Mainstream Green Narratives: It’s About Selling More Industrial Products
A follow-up to Contemplation LXXXIX that responded to the idea that if enough people found true contentment and happiness by cooperating with others, humanity would discover a ‘oneness’ that could ‘achieve truly coherent action’; all within the context of pursuing a ‘sustainable’ future. The individual that shared this notion added a link to a UK House of Lords publication as a follow-up, suggesting it demonstrates ‘an evolution of ideas’. The following is my response after reading the document.
Skimmed through the document. Here are a few clues as to why what is written will not and cannot work, and, in fact, will exacerbate our overshoot:
“…through adopting new technologies…[that] will bring…economic benefits.”
“… through technological innovations and their uptake…[by] making it easier…to adopt new technologies…”
“…focus [upon]…adopting ultra-low emission vehicles…low-carbon heating technologies…”
“…several positive trends such as…growing uptake of electric vehicles…”
“…stimulate investment and innovation…”
“…focus on the rollout of low-emission vehicles…”
“…new developments [of public transportation]…”
Then there’s the entire mythical narrative around ‘net zero’ and achieving it via non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies and their associated industrial products (when really it’s about dependence upon unproven technologies and manipulative accounting). And one way of achieving this is the ‘phasing out’ of fossil fuel-based products (conveniently leaving out the inconvenient facts that ‘green/clean’ energy products rely heavily upon fossil fuels both up and down their production, maintenance, and disposal/reclamation industrial processes).
While there is much, much more in the document, these examples point to the undeniable fact that much of what is being proposed relies upon the (mandated?) adoption of ‘green/clean’ industrial products, and the continuation of, for the most part, our status quo systems. They’re simply tweaked a bit to reduce our cognitive dissonance.
Much of the document relies upon marketing/propaganda to drive behavioural change, learning from what was achieved without much pushback during the pandemic. In fact, I get the sense that the document is a stepping stone (slippery slope?) towards what some analysts have predicted: widespread pandemic-type lockdowns in the guise of combatting climate change.
And I cannot help but interpret this as further confirmation of my growing belief that this is primarily (totally?) about narrative control and forced adoption of industrial products by those who own/control the industries and resources as they attempt to consolidate/maintain/enlarge their slice of an ever-shrinking economic pie as we increasingly bump up against the limits to growth on a finite planet. To say little about the blindness to the many layers of our predicament, especially when it comes to energy and other finite resources.
My ‘fear’ is that we will do almost exactly what is outlined here because rather than challenge or disrupt the status quo power and wealth structures of the globe’s ruling caste it actually enhances them; but, as demonstrated in this document, can be wrapped up in a veil of ‘green’ and marketed to the masses as another beneficent policy/action by the ruling class for the masses. Perhaps this image sums it up best:
At this point Israel’s ties with key Gulf countries like the UAE are near breaking point, after only a few short years ago diplomatic normalization was hailed through Trump’s Abraham accords. But international and Israeli press reports are confirming the UAE has announced it is halting all coordination on humanitarian aid with Israel.
Further, as Israeli media reports: “The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has announced a suspension of diplomatic coordination with Israel in the wake of the death of seven World Central Kitchen humanitarian workers in Gaza.” Simultaneously, Israel is busy putting its embassies across the world on high security alert due to the “heightened Iranian response threat” in wake of Monday’s Israeli attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus. All of this served to send Brent soaring in the last two hours, with Brent spiking above $90 for the first time since October….
… and sending stocks tumbling to session lows.
With Iran vowing that its retaliation is coming at any moment, Israel’s military is scrambling for readiness, with the latest measure being to pause all home leave for all combat troops.
“The IDF is at war and the issue of the deployment of forces is constantly reviewed as needed,” the Israeli military said.
President Biden is meanwhile is said to be “pissed” with PM Netanyahu over the killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza, though Israel acknowledged that it was a “grave mistake”.
So far this sounds like more mere empty words of “concern” – a talking point that’s been on repeat from the White House even as its Gaza policy continues slowly fracturing the Democratic base – but Biden is said to have pressed Bibi for “an immediate ceasefire”.
The call readout further said ceasefire is needed to “protect innocent civilians” in Gaza and improve the humanitarian situation. Axios writes that Biden gave his Israeli counterpart an “ultimatum” as the US president “emphasized that the strikes on humanitarian workers and the overall humanitarian situation are unacceptable.”
With ever-present fears, Tehran could launch a missile or drone attack against Israel to avenge the deaths of three commanders and four officers of the Iranian Armed Forces, taken out by a precision Israeli airstrike at the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus earlier this week. New data suggests that GPS jamming across Israel is likely related to prudent defensive efforts to counter such an attack.
On Thursday, Reuters journalists and Tel Aviv residents said GPS service deteriorated and, in some cases, entirely disrupted as an attempt by the military to prevent guided missiles and drones from hitting critical high-value targets deep within the nation.
