The Kids Are All Right

How can we sleep

When our beds are burning? 

   -Midnight Oil

Butterflies and seabirds

And fairy tales

    _Jimi Hendrix

     

Good news  Supreme Court hands Exon Crushing blow

                   Jay Inslee Runs for President on Climate Change Platform

PSA   Joint Committee on Carbon Reduction    1/28 5:00  pm

Greetings

     How about those kids?   Here's what 14 year old Greta Thunberg says to world leaders

For 25 years countless people have stood in front of the UN climate conferences, asking our nation’s leaders to stop the emissions. But, clearly, this has not worked since the emissions just continue to rise.

So I will not ask them anything.

Instead, I will ask the media to start treating the crisis as a crisis.

Instead, I will ask the people around the world to realize that our political leaders have failed us.

Because we are facing an existential threat and there is no time to continue down this road of madness… So we have not come here to beg the world leaders to care for our future. They have ignored us in the past and they will ignore us again.

We have come here to let them know that change is coming whether they like it or not.

Here's the video

Also :

Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people, to give them hope,” [Greta] Thunberg said, “But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.”

It's quite refreshing to see this young women "tell it like it is"}

We must not "continue down this road of madness"

Here is a quick peak at the madness    Yesterday's paper carried a report about the unprecedented heat wave in Australia.

"This month, fruit growers in South Australia reported that the pits in peaches and nectarines had gotten so hot that they burned the fruit from the inside. (Nyt)

Butterflies and Seabirds? 

The total number of West Coast monarchs was estimated at approximately 4.5 million in the 1980s. In the latest count, that number fell to 28,429, dipping below the number scientists estimate is needed to keep the population going.   (NYT)     See also. The Insect Apocalypse is Here.   (New York Times)

As for seabirds

Over a 60-year period up to 2010, for example, worldwide seabird populations declined by approximately 70%, and globally, species are being lost 1,000 times faster than the natural rate of extinction (9, 10). 

Other kids are beginning to make noise   The Extinction Rebellion  started im 2018, already has groups om 35 coumyties.  see here   and here Portland Group here

Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez  (AOC)  is grabbing lots of attention promoting the Green New Deal.    According to some 80% support the Green New Deal   But that may be because it means different things to different people.  See here

One thing hat the it seems to contain is continued economic growth.  This of course requires "decoupling" of carbon from growth.    This is a very risky strategy.   It's not clear whether the proponents understand just how risky it is. But we hope

We seem to have a natural desire to believe fairy tales.  Whether it's too cheap to meter, the hydrogen highway,  corn based bio-fuel, cold fusion, algea based bio-fuel, burning wood as "green" power, ehatever. 

A very interesting article by Dave Robert's looks closely at recent studies on decoupling. .    He notes that recent studies call the notion of decoupling into question.     Simply put there is no precedent for such a rapid change.   It has never happened before and to assume it will happen the future can be seen as believing in magic, or fairy tales 

First it's clear that currently rich countries that appear to be decoupling are merely exporting their carbon emissions.

They specifically distinguish two different ways of classifying emissions: territorial, i.e., carbon emissions that take place within a country, and consumption-based, i.e., the carbon emissions represented by the production and transport of the (often imported) goods and services consumed by citizens of a country. (By way of example, consider a television that is manufactured in China and shipped to America. Which country is responsible for the emissions involved? Territorially, China. In consumption-based terms, America.)

In a nutshell, they found that “over this period there is some evidence of decoupling between economic growth and territorial emissions, but no evidence of decoupling for consumption-based emissions.” As economies get wealthier, they tend to offshore carbon-intensive industries, shift to more service-based economies, and clean up their energy sectors; emissions generated within their borders decline. They (at least partially) decouple their growth from territorial emissions.

But as they get wealthier, they consume more, and every bit they consume represents carbon emissions generated somewhere else. A country with a growing, developed economy may produce fewer emissions directly, but is still responsible for more greenhouse gases with every bit it grows. Again, consumption-based emissions are not decoupling from growth.

