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Leaked report of the IPCC reveals that the growth model of capitalism is unsustainable

| Satellite image showing smoke from Siberian forest fires reaching the North Pole August 3 2021 | MR OnlineSatellite image showing smoke from Siberian forest fires reaching the North Pole (August 3, 2021). Image credit: Felton DavisFlickr.

Leaked report of the IPCC reveals that the growth model of capitalism is unsustainable

The second draft of the IPCC Group III report, focused on mitigation strategies, states that we must move away from the current capitalist model to avoid surpassing planetary boundaries and climate and ecological catastrophe). It also confirms our previous reports, covered by CTXT and The Guardian, that “greenhouse gas emissions must peak in the next four years”. The new leak acknowledges that there is little or no room for further economic growth.

The undersigned scientists and journalists have analyzed a new part of the Sixth Assessment Report, which has been leaked to us by the same sources as last time—Scientist Rebellion and Extinction Rebellion Spain. In this leak the usual more timid positions can be found, but also prominent statements that would have been unthinkable not long ago.

To contextualize, let’s just remember: In 1990, the First IPCC Report stated that, “the observed increase [in temperature] could be largely due to natural variability”, and although subsequent reports put this position to rest, this Sixth Report eliminates any possibility of doubt, and leaves no room for the climate denial arguments which have been historically and amply financed by those who had the most to benefit from maintaining this narrative: the fossil fuel lobbies.

The leaked report mentions that indefinite growth must be renounced. Since radical transition is required, the key question is how can a shift away from models of perpetual growth be understood as a benefit and not merely relinquishment? …

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What if your government has decided to kill you? An interpretation by Antonio Turiel

What if your government has decided to kill you? An interpretation by Antonio Turiel

In the 1976 movie, “Logan’s Run,” the law is that everyone must die when they turn 30. And everyone accepts that law. 

“Necroeconomics” is a concept used by some economists to describe the results of the collapse of the Soviet Economy, in the 1990s. Apart from the pure economic disaster, the collapse led to a trend of population decrease that, in some cases, is continuing to this day. The term may have a more general meaning and Warren Montag discusses how a purely market economy might deal with workers in a situation in which there are no sufficient resources to keep all of them alive. The idea that the state might decide that some people need to be eliminated has been called “necropolitics.”

These concepts do not necessarily imply that your government has decided to kill you. The extermination may be the unwanted result of wrong policies or one of the unavoidable consequences of the overexploitation of the resources that make people live. But what if the government secretly decided to eliminate a fraction of the population, judged to be a useless burden for society? We all know that it happened in some states in a non-remote past. What form could it take today?

This idea has been explored by Antonio Turiel of the “Oil Crash” blog in a story published in Spanish two years ago and titled “Good Vibrations.” When I read it the first time, I found it fascinating but hardly prophetic. It seemed to me just farfetched that people, anywhere in the world, would meekly accept to be ordered by their government to take a drug that they knew would kill them. But, today, I think that Antonio may have been more prophetic than he himself could have imagined. So, I translated the story into English, and here it is. Not for the faint hearted!

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Peak Diesel or no Peak Diesel? The Debate is Ongoing

Peak Diesel or no Peak Diesel? The Debate is Ongoing

In a recent post, Antonio Turiel proposed that the global peak of diesel fuel production was reached three years ago, in 2018. Turiel’s idea is especially interesting since it takes into account the fact that what we call “oil” is actually a wide variety of liquids of different characteristics. The current boom of the extraction of tight oil (known also as “shale oil”) in the United States has avoided, so far, the decline of the total volume of oil produced worldwide (“peak oil”).

Shale oil has changed a lot of things in the oil industry, but it couldn’t avoid the decline of conventional oil. That, in turn, had consequences: shale oil is light oil, not easily converted to the kind of fuel (diesel) which is the most important transportation fuel, nowadays. That seems to have forced the oil industry into converting more and more “heavy” oil into diesel fuel but, even so, diesel fuel is becoming gradually more scarce and more expensive, to the point that its production may have peaked in 2015. In addition, it has created a dearth of heavy oil, the fuel of choice for marine transportation. In short, the famed “peak oil” is arriving not all together, but piecemeal — affecting some kinds of fuels faster than others.

Turiel’s proposal has raised a considerable debate among the experts, with several of them challenging Turiel’s interpretation. Turiel himself and Gail Tverberg (of the “our finite world” blog) discussed the validity of the data and their meaning. Below, I reproduce the exchange with their kind permission. As you will see, the matter is complex and at the present stage it is not possible to arrive at a definitive conclusion. 

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For Whom is Peak Oil Coming? If you own a Diesel Car, it is Coming for you!

For Whom is Peak Oil Coming? If you own a Diesel Car, it is Coming for you!

At the beginning, the idea of “peak oil” seemed to be relatively uncomplicated: we would climb from one side and then go down the other side. But no, the story turned out to be devilishly complex. For one thing, there is no such a thing as “oil” intended as a combustible liquid — there are tens, perhaps hundreds, of varieties of the stuff: light, heavy, sour, sweet, shale, tight, dumbbell, and more. And each variety has its story, its peculiarities, its trajectory over time. Eventually, all the oil curves have to end to zero but, in the meantime, there is a lot of wiggling up and down that continues to take us by surprise. Mostly, we didn’t realize how rabidly the system would deny the physical reality of depletion, much preferring to “legislate scarcity” on the basis of pollution.

Here, Antonio Turiel writes a fascinating post telling us how the peak is coming “from below,” affecting first the heavy fraction of crude oil: diesel and fuel oil. That’s already causing enormous problems for the world’s transportation system, as well as for the owners of diesel cars, and the situation will become much more difficult in the near future. The light fraction, the one that produces gasoline, seems to be still immune from peaking, but that will come, too.(U.B.)

The Peak of Diesel Fuel: 2018 edition. 

By Antonio Turiel (translated from “The Oil Crash“)
Dear Readers,
Six years ago we commented on this same blog that, of all the fuels derived from oil, diesel was the one that would probably see its production decline first. 

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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