Many bombs, drones, and other weapons use GNSS (global navigation satellite systems) for increased accuracy. Signs of GNSS signals disrupted are more evidence Israel is on the defensive as it awaits missile attacks from Iran.
Data from the GPS interference website “GPSJAM” shows large swaths of Israel have high levels of GPS interference.
Other signs the conflict in the Middle East is broadening and entering a new dimension are reports that the Israeli military halted leave for all combat units on Thursday.
“The IDF is at war, and the deployment of forces is under continuous assessment according to requirements,” the military told Reuters in a statement.
In a separate report, Israel’s military said it was strengthening its aerial defense system with reserve soldiers:
“It was decided to increase manpower and draft reserve soldiers to the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) Aerial Defense Array.”
This follows the deaths of some of the highest-ranking leaders in the Quds Force, who were in charge of Iran’s covert intelligence and military operations across Syria and Lebanon on Monday. The strike was among the deadliest for the Iranian military in years (read: “ZH Geopolitical Week Ahead: This Is A Declaration Of War”).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Iranian protesters burn US flags during a protest gathering to condemn the Israeli airstrike against the Iranian consulate in Syria, at Palestine Square in Tehran, Iran, on April 1, 2024. Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Joshua Keating is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood, an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map.
Even as the fighting has raged in Gaza, a question has hung over the war: Would it escalate into a wider regional conflict involving Iran, its various proxy groups, and perhaps even the US military?
Nearly six months after October 7, it’s a mixed picture. The Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have played a much larger role in the conflict than most observers expected, up to the point of meaningfully disrupting international shipping. But early fears that a full-scale war with Lebanon-based Hezbollah would break out on Israel’s “northern front” or that the Iranian government itself would get directly involved haven’t materialized.
Nonetheless, Monday marked a major step up the escalatory ladder. Warplanes, presumably Israeli, carried out an airstrike in Damascus, Syria, which killed a senior Iranian general, Mohammad Reza Zahedi, who was deeply involved in his government’s activities in Syria and Lebanon. He is the highest-ranking Iranian military officer killed by enemy fire since Gen. Qassem Soleimani was killed by a US drone strike in 2020.
Per its general practice with strikes in Syria, Israel has not officially acknowledged the attack, but four Israeli officials, speaking anonymously, confirmed their involvement to the New York Times…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Today’s Contemplation: And Now For Something Completely Different, Part 4
January 13, 2023 (original posting date)
While I take a break from my Contemplation posts and specifically the energy series I began (see here for Part 1, Part 2), here is the fourth installment of chapters from the fourth book in my fictional novel series (that stalled a few years ago but have ready). I will continue to share some of these over the next little while. Here are the links to PDF files of Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and now Chapter 4.
The storyline: Flowing from actual world events, a damaged environment, dwindling energy resources, and a manipulated market-economy all come crashing together in this tale about the social and individual impact of stresses that overwhelm a precarious and complex global system. Supply chain interruptions, border disputes, increased fascism, growing protest movements, and mass migration out of rural areas into cities dominant the new normal.
Basically, this is a tale (set in Canada) about the individual (and societal) reactions to a breakdown of our complex systems. Life is proceeding ‘normally’ for most while a marginalised minority are increasingly concerned about the unsustainability of our way of life. Governments begin to clash with domestic populations while the machinations of some of the ruling caste, especially around energy systems, is exposed. Chapters trace the lives and experiences of a handful of people during the timeframe of about 3 months before to 3 months after a grid-down situation…
If you’ve made it to the end of this contemplation and have got something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers). Encouraging others to read my work is also much appreciated.
The following contemplation shares my thoughts/response to The Honest Sorcerer’s latest article (another very worthwhile read) regarding the diminishing returns being increasingly encountered by non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies (aka ‘renewables’) — and, yes, I am still plugging away at the Energy Series (Part 1; Part 2) I began as I organise a Food Gardening Guild within my local community, the response to which has been great!
The material and environmental ‘blindness’ to the situation you describe so well seems, at least for the masses, mostly due to attempts to reduce the stress of the cognitive dissonance created by the contradictory information we are exposed to — on the one hand we have increasing numbers of ecologists/biologists warning about the perils of our unchecked growth, finite resource use, and the increasingly negative consequences of these practices; while on the other hand, we have our politicians/industrialists/economists weaving stories about salvation and continued prosperity mostly via the shifting of energy sources and associated products (their motivations being self-serving and that I have written about repeatedly).
These denial-/bargaining-based narratives around a ‘green’ energy transition must be overcome to allow us to see/comprehend the fundamental predicament we have on our hands — ecological overshoot — before any ‘progress’ can be made towards mitigating some of the inevitable consequences we will increasingly encounter as various systems break down (both human-contrived and natural). Without seeing and understanding this predicament we will not, except perhaps in some few local and lucky ‘safe havens’, be able to mitigate at least some of the fallout of the coming storm.