  According to this study

" The world’s current economies are not capable of the emission reductions required to limit temperature rise to 2 degrees. If world leaders insist on maintaining historical rates of economic growth, and there are no step-change advances in technology, hitting that target requires a rate of reduction in carbon intensity for which there is simply no precedent. Despite all the recent hype about decoupling, there’s no historical evidence that current economies are decoupling at anything close to the rate required.

“The key insight,” they write, “is that marginal, incremental improvements in energy and carbon efficiency cannot do the job and that what is needed is a structural transformation.” In other words, 2 degrees requires radicalism.

“Without a concerted (global) policy shift to deep decarbonization, a rapid transition to renewable energy sources, structural change in production, consumption, and transportation, and a transformation of finance,” they write, “the decoupling will not even come close to what is needed.”

see also Why growth cant be green. (Foreign Policy)

George Monbiot puts it this way

We're getting there, aren’t we? We’re making the transition  towards an all-electric future. We can now leave fossil fuels in the ground and thwart climate breakdown. Or so you might imagine, if you follow the technology news.

So how come oil production, for the first time in history, is about to hit 100m barrels a day? How come the oil industry expects demand to climb until the 2030s? How is it that in Germany, whose energy transition (Energiewende) was supposed to be a model for the world, protesters are being beaten up by police as they try to defend the 12,000-year-old Hambacher forest from an opencast mine extracting lignite – the dirtiest form of coal? Why have investments in Canadian tar sands – the dirtiest source of oil – doubled in a year?

The answer is, growth. There may be more electric vehicles on the world’s roads, but there are also more internal combustion engines. There be more bicycles, but there are also more planes. It doesn’t matter how many good things we do: preventing climate breakdown means ceasing to do bad things. Given that economic growth, in nations that are already rich enough to meet the needs of all, requires an increase in pointless consumption, it is hard to see how it can ever be decoupled from the assault on the living planet

 When a low carbon industry expands within a growing economy, the money it generates stimulates high-carbon industry. Anyone who works in this field knows environmental entrepreneurs, eco-consultants and green business managers who use their earnings to pay for holidays in distant parts of the world and the flights required to get there. Electric vehicles have driven a new resource rush, particularly for lithium, that is already polluting rivers and trashing precious wild places. Clean growth is as much of an oxymoron as clean coal. But making this obvious statement in public life is treated as political suicide.

So, is insisting on more economic growth "acting like the house is om fire"?  I doubt it.    Is it worth the risk?

  The problem is that a growing industrial economy has produced lots of goodies,  and so it appears to be "unthinkable" that we could operate things in any other way.   Even if we have to "burn down the house"

Here's what Jay Inslee says:

When you want college education for your kids, when you want better health care, when you want net neutrality, when you want all of those things, but your house is on fire and it's burning down, you've got to put the fire out first and get your family out of the house," he said.

Looking at pointless consumption, how about this sensible suggestion.  Suppose the top 20% tightened our belts a little.   After all it is " our" lifestyle that is the problem.  

Here's an interesting alternative from Kevin Anderson

KEVIN ANDERSON: Well, firstly, although Oxfam used that data, that originally came from some work by Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, and Piketty is well known for his work as an economist. And that demonstrates that rather than necessarily always focusing on countries, we need to focus on the people who are actually emitting. So the idea that 10 percent of the global population are responsible for 50 percent of global emissions, or 20 percent of the global population are responsible for 70 percent of all global emissions, tells us that we need to be tailoring our policies towards that small group, rather than trying to squeeze the emissions out of the majority of the world’s population, who are hardly emitting anything at all.

So, one of the ways to explain this that I often use, which will hopefully be helpful, is that if that 10 percent of high emitters reduce their carbon footprint, their individual carbon footprint, to the level of the average European citizen, that would be equivalent of a one-third cut in global emissions, even if the other 90 percent did nothing. I mean, a one-third cut in global emissions just from the 10 percent reducing to the level of the average European citizen.

I'll close with some more words from Dave Roberts

In a sense, we’re already screwed, at least to some extent. The climate is already changing and it’s already taking a measurable toll. Lots more change is “baked in” by recent and current emissions. One way or another, when it comes to the effects of climate change, we’re in for worse.

