How the CIA made Google
Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet—
part 1
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The Sustainable End of History?
Why California’s 100% renewable energy plan is not a blueprint for our sustainable future.
The Sustainable End of History?
Recently, I was a panelist at a forum titled “Tough Talks” which was to eliminate the cozy complacency and tiptoeing of panelists and instead talk die-hard solutions. The topic: Ecological Destruction and strategies for a sustainable future. I was hot. I was excited. I was prepared. And I ended up rather puzzled. I’ll tell you why:
Midway through the discussion — after one panelist had made an amusingly sarcastic allusion to the Beatles’ song “Let it be” by saying that we should simply let all efforts be and accept whichever faith we have brought upon ourselves — the host asked me about my views on the Californian 100% renewable energy plan. She asked whether I agree, with so many others, that the plan serves as a role model for communities around the world and a blueprint for transitioning into a sustainable future (not even energy system; no, FUTURE).
At first, I was shocked. Was this an equally sarcastic allusion as the Beatles’ song? If so, then to what? Fukuyama’s ancient End of History piece? I didn’t get it. Also, this was the host. Would she really ask a question in this sarcastic spirit? I gambled that it was a serious question which demanded a serious answer. However, I believe my face and body language were expressing my sheer disbelief to the audience, and the fact that I had to gather my thoughts for a moment amplified this effect. At last, I made my point:
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Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh VI
Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh VI
It’s truly unfortunate that our society pursues such self-evidently egregious exploits on our environment. You can’t continue to pollute your backyard without eventually destroying the complex ecological systems that support you — to say little about the finiteness of most resources we overly depend upon. And, certainly, we can’t continue to allow our sociopolitical ‘leaders’ to pursue such destructive policies and actions.
Yet, the issues and underlying dilemmas are much more complex than just exploitive foreign capital and revenue-seeking politicians. Yes, these are problematic; without a doubt. But they are one piece in a multi-layered puzzle that may or may not have a ‘solution’.
Society’s embracing of several self-destructive behaviours must be undone and reversed. Perhaps the most fundamental of these is the pursuit of ‘growth’. Economic. Population. Technological. Et cetera.
We do not live on a planet with infinite resources and the exponential increase of our activities continues to paint us further and further into a corner. While it is unlikely there will be a definitive ‘day of reckoning’ because of our blasting past our natural carrying capacity (since collapse is a process, not an event), the consequences of our actions will be felt as surely as day follows night.
In fact, it could be argued that we are already and have been experiencing the fallout of our expanding and increasingly complex activities for some time now. Decimated species required for food crop pollination. Expanding geopolitical tensions over resources, especially fossil fuels and water. Supply chain interruptions. Environmental disasters. Increasingly authoritarian government policies and edicts to control populations. Currency debasement. Global pandemics. And on and on.
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Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh V
Yet another of my comments for an article on The Tyee regarding energy and how we should approach our coming dilemmas. https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2020/10/02/BC-Needs-Wartime-Approach-Climate-Emergency/
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While I certainly appreciate the need to ‘correct’ our global industrial civilization’s path from its current trajectory there is an obvious ‘problem’ with the argument presented here: forcing the wrong ‘solution’ upon society is a recipe for an expedited collapse. As in the movie/series Snowpiercer (where an attempt to ‘correct’ global warming ended up leading to a frozen planet), the human need to ‘do something’ often leads to negative, unintended consequences and, quite frequently, the opposite of what was desired.
A great example of how the above ‘solution’ would likely bring about more quickly the opposite of what is desired is found in this statement: “We must conduct an inventory, determining how many heat pumps, solar arrays, wind farms, electric buses, etc., we will need to electrify virtually everything and end our reliance on fossil fuels.” To me, this shows quite clearly that the ‘solution’ is not to address the dilemmas created by chasing infinite growth, as our ‘modern’ world does, but maintaining business as usual by trying to have our cake and eat it too. It proposes maintaining all the technological, industrial, and energy-intensive baubles/conveniences that fossil fuels have brought us without realising the price that must be paid to do this (in fact, I would argue the impossibility of doing this).
As I have argued several times on these pages, renewables are NOT the panacea they are marketed as. The energy-return-on-energy-invested (EROEI) is markedly lower than fossil fuels resulting in significantly less energy available for end use. They all rely on environmentally-destructive processes for their material input. They depend upon industrial processes in their manufacture that cannot be done without fossil fuels. They use finite resources, some of which are already experience diminishing returns. They cannot replace fossil fuels.