The problem with predicaments of course is that they have no solutions, only consequences, and human complex societies tend to be problem-solving organisations (see archaeologist Joseph Tainter’s thesis in The Collapse of Complex Societies[1]). And this problem-solving orientation of large, complex societies has served humanity well during its last 10,000 or so years, so it seems next to impossible to counter this ingrained/enculturated belief that we can ‘solve’ any issue thrown down in front of us — most recently by throwing gargantuan amounts of fiat currency and/or complex technology at it. Toss on top of this long-term belief system the tendency of our ruling caste to leverage crises to their personal advantage and our dilemma becomes increasingly ‘wicked’; in fact, it becomes next to impossible to see clearly for a variety of reasons (mostly psychological in nature; e.g., deference to ‘authority’, groupthink, cognitive dissonance reduction).
Perhaps one aspect of the issue is that we tend to interpret the world partially through our perceived position on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs[2]. Or at least through a lens that impacts our perceived risk of needs. If we believe our more basic needs are at risk, we focus upon the risk factors located there (e.g., predicament of overshoot, resource scarcity, etc.) whereas those who are in denial of/blind to those risks are concentrating on the needs to be met further along the hierarchy (e.g., achievement, prestige, growth, play, etc.) and hold out that since their basic needs are being met satisfactorily (at least for now) they are not at risk and ‘higher’ needs should be one’s focus.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
As well, It seems next to impossible to counter ruling caste propaganda regarding a renewable energy-based transition to ‘sustainability’ in balance with ecological systems (all while pursuing growth), especially if they serve to instill hope (falsely-based in my opinion) and promises of continuing prosperity/security/etc.. And while some accuse ‘doubters’ of this grand narrative of being fossil fuel-industry shills, ‘doomers’, and/or — God forbid — ‘conspiracy theorists’, the truth of the matter appears to be that we are living during the time of a significant ‘phase transition’[3]. Such eras tend to be a time of competing narratives, confusion, grieving, and even despair for some.
Phase transitions are an interesting phenomenon, particularly in societal settings (an area I think I need to explore further for better understanding). There is growing research/academic study upon them, especially in the realm of transitioning to a ‘sustainable’ society[4]. It seems all of what I read in my brief look into the subject was oriented towards understanding how to shift societal ‘thinking’ towards the acceptance of a ‘sustainable’ future. There is even an entire journal dedicated to this[5]. Of course, the mainstream future being propagated by the ruling caste can be seen in much of this work: technological solutions and the concomitant uptake of new industrial products, and governing shifts that centralise power.
Regardless of the orientation of this research, the important thing to understand about phase transitions is how ‘quickly’ they can occur and how unpredictable they are. My introduction to the topic was during my research for my first novel when I came upon the topic of the Abelian sandpile model[6] and self-organised criticality[7]. Basically, the sandpile model shows why complex systems cannot be predicted and their ‘collapse’ can occur quickly, without warning.
Here are two passages from texts I read while researching for my ‘fictional’ writing that brought this to the forefront of my thinking:
First, from David G. Green’s 2014 book Of Ants and Men: The Unexpected Side Effects of Complexity in Society[8]:
The history of human civilization is, in large measure, a story of the human quest for control. After thousands of years of civilization, we think that we control the environment in which we live. We begin to think that we control the natural world. We might even fool ourselves into thinking that we control human nature. Modern society is built on the assumption of control. Yet, as the terror of the New York blackout shows, chaos all too easily bursts forth, reminding us how flimsy the illusion of control really is.
The root cause of much of the chaos that besets us is complexity, sheer complexity. From complex webs of interactions, chaos emerges. It is complexity that leads to unexpected problems, that turns order into chaos. As much as anything, the New York blackout, like most accidents and breakdowns, was a result of complexity. The power system did have backups and safeguards built in. But no one had anticipated that the network could suffer a cascade of failures of the kind that occurred. Nor could anyone anticipate the mayhem that would ensue when power failed on such a large scale for such a long period. This does not mean that the planners were incompetent; there are just so many possible ways that the system could behave, it is not possible to anticipate and plan for all contingencies.
Second, from a 2003 Corey Lofdahl paper, On the Confounding of Overshoot and Collapse Predictions by Economic Dynamics[9]:
The ability to predict when a system will ‘collapse’ is possible if it is understood when the underlying, foundational resources will exhaust themselves…The best that can be said…is that entropy decreases as the system moves towards its natural limit. The system becomes more likely to collapse, but it is impossible to say exactly when…the larger the resource base, the larger the overshoot and the more postponed the collapse…
[G]rowth can continue for far longer than seems possible to somebody who recognizes the systems’ eventual unsustainability and foresees limitation and collapse…The strongest statement that can be made is that as growth continues, the likelihood of system limitation and collapse increases. For the individual, the growth dynamic can prove so overwhelming that the possibility of collapse begins to seem unlikely and remote as naysayers are continually proven wrong…[However,] the actual likelihood of collapse grows ever larger, while for those under its thrall, the possibility of collapse grows ever more distant. When the system eventually collapses, it does so suddenly, dramatically, and unexpectedly.