But we have some choice in how screwed we are, and that choice will remain open to us no matter how hot it gets. Even if temperature rise exceeds 2 degrees, the basic structure of the challenge will remain the same. It will still be warming. It will still get worse for humanity the more it warms. Two degrees will be bad, but three would be worse, four worse than that, and five worse still.

Indeed, if we cross 2 degrees, the need for sustainability becomes more urgent, not less. At that point, we will be flirting with non-trivial tail risks of species-threatening — or at least civilization-threatening — effects.

In sum: humanity faces the urgent imperative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then eliminate them, and then go “net carbon negative,” i.e., absorb and sequester more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits. It will face that imperative for several generations to come, no matter what the temperature is.

Yes, it’s going to get worse, but nobody gets to give up hope or stop fighting. Sorry.

Ecce Homo

I am the man who 

brought you the yo-yo

     -Joe Jackson

Can't be a man 

if he doesn't smoke

the same cigarettes as me

      -Mick Jagger

Greetings

     Happy Earth Day!  (a little late).   Back in the days when Earth Day was a new idea, environmentalists could look around and see "mother nature on the run".   Their goal then was to get humans to back off, and let nature do its thing.  After all, nature had been doing so for millions of years, and it seems to have worked out.

   That was then.    Then Bill McKibben wrote "The End of Nature", and someone coined the term "anthropecene".   Nature was no longer doing its thing alone  we were "helping"..  

     What's next?  The "Eco modernist Manifesto" of course!    Below Clive Hamilton, an Australian philosopher , who incidentally wrote an excellent book "  Requiem For a Species, examine the "manifesto" and the "post environmental" movement.  something you are going to hear a lot more about, as it is a well funded, gee wiz, "technology can fix anything", type of philosophy that appeals to our optimistic  "can do" culture..   And its got a lot of money behind it.

     

           While Hamilton rightly turns away from this absurdity, he seems to fall into the arms of another absurd idea - endless growth.   He suggests we adopt the view of the IPCC  which ( though it's own technological magic - CCS ),  offers a vision of continued economic growth of 2%.     The IPCC'S version of "green growth"  may be preferable to putting all our faith in future developments in nuclear power,  but it maintains the same self contradictory goal - endless growth.    

As George Monbiot put it, here

"The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth’s living systems are the overwhelming facts of our existence. As a result they are mentioned almost nowhere. They are the 21st Century’s great taboo, the subjects guaranteed to alienate your friends and neighbours. We live as if trapped inside a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame, fashion and the three dreary staples of middle class conversation: recipes, renovations and resorts. Anything but the topic that demands our attention.

"Statements of the bleeding obvious, the outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated as exotic and unpardonable distractions, while the impossible proposition by which we live is regarded as so sane and normal and unremarkable that it isn’t worthy of mention. That’s how you measure the depth of this problem: by our inability even to discuss it.

For a more fully developed view of degrowth see  here

             But logic rarely moves politics.   Money does.  As  Hamilton points out, the Break through Institute has strong monied  advocates. (Exxon, Koch, and the American Enterprise Institute)    The IPCC,  similarly reflect to the mainstream economic  credo " growth is not just good - it is the highest good "  .  And where is the profit in degrowth?

Once again , here' s Monbiot (I think)

Capitalism can sell many things, but it can't sell "less".

   

----

from here

The Technofix Is In: A critique of “An Ecomodernist Manifesto” 

The world’s best scientists are warning that the world is warming inexorably, the oceans are becoming acidic and have turned into a “plastic soup,” and we are in the middle of the kind of mass extinction event not seen on the planet in millions of years. But don’t worry — a new breed of environmentalists has just released a manifesto declaring that, with a little faith in technology, humanity can move into a “great” new century of prosperity and universal human dignity on a thriving planet. How can this be?

For some years the California-based Breakthrough Institute has been vigorously promoting what it claims to be a new “post-environmentalism,” one highly critical of the mainstream environment movement and no longer wedded to the verities of the past.