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Covid-19 and Our Competing Narratives
Covid-19 and Our Competing Narratives
It’s fascinating to watch the competing narratives regarding Covid-19 and risk assessment duke it out across the media universe (from social to mainstream to alternate media). As I’ve increasingly come to believe, we all believe what we want to believe. The continuum of beliefs seems to be that: we have faith in the complex systems we live within, our ‘leaders’ have things under control, everything will work itself out in some optimistic fashion, and life will return to ‘normal’ after a while; to the opposite belief that all hell is about to, or is, breaking loose and life will never return to where it was as sociocultural collapse is dead ahead.
‘Facts’ seem to make little difference to our belief systems. It is as author Robert Heinlein mused some years ago: We are rationalizing animals, not rational. We are not only not ‘objective’, but we are prone to using all sorts of cognitive/logical distortions to justify and confirm our beliefs and personal biases; because, after all, reducing our cognitive dissonance is a hugely powerful motivator. Our minds experience significant stress when ‘evidence’ opposes our belief system so we ignore or dismiss it and actively seek confirming information.
Science is not necessarily helpful here, although it is used as the ultimate arbiter by many. But one of the observations I made while attending university and shifting through different faculties as I sought a path to follow in those crazy formative years of mine in the 1980s was that the exact same ‘facts’ could be used for what were essentially diametrically-opposed ‘interpretations’. What one scientist saw as evidence supporting their paradigm was used by a colleague to justify their particular, and often very different, worldview.
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How the CIA made Google
THIS IS PART ONE. READ PART TWO HERE.
This exclusive is being released for free in the public interest, and was enabled by crowdfunding. I’d like to thank my amazing community of patrons for their support, which gave me the opportunity to work on this in-depth investigation. Please support independent, investigative journalism for the global commons.
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, western governments are moving fast to legitimize expanded powers of mass surveillance and controls on the internet, all in the name of fighting terrorism.
US and European politicians have called to protect NSA-style snooping, and to advance the capacity to intrude on internet privacy by outlawing encryption. One idea is to establish a telecoms partnership that would unilaterally delete content deemed to “fuel hatred and violence” in situations considered “appropriate.” Heated discussions are going on at government and parliamentary level to explore cracking down on lawyer-clientconfidentiality.
What any of this would have done to prevent the Charlie Hebdo attacks remains a mystery, especially given that we already know the terrorists were on the radar of French intelligence for up to a decade.
There is little new in this story. The 9/11 atrocity was the first of many terrorist attacks, each succeeded by the dramatic extension of draconian state powers at the expense of civil liberties, backed up with the projection of military force in regions identified as hotspots harbouring terrorists. Yet there is little indication that this tried and tested formula has done anything to reduce the danger. If anything, we appear to be locked into a deepening cycle of violence with no clear end in sight.
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Can economic growth continue without fossil fuels? The IPCC thinks so — here’s why its decarbonisation models are broken
Published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowdfunded investigative journalism project for people and planet. Support us to keep digging where others fear to tread.
In this third contribution to our symposium, ‘Pathways to the Post-Carbon Economy’, biophysical economist Graham Palmer assesses the plausibility of conventional economic forecasts of a global energy transition away from fossil fuels.
Most forecasts paint a rosy picture of continued, unimpeded economic growth, even as the world weans itself entirely off carbon-intensive energy sources. But are such scenarios really possible?
Palmer argues that they aren’t — not when we consider how the economy is fundamentally embedded in its biophysical environment. And if it isn’t, then we need a new approach to modelling, which pays greater attention the intimate relationship between energy, our societies, and their economies.
Climate change discourse is structured around competing narratives — degrowth, pro-renewables, pro-nuclear, localism, green business, techno-optimism, and so on. The energy scenario modelling by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a foundation for much of the discourse.
Integrated models are connected with socioeconomic and technological storylines to forecast a picture of key characteristics of future transformation pathways.
When we look at models from the most recent IPCC report (AR5), we see that that baseline scenarios project a 300% to 800% increase in GDP-per-capita by 2100. In these scenarios, strong mitigation is achieved with global consumption losses of only between 3 to 11% relative to baseline. Hence, the net-cost of decarbonising seems trivial over the long run.
From this perspective, the solution that follows is to put in place appropriate policies, support technology, remove fossil fuel subsidies and apply a modest but comprehensive carbon price.
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