The evidence is accumulating that a phase transition is fast approaching for the human species. When it occurs and how quickly it completes its shift is completely unpredictable, which is why it will be a Black Swan event[10] for the vast majority of people. The best preparation for this transition that cannot be avoided will not be to put the remainder of our diminishing resources — especially energy — towards more technologies and complexities, but the exact opposite. We need to be pursuing a ‘Great Simplification’[11], decommissioning those complexities that pose great risk for future generations, abandoning our cherished dreams of infinite growth on a finite planet, and accepting that the future is not going to be one as laid out by our ‘leaders’ and such fictional narratives as Star Trek — not even close.
Attempting to relocalise all those truly important resources (potable water procurement, food production, shelter needs for the local climate) as much as is possible is where I will be putting my energy and resources…as well as getting my community to try and do the same.
Today’s Contemplation: And Now For Something Completely Different, Part 3
January 7, 2023 (original posting date)
Common Grackle Fledgling, Whitchurch-Stouffville. (2022) Photo by author.
While I take a break from my self-indulgent Contemplation posts and specifically the energy series I began (see here for Part 1, Part 2), here is the third installment of chapters from the fourth book in my fictional novel series (that stalled a few years ago but have ready). I will continue to share some of these over the next little while. Here are the links to PDF files of Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and now Chapter 3.
Today’s Contemplation: And Now For Something Completely Different, Part 2
January 4, 2023 (original posting date)
Going to ‘try’ and take a bit of a break from my self-indulgent Contemplation posts and specifically the energy series I began (see here for Part 1, Part 2). I do attempt to take time to reflect upon and do additional reading when I’m in ‘the writing zone’ so it takes some significant personal time and energy, that I tend to have more of during the Canadian winter months when my food gardening chores are on hold.
The break is to pursue some ‘action’ on my part — something I am attempting to do more of. I am initiating a Food Gardener’s Guild in my local community and wish to put my energies into that for the next week or more (in between my hockey playing). I threw the idea out this morning to local residents on our community’s Facebook group and got a resounding positive response in the first hour or so.
In light of this, I will be devoting some time to trying to get this off the ground.
However, having written a few chapters in the fourth book of my fictional novel series (that stalled a few years ago but have ready), I will share some of these over the next little while. Here are the links to PDF files of Chapter 1 (shared a few days ago), and now Chapter 2.
Another brief contemplation this morning that I put together in response to a post that appeared on a Facebook Group I help to administer. One of our moderators works diligently within the ‘system’ in an attempt to persuade some of the ruling caste to embrace degrowth strategies. While a very noble endeavour, we disagree on the ability of this to bring about meaningful changes.
She posted the following introduction to the image below:
“This is a quote from a friend with an exceptionally high IQ, he has encouraged me ever since I started my Degrowth divining efforts. His Twitter feed is both fascinating and thought provoking, look for JamesCMorrow; he is an expert in Nudge theory and he assures me that the paradigm shift to a united aspiration for altruistic Degrowth is already well underway. Your feedback on the idea expressed in the image below is invited.”
My feedback:
While a lovely sentiment that many will certainly grasp onto and embrace in their attempts to reduce anxiety-provoking thoughts, the harsh reality is that we are probably far too deeply into ecological overshoot that even if we reach a tipping point in the population whereby a cooperative (and agreed upon — the truly difficult (unachievable?) part) mentality sweeps the planet — and not one the ruling caste develops/implements since their plans are always simply a leveraging of crises to control/expand their positions of power and prestige, despite the constant propaganda/marketing that what they do is for the benefits of the hoi polloi — the fact is we are in a predicament that can only be mitigated, not solved (not even, as some argue, if we were to experience an even more drastic population reduction than the 50% as was Thanos’s plan in the Marvel Comics Universe movies).
We have painted ourselves into a corner from which there appears no escape (as I would argue most evidence suggests). Rather than focus our energies (and resources) on unattainable ‘enlightenment’, I’d prefer to see — while we have the quickly diminishing resources — a decommissioning of the dangerous complexities we’ve created (e.g., nuclear power plants and their waste products; biosafety labs and their pathogens; chemical production and storage facilities and their toxins; armament factories and their weapons; etc.) and a concerted effort to push self-sufficiency based upon local and truly renewable resources for as many as possible to help them weather the coming storm. Unfortunately, I no more see this coming down the pike than global cooperation — apart from a few small communities pursuing self-reliance.
Whether any of humanity makes it out the other side of the ecological bottleneck we’ve created is in all likelihood well out of our hands for the biogeochemical limits, physical laws, and biological principles will always, in the end, trump human ‘ingenuity’, ‘technology’, and ‘cooperation’ — especially if the last 10,000 years of our existence is any indication. Human societies grow, increase in complexity, over-exploit their surroundings, encounter significant diminishing returns on their investments in complexity, then eventually (and always) decline and perish. This time, however, this recurrent phenomenon is global in nature — thank you fossil fuels.
