June 2, 2015

It would be nice to hear it straight for once. Stopping climate change means giving up on growth.

from Dissent magazine:


Growth vs. the Climate
Daniel Immerwahr ▪ Spring 2015



[font size="1"]"We have the solutions." At the People’s Climate March, September 21, 2014 (Light Brigading/Flickr)[/font]

The year 2013 was one of the ten hottest on record. So was 2010. So were 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2003, 2002, and 1998. Last year, with its polar vortex and biting winter, seemed to bring relief to North America. Except it also brought temperatures of over 120ºF to Australia, massive flooding to Malaysia, and the third harrowing year of drought to California. As it turns out, 2014 was the hottest single year since meteorologists started measuring in 1850.

By now, we’ve raised the average global temperature a little less than one degree Celsius since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The best predictions suggest that, if we go about our business as usual, we will raise it somewhere between four and six degrees by 2100. With the heat will also come side effects: fiercer and more frequent storms, droughts, acidifying oceans, melting glaciers, and the loss of species.

And the bad news is, that’s not even the bad news. Although the altered climate is threatening in its own right—heat alone killed tens of thousands of Europeans in the lethal summer of 2003—the thing to really worry about is the infrastructure. Each drought, each megastorm, each scorching summer puts a strain on the complex systems that provide us with water, food, and power and that keep disease and disorder at bay. These systems can often endure a single crisis—one Sandy, one Katrina. The problem is what happens when the Sandys and Katrinas start coming back to back, piling up on each other. That’s when the money runs out, the electricity goes off, and everyone starts wondering where to find water. If true catastrophe arrives, it will not come gradually—the frog in boiling water—but, as the historian Nils Gilman writes, “as a series of radical discontinuities—a series of bewildering ‘oh shit’ events.”

Welcome to the future. Oh shit.

Those with long memories will know that this isn’t the first time it felt like we were testing the earth’s ability to support us. In 1968, the biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which prophesied civilizational collapse for societies unable to rapidly bring down their birth rates. There were simply too many people, he argued, for the planet’s dwindling supply of resources. Ehrlich got a vasectomy and preached birth control, though he also advocated for more extreme measures: compulsory sterilization, a ban on cars, and a tax on cribs. Internationally, he proposed “triage,” aiding the countries that remained viable but writing off those, like India, that he saw as too far gone. .......................(more)

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/growth-vs-the-climate

June 2, 2015

Richard Wolff and Thom Hartmann: The Coming Crash & The Recession That Never Ended (pts I-IV)

Published on May 29, 2015
Economist Dr. Richard Wolff, Democracy At Work joins Thom Hartmann. The Coming Economic Crash...And What We Can Do About It .

June 2, 2015

''Imminent'' Collapse of the Antarctic Ice Shelf and a ''New Era'' in the Arctic

''Imminent'' Collapse of the Antarctic Ice Shelf and a ''New Era'' in the Arctic

Monday, 01 June 2015 00:00
By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report


Recently, two friends and I attempted to climb Washington State's beautiful, glacier-clad Mount Baker. Roped up while climbing up a glacier, roughly 1,500 feet below the summit, our route reached an impasse.

Given that it was technically early in the climbing season, and that we were on the standard route, we were dismayed to find a snow bridge spanning a 10-foot wide crevasse about to collapse. Finding no other way around the gaping void, we agreed to turn back and return another day.

After breaking down our camp and hiking out, we stopped off for a bite to eat in the nearby small town of Glacier, Washington. Our waitress told us of a friend of hers who worked in the Forest Service there, who told her that the area had, in the past year, "received the least amount of precipitation (that) it had for over 100 years."

While planning our next trip to Mount Baker, one of my climbing partners spoke with a local guide who informed him that, despite the fact that it was only mid-May, "climbing conditions are already equivalent to what they usually are in mid- to late July ... crevasses are opening up, and snow bridges are already melting out like it's late season."

.....(snip).....

Changes in the Arctic Ocean have now become so profound that the region is entering what Norwegian scientists are calling "a new era." They warn of "far-reaching implications" due to the switch from a permanent cover of thick ice to a new state in which thinner ice vanishes in the summer. ..................(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31089-imminent-collapse-of-the-antarctic-ice-shelf-and-a-new-era-in-the-arctic

June 2, 2015

Richard Wolff and Thom Hartmann: The Coming Crash & The Recession That Never Ended (pts I-IV)

Published on May 29, 2015
Economist Dr. Richard Wolff, Democracy At Work joins Thom Hartmann. The Coming Economic Crash...And What We Can Do About It .

June 2, 2015

Chris Hedges: Karl Marx Was Right

from truthdig:


Karl Marx Was Right

Posted on May 31, 2015
By Chris Hedges

On Saturday at the Left Forum in New York City, Chris Hedges joined professors Richard Wolff and Gail Dines to discuss why Karl Marx is essential at a time when global capitalism is collapsing. These are the remarks Hedges made to open the discussion.

Karl Marx exposed the peculiar dynamics of capitalism, or what he called “the bourgeois mode of production.” He foresaw that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. He knew that reigning ideologies—think neoliberalism—were created to serve the interests of the elites and in particular the economic elites, since “the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production” and “the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships … the relationships which make one class the ruling one.” He saw that there would come a day when capitalism would exhaust its potential and collapse. He did not know when that day would come. Marx, as Meghnad Desai wrote, was “an astronomer of history, not an astrologer.” Marx was keenly aware of capitalism’s ability to innovate and adapt. But he also knew that capitalist expansion was not eternally sustainable. And as we witness the denouement of capitalism and the disintegration of globalism, Karl Marx is vindicated as capitalism’s most prescient and important critic.

In a preface to “The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” Marx wrote:

No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.

Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since looking at the matter more closely, we always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist, or are at least in the process of formation.

Socialism, in other words, would not be possible until capitalism had exhausted its potential for further development. That the end is coming is hard now to dispute, although one would be foolish to predict when. We are called to study Marx to be ready.

The final stages of capitalism, Marx wrote, would be marked by developments that are intimately familiar to most of us. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it. It would prey upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens. It would, as it has, increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers. Industries would mechanize their workplaces. This would trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class—the bulwark of a capitalist system—that would be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant. Politics would in the late stages of capitalism become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates and money of global capitalism.

But as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, Marx knew, when there would be no new markets available and no new pools of people who could take on more debt. This is what happened with the subprime mortgage crisis. Once the banks cannot conjure up new subprime borrowers, the scheme falls apart and the system crashes. ......................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/karl_marx_was_right_20150531