Send in the clowns

Fools rush in

Where wise men fear to tread 

    -Elvis

Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your mouth

    Bob Dylan

Greetings 

        Phil C sent this to me. I'm a scientist . I'm blowing the whistle on the Trump Administration.

What can I say?  A bit heavy handed but fairly typical of this administration .       See also Glacier Park Ranger can't talk to Zuckberg about the future of glaciers. here.     The market place is at least slowing Trump's efforts to re-carbonized the economy.  As long as natural gas is cheaper than coal, less coal plants will be running.  Similarly Rick Perry's attempt to prove the fossil fuels are better than renewables seems to have hit a snag..

       As this op ed points out ,Trump trying to lobotomizing America, introducing The Golden Age of Stupidity

“The opposite of knowledge is ignorance. But the willful disregard of knowledge — regardless of motive — is stupidity. That is because those who battle facts are at war with reality. It is an unwinnable proposition. Furthermore, specialized knowledge, particularly that of scientists, is essential if we are to do what leaders must, anticipate change, understand its consequences and harness the opportunities it presents. Trump, in waging a systematic campaign to rid the government of the experts and ideas he sees as threats to his agenda, has done more than just usher in a Golden Age of Stupidity.  He is unwittingly asking a question it doesn't take an expert to figure out: "What happens when you lobotomize the world's leading power?"

        LOokingat th e bigger picture, it seems to me that the "big question "seems to have shifted from "Can we avoid "dangerous"climate change ( 1.5 or 2 degrees)"   To something like "Can we slow things down at bit, maybe decarbonize before we hit 4 degrees?"  

      Four degrees does look a little spooky:  Here's one description.  From here 

 "But according to one of the world’s most influential climate scientists, John Schellnhuber, ‘the difference between two and four degrees is human civilisation.’ Thanks to the global paralysis since 1992, the ‘window of opportunity’ for reducing emissions fast enough to avoid this scenario is starting to look more like a crack in the plaster.

Four degrees of warming, Marshall tells us, is likely to bring heatwaves of magnitudes never experienced before, and temperatures not seen on Earth in the last five million years. Forty per cent of plant and animal species would be at risk of extinction, a third of Asian rainforests would be under threat and most of the Amazon would be at high risk of burning down. Crop yields would collapse, possibly by a third in Africa. US production of corn, soy beans and cotton would fall by up to 82 per cent. Four degrees guarantees the total melting of the Greenland ice sheet and probably the Western Antarctic ice sheet, which would raise sea levels by more than thirty feet. Two-thirds of the world’s major cities would end up underwater. And we aren’t looking at a multigenerational timescale: we may see a four-degree rise over the next sixty years. ‘The science around four degrees keeps moving,’ Marshall notes, ‘usually in the direction of greater pessimism.’

       Trump and his fossil fueled friends seem happy to push ahead burn what there is, and deal with 4 when that comes. 

          I've been reading an interesting book called Defiant Earth, by Clive Hamilton.  He explores some ideas about what it means to be in the Anthropocene.  Stuff like :  In the post anthropocene - what is "nature", what is  "progress", and what is humanity's role?  Its pretty dry, but  worth a look,  One quote sticks with me:

"What kind of creature interfered with the Earths functioning and would not desist when the facts became known?"

           So, Trump's "plan" is pedal to the metal.  What about the rest of the world?   Plan B seems to be green growth,  as growth is apparently non negotiable .  For instance see here.

'There seems to be a complete inability for senior policy makers to even countenance the possibility that a period of economic contraction may be required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the rate required to forestall dangerous climate change. This inability was on display in an interview given by Christiana Figueres, the former UN Climate Chief, to Radio New Zealand[1]. She went out of her way to state that the decarbonization of the global economy was not inconsistent with continued economic growth. The desperation to not question the growth paradigm, and the many misleading tactics used to keep questions of growth at bay, were fully on display in the Figueres interview and the recent paper she published with others[2]:

       Arguably  both Plan Trump, and Plan B are both versions of what has been called "the politics of unsustainability ".   Consciously, or unconsciously, the unsustainability of our life style is accepted.  Therefore the only real strategy is how to adapt to its effects  -  rising tides, drowning cities, burning forests, climate refugees.  These are all just facts of life in the Athropocene.  Expressing ourselves through consumption,  travel,  and other high status displays are the highest good.  Maintenance of nature, the biosphere get lip service only.    We are in a post e ogical era    This is described in a somewhat academic way as follows:

The governance of unsustainability: ecology and democracy after the post-democratic turn.  

'Whatever its declared commitments, this politics of unsustainability is no longer powered by the ecologist attempt to change individual lifestyles and societal structures in such a way that environmental integrity may be sustained and ecologist visions of authentic social well-being achieved. Instead, its primary concern is to manage the inevitable consequences, social and ecological, of the resolve to sustain the established order. Rather than tryingto suspend or even reverse the prevailing logic of unsustainability, its main preoccupation is to promote societal adaptation and resilience to sustained unsustainability.

The mechanism is described below.   This may seem a little cynical, but consider this little factoid from the head of the IEA.

"Fossil fuels accounted for 81% of the world's energy consumption in 1987. Thirty years later it's still 81%."  (Kyoto was in 1997, ever since CO2 concentrations have been accelerating)

"For their politics of unsustainability, so the theory of post-ecologist politics suggests, advanced post-industrial societies are relying, in particular, on strategies of simulation. These strategies entail the production and maintenance of societal self-descriptions in which modern societies portray themselves as having fully recognised the seriousness and urgency of the sustainability crisis, as having a clear understanding of what remedial action is required and as commanding the political will and ability to implement it. These societal self descriptions provide reassurance that the problem is taken seriously, that it is being researched and addressed with all available expertise, and that appropriate counter-strategies are being pursued with undivided determination. They create discursive spaces in which individuals, collective actors and society at large can present and experience themselves as ecologically virtuous and committed without compromising the post-ecologist value preferences which condition their thinking and behaviour otherwise. These narratives of reassurance include, for example, the above-mentioned stories of ecological modernisation and the Green New Deal, the story that a ‘science of sustainability’ can ‘provide the rock-solid foundations upon which the structures of sustainable development’ can then be raised...

            

         What would the politics of sustainability look like?   Here's  a critique of green growth and decoupling.   Here;s a possible  Plan C  Avoiding Collapse, An agenda for sustainable degrowth  

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