We do not and have never stood apart from, outside of, or above the biosphere and its biophysical nature (especially the limits imposed by a finite planet), no matter how much we would like to believe or wish otherwise. For as Guy McPherson has argued: Nature bats last. And nature’s method for rebalancing a species that has shot well past its natural environmental carrying capacity and the waste products produced from its expansion and existence cannot, no matter how much we’d like, be avoided or put off indefinitely. The piper must always and eventually be paid, and s/he is getting ever closer…
As I continue to work on my multipart contemplation regarding our energy future (Part 1; Part 2), thought I would throw out this ‘brief’ one that shares my comment on the most recent post by The Honest Sorcerer, whose writing in general continues to parallel my own (probably not surprising given the increasing evidence regarding the trends in the topic(s) we discuss).
Great article. As the saying goes: it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future[1]. We mostly look at current trends and extrapolate them into the future, believing that tomorrow will unfold much like today — and we do this for pretty sound reasons but mostly because our primate brains have extreme difficulty comprehending complex systems and their nonlinear feedback loops and emergent phenomena. In a time of flux/chaos/transition, such an approach is not always such a good strategy — to say little about all the Black Swans circling overhead[2].
One of the places I default to when hoping to give some certainty to the future (something homo sapiens strongly desire[3]) is the past. This is likely because of my ‘brief’ educational background and work in pre/history (aka archaeology)[4].
While technology has dramatically changed some aspects of how we re/act (i.e., adapt) to our changing environment through our problem-solving abilities, we tend to follow a similar path to our distant ancestors by way of leveraging our tools and ingenuity to help us survive and adapt (agriculture being perhaps the big one that resulted in food surpluses, sedentary lifestyles, exponentially increasing populations, and eventually organizational structures that led to differential access to resources, sociopolitical complexity and, perhaps finally, territorial competition[5]); but these solely human abilities can only take us so far in a world of biogeochemical limits — particularly when the energy required to sustain all our complexities have encountered significant diminishing returns and resulted in catastrophic ecological systems breakdown.
Mix in cognitive and social psychology, biological principles, and physical limits and laws, and we humans can more or less get a better picture of the path(s) we are likely to take in our societal evolutionary journey. One only need review the business-as-usual scenario painted by Meadows et al. in The Limits to Growth for a fairly accurate longer-term prediction of how a world with hard limits will unfold[6].
Based upon all previous experiments with complex societies over the past ten millennia or so, ‘collapse’ appears unavoidable. This decline in complexity (which is what ‘collapse’ is when one gets right down to it and ignores all the emotional baggage we’ve tied to the term) manifests itself in less; less in terms of: social differentiation/stratification; occupational specialization; centralised control by political elite; behavioural control/regimentation; investment in the epiphenomena of complexity — i.e., monumental architecture, artistic and literary development; flow of information between groups; sharing, trading and redistribution of resources; and, coordination between polities[7]. This is a simplification (or Great Simplification as Nate Hagens has termed it[8]) of our adaptive complexities, something that likely would have happened much sooner had we not leveraged fossil fuels to hyper-complexify human adaptations and extend/expand — temporarily — the planet’s carrying capacity for homo sapiens.
Given how far we’ve overshot our natural environmental carrying capacity and consequently degraded our much needed environments and ecological systems — and overexploited virtually every corner of our planet — this inevitable simplification may actually end up being even more dramatic than previous experiments as Catton has pointed out in Overshoot[9].
The journey to this endgame of a substantially simpler future is sure to be the hard part. Increasing geopolitical tensions between competing polities for scarcer resources is sure to occur. Concomitantly, the ruling caste is certain to tighten their grip on their domestic populations by way of authoritarian tendencies (e.g., behavioural and narrative control via increased mass surveillance, militarisation of police, media influence). We are going to witness a continuing breakdown of ecological systems and environmental degradation yet be told these are temporary or reflective of ‘natural’ change. Our Ponzi-type financial/monetary/economic systems are going to be further manipulated from their current highly-manipulated states and any ‘temporary’ deviations from the economy-is-great narrative will be blamed on some evil ‘other’ rather than our own ruling caste and their ongoing machinations.
Like the story about being able to boil a frog alive because of minute temperature changes that go unnoticed, we may miss the little steps that take us to an entirely different world than the one we currently exist within and accept that everything is ‘normal’ despite evidence to the contrary. The ruling caste has learned to be quite adept in manipulating our beliefs about life and their abilities to ‘protect’ us.
All of this said, the future is both unknowable and unpredictable. It will hold many surprises, particularly for the vast majority of people who are just struggling to get through another day/week/year and tend to defer to the ‘authority’ figures that promise them this, that, and everything…
[4] Although my career was in education, I spent a handful of years in university studying and practising archaeology — graduating with a Master of Arts in the subject.
