolution of lowered expectations.  No "viable" candidate even bothers with the people anymore, and the "solution" to environmental problems is a subsidy for ethanol fuel.

Eventually some sort of third party will emerge from the desolation of the American political landscape -- once the vaunted "American middle class" has been thrown into the streets and has been allowed to recognize the Democratic Party as just another political commodity for the investor classes.  This third party will appeal to the American people on terms that Americans will grasp as their own.  It won't be the Green Party. On U.S. Green Party holds its first presidential debate of the season posted 1 year, 10 months ago 20 Responses

Love those slogans!

"Hope is never false."

What was Neville Chamberlain's hope, was it that Hitler would be placated by the gift of the Sudetenland?

How about those hopes we all had upon Bush II's coronation, that maybe he would turn out to be the moderate he promised he would be in the 2000 election run-up?

Or here's a good one: the hopes we all had at the beginning of '93 that Bill Clinton would be a good liberal?

False hope is the system's way of telling us we're being scammed.  We ignore it at our risk.

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Scenes from the Obama movement

I can imagine Obama's primary campaign donors right now, marching hand in hand down Wall Street in their Armani suits, singing: "We shall overreach, we shall overreach, we shall overreach some day..."

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Obama's social movement

Here is Russell Mokhiber's take on what it stands for.  Pay especial attention to the part where it says:

Fred Hiatt in the Washington Post in June 2007 compared Mitt Romney's foreign policy to Obama's.

Conclusion--"the similarities dwarf the differences."

Or Lee Sustar's analysis:

Obama's agenda is reheated Clintonism: raising the minimum wage, an expansion the Earned Income Tax Credit, and investment in education, alternative energy and technology--positive steps, perhaps, but certainly no far-reaching social programs. Workers at risk of job loss should have access to wage insurance, he writes, but he doesn't call for an increase in today's miserly unemployment benefits.

A President Obama will keep his corporate backers happy with huge slices of pie while tossing a few crumbs to the rest of us.  Meanwhile, the shredding of the Dollar, rampant militarism, the health care crisis, abrupt climate change, and all of the other problems that have been neglected under Bush will just continue to get worse.

Sounds like a social movement to me.  I think it's called "neoliberalism."

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A proposal for passive spectatorship

Until a candidate makes the case that an aggressive climate/energy program can revitalize the economy, the cause is doomed.

Revitalize the economy?  How much power do the politicians have over that?  Economic "vitality" was, for the most part, a matter of US manipulation of its global reserve currency, the almighty US dollar.  I suppose they could hand out large cash grants to Americans in order to balance out an economy in which a rich few own practically everything and the rest of us are debt peons.  What those cash grants would be worth in light of the sinking value of the dollar on currency exchanges is beyond me.  Such a move would, moreover, be against the special interests who want us to be participants in a cheap labor pool.  These are the folks who buy your politicians.

At any rate, the real economic picture is one of declining real growth rates over the long run.  From William K. Tabb:

Real global growth averaged 4.9 percent a year during the Golden Age of national Keynesianism (1950-1973). It was 3.4 percent between 1974 and 1979; 3.3 percent in the 1980s; and only 2.3 percent in the 1990s, the decade with the slowest growth since World War II. The slowing of the real economy led investors to seek higher returns in financial speculation...

(I did, btw, request this paper from Tabb himself, and these statistics are calculated off of one of Angus Maddison's OECD compendia.)

Within this decline-and-fall trajectory, the US role within the global economy is that of the consumer of last resort.  Remember, dollar hegemony implies an economy in which "world trade is now a game in which the US produces dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy."  Aggressive climate/ energy programs, however, imply less consumption and less production.  So, yeah, climate change is likely to be a tough sell.

Actually, it's even stricter than that.  An effective program would imply an absolute prohibition on certain types of energy production -- the reasoning being that if you keep the grease in the ground, people won't use it, whereas if you bring it up and refine it, it will be used, and if it's used, you get more climate change.  And that runs directly contrary to the profit motives of the oil companies, which buy the politicians.  I myself would start with a total ban on coal mining, enforced worldwide.  If China doesn't like it, let's pay them a subsidy to keep quiet about it.

On the other hand, if we are altogether too shy of offending the politicians and their sacred allegiance to the economic system, neoliberalism unto death and all that, we could just wait until abrupt climate change wrecks the capitalist system as a whole.  (Look, for instance, at the chapter of Mark Lynas' Six Degrees titled "Five Degrees" for greater detail.)

At any rate, when capitalism is dead (taking with it, say, about 2/3 of the human race), we (or, rather, those few of we who are still around) can then begin to think about ending the economy based on commodity production, and creating an economy based on Joel Kovel's notion of "ecological production" -- production that intentionally produces its ecosystem substrate.

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I've reviewed Barnes' book:

here...

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A trip to Venus!

CO2 doesn't matter at all.

Perhaps Exxon/Mobil can fund the next Venus expedition for those who believe that 90 atmospheres of CO2 won't matter at all...

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Jon --

Since I'm not one of the "contributors" here (although I certainly could be such a thing, given my abilities as a researcher/ writer), I don't write here often.  But I do publish "diaries" on various subjects at DailyKos.com...  

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CO2 was higher hundreds of millions of years ago

but also the Sun wasn't as bright then as it is today.  The luminosity of a mature star increases as it gets older, up to the point at which it becomes a white dwarf...

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For those who deny CO2 heat absorption:

I would like to recommend a one-way trip to Venus, where 90 atmospheres of CO2 keep things nice and cool...

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Second-level denial

If they waste enough time during these next few years of democratic rule, no signifigant GHG related legislation will be passed.  Even if democrats have an overwhelming majority, key democrats can be bribed to block any reform.

The corporate leadership actually believes something is going to happen, as evidenced by the lists posted here on Gristmill -- they just don't want to do anything about it.  They've gotten to the point of "it's going to happen," they just can't bring themselves to the point of "we need to do something about it," since their fiduciary duties are to increase profits for the stockholders, not to save the planet or anything of that sort.

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Global warming deniers lack an adequate motive --

for why anyone would want to invent the scary scenarios of the IPCC.  What business interest could possibly be behind the theory of "runaway greenhouse effect" that could seriously amplify the effect of CO2-driven abrupt climate change?

The idea of abrupt climate change driving increases in the intensity of natural disasters would have to look to big business like a "lose-lose proposition."  No?  Which big business interests stand to benefit from news about the IPCC?

The deniers aren't anywhere close to being believable because they can't establish a motive for the IPCC's recommendations other than, well, that the IPCC is suggesting some rather likely possilities.

They also have no counter-theory: as Coby Beck points out here:

Second, they need to come up with an explanation for why a 35% increase in the second most important greenhouse gas does not affect the global temperature. Theory predicts temperature will rise given an enhanced greenhouse effect, so how or why is it not happening?

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Productive consumption

Simplistic calculations about population and carrying capacity underestimate one countervailing possibility: human beings as ecosystem resources.

This possibility is ignored because, for the most part, global society under the rule of the G-7, the World Bank, the IMF, dollar hegemony, and so on, is oriented to "producing" humanity as a collection of individual entrepreneurs within a financial house of cards, without reference to the observable (and real potential) ecosystemic contribution of the individual human being.

All of the studies about "overpopulation" or "carrying capacity" that I've seen miss this point.  Carrying capacity moves forward, but only at the rate at which plants can convert sunlight into low-entropy metabolic orders.  To create a global, ecologically sustainable, society, human social life must slow to the point at which photosynthetic regeneration will sustain it.

Labeling the individual human being as a mere infraction upon "carrying capacity" misses her true contribution to the cycles of life.  Often, for instance, studies will criticize certain areas (Rwanda-Burundi, for instance) for being "overpopulated" without asking fundamental questions as to how the people in the area live their lives.  A lot of people, for instance, means a lot of human poop.  Is the great mass of human poop produced by "overpopulation" being properly composted and used to promote new plant life?  Is human ingenuity being used to manage the land in any agroecological sense?  People CAN promote new life, you know; the point isn't being made in any proper manner because almost all of our intellectual resources are devoted to the sacred twin causes of corporate profit and government-managed macroeconomic "growth."  Goals of ecosystem sustainability exist within capitalist universities as mere afterthoughts.

If the scientific discussion of sustainability cannot get to the point of looking at people, ordinary people (and not just corporate planners designing phony "carbon sinks") as potential ecosystem resources, it will never develop into anything for which people will grant any attention.  It will merely churn out predictions of doom and gloom, and commandments of sacrifice ("have fewer babies," "consume less," etc.) which will have no point to anyone, because such words do not connect to any positive meaning in their lives.  It's easy to disbelieve the guy wearing the sandwich board that says "carrying capacity is nigh -- the end is near!"  Best to just go shopping at the mall; the mall, after all, offers true consolation for the life wasted in purposeless wage-labor.

Now, as for "consumption," it needs to be looked at as only one step in the dissipative system involving production, distribution, and exchange, the system identified by Marx in the Grundrisse.  Thus "bookerly's" remark:

In terms of developing countries and their resources, a lot of those resource go to feed the maw of mammoth America.  That's the American consumption issue.

If we are to say that the world is being consumed to death, we would also have to say that most of this consumption is productive consumption, consumption done in the act of production.

Understanding productive consumption is something that world elites have only done so far in the feeblest of ways.  The Kyoto Protocol, for instance, rests upon a fundamental misconception about productive consumption: it assumes that productive consumption can be controlled through government regulation of mere consumptive consumption.

The Kyoto Protocol is, and will be, a failure because it makes no account of the tendency called "Say's Law": what is produced will be consumed.  As long as world-society produces fossil fuels, they will be burnt, and no system of "carbon credits" will stop this burning, now at the rate of 85 million barrels per day, nor its consequent abrupt climate change.

We will get nowhere, in sum, if we blame the consumer: what's needed is to stop the producers from producing, producing the nasty stuff that rips up ecosystem sustainability.

Of course, what I am recommending here is that we rip out the heart of the capitalist system, its basis in productive consumption, while establishing another civilization-basis for human life.  This in accordance with the recommendation of Paul Prew:

The question to be asked, really, is whether we proceed with capitalism until we reach an ecological bifurcation point that leaves the habitability of the earth in question for the vast majority of the population, or we reach a social bifurcation point that leads us to a social system of production that is dissipative, nonetheless, but does not threaten the flowing balance of nature. We must develop a metabolic interaction with our natural environment that is based in a logic of production consistent with renewable sources of energy and does not significantly add to the volatility of variables leading to an ecological crisis. We must begin to nudge the trajectory of the current social system of production in the direction of a more harmonious relationship with nature. To seek short term solutions or reforms to the current system may help increase the instability of the capitalist system necessary for its eventual transition, but a "reformed" capitalism is not sufficient to salvage our relationship with nature. A new metabolic interaction with our natural environment is necessary before we can hope to live with nature instead of opposed to it.

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Boo hoo

The science is wrong.

Still afraid to address what it actually says?

Still can't disturb any of the premises I listed?

The predictions of IPCC IV are not coming true.

The fourth report came out this year, with predictions over the long run.  Should these predictions have come true already?

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Reliability of evidence questions

I posted a definition from the WikiPedia

Wikipedia, of course, is no authoritative source, as any fool can post anything anonymously on Wikipedia, and nobody need take any responsibility for what was posted...

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Ridiculous

Caesar cared about the plebes -- Bush?

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I'm not sure it's self-deception

I think hard science tries harder, and that there is less self-deception there than in the more "social" sciences

Deception in the social science serves a purpose, and that purpose isn't self-deception.  Social scientists can operationalize anything, make up relationships in any arbitrary way (using chi-squared if necessary to force the statistics into place), or start with any fallacious notions they care to name, in order to justify whatever social order they think will be good for the rest of us.  It's propaganda, then.

On this thread the big mathematical manipulation is "GDP," which is in fact a sum of prices, which are in themselves the measurement of no real material entities but rather a set of relationships between buyers and sellers as regards their fetishism of commodities.

The purveyors of "GDP" would have you believe that a high-intensity, high-consumption lifestyle would be better than a low-intensity, low-consumption lifestyle because the former generates more "GDP."  Myself, I'd choose the latter, as being healthier.  