In a much-discussed 2004 article, “The Death of Environmentalism,” the Institute’s founders, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, argued that mainstream greens had become too professionalised and insular. Caught up in Beltway politics, Big Green failed to recognize that the American political landscape had shifted well to the right. Their messages no longer cut through, and environmentalism needed a bold new vision to inspire citizens.

So far so good. But the bold new vision turned out not to be one calling for a far-reaching shake-up, but the opposite — collaborating with the same conservatives that Shellenberger and Nordhaus said had been winning the battle.

The institute maintains a determinedly optimistic view of the world, although the bright facade frequently veils a rancor directed against other environmentalists. This rancor perhaps explains some of its baffling policy stances.

The institute frequently attacks renewable energy and energy efficiency, at times with a highly tendentious use of data. For an organization concerned about spiraling greenhouse gas emissions, it’s hard to work out why the group is so dismissive, except as a way of differentiating itself from mainstream environmentalism. Conversely, it vigorously promotes nuclear power, also deploying data and arguments in a misleading way.

Nuclear power has become an obsession for the institute, a kind of signifier by which players in the environmental debate are allocated to the “good guys” box or the “bad guys” box. In a perfect example of mimesis, the dogmatic stance of some anti-nuclear campaigners is reflected back by these pro-nuclear campaigners.

Describing themselves as “ecomodernists,” those gathered around The Breakthrough Institute are not anti-science; they are after all ecomodernists. But in order to maintain their belief in a bright new future, they must find ways to temper or reinterpret the increasingly dire warnings from the world’s scientists. The preferred strategy is to scan the world for good news stories and from them create an alternative perceptual reality. (The recently launched “Bright Spots” is a similar approach.)

And this has led them to their most audacious declaration to date: the publication, last week, of what they are calling An Ecomodernist Manifesto, a self-consciously provocative attempt to make sense of what some scientists are calling “the Anthropocene,” or the Age of Humans. In the end, however, the manifesto’s faith in technological breakthroughs means it substitutes a kind of Californian positivity for the hard reality of climate politics. As a roadmap out of our ecological and social predicaments it leads us nowhere.

But before I go any further, first some background to understand how we got here.

Anthropocene: good or bad?

When Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term “the Anthropocene” in the year 2000, he was expressing his frustration at the inability of his fellow scientists to see that human activity has changed the Earth System, not just on its surface, but in fundamental ways. We have become so powerful, he argued, that we now rival the great forces of nature, to the point where we have disturbed the functioning of the planet as a whole.

In saying that Earth had passed out of the Holocene epoch and into the Anthropocene, Crutzen mostly expressed anxiety about the effect of carbon emissions and the unfolding catastrophe of climate change. It was global warming above all that he identified as the central process driving Earth into a new and dangerous epoch.

Yet as the scientific debate about the Anthropocene unfolded, some associated with The Breakthrough Institute began to reframe it in an unexpected way. If we live on an Earth dominated by humans, they reasoned, why not embrace our role as “the God species”? If humans have become the dominant force, why not extend our domination and turn it to the good rather than pull back?

The ecomoderns believe that human beings are not destructive creatures — and certainly not sinful ones as some greens imply — but creative, ingenious and basically well-meaning. If it is our destiny to inherit Earth, then the arrival of the Anthropocene is the fulfilment of that destiny.

One scientist close to The Breakthrough Institute, landscape ecologist Erle Ellis, began to do what no one had anticipated. He started to put the word “good” next to the word “Anthropocene.” He wrote of humanity’s transition to a higher level of planetary significance as “an amazing opportunity” and of how “we will be proud of the planet we create in the Anthropocene.”

For many, this was a jaw-dropping reframing of Anthropocene science. But for conservative environmentalists, like the influential Andrew Revkin at The New York Times, the “good Anthropocene” neatly reversed the dispiriting message of a collapsing Earth system, and so it had immediate appeal. (You can find more of Revkin’s thoughts on the Anthropocene here and here.)

There are facts and there are interpretations put on facts, and sometimes the most robust facts cannot penetrate the defensive walls of the determined optimist. Voltaire satirized Leibniz’s belief “that good ultimately will prevail in the world” in Candide (published in 1759 and subtitled l’Optimisme). But neither the harshest facts nor the sharpest satire can dissuade those determined to declare, “Well, I’m an optimist.”