“A modern nuc can fit in the trunk of a car. When millions of people can walk across our border with impunity what do you think the chances are we would catch something that size?” — Sam Faddi
That’s Sam Faddis, retired CIA (quote didn’t quite fit in block).
Who among you was not impressed seeing the sudden and total collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge after getting its pylon bonked by the container ship Dali a few hours before the dawn’s early light in Baltimore harbor? In America’s ongoing death-of-a-thousand-cuts, that one literally severed a major artery, but it may take a while to know how badly the wounded colossus known as the USA is bleeding out.
“Joe Biden” emerged from his crypt pronto to state that the federal government would pony-up the cost of building the bridge back better, meant to reassure the public, you’d suppose. But perhaps the real reason was to obviate an otherwise requisite investigation of the crash by ship-owner Grace Ocean’s insurance company — since legal wrangling over responsibility would add more years to the already years-long estimated bridge replacement time-frame. And Gawd knows what else they might discover about how the darn thing came to pass. . . rumors of a Ukrainian captain at the Dali’shelm. . . stuff that the ruling intel blob might not want to get out there, especially given the still-murky role of the joint USA-UK black-op blobs in the Moscow Crocus Theater Massacre just a week earlier.
The Crocus op, you understand, was probably the worst clusterfuck qua Three Stooges blob operational procedure in memory, since four of the six surviving Tajiki shooters were nabbed in a car enroute to the Ukraine border (where they would’ve been whacked into silence, since they failed to martyr themselves at the scene-of-the-crime)…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Today’s Contemplation: And Now For Something Completely Different…
January 1, 2023 (original posting date)
A corner of our property after a typical February snowstorm.
As I work upon the multi-part series regarding my thoughts on our energy future, thought I would throw together something a little different for this initial contemplation of 2023.
My journey down the rabbit’s hole of Peak Oil and related energy/societal issues began more than a decade ago after watching the documentary Collapse featuring the late Michael Ruppert. The information presented seemed to mesh closely with my educational background in biology and archaeology — particularly the rise and fall of complex societies. My thinking about virtually everything shifted significantly shortly afterward. The typical Kubler-Ross grieving process was followed with much denial, bargaining, and anger until I finally reached acceptance and really began to explore ways to better understand our predicament and to help others along that road as well.
The first method of talking to people about my appreciation/understanding of what we were facing did not go very well, perhaps because I was still overly ‘enthusiastic’ about my ‘discovery/enlightenment’. It took a while but I’ve learned to mostly reign in that ‘preaching’ tendency and offer ‘insights’ only if asked directly or the topic has been raised by others. My understanding of things still doesn’t sit well with most people, but I have grown to appreciate why — we have a host of cognitive/psychological mechanisms that keep us from holding anxiety-provoking thoughts for very long, if at all.
The second way I dealt with my new perspective was more cathartic in nature. I have always enjoyed writing. I’ve found it a pleasing and somewhat more precise method to both explain my understanding of our world and work out this understanding by way of the feedback I receive and reflection upon it (primarily during the process as I edit and rework the wording for greater clarity). Speaking — particularly in public venues — is not something I find that I can do with much confidence or clarity, although others tell me I do fine (I did, after all, spend 25 years in a career that demanded lots of it and pursue some voluntary leadership positions that required it). Writing is my chosen and preferred method of communication outside of my immediate circle of family and a couple of close friends/acquaintances. I leave it up to readers to conclude whether I do it well or not.
Anyways, I thought I would share some fictional prose. It is a chapter I wrote some years ago as I began putting together Olduvai IV: Courage, a follow-up to my first three novels. Writing on this book has come to a stop for a variety of reasons, mostly because I lost the motivation to continue it as I transitioned into non-fictional writing and have begun to enjoy it and I have grown to believe I need to be ‘acting’ on my altered belief system rather than simply thinking/reflecting upon it so have put much greater effort into personal actions — especially as it comes to learning about and practising food production.
Please keep in mind that this was written at least 6 years ago before some of the chaos of the last few years occurred and when my understanding was different than now, which is pertinent since I attempted to weave current events into my story and many of my ‘predictions’ of what might take place in an unknowable future are completely off the mark — such is the difficulty of making predictions, especially if they are about the future!
I may, depending upon feedback, share the other chapters I’ve already written (or mostly written) in the future. Difficult to predict…
A brief contemplation that shares my comment on the latest post by The Honest Sorcerer regarding the recent fusion energy ‘breakthrough’ that has been making the rounds on many media sites. My current ‘bias’, given my last post, has me viewing this particular topic in a focused way that I outline below.
You’ve hit the nail on the head of the dominant narrative and mass magical thinking that goes on in our world around notions of limitless and ‘clean’ energy: given time (and funding/resources), our human ingenuity and technological prowess can ‘solve’ any problem thrown our way. Limits imposed by our existence on a finite planet are minuscule compared to our unfettered imaginations and abilities provided by our opposable thumbs. Finite limits? Meh. Ecological destruction? Who cares. Global collapse? Nothing to see, look over here…
And you ask a pertinent question: “Who in their sane minds approved the budget for all this?!”