The most arbitrary concept I've seen in this thread is that of "economic freedom," defined as the freedom of the rich to dominate the rest of us.  Everyone's "economic freedom" is of course the freedom to leverage what they've got, but "economic slavery" (the fate of those of us with nothing that would attract the attention of the all-sacred market) isn't something measured by the purveyors of "economic freedom," who simply look at the rights of the possessors of capital to penetrate markets, without heed to social context.

Imagine a similar concept: "military freedom," defined as the right of militaries to conduct war wherever they so choose.  Would that be a fun use of brainpower?  

Thus my argument that one can have all of the brainpower in the world to devote to a problem, yet be completely stymied by adherence to the wrong initial premises.

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Indeed...

Many sciences don't predict future

I know that, you know that, but...

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Predictions can be functional

but not in the sense usually meant by "prediction."  If you "predict" a train wreck up ahead, this may spur people to attempt to prevent the train wreck.  Thus negative "predictions" can have a preventative function......

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In reality

Try telling the hundreds of millions of people who live in misery and poverty that we have all the economic growth that makes sense at the moment.  Several million of whom, by the way, die every year from environmentally-related diseases induced by gut-wrenching poverty.

"Economic growth" for most of the world's people means the "right" to exchange rural poverty (which brought them a relatively high standard of living) for urban poverty, which today grants them the "economic freedom" to leverage nothing into nothing, having neither land to work nor any labor of value to sell.  See, for instance, Jeremy Seabrook's Victims of Development or Mike Davis' Planet of Slums for graphic first-hand observations of how this reality came into being.  The idea that more "economic growth" as such will do anything besides force quite a few more people into cities while enriching a rather tiny "middle" class is rather difficult to believe.

The point of saying there's enough economic growth, by the way, is merely to point out that greater prosperity for all could be easily achieved if the present-day level of economic growth were to be distributed more equitably, without there being any crying need to throw the economies of the exploiter nations into further crises of overproduction just to keep the investor class in business.

You want sustainability?  If by that you mean a steady-state world with little economic or population growth but little environmental impact at the margins, we've been there.  It was called the Dark Ages.  Life expectancy was less than 40 years.  Not my idea of utopia.  But your mileage may vary.

The false dilemma being offered here, rather uncreatively I might add, is that we can either have economic and population growth (i.e. either an accumulation of wealth by the very rich in a world being relentlessly urbanized into ecological disaster), or we can just go back to the Dark Ages.  I might add at this point that, for anyone who does a serious analysis of what urbanization does to the ecosystemic resilience of an area over the long run, both routes will lead to a Dark Ages.

As an aside note here, the famous Dark Ages, at least in the western portion of the Roman Empire between (more or less) 400-1000 CE, was caused by the disappearance of a society (Roman imperial society) that had grown dependent upon mass production.  See, especially, Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, which (among many other things) engages a comprehensive summary of artifact finds at Roman ruins.  The evidence suggests that, as the Roman Empire collapsed, the mass production supply lines disappeared, leaving whole populations who were at that point incapable of making their own pottery, farming their own food, building their own tools, and so on, leaving Britannia in a more primitive state than it was during the Bronze Age.  If anything in modern society is evocative of the Dark Ages, then, it is the populations which have become so dependent upon "economic progress" that they have forgotten the basic skills of wresting a living from the land.

A third route, past the false dilemma, might be that of an orderly transition to a conserver society, a society that manages a comfortable standard of living for all of its members while at the same time operating at a much slower pace than the current, competition-frenzied, capitalist society we live in today.

Lets assume for the sake of argument that climate change will induce a forced retreat to a pre-industrial era.  If so, at least mankind had a few glorious centuries of relative well-being.  I wouldn't have traded it all for all of the sustainability in the world.

Of course, I don't buy the idea that such a forced retreat is in the offing.  But having been hammered up and down for not bowing down to the omniscient, omnipotent body that is the IPCC, I find it a relief to find that apostasy regarding their clay tablets is OK in certain circles.

Taylor is probably not an apostate.  An apostate would be someone who used to believe, but no longer does: the classic example was the (Roman) Emperor Julian, ruling from 361-363 CE: having been raised as a Christian, upon having been proclaimed Emperor by his troops, Julian abandoned Christianity and became a worshipper of the traditional Gods.  Taylor, on the other hand, shows no signs of having believed in the IPCC's words (or even of having addressed its arguments) in the first instance.

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Genius! Pure genius!

The overwhelming likelihood is that, given the nature of internet discourse, nobody's mind is changed, and everyone's biases are buttressed.  So we all go off tooting our own horns, from here to the grave.  This, in fact, is what sociological research on the Internet has revealed about the actual functioning of chatlists, blogs, and the like.

At any rate, Bahner has decided to use his "free human mind" to repeat the fallacies I've debunked the first time around.  So there's really no debate here, no real communication, and definitely no evidence that Bahner has carefully read any more than a small portion of what I wrote in my last post.

"The free human mind is the ultimate resource, therefore we need not worry about the environment."

Who wrote that?  Certainly not I.

Bahner need not say this outright.  Can any of you bystanders find any environmental concern at all in any of Bahner's texts?  Any at all?

My guess is that most people would prefer an income of $100,000 to an income of $5,400.

Don't you think?

It really is too bad that Bahner has not yet developed the wherewithal to respond to my numerous, numerous objections to this brand of reasoning, all of which I have voiced before.

If $100,000 bought you a bare existence in a world that had been ruined by ecological devastation, would you prefer it to a merely $4,500 that brought with it the possibility of a robust existence in a world with healthy, resilient ecosystems?

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Here's my Modest Proposal here

Julian Simon (The Ultimate Resource 2) pointed out that the real source of all wealth is the (free) human mind.  Free politically, but especially economically.  Therefore, the more free humans (again, politically, but especially economically) that exist in the 21st century, the greater the economic growth should be.

Remember the two possibilities I suggested?

1. Get rid of the people, and

2. Get rid of the environment

This one is firmly in the #2 camp.  The free human mind is the ultimate resource, therefore we need not worry about the environment.

We need not worry, first off, about abrupt climate change, since with no environment we need not worry about any runaway greenhouse effect.  The human mind will make up, somehow, for our 85-million-barrel-a-day fossil fuel burning habit.

We need not worry about the great drop-off in species diversity (1000x the norm for most of natural history, according to Leakey and Lewin) in the era of human domination, since the human mind will use Brown's principle of infinite substitutability to make up for the millions of extinct species and the loss of ecosystemic resilience somehow.  We need not worry about energy return on energy invested, since the human mind will make energy cheap, plentiful, and ecosystemically harmless even if it isn't.  

Finally, the human mind will eventually discover some way around the 2nd law of thermodynamics, so that the civilizational cores will be able to suck infinite wealth out of a global periphery which, up until now, has appeared to be a rather limited place, judging from the melting of the north polar icecap, the overfishing of the oceans, the disappearance of the coral reefs, and that Connecticut-sized dead zone south of New Orleans reported in National Geographic a couple of years ago.

And this is a mere shadow of what the human mind can do in economics!  Bahner is telling us, mind you, that money -- which is merely (apart from its concrete aspect as paper, metallic coins, and pixels on a screen) the measure of the relationship between buyer and seller, as registered in the ruling notion of price, will be transformed by the human mind into a real, concrete "thing," as real as your face.  After all, we are told that "world per-capita GDP will exceed $100,000 (1990$) by approximately mid-century."  

This sort of bald-faced silliness is, of course, is no measure of whether any of this fictional "per-capita GDP" will reach the bottom 40% of global population which currently make less than $2/day, or of how it will reach such people (absent their actually having any leverage on the world economy as participants in a vast cheap labor-pool), and it is no measure of whether any of this supposed "per-capita GDP" will represent any real "wealth" we will actually want, or anything more than what the phony cooked-up statistic that is currently called "GDP" actually represents, or will be anything more than the mere impact of asset inflation upon the value of money.  See Henry C. K. Liu's analyses for a deeper look into the latter.

I suppose this is the ultimate hubris of those who would like to dispense with the concern about a global, ecologically sustainable society by imagining the infinite versatility of the human mind, and beyond that, the infinite versatility of the computer mind.  The problem is that environmental problems are not problems of the environment, strictly speaking, but rather problems of society, and problems of society are problems of human relationships.  It's easy to show how the spread of free-thinking has been greatly magnified since the cultural and technological revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s -- revolutions which are to a certain extent still going on today -- yet the divorce rate still hovers around 50% and there is still about 1/8th of humanity that still doesn't get enough to eat.  Did greatly advanced (and liberated) braininess make everyone just want to get along with each other?  I don't think so.

 Environmental problems are, then, in fact fundamentally social in nature, and not reducible to calculation.  The "herdsmen" of Garrett Hardin's illustration of the "tragedy of the commons" do, in fact, calculate the shortest route to profit and to happiness, each of them individually, yet the sum of their individual calculations leads to the tragedy of the commons, and thus to disaster.

You can, then, increase the brainpower factor all you want, yet at the same time fail utterly in your intellectual task, fundamentally if you start your thinking from the unwarranted acceptance of faulty initial premises.  This is at the very least what we should have learned from puzzles such as the "prisoner's dilemma."

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Easy solutions

I believe that the "neoclassical" position is that if you want to stop CO2 growth, you should just tax it into submission.

I kinda wonder why it isn't as simple as that.

Because such a move isn't politically feasible, given the role of the capitalist state in maintaining the capitalist economy?

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I'm not sure it's "growth" we want

First of all, the development of major technologies such as solar, wind, geothermal power, and trains are the development of the production machinery that I was referring to as the real source of economic growth. The same applies to technologies such as organic permaculture-type farming, or producing materials to retrofit buildings. So even if preventing as much global warming as possible led to a decline in certain activities such as the production of fossil fuels or bigger houses, it would build the foundation for larger economic growth -- and sustainable, long-term economic growth, at that.

Creating a global, ecologically sustainable society is not really about "growth" -- this is where capitalist economics fails us, for the capitalists are looking first for "growth" and then, if there is any time left in their busy corporate schedules, for some means of dispensing with the problem of "sustainability" in a manner that doesn't interfere with "growth."

Meanwhile, despite all the talk by the Schumpeter-inspired Silicon Valley geniuses, real economic growth, decade by decade, has been slowing since the 1970s (i.e. since the adoption of neoliberal economics by the elites).  In an economy dominated by an enormous surplus of capital, the corporate world tends to generate investor Ponzi schemes while cheapening its labor supply and leaning increasingly upon government subsidy, instead of basing its profits upon growth per se.

One of the main hindrances to "growth" per se, of course, is the crisis of overproduction.  With the economy top-loaded in favor of the investor class, and with wage growth basically (despite a few ups and downs) stagnant since 1973, whatever economic "growth" has occurred has been because of increasing mountains of debt leveraged on the home equity boom.  And here we are, with said boom having come to an end.  We should soon see the stores with zillions of products that nobody can afford to buy.

The other main hindrance to "growth" is the ecological limits to growth.  There is really only so much economic growth that the environment can stand, before the environmental impacts exert blowback upon the "growth-rate" itself.  This is what James O'Connor called "the second contradiction of capitalism."  This effect isn't limited to abrupt climate change: think, for instance, of the impacts of urbanization upon the resiliency of natural ecosystems.

In the final analysis, the primary defect of the capitalist system itself is a matter of rates.  The ecosystemic cornucopia that is Planet Earth is limited in the munificence of its gift by the rhythm of the natural systems themselves; this underlies Teresa Brennan's notion of the "prime directive," to wit: "we shall not use up nature and humankind at a rate faster than they can replenish themselves and be replenished."  We need an economic system that moves with an ecosystemically affordable rhythm, and it's not clear whether a system geared to exponential growth can ever supply that.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

I suppose Jonathan Swift is too obscure --

for this audience -- I should have thought that titling the post "A Modest Proposal" would have given everyone a clue.  Did any reader get it?

Of course, neither of the "solutions" I suggested means anything outside of the spirit of sarcasm/ irony in which they were suggested, the same spirit in which Jonathan Swift suggested the solution of killing and eating Irish children as a solution to the "Irish Problem" in his famous essay of the year 1729.  

Nobody really wants to "get rid of the people" (except maybe the neoMalthusians who complain about "overpopulation," of which I am not one) and "getting rid of the environment" is only the fantasy of the folks who want to pretend the whole problem would just go away.  The Cato Institute people seem to be in that category, sticking with their market fetish while looking for a cheap rhetorical device in order to wish away "the environment" and the "problem" it supposedly has.