In the hands of the ecomodernists, optimism isn’t used as a torch to light the way forward, but rather as a cudgel with which to beat intellectual opponents into submission — because, especially in the United States, to be less than optimistic is to be, in a way, un-American. The ecomodernists have been trying to achieve a monopoly on optimism as a way of winning the debate about how to balance human interests with the needs of wild nature. In the end, it doesn’t work, as the relentless optimism in their manifesto comes across as detached and dreamy, and blind to the hard truths of political combat.

A new manifesto

Many were aghast that people claiming to be environmentalists could so misread the science of climate change as to append “good” to “Anthropocene.” How can a happy future be conjured from the devastation that will be visited on millions of people by global warming, much of which is already locked in to the climate system?

Undeterred, and as if emboldened by the dismay, The Breakthrough Institute has now gone one better. An Ecomodernist Manifesto, signed by 18 “scholars, scientists, campaigners, and citizens” associated with the institute, is not satisfied with proclaiming that we can look forward to a good Anthropocene. The manifesto declares that we are entering a great Anthropocene.

What force can turn a gloomy prognosis into a golden future? The answer, of course, is technology. The manifesto’s authors are convinced that “knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene.”

For those who believe we must embrace low-emissions technology (i.e. all of us who recognize the reality of anthropogenic climate change) the manifesto is oddly selective, dismissing many large-scale renewable energy technologies (especially wind power and biomass), and taking a skeptical view of solar energy’s potential.

And so the manifesto returns to the ecomoderns’ peculiar obsession: only nuclear power can give us climate stabilization. But, the authors concede, the nuclear industry is flat on its face in most places, so we must wait for the next generation of nuclear fission (or even fusion!) plants, before which opposition will surely melt away. In the meantime, we will need to build more hydroelectric dams and construct “fossil fuel plants with carbon capture and storage” technology.

Here the ability to set aside science is on full display. The manifesto does not say how long we will need to wait for the next generation of nuclear plants, or how much of the global carbon budget will be used up while we cool our heels. Perhaps it might take 20 years for the first plants to be built, and 40 before they are making a large dent in global emissions. By then the planet will be, in Christine Lagard’s arresting phrase, “roasted, toasted, fried and grilled,” and there will be no way to rescue the situation.

If we must wait a long time for the solution, the standby of carbon capture and storage is almost as speculative. Even “clean coal’s” boosters accept that the technology will not be cutting global emissions significantly for two or three decades.

Those who signed the manifesto must “know” all this, so their stance can only be described as a form of denial or at least evasion, one that selectively permits certain facts through the optimo-filter while blocking or downplaying others.

Politics gone missing

The ecomoderns’ techno-fetishism is possible only because they don’t think about politics. It is true that thinking about the politics of climate change is depressing. For those who “embrace an optimistic view toward human capacities and the future,” the easiest path is to ignore the messy world of politics and focus one’s gaze on humankind’s amazing technological achievements.

And so in the manifesto, which tells a story of how we got here and where we should go, there is no mention of the forces, national and international, that have given us rising carbon dioxide concentrations, acidifying oceans and all the rest. We look in vain to find reference to the proven power of corporations and lobbyists to stop environmental laws, or to the total victory of money politics in the United States, now entrenched after Citizens United. Exxon and organized denialism do not appear even between the lines.

For the ecomoderns, the story of the past and the story of the future revolve around one thing: “Meaningful climate mitigation is fundamentally a technological challenge.” It’s an entire historiography in which the human relationship to the natural world depends essentially on human ingenuity and entrepreneurship. It is not kings, presidents, proletarians or generals who make history — but rather scientists, inventors and engineers, and it is they who will save us.

It’s a Silicon Valley view of the world, one of heroic inventors like Steve Jobs, who disrupt the old and bring in the new to improve our lives. This position is a defense of the status quo and is the same one argued by those who have resisted all climate protection legislation that would disrupt the structure of power, not least in the coal lobby’s appeal to the pipe dream of “clean coal.”