I think energy analyst Art Berman highlights the nefarious actors that have done just this (see here). As he argues, not only are the claims about the ‘breakthrough’ a big nothing burger (since the energy-return-on-investment is about 0.005, or basically zero) but the announcement just happened to coincide with an announcement by the U.S. Congress to fund to the tune of $624 million this type of research.
Given the ties to the military that lay in the shadows of the event and the media propaganda about this fusion energy ‘miracle’ that ignores this connection, we should all be asking some hard, critical questions. Like: is this all just a form of ‘money laundering’ by the government to divert funding in a roundabout way to its military while marketing it as ‘energy research’; and, is this just a funnelling of wealth to the elite that own/control the industries necessary to carry out the work? (Questions that should also be asked about the billions (if not trillions) of dollars heading to Ukraine, NATO, various military and quasi-military establishments around the globe; as well as all the other ‘clean/green’ energy research and industries.)
This certainly plays into one of the themes I’ve been writing about: the actions of our ruling caste is driven by the primary goal of controlling/expanding the wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and thus positions of power and prestige. Having control (or at minimum overriding influence) of the politicians/government aids this immensely.
Mix this up with the competition between polities that occurs (and is discussed by archaeologist Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies; and that I have just written about here) and one can well imagine the shenanigans that goes on amongst politicians (i.e., those allocating a society’s resources in the name of ‘citizen prosperity’), industrialists (i.e., those that ‘own’ the needed industries and resources), and the media (i.e., those that own the propaganda machinery and guide/influence societal narratives) to fund ‘research’ (especially military-oriented) and other wealth-extraction/-generation systems in the name of citizen welfare.
But let’s be frank, the ruling caste cares not one iota for the hoi polloi or the ecological systems destruction this pursuit is causing. Their concern is to maintain the rigged game with them at the apex of the pyramid (an apt description given the entire scheme is little more than a gargantuan Ponzi-like structure predicated upon infinite growth on a finite planet). And as Tainter concludes regarding the peer polity competition that arises as an epiphenomenon of this:
“Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole. Competitors who evolve as peers collapse in like manner.”
On Friday Israel conducted its deadliest strikes on Syria in months, or perhaps even years, given the immense death toll is mounting into several dozens killed amid a large emergency response to the scene.
The airstrikes were conducted deep into Syria, in northern Syria’s Aleppo province, and left over 40 people dead. This reportedly included Syrian soldiers, Hezbollah militants, and civilians. Most international reports are saying 42 were killed, but the Syrian government did not initially give a precise casualty count.
Stillframe of local footage showing massive attack on northern Aleppo.
The anti-Assad opposition and UK-based organization Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) described that the Aleppo attack left the highest number of dead among Syrian soldiers in a single such Israeli attack. While Israel doesn’t typically directly own up to or confirm such attacks on Syrian soil, its military has been conducting sporadic attacks on Syria going back years.
The attack happened in the pre-dawn, overnight hours – with state-run SANA emphasizing that many civilians were killed and wounded, but without giving a figure.
Syria’s defense ministry pointed to the airstrikes having some level of coordination from “terrorist organizations” on the ground which “in conjunction” to the air raid carried out drone attacks, presumably from Al-Qaeda (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) occupied Idlib. Some reports are saying that Israeli warplanes hit a “Hezbollah warehouse” – though there’s no ground confirmation of this.
This new major attack comes the day after Israeli airstrikes on a suburb of Damascus, which reportedly wounded two civilians. Israeli officials and media have long claimed to be waging a campaign against Iranian and IRGC operatives and assets in Syria.
Sky News has verified social media video showing massive explosions from the site of the overnight Aleppo attacks:
After the Oct.7 Hamas terror attack, this ‘counter Iran’ campaign has also focused on Lebanon, where Tehran-backed Hezbollah has entered a hot conflict with Israeli forces along the border.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Energy Future, Part 2: Competing Polities and Geopolitical Stress
Part 2 of my multi-part contemplation on our energy future.
It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. -various attributions (e.g., Niels Bohr, Samuel Goldwyn, Yogi Berra, Mark Twain, Nostradamus)
As I argued in Part 1, energy underpins everything including human societal complexities. And the more energy humans have at their disposal, the greater the complexities and their concomitant ‘quality of life’ (not for all, but for those with greatest access/exposure)[1]. Being a ‘finite’ resource, the difficulty (impossibility?) in sustaining this ‘prosperity’ is self-evident — or at least it should be[2].
As walking, talking apes that communicate via stories we have weaved many tales of how we will sustain our complex living arrangements and the energy ‘slaves’ that make this possible[3]. In our quest to reduce anxiety-provoking thoughts we have, for the most part, ignored/denied the implications of dwindling resources — especially energy — and the implications of this for our future[4].