What I was suggesting above, of course, is that a REAL solution means looking for a global, ecologically sustainable, society, and that if our society isn't ecologically sustainable, we might consider the possibility of changing society.

Was there anybody who read my "Modest Proposal" post and DIDN'T need this spelled out?

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

And the laughs just keep coming!

If you want to move "human behavior away from the 'economic actor' model" you might have to do gene hacking.

We live in an environment of constant "behavior modification."  It exists in the police enforcement of traffic rules, the customs surrounding money and property, formal rules for greeting, commercials on television, billboard advertisements, schooling/ education (and reactions to it), demands of family life, and so on.  Behaviors change when the conditions surrounding them change.  Right now, we'd better start changing a lot of conditions, because the sum total of "behavior" is the burning of 85 million barrels of oil every day.

If culture were natural, there wouldn't be all of the cultural diversity that exists in the world.  Is it really "worth it" to make everyone into a possessive, individualist consumer?

The "economic actor" model only covers some of the rationalizations for human economic behavior.  See any sort of literature written about culture in the substantivist or culturalist traditions of economic anthropology if you want to see how this plays out in observed human behavior.  Your economic rules are not everyone else's, and certainly there is no genetically-determined rule that everyone is an "economic actor" in the neoclassical sense from birth onward.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Thanks Jon! (nmi)

.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Economic agents are not natural

You pooh-pooh market-oriented solutions like a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade, but the beauty of such policies is that each person, each economic agent, can decide best how he or she is going to economize in light of the policy.

People are not naturally economic agents.  We don't just naturally view the world according to a balance sheet in which all objects are viewed monochromatically as "assets" or "liabilities," "revenue" or "expenses."  It's bred into us, and we take on such a persona as an adaptation to circumstances.

The neoclassical economic model of "self-interest" is at best a tautology.  Everyone behaves in her "self-interest" because "self-interest" is defined as what we do.  Tautologies, of course, are intellectually harmless; the real intellectual hazard is in neoclassical economics' definition of "the self," as described above.  My recommedation is that, if we are truly to focus upon ecosystem sustainability, we will in fact have to behave less as the "selves" defined by neoclassical economics than we do today.

Remember my quote above from Klein's essay?

The idea that capitalism can save us from climate catastrophe has powerful appeal. It gives politicians an excuse to subsidize corporations rather than regulate them, and it neatly avoids a discussion about how the core market logic of endless growth landed us here in the first place.

The market logic of endless growth got here because of the universalization of this monochromatic vision of the world.  Neoliberal economic policy (about which Klein has much more to say) requires everyone to be an "entrepreneur," most especially the little girls you see in Sunday morning TV charity appeals who "make a living" selling collected glass from the Manila city dump.  Economic hardship, then, is the tool the neoliberal elites have used to require people to behave as "economic actors."

Self-interested, balance-sheet-driven economic motivation is not the only motivation, nor is it clear that the profit motive is any good at all as something that can be twisted around somehow to benefit ecosystems rather than being one of their primary destructive agencies.  For instance, Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" depicts "herdsmen" as mere economic actors as such, with disastrous results.  Hardin's exact words:

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?"

After the publication of this essay, it was of course pointed out that in many cultures neither the economic model for "maximizing gain" as such held sway over individuals, nor was the tragedy of the commons a foregone conclusion as evidenced by ecological anthropology.  This caused Hardin to change his slogan to that of the "tragedy of the unmanaged commons."  Commons management, then, is our first priority.

What we want, then, is a society in which "agents" are motivated not to be "economic," but rather to create a global, ecologically sustainable society.  Such a society can be brought into being by moving human behavior away from the "economic actor" model, and toward a model that imagines the human race working together to live in the natural world without destroying its ecological substrate.  The protection of the ecological commons, then, must be the first law enforced, and human behavior must be adapted to what John Dryzek called "ecological reason" through which we recognize that, without a sufficiently resilient ecosystem, no other ideals can be achieved.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

An ecology-free world

From Jerry Taylor's post

Hence, it's unclear whether the "hottest" world is really worse off than the "coolest" world - at least as these scenarios are constructed.

This construction, of course, ignores the one biggest fear about abrupt climate change: that it is, in fact, abrupt, that it is happening at a rate that does not allow the natural world to adapt without interfering rather dramatically with the resilience of the Earth's ecosystems.

(Pile that on top of the standard destruction of ecosystems during the industrial era, with (as Leakey and Lewin suggest in The Sixth Extinction) a species-extinction rate 1000 times the norm throughout most of natural history...)

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

This is all about being polite --

when Almighty Capital is in the room.

By "hundreds of ways", I mean distributed decisions. In order to avoid paying a carbon tax, any individual might: (1) turn down the thermostat and put on a heavier sweater; (2) move closer to work or school; (3) buy a smaller car; (4) bicycle or walk mor often; (5) replace their lightbulbs with more-efficient ones; (6) turn off their lights more often; (7) invest in a solar water heater; (8) ... you get the picture.

Do people behave differently to avoid paying taxes?  Maybe if they're rich they invest in tax shelters, but otherwise?  Are people spending less at the mall because of those onerous sales taxes?

And does any of this really count as a reduction of the human race's carbon footprint?  Here's an illustration from Econ 101: the supply-demand curve.  As demand goes down, price goes down.  Any nation imposing "carbon taxes" severe enough to make a difference would just make oil cheaper for other nations.

The idea that with "carbon taxes" we can "do something" about the world's 85-million-barrel-a-day crude oil habit is a shell game.  From Alf Hornborg's The Power of the Machine:

Unless we are prepared to reorganize society in a much more fundamental way, it seems that any "green taxes" or other brakes on the system substantial enough to have a real impact on consumption would lead to economic decline, the most obvious sign of which would be rising unemployment rates, in the face of which any government would very quickly retract its "green taxes."  More likely, the "green taxes" would never reach the magnitude at which such effects would follow, in which case they would remain symbolic and pointless. (18)

It's time to admit that crude oil production follows Say's Law: "what is produced will be consumed."  You want to reduce carbon-burning?  How about leaving the carbon in the ground?

Your "free market" is a fetish.  A universally popular fetish, of course, as world leaders convene today to save capitalism for a dying planet, but a fetish nevertheless.  

A global, ecologically-sustainable society -- now that means something.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

For less empty conversation

Given that there are hundreds of ways that carbon emissions can be reduced, could you please explain to us the process under which you envisage (deleted) the Government choosing among the different technologies, spending the money, and ensuring that both the contracts and the benefits alre allocated equitably?

This looks like the same old Republican song-and-dance -- blame "big government" as a diversion so that nothing gets done.

There may be "hundreds of ways" to reduce "carbon emissions," but only one of them is meaningful -- keep the oil and coal in the ground.  So how's the sacred "free market" going to do that?

As Naomi Klein reported recently:

The idea that capitalism can save us from climate catastrophe has powerful appeal. It gives politicians an excuse to subsidize corporations rather than regulate them, and it neatly avoids a discussion about how the core market logic of endless growth landed us here in the first place.

The market, however, appears to have other ideas about how to meet the challenges of an increasingly disaster-prone world. According to Lloyd, despite all the government incentives, the really big money is turning away from clean energy technologies and banking instead on gadgets promising to seal wealthy countries and individuals into high-tech fortresses. Key growth areas in venture capitalism are private security firms selling surveillance gear and privatized emergency response. Put simply, in the world of venture capitalism, there has been a race going on between greens on the one hand and guns and garrisons on the other--and the guns are winning.

That's right -- that evil Big Government and the sacred "free market" are for the same solution -- fortresses!  Are we, the tortured victims of this nonsense, supposed to be surprised that Good Cop and Bad Cop work for the same team?

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Accelerate the pace of social change

The reigning attitude in America is "apres moi, le deluge," in short, I don't give a damn about the future past the short term.  Perhaps it will take some sort of tremendous economic disaster, an "Argentina moment," to wake America up to the fact that it is no longer immune at home from the disasters that the rest of the world experiences as commonplaces.  But it will happen, sooner or later.

The history of capitalism is a history of "capitalist discipline," of the spreading of forces of commodification, marketization, and alienation into the deepest recesses of nature.  Since capitalism, at this point, has gotten into the DNA itself (via genetic engineering), it has become like a cancer that is metastasized.  The spread of "capitalist discipline," then, has a rather limited longevity.  Don't count on the system surviving into the long term.

The scariest aspect of this all, however, is that the intelligentsia, the folks who have studied all of this and who should know better, still imagine that American society will change very little over the coming decades.  In real life, however, we can expect something like the disaster that hit New Orleans to spread across America as global warming deepens, while the real estate market in several American cities teeters on the edge of collapse and the position of the US dollar in world currency markets grows increasingly shaky as US aggregate debt balloons out of sight.  Our "Argentina moment" rushes at us, though our intelligentsia appears rather unprepared to seize it.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

"First you have to give them choice"

I choose a world where the laws of nature don't apply and we can burn as much fossil fuel as we want without any global warming.

What?  They're not offering that?

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Question for Patrick and others

We may also, discover that the environmental room is too empty and everyone is discussing (pick a topic).  At this point, it occurs to us, that if we can form an alliance and created a new cross-discipline (environmental-war studies), we will attract more people.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

most "market solutions" aren't

Want to cut down on co2 emissions by burning less fossil fuel?  All that does from a "market perspective" is to make fossil fuels cheaper for the rest of us, thus more enticing.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Why it's "complex":

kmp argues:

Pump less CO2 into the air, plant more trees.  How can we contiuously make something so simple, so hard?

Let's face it, folks.  Pumping less co2 into the air and taking care of the ecology just aren't profitable.  If they are to happen, the profits system must release its hold on humankind.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Why it won't work

The six steps are:

   1. Stabilize vehicle travel.
   2. Increase vehicle fuel economy standards to 40 miles per gallon and set fuel economy standards for large trucks.
   3. Replace 10 percent of vehicle fuel with biofuels or other clean alternatives.
   4. Reduce energy consumption in homes, business and industry by 10 percent from current levels.
   5. Obtain 20 percent of our electricity from new renewable energy sources.
   6. Hold emissions from other sources to current levels.

1.  The point of having a consumer society is to encourage people to participate in unnecessary vehicle travel; the economic indicators that measure prosperity and thus preserve careers, from politicians and business executives all the way down to temp workers, depend on this travel.

2.  This will just encourage more vehicles on the road.  Cutting down on consumption only makes the item consumed cheaper, thus encouraging more demand.

3.  More biofuels consumption means more resources consumed in producing biofuels, thus increasing overall consumption.

4.  Thus making energy cheaper.

5.  Thus meaning more productive consumption on renewable energy sources.

6.  Current levels are too high already.  Does US PIRG really imagine that, under capitalism, anything will restrain the producers from squeezing every last drop of cheap oil from planetary sources?

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

historicizing and eternalizing

Charities, cooperatives and communes are not examples of what you get when you try to make an entire country communist. That is the last time I am going to say that. They have little to do with institutionalized communism in fact and your repetition of them as your best examples of communism makes for a very weak argument.

Where does Marx mention hunter-gatherers?

No one is herding people into cities. They move from small towns and farms because they want to.

It is all history but you talk as if nothing has changed over the last century.

I, for my part, have been careful to make it clear that my support for economic democracy and the for the phasing out of dominative/ subordinate social classes for the sake of dealing with environmental catastrophe is contingent upon social developments that would make the further growth of solidarist organizations possible, most specifically the disasters that will shake the public faith in the existent system.  Furthermore, I have been careful to note that capitalism, among other "market systems," are historically-bounded frameworks within a developing global human society.  I do not assume, for instance, that "the free market" can be used to lump together the peasant markets of medieval Europe, and EBay, as if they were essentially the "same thing."  

I'm also quite careful to historicize other social frameworks.  "Communism," for instance, was not the same thing in 1917 as it was, for instance, in the 1980s when the marxists of the Sandinista regime were asked to theorize their control of the Nicaraguan state, or for that matter when Hugo Chavez talks of socialism.  I do not assume, furthermore, that the "communism" of the future (as it may coalesce in response to a need to end divisions within humanity for the sake of saving what will be left of a collapsing ecosystem) will be anything like 1917 or 1945 or 1979, nor do I assume that "charities, cooperatives and communes are not examples of what you get when you try to make an entire country communist," regardless of historical conditions.  In fact, I assume that the identity of a "country" or a "state" is in fact a historically-conditioned thing, and so I am capable of understanding, as do the world-systems theorists, the decreasing relevance of national identity in a globalizing world.