If you believe that solving the climate change problem “is fundamentally a technological challenge,” then we are in this mess not because of the power of the fossil fuel lobby, not because of the influence of the campaign of denial, not because of money politics, not because persuading consumers to accept a price on carbon seems too hard, and not because getting international cooperation has been fraught. No, we are in this mess because technology has not evolved quickly enough to avoid it.

Yet no one involved in the climate change debate can be unaware that the technologies to sharply reduce global emissions have been available for a long time. Nor can they be unaware that for at least 15 years every study of the economics of transforming the energy economies of nations like the United States shows that the cost to GDP would extremely small. An exhaustive assessment in the latest IPCC report has been summarized like this:

Ambitious climate protection would cost only 0.06 percentage points of growth each year. This means that instead of a growth rate of about 2 percent per year, we would see a growth rate of 1.94 percent per year. Thus economic growth would merely continue at a slightly slower pace.

The roadblock to climate mitigation has never been technological. Nor has it been economic. It has been political. The ecomoderns’ claim that we must wait for new technologies to make serious mitigation possible is not merely untrue, it is irresponsible.

The technofix is in

An Ecomodernist Manifesto does not offer a new way out of the climate morass, but only a warmed-over version of the old-fashioned American technofix. Politics has gone AWOL in it. The only place politics intrudes is where the manifesto bewails social and institutional obstacles to the further spread of nuclear power. So it is the greens who bring politics to the climate debate! This is not an accidental slip, for The Breakthrough Institute gives the impression of being motivated less by the vision of a great future on a human-regulated Earth than by animosity towards other environmentalists.

Predictably, the manifesto has been greeted with enthusiasm by various purveyors of climate science denial, like the National Review, the Fraser Institute and, in Australia, the Murdoch media’s chief promoter of climate denial and denigrator of renewables (the Australian’s Graham Lloyd.)

We cannot be held responsible for the supporters our ideas attract. Yet in pursuit of its bold new vision, The Breakthrough Institute has allied itself with some unsavory characters, like the American Enterprise Institute which has been active in promoting climate science denial and has been partly funded by Exxon and the Koch Brothers. Is this the “post-partisan politics” foreshadowed by “The Death of Environmentalism”? If so, it’s a tarnished vision and reflects The Breakthrough Institute’s self-defeating policy of cozying up to environmentalism’s natural enemies and alienating its most stalwart friends.

Disagreement within the broad coalition that is the environment movement is not only inevitable, but desirable, and that includes disputing the pros and cons of nuclear power. But one thing we all ought to agree on is the basic science of climate change, and any reasonable reading rules out a rosy view of what the Anthropocene holds in store for us.

Clive Hamilton is the author of Earthmasters: The dawn of the age of climate engineering (Yale University Press) and Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change (Earthscan), among other books. He is professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra.

Basic Arithmetic

Maybe I'm just too blind

To see

- Dr John

All lies and jest

Still a man hears what he wants to hear

And disregards the rest

- Paul Simon


Greetings

      The "no growth" movement, if there is one, got a boost this week from Heinberg and Monbiot  (see below).   They both recognize that continued economic growth is incompatible with a sustainable, or even a merely livable ecosystem.  Nevertheless, all politicians accept as a basic faith that growth both  in economic activity must be maintained.

        Meanwhile Rees and Wackernagel have demonstrated that we are in overshoot, by 50%, a situation that cannot last.  I just finished re reading Catton's " Overshoot", which first appeared the eighties. It provides an excellent ecological and sociological framework for viewing our current situation, vis-a-vis the  carrying capacity of this planet, including the perennial calls for " green growth" or "sustainable development".  

        For an interesting discussion of the psychological barriers to accepting hard truths such as what is really needed to stop climate change , see the interviews with George Marshall  here or here.  George Marshall is the author of " Don't Even Think About It- Why Our Brains Are Wired To Ignore Climate Change"

_____________

The Impossibility of Growth

Why collapse and salvation are hard to distinguish from each other.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 28th May 2014

Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham(1).

Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The Atlantic ocean? The volume of the planet? A little more? It’s 2.5 billion billion solar systems(2). It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse.