The more dominant and mainstream narratives argue we can or will transition to low-/zero-carbon technologies with nary a hiccup[5]. Our ingenuity guarantees this — or at least the snake oil salesmen marketing their wares and standing to profit handsomely from these tales do[6].
While I believe we will indeed attempt this (primarily because the ruling caste that guides/influences the narratives that we tend to believe in and allocates our society’s resources towards actions/efforts that helps to meet their overarching goal — the control/expansion of the wealth-/extraction-generating systems that provide their revenue streams and thus positions of power/prestige — will make it so), all it will likely accomplish (besides creating some comforting stories to share and huge profits for our already insanely wealthy few) will be the exacerbation of our fundamental predicament: ecological overshoot[7].
This means the speeding up of the drawdown of our resources (both ‘non-renewable’ and ‘renewable’) and the magnification of the concomitant ecological systems destruction[8] — more on this in a future post.
Speeding up the drawdown of resources (especially some that are only or primarily found in far-off locations from the sociopolitical centres that ‘require’ them to support their complexities, and ‘controlled’ by others) feeds into another unfortunate propensity of human complex societies: competition between polities.
In their detailed computer analyses of how a species that pursues growth on a finite planet might fair in a future of biogeochemical limitations, Meadows et al. highlight that two of the symptoms of overshooting the natural environmental carrying capacity are increasing conflicts over resources/sinks and declining respect for government as it uses its ‘power’ to maintain/increase the share of declining ‘wealth’ for the ruling elite — primarily by disproportionately allocating resources towards its military and industry, and away from the majority of its citizens[9].
And while his focus is upon pre/historical sociopolitical collapse, as opposed to ecological systems collapse (although ecological breakdown certainly has contributed to past societal collapses), archaeologist Joseph Tainter argues in his text The Collapse of Complex Societies that past collapses have occurred in two different political situations: a dominant state in isolation or as part of a cluster of peer polities[10]. With global travel and communication, the isolated dominant state has disappeared and only competitive peer polities now exist.
Such polities tend to get caught up in spiralling competitive investments as they seek to outmaneuver each other in their quest for control/influence and evolve greater complexity together. The polities caught up in this competition increasingly experience declining marginal returns on their investments in this strategy and must divert ever-increasing amounts of energy/resources leading to increasing economic weakness — especially for those outside of the ruling caste.
Withdrawing from this spiral or collapsing is not an option without risking being subsumed by a competitor. It is this trap of competition that will continue to drive the pursuit of complexity regardless of human/environmental costs and the impact upon dwindling resources. Incentives and economic reserves can support this situation for a lengthy period, as witnessed by the Roman and Mayan experiences where centuries of diminishing returns were endured, but not forever.
Ever-increasing costs and ever-decreasing marginal returns typify peer polities in competition. This ends in either domination by one state and a new energy subsidy, or collapse of all. As Tainter concludes:
“Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole. Competitors who evolve as peers collapse in like manner.” (p. 214)
It would seem one of the consequences of our diminished energy future will be increased tension between competing polities. And this competition will be primarily about energy/resource reserves. In fact, a number of analysts have predicted that the globe is heading for (or is already engaged in) significant geopolitical stressors, if not resource wars[11].
William Catton Jr. also discusses this trajectory towards increasing geopolitical tension in Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change[12]. He argues that we are fated to continue our self-destructive proclivities as long as we fail to understand them. While we have learned to be civil over the centuries, particularly since the leveraging of fossil fuels began and net surplus energy has led to an explosion of growth and ‘wealth’, the concomitant population irruption and the pressure compounded by technology have led to a degradation of these relationships and have become increasingly competitive.
Humans have reacted in pressure-increasing ways that has created a further diminishing of carrying capacity making our overshoot situation even worse. War-like rhetoric has increased as population pressures have. Wars are a useful leverage point for the ruling caste to target the ‘other’ as redundant, as opposed to ourselves who ‘deserve’ our energy-intensive way of life and the resources required to maintain it.
“In a habitat that was not growing any larger, the continuing increase in either our numbers, our activities, or our equipment would ultimately induce more and more antagonism. Our routine pursuit of legitimate aspirations as individual human beings, as breathing, eating, drinking, traveling, working, playing and reproducing organisms, would increasingly entail mutual interference.” (p. 224)
Here we have competition over finite resources that is leading to a quickening of the drawdown of these resources. These diminishing resources are being allocated to this spiralling pursuit of competition while the consequences — both economic deterioration for the majority of humans and ecological destruction of the planet — are ignored/denied and/or rationalised away by way of narratives that argue the very instruments of our demise (increasingly complex and resource-dependent technologies) must be pursued with all the expediency we can muster.
Our conundrum is becoming ever-more wicked in its complexity.
In Part 3 I will explore some of the issues for human societies of this increasing geopolitical competition.
[2] Fossil fuels are finite in the sense that the flow from the existing stocks in the form of extraction far, far exceeds their replenishment rate which is estimated at millions of years. See this.
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