I would further like to note, for the record, that human notions of "human nature," linguistic constructs all of them, have changed with history, largely in the direction of assuming a wider berth for human versatility.  A very early example is instructive: the 4th c. CE historian Eusebius of Caesarea, court apologist for the Emperor Constantine, argued that, as there is one God ruling the universe, so there should be only one Emperor ruling the human race.  Monarchy, therefore, was presumed to be the natural order of things, as opposed to "polyarchy" (i.e. democracy), which was unstable, as the example of Classical Athens so obviously proved to all.

Now, in this historical era, the right-wing version of "human nature," that assumes social classes, capitalism, and competition to be an immutable and natural fact of human existence, is a prescription for mass human dieoff.  To reiterate a previous challenge I made more than two weeks ago:

More specifically: if we assume that human beings "naturally" compete and "naturally" self-organize into "free markets" because it is an inescapable part of the genetic code for humans to do so, then we can expect the rest of human history to be an ever-accelerating conflict.  As natural resources become scarcer, human beings will spend an ever-increasing proportion of said resources in competition for the right to dominate and commodify what is left of Earth's resource base, leading, ultimately to -- mass dieoff, when there is nothing left to conquer and commodify.  The US conquest of Iraq is only the first shot fired in this conflict.

This conclusion, of course, is only inevitable if one accepts the abovestated right-wing assumptions about "human nature."

Anyone care to take this one on?

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

*yawn*

You cannot have one without the other. The only way to prevent social striation in modern societies that use currency is to prevent the accumulation of personal wealth, which is accumulated via economic competition.

And I thought "wealth" was accumulated through the process of capital accumulation, which assumes several things: the exploitation of wage labor and the capitalists' claim upon surplus value being the most immediate of them.  The foundation of capitalist society, everywhere, is primitive accumulation.  In every capitalist society, the masses have been dispossessed of their access to the commons and herded into cities, where deprivation and coercion can be used to make them work for capitalists.  Afterward, the history of primitive accumulation is typically sanitized as "economic competition" by the same folks who would moralistically denounce "20-30 million deaths" under "communism." From Marx:

This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone-by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work. Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in the defence of property. M. Thiers, e.g., had the assurance to repeat it with all the solemnity of a statesman to the French people, once so spirituel. But as soon as the question of property crops up, it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the intellectual food of the infant as the one thing fit for all ages and for all stages of development. In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part.

I continue:

Squashing the natural genetically endowed tendency for our species to organize into hierarchies like other social primates do can only be accomplished by force, thus the consistent degeneration of all communist societies into authoritarian states. Sounds like a respectable hypothesis to me.

And the phenomena of the Soviet Union and China, at least, can be explained by the need of large, peasant empires to industrialize in a hurry in an era (the early/ mid 20th century) in which superpowers fought to dominate the whole Earth.  An application of Ockham's Razor is in order here: it shouldn't be necessary to prove that humans are "like other social primates" in order to understand why "communism" turned out the way it did.

And too bad humans are more versatile than you think they are, although the proof of that is given in that book on "Neo-Liberal Genetics" I suggested.

The great leap forward claimed about 20-30 million lives. Some estimates claim that Communist China and the Soviet Union account for about 75% of all deaths by atrocity in the 20th Century.

It also does not take a brain surgeon to recognize that communism is something best left in the history books as a nice idea that degenerates into a disaster anytime anyone attempts to put it into practice.

"Dozens" of "thriving" communes in a nation of 300 million is not a statistic that bolsters your argument.

Charismatic alpha males eventually dominated all of them before they disintegrated.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

systems breakdown

LSam makes the interesting observation that the economic categorization of the government or polity of the late Soviet Union is not "communism," but rather "state capitalism."  I had never read that before.  LSam provides a link to "state capitalism," but unfortunately that link took me no where.  Do you think you could try again, LSam?

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

And one last thing

We need to tweak what people compete with and for toward ecologically benign symbols.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

"not working"

You think that communism would work if a way could be found to keep bad people from wrecking the ideal every time an attempt is made to implement it. The weak link in your hopes is that people like Stalin, or Fidel, will always end up in control, because without that kind of control, communism evolves into other things that better fit human nature, not necessarily good things.

"always"?  You think you know the rest of history through to the end of the human race.  Yeah, bullcrap.  Like you or anyone else knows the course of the future.  By the way, what so terrifies you about economic democracy, with the public (and not Stalin) in control?

Lenin's Soviet Union became Stalin's Soviet Union because of a historical dynamic that was existent at that time, because it was the product of social life in a particular stage of capitalist development.  That stage has passed.

I have a good friend from the Soviet Union. She told me that everyone was hoping the free world would somehow find a way to dismantle their government. They were sick to death of living that way and there was nothing they could do about it. They were not even allowed to leave. In fact, it might do you some good to sit down and have some coffee with a walking talking refugee from the USSR.

How about that human trafficking, eh?  Is that the people's choice, too?

Oh, it was human nature alright--our propensity to form into groups to defend ourselves from or to attack other groups.

Those were 70 of the most violent years in all of human history.

The technological advances and economic growth of Nazi Germany in the few years of its existence have never been matched by any free market economy before or since. A country the size of one of our states almost took over Europe in just a few short years.

That's the sort of "not working" that "fascism" is capable of. Does that make fascism a good thing?

If communism, whatever that is exactly,

By the standard that says that only public (and not state) control of the means of production counts as communism, the Soviet Union was NOT "communism," but rather a form of state capitalism.

why are there no examples of it

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

A question

If free markets were to all become non-profit NGOs, the whole system would collapse like the Soviet Union did. NGOs have their place.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

It all boils down, once again, to...

Jevons' Paradox...

(especially the part where Foster argues:

Insofar as Jevons' paradox continues to apply to us today--that is, insofar as technology by itself (given the present framework of production) offers no way out of our environmental dilemmas, which generally increase with the scale of the economy--we must either adopt Jevons' conclusion or pursue an alternative that Jevons never discussed and which doubtless never entered his mind: the transformation of the social relations of production in the direction of socialism, a society governed not by the search for profit but by peoples' genuine needs, and the requirements of socio-ecological sustainability.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

butting in...

if you think my views are right-wing you know nothing about economics

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

The Robinson book was what I was thinking of

That is a fascinating concept.  My understanding is that Venus is the most promising candidate.  The problem with Venus is that it ought to be very similar to Earth, but it fell victim to an out-of-control greenhouse effect; so now, it has both impossibly high temperatures, and impossibly high atmospheric pressure.

Three barriers lie in the way of this idea:

1. Venus contains practically no water we know of.  What's more, Venus has no magnetic field, so water molecules in the upper atmosphere are exposed to the force of the solar wind.  Mars, however, has water ice, which can be melted.

2. The Venusian day is 243 times longer than our day.  Nobody will be able to live on a planet with a day that long.  A Martian day, on the other hand, is 24 hours and 39 minutes long.

3. Ninety atmospheres of carbon dioxide heats the surface to 900 degrees Fahrenheit.  A further constituent of Venus' atmosphere is sulfuric acid, unhydrated of course.  What bacteria can stand that?

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Here's a Mexico question for you all

As Professor Stephen Gliessman said back in 1990, "soils in the state of Tlaxcala, Mexico have been under cultivation for thousands of years."  Why would we want to celebrate Tlaxcala's departure from sustainable agriculture?

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Welcome to capitalism

where vulnerability to "market forces" is trumpeted as a virtue.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Ramsey/ al Janabi

And as for this miserable troubled fellow who has a fatal crush on Jon Benet Ramsey: Enough already!  Has the MSM ever served us worse?!

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

And a nod to Tyson Slocum

Mr. Komanoff doesn't provide the methodology he used to infer that gasoline demand has dropped in relation to economic and population growth. In fact, this is a surprising assertion because in nearly all analyses that I've come across, everyone concludes that gasoline demand is NOT declining in response to higher prices
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14340379/
That's because gasoline demand is highly inelastic. Tens of millions of households have bought homes and cars years ago when prices were cheaper, and it is simply not a viable economic option for working families to change their consumption habits because prices have tripled. The only way for demand to drop is if prices get punitively high to cause a recession. Economic stagnation will guarantee reduced energy use. But at what cost to society? Relying on markets (prices) alone to achieve energy conservation, as Mr. Komanoff suggests, simply won't get the job done in an efficient, humanitarian manner.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

A response

Jevon's Paradox is less relevant now than it was in his day.  Coal is one-tenth the price of oil and the reserves will out live us, because of global warming, forever.

At any rate, Jevons' paradox is not about coal; it's about whether creating more efficient consumption processes will lead to overall reductions in consumption under capitalism.  Let's go to the meat of Jevons' argument:

It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economic use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth. As a rule, the new modes of economy will lead to an increase of consumption according to a principle recognized in many parallel instances....

If the quantity of coal used in a blast-furnace, for instance, be diminished in comparison with the yield, the profits of the trade will increase, new capital will be attracted, the price of pig-iron will fall, but the demand for it increase; and eventually the greater number of furnaces will more than make up for the diminished consumption of each. And if such is not always the result within a single branch, it must be remembered that the progress of any branch of manufacture excites a new activity in most other branches and leads indirectly, if not directly, to increased inroads upon our seams of coal.... Civilization, says Baron Liebig, is the economy of power, and our power is coal. It is the very economy of the use of coal that makes our industry what it is; and the more we render it efficient and economical, the more will our industry thrive, and our works of civilization grow (Jevons 140-142, qtd. in Foster).

  Oil replaced coal as the fuel-of-choice because its much higher EROEI (energy return on energy invested) allowed for the development of a much more intensive energy economy than that which was once available with coal-burning.  Jevons' Paradox will become imporant once again, the argument goes, because the capitalist powers-that-be will try to maintain the intensive energy economy now available with oil, only using other energy sources.  The world of today consumes 85 million barrels of oil each day, every day.  Will the capitalist system be able to find another source of energy to do that which it currently does with those 85 million bbls./day of oil?

Wikipedia discusses this, but wrongly:

Also, this principle is often referenced in conjunction with Peak oil, to show why conservation of oil will not slow the arrival or the effects of peak oil. However, a key part of Jevons Paradox assumes a relatively steady supply of a given resource. Under this principle, demand increases after the price came down due to a reduction in demand. Starting with a significant reduction in supply however (as in the case of Peak Oil), prices will go up, requiring an equally significant reduction in demand from increased efficiency just to maintain the status quo of price and therefore consumption.

Here the Wikipedia author misapplies Jevons' Paradox.  The point is not that "conservation of oil will not slow the arrival or the effects of peak oil" -- clearly, if everyone conserved oil, peak oil would come later rather than earlier.  An application of Jevons' Paradox to the problem of peak oil would endeavor to show that more efficient uses of oil will not result in an aggregate reduction in oil use.  Thus the examples in the first article I cited:

The contemporary significance of the Jevons paradox is seen with respect to the automobile in the United States. The introduction of more energy-efficient automobiles in this country in the 1970s did not curtail the demand for fuel because driving increased and the number of cars on the road soon doubled.

As the total oil output of the world's wells is reduced, in fact, we can expect the world economy to cling even more tightly to what is left of cheap oil than it does today.  Conservation, and oil alternatives, may reduce the individual's need for what will be left of cheap oil, if the individual is lucky enough to be able to make a living and still do so.  But the aggregate of humanity, under capitalism, will still be operating the engines of economic growth, and those engines will gravitate to what's left of cheap oil, because the development of alternatives to oil is more likely to usher in an economy of conservation than (like oil when it replaced coal) it is to create an even-more-intense energy-consuming civilization.  All the energy alternatives will do in such a context will be to preserve what's left of capitalist economic growth against the possibility of post-oil-peak economic collapse.

In clinging to cheap oil, then, and (secondarily) in developing oil alternatives, people will be clinging to what's left of this civilization's intensity, even if the price is significantly higher.  Capitalist competition and capitalist growth will oblige them to do so.  (Some of the oil alternatives will indeed promise a happier relationship to nature, but only if capitalism is brought to an end.)