To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To fail is to destroy ourselves. That is the bind we have created. Ignore if you must climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all these issues were miraculously to vanish, the mathematics of compound growth make continuity impossible.

Economic growth is an artefact of the use of fossil fuels. Before large amounts of coal were extracted, every upswing in industrial production would be met with a downswing in agricultural production, as the charcoal or horse power required by industry reduced the land available for growing food. Every prior industrial revolution collapsed, as growth could not be sustained(3). But coal broke this cycle and enabled – for a few hundred years – the phenomenon we now call sustained growth.

It was neither capitalism nor communism that made possible the progress and the pathologies (total war, the unprecedented concentration of global wealth, planetary destruction) of the modern age. It was coal, followed by oil and gas. The meta-trend, the mother narrative, is carbon-fuelled expansion. Our ideologies are mere subplots. Now, as the most accessible reserves have been exhausted, we must ransack the hidden corners of the planet to sustain our impossible proposition.

On Friday, a few days after scientists announced that the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is now inevitable(4), the Ecuadorean government decided that oil drilling would go ahead in the heart of the Yasuni national park(5). It had made an offer to other governments: if they gave it half the value of the oil in that part of the park, it would leave the stuff in the ground. You could see this as blackmail or you could see it as fair trade. Ecuador is poor, its oil deposits are rich: why, the government argued, should it leave them untouched without compensation when everyone else is drilling down to the inner circle of hell? It asked for $3.6bn and received $13m. The result is that Petroamazonas, a company with a colourful record of destruction and spills(6), will now enter one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, in which a hectare of rainforest is said to contain more species than exist in the entire continent of North America(7).

The UK oil company Soco is now hoping to penetrate Africa’s oldest national park, Virunga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo(8); one of the last strongholds of the mountain gorilla and the okapi, of chimpanzees and forest elephants. In Britain, where a possible 4.4 billion barrels of shale oil has just been identified in the south-east(9), the government fantasises about turning the leafy suburbs into a new Niger delta. To this end it’s changing the trespass laws to enable drilling without consent and offering lavish bribes to local people(10,11). These new reserves solve nothing. They do not end our hunger for resources; they exacerbate it.

The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world’s diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.

Some people try to solve the impossible equation with the myth of dematerialisation: the claim that as processes become more efficient and gadgets are miniaturised, we use, in aggregate, fewer materials. There is no sign that this is happening. Iron ore production has risen 180% in ten years(12). The trade body Forest Industries tell us that “global paper consumption is at a record high level and it will continue to grow.”(13) If, in the digital age, we won’t reduce even our consumption of paper, what hope is there for other commodities?

Look at the lives of the super-rich, who set the pace for global consumption. Are their yachts getting smaller? Their houses? Their artworks? Their purchase of rare woods, rare fish, rare stone? Those with the means buy ever bigger houses to store the growing stash of stuff they will not live long enough to use. By unremarked accretions, ever more of the surface of the planet is used to extract, manufacture and store things we don’t need. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that fantasies about the colonisation of space – which tell us we can export our problems instead of solving them – have resurfaced(14).

As the philosopher Michael Rowan points out, the inevitabilities of compound growth mean that if last year’s predicted global growth rate for 2014 (3.1%) is sustained, even if we were miraculously to reduce the consumption of raw materials by 90% we delay the inevitable by just 75 years(15). Efficiency solves nothing while growth continues.

The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth’s living systems are the overwhelming facts of our existence. As a result they are mentioned almost nowhere. They are the 21st Century’s great taboo, the subjects guaranteed to alienate your friends and neighbours. We live as if trapped inside a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame, fashion and the three dreary staples of middle class conversation: recipes, renovations and resorts. Anything but the topic that demands our attention.

Statements of the bleeding obvious, the outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated as exotic and unpardonable distractions, while the impossible proposition by which we live is regarded as so sane and normal and unremarkable that it isn’t worthy of mention. That’s how you measure the depth of this problem: by our inability even to discuss it.

www.monbiot.com

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/27/if-we-cant-change-economic-system-our-number-is-up