Thus, don't expect any global warming dividends from alternative energy under capitalism.  The best we can hope for is an end to capitalism, facilitated by the disastrous effects of global warming, before the capitalist system finds it "necessary" to go back to large-scale coal burning, or the exploitation of the tar sands of Canada and Venezuela, or the production of large quantities of nuclear-energy-related toxic waste.  The search for a high-EROEI energy economy will, presumably, compel capitalism to multiply crises in this regard.  Let's stop it before it's too late.

Remember, folks: we don't have to have a capitalist economy.  This dilemma is avoidable.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

More is needed

Slash use of fossil fuels by instilling across-the-board incentives to improve energy efficiency and creating the market pull for renewable biofuels, solar, and wind energy.

Drive down the before-tax price of energy by reducing demand. (Excise taxes on any commodity always cut its before-tax price; this is Econ 101.) This would curb oil profits without the need for a complex, difficult-to-enforce excess-profits tax.

Make polluters pay, while rewarding with cool cash every action that conserves fossil fuels.

Diminish the political power of the oil/energy industry, as sales volumes and earnings plummet.

Dry up the financing of "oilgarchies" from Africa to the Middle East to Indonesia -- and Washington, D.C.

Inject that money into our economy, providing more and better jobs at home instead of funding violence abroad.

And Ralph Nader?  Are you still mad at him because he dared to run against John Kerry?  If Kerry was so great, what's he advocating?  And if the problem with Nader is that he's got "such a big ego," why are you puffing it up further by talking about him?  I have a simple request in this regard.  Would you all mind talking about me, instead of Nader?  My ego is too small, and I need a bigger one.  

That having been said, a progressive energy tax is better than a regressive energy tax, if you can get the votes to pass it.  I suppose the current market for politicians' votes would present a challenge to that.  Komanoff is just overselling it, that's all.  I think everyone supports something good.  I, myself, support Howie Hawkins' proposal:

Howie Hawkins supports convering $300 billion a year of US military spending to a Global Public Works Program to rewire the planet for renewable energy in 10 years.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Kudos to SMLowry

We can't go back in time to a supposedly more idyllic time, but what we must do is evolve as a species. Right now it seems that we are stuck. We think creating material wealth is the highest and most important thing humans can do. And instead all we're really doing is consuming the Earth, and for what?

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

First off...

People want a free market because it gives them what they want.

That is a strawman. I will leave it sit.

You need to get with the times.

What they want is predicated by good feelings, good feelings come from hormones, hormones are released for specific reasons as dictated by evolution and are a function of genetic programming...

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Aggression and competition

Your agressive stance is a product of human nature. Competition like this debate is part of human nature.

Human behavior is overdetermined by culture, which is a product of human history.  There might be a "human nature," but any role it might have in influencing social forms cannot be determined by reference to "human nature" itself.

I'm saying this not to display some "natural" "aggressive" stance, but merely to offer a better model of culture into Gristmill than the model I've seen so far, according to which Gristmill's privileged contributors ignore my posts while repeating brief, unsubstantiated ideological communiques such as "human nature makes communism impossible" or "more capitalism will save the world" over and over again.

An example:

I think E.O.Wilson (sometimes called the father of evolutionary psychology) would be offended by that remark.

But when asked whether their opinions were of importance to science, all astronomers voted "no."  Scientific results are determined experimentally, not according to whether or not E.O. Wilson would be offended.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Ancient Rome

Rome was most of the time a strictly structured class-based oligarchy; and many of the emperors, later on, emulated the example of big-building, big-spending, big-consuming Oriental kings.

The slavery of the antebellum South was an ad hoc response to a labor shortage in a frontier economy.  The Civil War which brought about its end in the US was the violent complaint of a plantation aristocracy fast approaching economic obsolescence.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Cont'd...

Capitalism caused Hurricane Katrina?

That's a new one.

Indeed it is, and not one of my invention to boot.

What I said was:

When capitalism creates more and more disasters (think Hurricane Katrina, as it might strike differently in different environments),

I am suggesting Hurricane Katrina as a metaphor for disaster.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

There is no need to cripple capitalism

Capitalism will cripple itself.  The hypertrophy of the financial sphere, the slowing of the global growth rate, the persistence of social unrest (despite the much-ballyhooed "death of communism"), the failure of capitalism to develop a meaningful "post-oil economy," and the multiplication of environmental crises (of which global warming is only one) in the era after the 1970s are all indicators that the current stage of capitalism (called variously "neoliberalism," "globalism," "the age of finance capital," and so on) has set problems for the global economy that it cannot solve.  This comes out in what James O'Connor called the "second contradiction of capitalism."

The system is "out of control" -- fighting global warming might be incompatible with capitalism, but doing something meaningful about it is.  You simply aren't going to regulate away 85 million barrels/ day of global oil consumption in an economy where 10 percent of proceeds are under the table and $2 trillion/ day changes hands.  The economy regulates you, not vice versa.  If you are a cheerleader for capitalism, using its institutionalized standards for "wealth" (i.e. the profit rate), meaningful control over "carbon emissions" simply requires more than you're willing to give.

I guess it's convenient to blame the failure of the US to even plan for a post-oil future upon "conservatives" -- yet the 95-0 Senate vote against the Kyoto Protocol in July of 1997 (under a Democrat Administration) would seem to make that presupposition a little less convenient.  And Kyoto, by itself, is no more than a baby step toward the sort of "regulation" that would do something meaningful about global warming.

I guess that someday the pro-capitalists who regularly contribute to Gristmill will come up with a coherent response to the article in the May 2004 Monthly Review titled "The Pentagon and Climate Change" -- if they haven't done so already.  But I haven't seen it yet.  Do any of you writers have the ganas to answer their challenge?

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

From Adam Engel's interview of Derrick Jensen

See here:

Engel: What about the "mainstream" like Al Gore and his whole environmental thing?

Jensen: I'm doing this little book right now with Stephanie McMillan about 50 simple things you can do to stay in denial while the world is being murdered and it's based on Al Gore going around the country showing this film. It's great that he's increasing awareness, but according to the filmmaker, Timothy S Bennett, who's directing a documentary, "What a Way to Go: Life at the End of the Empire," if every single American did every single thing that Al Gore's suggest that that would reduce carbon emissions in the US by about 22%. The scientific consensus at this point is to revert further disaster it needs to be reduced to 75%.

Note the similarity to the earlier statement in the Monthly Review here:

The truth is that addressing the global warming threat to any appreciable degree would require at the very least a chipping away at the base of the system. The scientific consensus on global warming suggests that what is needed is a 60-80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels in the next few decades in order to avoid catastrophic environmental effects by the end of this century--if not sooner. The threatening nature of such reductions for capitalist economies is apparent in the rather hopeless state at present of the Kyoto Protocol, which required the rich industrial countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. The United States, which had steadily increased its carbon dioxide emissions since 1990 despite its repeated promises to limit its emissions, pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 on the grounds that it was too costly. Yet, the Kyoto Protocol was never meant to be anything but the first, small, in itself totally inadequate step to curtail emissions. The really big cuts were to follow.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

The US is still too predatory

(at least at the Federal level) to be part of a global sustainable society.  America appears to have put all its eggs in the basket of "let's conquer the world so we can have first dibs on its cheap oil, so we can keep our SUVs running."  When the cheap oil runs out, maybe at about the time the US Dollar collapses and America's foreign creditors start demanding an immediate payback of the national debt, the defects of this US strategy will be plain to all.

Other countries must lead the way.  Sujatha Fernandes, in an article in ZNet, suggests that genuine political change is promoted through a politics that puts community organizing at the center of things.  The Zapatistas, in Mexico, offer her a political model of sorts:

The Other Campaign was launched in San Cristobal de Las Casas in January 1, 2006, a historic date on which the Zapatistas had occupied the city twelve years earlier. Alongside the campaign efforts of political candidates, the Zapatistas took to the road with marches, mobilizations, and mass meetings across the country.

The aim of the Other Campaign is not to tell people to abstain from voting, but rather to point to the limitations of an election where political parties share a consensus on most major issues, and participation is reduced to going to the ballots once every six years. It is to carry the campaign beyond the period of elections to everyday organizing. It is to raise debates over issues such as land reform, neoliberalism, indigenous rights, and free trade, which are not being addressed in the electoral arena.

"Mainstream environmentalism" is too thoroughly plugged into the "lesser of two evils" logic that lends support to the Democratic Party because it is "not as bad as" the Republican Party.  As you can see above, all the "mainstream environmentalists" supported Lieberman.  And Lieberman-politics, the politics of "bipartisanship," is not going to save the Earth.  This situation, needless to say, does not do wonders for the credibility of "mainstream environmentalism."  It certainly did little for Lieberman's credibility this week.

Working through "mainstream" political parties appears to be a completely inadequate means of facing the environmental challenges of the 21st century.  They do this now, and are captured in the web of alliances of the Democratic Party.  This web (for instance) required complete and ultra-conformist support for the agenda of John Kerry.

At the very least, a different approach will have to be taken by environmental organizations wishing to become credible.  This approach must:

• divorce itself from both major political parties, ideally through a third party such as the Green Party (or elsewhere if necessary)
• rededicate itself to community organizing and
• stay in touch with the organized communities in order to make sure that the legitimate concerns of said communities are represented legitimately.

Only in such a way will the US be made less predatory.  Lamont defeated Lieberman; hurray, but it still won't change very much, and neither will a Democrat victory in November.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Environment or capitalism?

"the solution seems to me to help them get rich like us so then there will be no countries or regions that can be exploited"

Is this thread even about the environment?  Or is that just a hobby to be pursued while we continue our careers justifying capitalist exploitation?

There will be "no countries or regions that can be exploited" when the environmental substrate everywhere is DEAD.

What's the argument of this thread, again?  As Kif Scheuer suggests it:

"Capitalism has produced the best environmental outcomes of any system so far"

That's nice.  Under capitalism, the oceans are dying, the planet is experiencing unprecedented and destructive heatwaves, species diversity is shrinking rapidly, and the forests are shrinking.

Are we arguing that since capitalism is the "best so far," let's not bother to imagine viable alternatives to capitalism?  From a career standpoint, imagining a post-capitalism would be counterproductive, of course.  After all, academic establishments in departments of economics, which determine who is hired and who makes tenure and who doesn't, generally don't encourage the holders of assistant professorships to become anticapitalists.  It doesn't promote the health of the academic industry.  And "Marxism," the main anticapitalist alternative, besides (for the most part) being ecologically unaware, is hardly a sure route to all that an academic careerist desires.  Once again, the priorities fall into place.  First: career.  Second: planetary health.

Instead, it's more fun for the professors to diss the alternatives to capitalism and its continued exploitation of every "resource base" our planet contains.  That way, the professors can keep their careers in their departments of economics.  They can make up for the suspect appearance of the whole enterprise by promoting "capitalist environmentalism" on Gristmill.  But as for the alternatives to "capitalist environmentalism": Communism?  Socialism?  Oooh, we can associate that with the Soviet Union!  Hey, that'll work!  The Soviet Union had a bad environmental record.   Never mind that what the Soviet Union was, was this corporate state entity, running the state as a corporation within an overall CAPITALIST system, that was (as Tony Cliff suggested) a form of state capitalism.  

Cliff's thesis of "state capitalism" would explain, first and foremost, why the Soviet Union folded so neatly into capitalism after 1991.  The Soviet Union, after all, had elites.  A "communist" or "socialist" regime wouldn't have elites -- the idea of a "dictatorship of the proletariat," as expressed in Marx's The Civil War in France, was that of (at least conceptually) direct rule by the WHOLE of the working class, not of a clique of bigshots claiming to represent them.  And so when Emperor Yeltsin unilaterally disbanded the Soviet Union (without any say-so at all being expressed by the Soviet working class in that momentous decision), the old Soviet elites simply became Russian corporate elites.

Now, of course we would expect a "developing nation" such as the Soviet Union to engender professional elites.  But the folks running the USSR could have created a system where anyone qualified to run the country could have run it, with coordinating positions routinely rotated.  Instead, what Russia got politically was something more akin to Czarism, with a "Communist" ideological overlay.  I suspect that humanity's future could do a lot better than that.

The Soviet Union could also have embraced localism, where local producers could have exerted direct control over their work.  It wouldn't have to be "ownership" related.  If we are going to create a system where the working class itself (and not a mere political party claiming to represent them) is in charge, we will have to find some way of handing the workers direct control of their own doings.  Perhaps, if that had happened, the Soviet people could have avoided fouling the nests of the Soviet homeland.  When you have local control, you tend to avoid destroying the local environment.  But that didn't happen, either.

The point is this: if we are really in the business of imagining a post-capitalist future, holding up the Soviet Union and saying "that's the best the human race can do, so let's forget about alternatives to capitalism" doesn't cut it.

But, see, I don't think the folks at Gristmill are in the business of imagining a post-capitalist future.  Instead, I think they pursue "environmentalism" as a way of defending career, and capitalism, first, while covering their butts on the environment thing.  This would explain all the flagwaving in the initial post about "flexibility and a wider range of innovation" and "much improved standard of living" supposedly connected to industrialism.

I'd like to address the second claim first.  For my part, I don't see why the whole of industrialism should be allowed to take credit for "much improved standard of living."  Longer human lifespans are largely due to advances in sanitation and (secondarily) in medicine -- we no longer fear the Black Death because we no longer dump our trash in the local river, and we no longer fear smallpox because modern medicine has eradicated it.  And electricity, heating, and better diets can be achieved within a system that is far less "industrial" than how the capitalist system creates such things today.  Sunflower can lecture you all day about passive solar.

And, as for enjoying the benefits of "much improved standard of living," we can (for the most part) exclude the residents of Earth's burgeoning slums, as described in Mike Davis' Planet of Slums.  It's not just a small chunk of humanity, to be sure.  The human race is not yet a "we," but (under capitalism) rather a collection of separate individuals trying to buy their way into "increased standard of living" without any real "we" being assembled for the purposes of considering the overall cost of the system.

The point is that, although there are some benefits to industry, industrialism has become a fetish because of capitalism.  Food, for instance, doesn't have to be an "industry" -- it can, instead, be grown locally with a much smaller ecological impact than that caused by a fleet of trucks distributing the produce of Washington, California, and Florida across 48 states through an interstate highway system for the sake of agribusiness profit.  The human race can get all it wants from "increased standard of living" while at the same time maintaining a much reduced industrial base -- but we'll never find out how much reduced it can be as long as our priorities are profit first, planetary health second.

Now, as for "flexibility and a wider range of innovation."  I believe I have already addressed "flexibility" -- "flexibility" is a product of decentralized, coordinated decision-making.  And "innovation."  Why is "innovation" necessary?  And does capitalism really promote the sort of "innovation" we need?  It seems to me that the sort of "innovation" we need, today, is the sort of "innovation" promoted by arts such as permaculture and sciences such as agroecology.  And permaculture and agroecology are, for the most part, about rediscovering genetic, cultural, and environmental diversities that are steadily being wiped out by standardized business practices under capitalism.  We certainly don't need a mass public of consumer drones that comes in a limited number of "lifestyle types" (as if that were itself an example of human "innovation"!)

In short, I don't think that, in the long run, this priority of "career first, planetary health second" is going to get Gristmill professionals either.  They just don't seem poised to think through the implications of the idea of "sustainability," largely because they're so attached to capitalism.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Human embeddedness: A response to JFK

Where exactly does "the environment" leave off and "the human world" begin?

I'm not trying to forbid anyone from using the concept of "the environment." My goal is to demonstrate better ways of describing our experience of being alive here.

It is true, as you have noticed, that each of us is embedded in the environment.  But this embeddedness is conditioned by our society's relationship to the environment, which in the case of the world-society of the present is a predatory, and not a sacred, relationship.  Just look at what capitalism is doing to the Amazon!  Only a sadist could call that "sacred."

Now let's go back to my short essay, above, on definitions of "environmentalism".  None of the definitions I've proposed are primarily concerned with doing "what's good for the environment."  Instead, the term "environmentalism" is typically used to express self-and-society themes.  

The first definition, centered around ethical egoism, expresses a predatory definition of the "environment" defined (some time ago) by Gary Snyder: the "environment" is like a refrigerator, with the goodies going to whomever raids the fridge first.

The second definition, centered around a symbolic yet toothless "care for the environment," defines the "environment" in the same way, but imposes a moral imperative upon it (without dealing with its implications).  This definition is held by corporate predators who nevertheless feel guilty about what they're doing.

The third definition is centered around ecological relationships, while at the same time observing human participation in these relationships.  (And isn't that what permaculture is about?)  It aims toward the universalization of the state purportedly observed by Stephen Gliessman in corn/ beans/ squash growing in the Isthmus of Mexico -- unchanged soil fertility over the course of millenia.  It isn't about doing "what's best for nature," either, but rather about creating a form for a sustainable human civilization.

These definitions of "the environment," I think, offer reasons why it is still meaningful to talk about "the environment" -- because they all reveal unresolved problems of our society's embeddedness in its environment.

Are you comfortable with that?

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

This could be fun

But if you say the environment does include human beings, then you're left with nothing that the environment doesn't include. "The environment" is thereby synonymous with "everything." But then the term is useless.

Saying something is good for the environment becomes tantamount to saying it's good for everything. And that doesn't make any sense.

Environmentalism, then, is not about what's "good for the environment."  Let's pursue this further.  One could easily argue that, since human beings have been so thoroughly destructive of the environment, that "what's good for the environment" would be the complete extinction of the human species, after which "the environment" could recover the biodiversity that humans have stolen from it, in a few million years.  This would be a philosophy of "what's good for the environment."

The fictional character "Crake" in Margaret Atwood's science-fiction novel Oryx and Crake thought this way.  Crake regarded the world as so horribly screwed-up by human beings that the whole lot of them needed to be wiped out and replaced by a genetically-engineered "human" species without humanity's faults.  Of course, the world of Oryx and Crake was (will be?) screwed up in a really catastrophic way, especially as regards global warming.

So this is how we could actually address the question of "what's good for the environment."  What's good for the environment is what resists the human invasion and destruction of the habitats of thousands of other species, and thus only one species (you and I) really has to go out of business to save the rest.  But no human environmentalist thinks this way.  I certainly don't.

Instead, I think there are three definitions of "environmentalism" which make sense today.  None of them is about "what's good for the environment."  They run as follows:

1. "Environmentalism" is a form of ethical egoism that thinks about its relationship to the "environment."  Ethical egoism, as philosophers will say, is basically the belief that "what's good is what's good for me.  Arguably, in today's economic/ political climate of neoliberal globalization, everyone is a sovereign individual.  As Margaret Thatcher argued, "there is no society, only individuals."  So there is no "we" to care for "the environment," only sovereign individuals living within an environment.  In this version of "environmentalism," everyone's duty is to themselves; thus the environment must be exploited (by each of us, separately) as efficiently as possible so as to get the most out of it.  What else could be good for me?  If the environment, however, were to collapse, leading to mass dieoff, as a result of the sum of individual "strategies"  pursued thusly, then we, each of us individually, should make sure this happens after (and not before) we die.  If there is no "me," in the world of ethical egoism, the problem of pursuing "the good" disappears.  (The elimination of the "me," things having come to their bad end, can doubtless be pursued through mass suicide a la People's Temple cult in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978.  Drinking cyanide-laced Koolaid will eliminate each of our "mes" effectively.)

2. "Environmentalism" is an existential reaction to the capitalist system's physical destruction of global planetary ecosystems.  In this version, we can do nought other than participate in capitalism; all other possibilities are to be dismissed as "utopian" or "crazy" or "dangerous" or "totalitarian" or "beyond the realm of possibility."  (At the same time, of course, we are hooked on the capitalist system's cornucopia of consumer products as it presents itself to our high-limit credit cards).

At any rate, according to this version of "environmentalism," capitalism will eventually die, and take the environmental diversity of our youth down with it.  But we, for existential reasons, must pretend otherwise.  Because we (in this definition's version of "we")are the professional class most privy to the secret of the corporate, capitalist, destruction of the enviroment (while at the same time being salaried professionals in corporate employ), we must keep our jobs while "doing something (ineffectual) for the environment."  We must behave at all times in this role as if we can have capitalism, capitalist growth, and environmental sustainability (aka "sustainable development") all at once.

And so our prescribed path is that of conscientious yuppies who religiously adhere to the advice in the "50 things you can do to save the Earth" book.  We know that what we are doing is insufficient because it will not stop the system (whose benefits we reap) from destroying itself and taking a big chunk of ecosystemic integrity with it.  Yet we trudge on anyway, as if each of us were like the doctor protagonist in Albert Camus' novel The Plague who cannot stop the plague but must practice medicine anyway.

3) "Environmentalism" is about saving civilization by creating a new, global sustainable society that will not create environmental catastrophes because it is based on principles of "ecological production."  This is a definition of environmentalism that has been explored philosophically by Joel Kovel, Enrique Leff, Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Teresa Brennan, John Bellamy Foster, Saral Sarkar, Vandana Shiva, Paul Prew, and many others.  Of course, philosophy won't do the trick all by itself; what is needed is a revolution of sorts, a great civilizational turn-around from escalating environmental catastrophe to direct, universal participation in ecological consciousness and to a phase-out of the high-impact consumer society that is causing catastrophe.  

"Ecological production" means, literally, that when we produce a thing we produce, not a commodity, but a series of ecological relationships.  The most effective presentation of this philosophy of "environmentalism" has been in agriculture, in concepts such as "permaculture" and "agroecology."  However, if we were to create a global sustainable society, we would have to apply the principles of permaculture or agroecology to everything we do.  The "we" of this philosophy of "environmentalism" is the human race as a whole.  The point of this form of "environmentalism" is not to do anything "good for the environment," but rather to save civilization from its worst aspects.

"Environmentalists," as such, do not think the way they do because they are primarily worried about how others will regard them; au contraire, they worry first about the proper relationships to have  (to nature, and to each other) before considering their statuses within an alienated society.

***

Well, there they are: three definitions of "environmentalism."  I hope you all were entertained by this spiel.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

What it would take

I propose we eliminate all corporate welfare to fossil, nuclear, and fuel farming energy production.

I propose we eliminate corporate ownership of government through a wholesale public desertion from both dinosaur "major political parties" as a prerequisite for anything of the sort.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

I concur

An economic market system that cares about immediate returns is going to cut them down.  Preserving them is never going to be as profitable as cutting them down in the short term.

Right.  And what's more, the world is in the iron-fisted grip of these short-term profiteers.  Each one of them, in their Fortune 500 corporations, is his own little Jim Jones, using the world as his own private Jonestown.  Capitalism is just a People's Temple cult writ large.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Just to pick on Biogrrl's otherwise excellent post

Biogrrl says at one point:

If more people had listened to the dark (and, it turns out, realistic) predictions, he would never have gotten the support that let him invade, and worse to do so with troop levels below what many in the military wanted to do the job thoroughly.

Now, much as I appreciated Biogrrl's excellent points about the scene, there, with Frodo and Samwise on Mount Doom, it must be said, here, that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was probably a consensus decision of the elites all along, from Bush I to Clinton's to Bush II's administration.  And in the US the elites pretty much get what they want.

Clinton tried to satisfy this demand by overthrowing Saddam Hussein, through the CIA.  A consistent policy directive, throughout these Administrations, called for Saddam Hussein's removal.  The point of the ongoing embargo on Iraq was to keep Iraq's oil in the ground until such time as it could be appropriated by the US or its proxies.  The only question was how it was to be done.  Clinton's failure in removing Saddam Hussein doubtless convinced the elites that more extreme measures had to be taken, and so George W. Bush was shepherded into the White House to "finish the job."

The elites knew all about Peak Oil -- if they hadn't known already, certainly Matthew Simmons told them.  And I don't think they had any plans to allow Saddam Hussein to peg his precious oil reserves to the Euro, either, not with the US government trillions of dollars in debt.  Hussein's threats against Israel made his removal almost a sure thing from their perspective.

The clincher must have been the Saudi request that US troops be removed from Saudi soil.  The Saudi government faced a serious threat from its revivalist, Muslim Brother wing (the bunch that gave us Osama bin Laden), which wanted the (US) infidel and its troops out of Saudi Arabia.  But it's not as if the US could continue to control the oil reserves from afar -- there had to be some sort of major Mideast US troop presence.  A country had to be found to house it.  And, sure enough, soon after the invasion, US troops were removed from Saudi Arabia, and inserted into Iraq.

I don't think there was any point at which this trajectory of events could have been derailed.  Winning the 2000 Presidential election didn't empower Al Gore to do anything.  And certainly the largest demonstrations in American history didn't stop Bush.  

I think that the idea that the US invasion of Iraq has been "a disaster" is in error.  Both major parties, publicly or privately, plan to "win the war in Iraq" regardless of the cost in time or money.  15 percent of the world's oil reserves are under that land -- the cheapest energy we will ever see is right there in Iraq.  They'll never give it up.  The so-called "civil war"?  All imperial powers have used a divide-and-conquer strategy to keep the natives in line.  This is more of the same.

Things turned out differently than in Tolkien's story.  In our world, Sauron has the ring, and he's using it as only he knows how.  The so-called "Left" in this country votes for the Democrats, who only oppose Sauron because they want his ring and his power.  The Democrats would doubtless bring Morgoth back from the Void, if they only knew how, in order to dislodge Sauron.  Dumping the Dems would be would be in our interests, if we care about them anymore.On Drop that apocalyptic vision and start imagining a positive future posted 3 years, 4 months ago 56 Responses

*cough*

many common property regimes rely on extreme forms of coercion and violence

Nor do I see my arguments about air, water etc. addressed in any serious way.

Could we stick with the subject?

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Tragedy of the Commons

Without property rights, resources are almost always treated as "open access," which leads to a "tragedy of the commons."

The revised, later version of the "tragedy of the commons" was the "tragedy of the unmanaged commons," and Garrett Hardin altered his slogan after having been persuaded by anthropologists that there were indeed human societies that knew how to manage their commons over the course of millenia.  Kudos to Bart Anderson for noticing this in his reply.

The "tragedy of the commons" is in fact the tragedy accompanying the triumph of a certain philosophy, namely possessive individualism.  Hardin's essay introduces its object thusly:

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

At that point the problem is specified further:

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?"

Indeed, there are other motivations for herdsmen to attend to.  Herding animals is hard work; the herdsmen may choose to limit herds in order to maximize leisure time, or to pursue other health-sustaining activities, or just to go to the beach and have sex (though preferably not with the animals).  Animals have to be taken care of; during a cold winter, for instance, they often have to be kept indoors, which entails sheltering costs.  We might say that a universe in which "it is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons," specifically, is a universe where herdsmen are expected to operate according to a balance sheet where assets are to be maximized and liabilities to be minimized.

In modern life, however, possessive individualism is more than a philosophy, rather, it is a foundation for endemic social behavior.  We do not obey property laws because we all popped out of our mommies' wombs having been programmed to do so -- rather, private property is endemic to our culture, and we are enculturated into it from a very early age.

Given that real estate is the model for the possessive invidualist world-view per se, we might regard entities such as the oceans and the atmosphere as being inappropriate to the idea of totalizing the (socially-imposed) model of privatization.  Real estate fits this model because, usually, it stays in one place (unless we're talking Mississippi River delta, or Florida, where the existence of vast tracts of real estate is dependent upon erosion patterns).  Air and water, on the other hand, slosh around a lot.  How, perchance, could one own a chunk of seawater (somewhere in the mid-Pacific, for instance), without seeing one's "property" mixed in with chunks of seawater owned by other proprietors?  It isn't going to happen.  And the idea that we can "privatize" the oceans or the air through a system of government permits is just a rationalization for exploitation, not a true property-system.

And I don't think that "self-interest" naturally obliges property-owners to take care of their property in an ecologically-sustainable manner, either.  In fact, private-property ownership, being (Locke's definition) the individual's absolute power over a thing, encourages owners to exploit what they own without regard to future ecological consequences.  The immersion of owners in a "free market economy," moreover, makes owners dependent upon markets in a radically unsustainable fashion.  

What characterizes the "free market economy," rather than ecological caring, is the alienation of everything to the economy -- people work, buy, and sell, for profit and for pay, in service to a regime of exchange-values, rather than for a system that directly addresses human needs.  This is why ecological integrity becomes a tragedy of the commons under capitalism -- all benefit from ecological integrity, but it is too easy for nature to be "exchanged away" for something else someone wants in the short term, at which point it might be "put into production."  Privatizing the commons will not delay the expected acts of exchanging-away and exploitation.

No, what you need for the commons is a society that will take care of it, year after year, generation after generation.  Hardin characterized this as a system of "mutual coercion, mutually agreed-upon."  In another, later, essay, Hardin dawningly admits that there is something wrong with the presuppositions of his earlier essay:

With Adam Smith's work as a model, I had assumed that the sum of separate ego-serving decisions would be the best possible one for the population as a whole. But presently I discovered that I agreed much more with William Forster Lloyd's conclusions, as given in his Oxford lectures of 1833. Citing what happened to pasturelands left open to many herds of cattle, Lloyd pointed out that, with a resource available to all, the greediest herdsmen would gain--for a while. But mutual ruin was just around the corner.

We do well, in other words, to begin an examination of how best to "manage the commons" (i.e. to institute "ecological production" along the lines specified by Joel Kovel) by examining our institutions and ideologies.  Will our institutions and ideologies take care of the commons?  If they won't, then, we need some that will.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Music reference

It's on the tip of my tongue, but I've got nothing.

Global warming is here, by the way...100 degrees and up and high humidity and I expect it to get worse as the years roll on...On Drop that apocalyptic vision and start imagining a positive future posted 3 years, 4 months ago 56 Responses

Parody of pessimism

OK, Caniscandida, I suppose I was being trivial.  I was merely trying to parody the pessimism of "doom and gloom," in my own obscure way.  (That was the point of this thread, no?)

(As for Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young: the star of  CSN, in my humble opinion, was and is Crosby, and Young can still produce sparks, if for the fact that he tries so hard... the Moody Blues lost their charm after breaking up in the '70s, anyway...)On Drop that apocalyptic vision and start imagining a positive future posted 3 years, 4 months ago 56 Responses

Indeed...

more kudos to JMG... showing once again that under capitalism there is no "we" as in "we can kick the oil habit," but, rather, Planet Earth houses (for the time being) a collection of unassociated individual human beings (Barack Obama et al.) trying to buy their way into a "we" through the "free market"...

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

technology question

While the present capitalistic economy is used in terribly destructive ways throughout the world, it's only a tool. What matters is not the tool but the mind of the tool-user, and the worldview which provides the framework that defines the limits of what that mind can think.

But if I am to become a nuclear power, certain social relations have to be there in the first place.  There has to be a command structure, and I have to be on top of it.  There has to be a resource base to provide the raw materials for atomic weaponry.  There have to be teams of technologists in my employ, to make the stuff operational.

The same thing is true of "present capitalistic economy."  It isn't "just a tool" -- it is a set of social relations, of owners to workers, of managers to subordinates, of landlords to tenants. These social relations determine who gets to decide and what happens thereafter regardless of the mindset or worldview of those playing the capitalist game.

Now, let's compare the atomic-weapons social structure with the capitalist social structure.  It's all very well for anti-nuclear activists to tell the world's powers "don't use atomic weapons."  But if the nuclear-weapons social structure is mobilized, if the resources are used and the technologists are hired and if all the systems are standing by, waiting to fire up those weapons, then the threat is always there.

The same thing is true of capitalism.  We can tell the power-brokers at the top of the capitalist system "don't do destructive things," but if the system is still mobilized to do those destructive things, then the threat is still there.

The main difference between capitalism and nuclear politics is that capitalism is less violent and more insidious than nuclear politics.  However, our governments are not setting off nuclear weapons, but capitalism is dismantling ecosystems.On Drop that apocalyptic vision and start imagining a positive future posted 3 years, 4 months ago 56 Responses

Beyond pandering to "business"

Imagine a world in which prices were adjusted to bring our economy closer to sustainability.  A few examples:

   1. What would it look like if organic food were cheaper than food laced with pesticides?  Well, we'd all be buying organic, and farmers wouldn't be using pesticides.

   2. What would it look like if it became cheaper to hire people, and more exensive to pollute?  There would be more employment, and less pollution.

   3. What would it look like if gasoline became significantly more expensive, and a national income supplement were financed from the revenues?  There would be fewer and smaller cars on the road, and poverty would be reduced.

A world where government has the power to "adjust prices" in such a way was the world of populist Keynesianism, of the historical period between World War II and the 1970s.  At that point, governments all became more and more like what William I. Robinson called the "transnational state" -- the state as just one of many enabling bodies for transnational capitalism, subordinate to transnational entites like NATO or the European Union or the WTO or the World Bank/ IMF or the various international trade agreements.

We need to do more than indulge nostalgia for a world gone by.  We need to think about the shape of a future world.

I suppose that a farming industry that didn't have to meet enormous production goals in order to operate on small profit margins wouldn't have to subsidize the pesticide industry.

If it were cheaper to hire people, then it would be less profitable to work for a living, no?

If gasoline were significantly more expensive, then running a business would run into significantly higher transportation costs, no?  Businesses won't like that.

Reclaiming government so we can get it to do what we want is an admirable project.  But we can't be stuck in the trap of imagining that, once we have government, all we need to do is juggle "prices" while maintaining the function of government as a conduit for business.  Let me suggest replacing the 1-2-3 above with another 1-2-3:

1.  If we re-organized the universities to teach sustainable agriculture while phasing out the pesticide industries altogether.

2.  If we guaranteed universal employment, and put everyone to world on this matter of "ecological production."

3.  If we phased out the old, gasguzzling transportation systems and created new, low energy ones.

If it's so easy and cheap to sequester carbon...

why aren't the nations in a race to do it now?

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

The meaning of the joke

Let me repeat the joke:

How many environmentalists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: 100. Ninety-nine to stew about the ecological and philosophical impacts of the move, and one -- who also happens to moonlight as a convivial advice columnist -- to climb the ladder and just freaking do it.

Now the joke wouldn't be funny, you know, if the core observation within it weren't true.  I think the truth of it comes out in the reflection that we're discussing the environmental impact of screwing in lightbulbs, instead of discussing the impact of the system as a whole.  In this case, the system as a whole is the electrical grid which powers the light bulb once we srew it in and flick on the switch.  Without the grid, no light bulb, no "energy saving," no light-bulb jokes.

  Oh, sure, energy-saving lightbulbs are nice, but isn't it the electrical grid, among the other grids (e.g. the transportation grid, the air traffic grid, the monetary grid, the military grid), which dominates the world.  Isn't it that which has forced us into this ecological crisis where we consume 85 million barrels of oil every day and can't stop?

You may now go back to your regularly-scheduled conversation about light bulbs.On Umbra on replacing light bulbs posted 3 years, 4 months ago 19 Responses

Thinking bigger than marginalism

They care about not paying taxes and like the idea of carbon taxes, something like a stiff $0.30 per pound of carbon that would double or triple energy cost.  Tax avoidance is a strong motivator and a tradition among conservatives.

Good for them!

Now let's imagine an application of the consumerist logic graciously illustrated by sunflower here.  This is where it gets tricky.

Here in southern California, as in much of the US, the economy depends upon cheap energy so that consumers can drive to shopping malls to buy consumer goods.  The bigger shopping malls, moreover, are further dependent upon cheap energy.  For the most part, they are indoors, and either air conditioned for hot or space-heated for cold weather.

Now let's raise the energy costs on these shopping mall economies.  To a certain extent, one will see felicitous changes.  More carpooling to the malls might occur, for instance.  Or solar panels on the mall ceilings themselves.

But there might also be some not-so-felicitous changes.  Fewer people shopping at malls.  Fewer people buying things, because more people are spending more money on energy and not on buying things.  Conservatives will not like these changes.  They may say that they like high energy taxes now, and then look at their balance sheets and decide they don't like high energy taxes because it costs too much to pay for them.

Some malls may have to shut down altogether because the costs of operating them (and the costs of bringing consumers to them) will have become too high.  Ordinarily, when malls shut down, the conservatives attribute these events to the "free market."  If you're not "competitive," you lose.  This is ostensibly normal business, though you and I know that capitalist business has depended upon government support from Day One.  

However, when a big mall shuts down in the political climate created by high energy taxes, the "free market" pretext for failure disappears.  The rich mall owners will then blame "big government" for their tragic business plights, and crank up the media machine to support their propaganda efforts.

Conservatives are not supposed to like "big government."  The idea that "free enterprise" is being impeded by "regulations" tugs at their heartstrings.

All of a sudden, in the midst of any significant big business failure, you will see a movement to lower those energy costs again, by reducing those evil energy taxes.  Oh, sure, the taxes sounded good to the conservatives when the liberals were in their ears talking about global warming.  But something more important than Planet Earth is at stake here: free enterprise.  

Now, "free enterprise" can mean a lot of things.  But, in this era of dying capitalism, it means defending Bill Gates's right to own as much, alone, as do the bottom 40% of American wage-earners own combined.  It means defending the rich, who own the big businesses.  Never mind that Bill Gates owes most of his wealth to manipulations of property law, or that Archer Daniels Midland is America's biggest welfare bum; free enterprise means defending big business.  Some of these big businesses, by the way, use a lot of fossil-fuel energy.  Can you imagine the energy costs of heating or cooling the Mall of America, in suburban Minnesota?  They run a roller coaster inside that thing!  Can you imagine the families who will hate us when we raise the energy taxes on it?

At some point, when a few big businesses have seen their profit margins dip for whatever reason, or even if they haven't (!), the heavy campaign donors (through their dummy organizations) and the corporate mass media (owned by the wealthy) will speak with one voice: high energy taxes are "bad for the economy."  Who will buy it first?  The conservatives.  This is why I imagine the "alliance with conservatives," on the conceptual grounds of high-tax energy economics, to be for nought.

Now here is my main point.  With the tax debate, we are trapped in what economists call marginalist economic thinking.  Everything in this line of thought depends upon the consumer's marginal propensity to consume.  Higher energy taxes are an attempt to make alternative energies more "competitive," by making fossil-fuel energy less attractive than alternative energy for the consumer with a dollar to spare.  But what about the dollars that the consumer can't spare, the dollars that are "locked into" the high-energy-consumption infrastructure?

Marginalist economics has nothing to say about a system that depends upon cheap energy so shoppers can buy products at shopping malls; it only debates which products they can buy, or whether they travel there individually or carpool.  It accepts such a system as it is; it cannot be bothered to question reality.  It will not provide us with the wiggle-room we need to specify alternatives to mere "adaptation" to global warming.  We need to be thinking bigger.

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

There's always ecosocialism...

David Roberts asks:

Conservatives see the approach of global warming and counsel passivity and despair. We can do better than that, can't we?

Well, I really don't think "conservatives" are passive.  Rather, their corporate overlords are actively "out there" exploiting the world's last cheap resources, ripping down the rainforests for saleable tropical woods, pumping the Earth dry of its last drops of cheap oil, and patrolling the continents, waiting for the next Hugo Chavez-type uppity regime to sprout from the impoverished masses in their slums so that it can be crushed.  The Right wins elections in Mexico and Peru and the "conservatives" breathe a sigh of relief.  Bolivia elects Morales, and they panic.  Hey, those are "our" "resources" they're nationalizing!  Capitalism of the type "conservatives" favor is characterized by the Wild Frontier mentality, and it will only come to a halt when Garrett Hardin's tragedy of the commons becomes a reality.  Who is George Bush if not a Wild West cowboy?  In sum, I don't expect harmony with nature from them.

Oh, sure, I suppose we can stop them for a little while with the standard prescription of mainstream "progressivism."  That may take awhile to come into being; The politicos in Washington, Demopublican or Republicrat, today all pretty much believe in the "Washington Consensus," which is a prescription for "free markets" everywhere on Earth.  The "Washington Consensus" is of course a cover under which big producers drive out small ones, and advance the prospects of a transnational capitalist class despite the slowing of the global economic growth rate.  And since the "progressives" are almost all either Democrats or belong to no party, we can hardly expect anything different from them.  

Imagine, if you will, convention hall after convention hall stretching to the horizons, filled with "progressives" in an eternal Boston, in a year 2004 frozen in time, all listening silently while a billion suited John Kerrys spout pro-war rhetoric unto eternity.  You scream as loud as you can to wake yourself from this horrid nightmare, but your voice has been restricted to the convention-approved "free speech zone" conveniently located under a bridge miles away from the convention halls.  It would make a great horror movie if it weren't so real.

I read some vague remarks here about how the "Third World" was experiencing "economic prosperity."  All classes, everywhere?  What about Latin America, which over the '80s and '90s experienced a sum-total growth rate of 7%?  Or Africa, which has actually regressed?  The statistics I've been reading characterize the period between 1948 and 1973 as having the fastest (capitalist) overall global economic growth rate in all history.  That isn't coming back.  And the global poor?  They're still starving.  If you don't think so, well, the time to show your hard evidence is now.

But I digress.  Let's take a look at that standard prescription of mainstream "progressivism," again.  Isn't our mentality basically one of "creating alliances"?  I read something about that here.    I believe the same commentator chimed in when I mentioned Gramsci's concept of a "war of position."  Well, here's the reality: the "alliances" the mainstream "progressives" have made have all led to entanglements with the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party is led by people who believe in the "Washington Consensus," which is basically a formula for rule by conservatives.  The "war of position," then, has been sold out to these "alliances" we've made, and basically been lost through them.  Mainstream politics has become a bait-and-switch operation at best.  To get anywhere within the system, one must win lots of elections; and to win even one puny election, one must raise loads of corporate cash, making promises to donors and sacrificing the ability to effect political change in the process.  The game is reinforced by the Two-Party System, which draws the nonpartisan organizations into its web of "necessary alliances" and denies them any meaningful opportunity to do politics outside its twin orbits.  Liberal Democrats have no right to discuss Gramsci without admitting a prior condition of defeat.

What's more, this defeat appears to be affecting the "progressives'" ability to project possible solutions onto the problem at hand.  Samuelson may be a conservative; but his approach to global warming is a microcosm of the problem facing "progressives."  In each of their prognoses you see dire warnings of the future state of the world, and milk-and-water "solutions" that seem to be addressed more to the reader's fear of change than to anything else.  A book I previously cited, Patrick Hossay's Unsustainable, seems to be written in this vein.  

But there's hope!  Let's imagine, for instance, that some sort of global climactic catastrophe effects a mood-change among the elites (who so far have been propping the Bush regime up).  Let's imagine, furthermore, that they spontaneously decide to embark upon a new compromise, altering their "Washington Consensus" principles slightly to offer the world an eco-friendly face.  (Never mind that the last great economic compromise, the one that pulled populist Keynesian economics out of the Great Depression of the '30s, took nine years to bring into being.)  

What happens at that point?  Will the environmental community be too desperate to declare victory in an environment which, until then, has been unremittingly hostile (or noncommittal) to their cause?  Will we celebrate some puny 4% reduction in "greenhouse gas emissions," forgetting that our "victory" was probably all the current system could take without dramatic restructuring?  What I'm trying to show with these questions is that the "environmental problem" is really a problem in political economy, a problem our current system hasn't solved.  Solutions will not only require new rethinking, but furthermore a reckoning of how our current "new rethinking" is entangled in the current realities of political economy.  

Part of this entanglement, I'm ashamed to say, rests secure in the false "hope" that the problem of the "Washington Consensus" can be wished away through technology.  So far, nobody here has bothered to refute John Bellamy Foster's thesis: solutions based on faith in the healing powers of "technology" do not stop the capitalist system from using the old, destructive technologies; in fact, they simply enhance the system's ability to use all technologies.  Simply because we recognize that fossil-fuel-burning is destructive, doesn't mean that the will-power to stop using fossil fuels will magically appear in our souls.  Rather, under the current regime of political economy, our souls have made a prior commitment to budgetary economics, which, in this era, amounts to a world that uses 85 million barrels of oil every day, not to mention all the coal/ natural gas/ tar sands which I don't have figures on.  Energy alternatives abound; show me one that can provide me with the same energy that humanity now gets from 85 million daily barrels of oil, and just as cheaply too, and I'll admit to the longevity of capitalist energy use.

I really loved the Samuelson arguments about "we don't know" and "some places will be nicer."  In 1945, mind you, "we didn't know" what would happen if the Bomb were to be dropped on urban populations; that didn't justify it.  And the elites, I'm sure, dream of palatial estates along the newly-tropical Arctic Ocean coasts of Siberia, Alaska, and Canada, complete with sex on the beach during those glorious 24-hour late June days.  For those of us who won't be able to move there without permission from the Department of Homeland Security, life will be nasty, brutish, and short.  We whose names will not be in the Social Register will need to take stock in a regime which aims, not for some "more sustainable" (yet catastrophe-bound) capitalist regime, but for something that is genuinely sustainable.  

This means, in the words of Joel Kovel and Enrique Leff, a regime based on "ecological production," where the principles of permaculture (creatively adapted to all fields of endeavor) are applied to all aspects of production.  It doesn't mean trying to change the subject to "capitalism" or "America" or "localism" or "consumer lifestyles" or "sustainable development."  A global sustainable society will have to be the first priority; comparatively, all else will have to be thrown in the basket marked "gossip."  

This will not mean the reduction of the human being to mere "population," to be manipulated by scientific eco-puppet masters; rather, the creative juices of every human being on the planet will be necessary to solve the ecological problem.  Thus ecosocialism; humanity solving its ecological problem communally, and not merely as representatives of the various social classes, nations, races, genders, or individual egos.  I respect your right to live on the planet; you respect mine, and we co-operate to save each other amidst the wreckage of the system that came before.

A complete bibliography of ecosocialism will be forthcoming.  However, I would like to recommend, firstly, that everyone start by reading Joel Kovel's The Enemy of Nature.  This is really the capstone book of ecosocialism.  Also important are Maria Mies (The Subsistence Perspective) and her husband Saral Sarkar (Eco-socialism or eco-capitalism).  An ecosocialist's view of the other movements, a very polite one, can be found in Derek Wall's Babylon and Beyond.  A short view of the dilemma posed above can be found in Foster's article Organizing Ecological Revolution.

Critiques of capitalism: the simplest of these can be found in Harry Shutt's The Trouble With Capitalism, although that book is mainly focused upon explaining how neoliberalism got to be as it is today.  The essential theory can be found in volume 1 of Marx's Capital, although Marx needs a modern interpreter to make sense to most readers.  Kees van der Pijl's Transnational Classes and International Relations lays out the whole history of capitalism, complete with its disastrous eco-future.  It is very abstract, however.  Leslie Sklair's The Transnational Capitalist Class is very ecologically conscious, though it focuses mainly upon the development of corporate business.

Social change: I have already recommended Gramsci's Prison Notebooks; we should all study and critique Alinsky's Rules for Radicals; and of course we should read Skinner's Walden Two and Hilke Kuhlmann's Living Walden Two to look at some models for alternative life.  (Kovel, of course, was interested in the Bruderhof, which I know nothing about.)

That's all for now.  Back to work!

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Food Not Bombs

Take Food Not Bombs, for example, (given in earlier posts). I live in rural Maine and there's not a Food Not Bombs in sight. But there could be, and hopefully not a two hour drive away. We need these things where we live. Here people are so busy often working two jobs, that they just don't feel they have the time to go to meetings and organize. On line could help that somewhat but if you aren't willing or able to go out once a month to accomplish something positive, then nothing will ever get done.

I would recommend starting a Food Not Bombs yourself.  The FNB manual is here.  You will have to have a food source.  I found mine by going to the local farmer's market at closing time and asking the farmers if they had vegetables/ fruits they couldn't use.  You will also need to find a population in need of healthy food.  My area in southern California has a plentiful homeless population, living outdoors; circumstances are likely to be different in Maine.  Food banks and churches can give information about their hungry clienteles.  You should eventually be able to rustle up people who can come by a house once a week on the weekend to help prepare food or circulate leaflets or gather items for giving away.  

http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/

Che and Fidel

Reading Bart Anderson's most recent reply to my post, I've decided that the main problem with my posts so far is that they aren't ultra-left enough, nor are they theoretical enough.  So it's time to kick it up a notch.  I read his literary sources back in the '80s, when I was an undergrad.  If I'd had any sense back then, I'd have gone to Nicaragua.

I've tried to demonstrate here, to the best of my powers, that capitalism is destroying the Earth's ecosystem