Where Is The Hope?

3000 years of civilisation has culminated in the goal of man becoming, ‘the utilisation of all things for our own purposes’. It is the 150th anniversary of publication of Darwin’s “origin of species” this year. The difference between these two principles could not be more stark.

On the one hand there is Darwin’s discovery of progression based on natural principles:-

1. mutation and sex as the basis for generation of variety, and
2. premature death as the means selecting between,
3. viable and non viable adaptations to,
4. an environment which changes slowly.

On the other we have a ‘declaration’ of a principle of progression based on the human will:-

1. The ubiquity and utility of human greed and self interest. (If this was true humans would not care for their offspring and we would be wiped out in one generation.)
2. The principle that respect diminishes with genetic distance. (Love yourself, your family, then it diminishes to zero once you cross any border, and all other forms of life are just food.)
3. Happiness is human, so more humans equals more happiness. Thus cheating death, even fleetingly, is a pinnacle of human achievement. (Paradoxically this does cross borders.)
4. The highest state of man is organised, urbanised, and free from considerations of inconvenience, shortage, hunger, crime, disease, and death, except, extravagantly, in art.
5. Mankind has an unalienable right to obsess about itself and to bring about its relentless growth at any cost.

That these models of how the world works are incompatible is self-evident; that there is no prospect that the earth will adapt sensitively and favourably to our desires is equally self-evident. That society is beginning to understand this paradox and yet does not respond is bizarre.

What is required is a complete revision of the meaning of ‘progress’. It is my view that ‘progress’ is obsolete and survival is the best we can hope for in the medium term. In some of the world’s best educated nations Darwin’s initial ideas are still disputed. What hope for the general understanding?

Galileo recognised that the earth is not the centre of the universe, which shattered orthodoxy and started a revolution. We need to recognise that mankind is not the centre of the universe, and shatter our own edifice of orthodoxy before the revolution towards survival can even begin. Galileo’s world had time on its side. Do we?

Robbert

What’s wrong with climate activism?

Adam Sacks has it right, (He must have ...he agrees with me! LOL).

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-08-23-the-fallacy-of-climate-activism

The problem as I see it is this:-
Sales, promotions, lobbying, moulding public opinion etc was the domain of the Church and the rulers. The rise of the middle class, merchants and manufacturers gradually moved power to themselves via advertising which has become a larger industry than education.
It is doubtful that the level of education required to wean us off rampant consumption can find enough space to exist, when the time and budget allocation for standard education and ‘standard’ advertising come first.

That space must be created, and clearly at the expense of ‘standard’ advertising. It could be by hijacking part of the advertiser’s resources (compare anti-cancer warnings on cig. Packets) This is already happening as voluntary green washing designed to eliminate competitors but not to reduce consumption!

Merchants, dealers, brokers, etc work on turnover and profit margins and are therefore fatally locked to advancing the problem not the solution. These are the same forces which provide most of the impetus for consumers’ daily decision making.

How can this nexus be broken and at which points in the chain?

1. At the profit motive? But this is the sacred cow of our society. We believe that without it we can’t eat!
2. At the turnover imperative? But this is the way to be efficient. It’s what the west does best!
3. At the obsolescence corollary? This one is a bit of a bummer but it keeps us fashionable and progress must be maintained. Conservationists want this too!
4. At the advertising juggernaut? This is the vehicle for creating all the false short-term excitement of our (beer and circuses) commercial/industrial lives. But it also “informs” us.
5. At human greed and arrogance? The belief that having more than all my neighbours, having it now has become my right because I said so.
6. At the alienated, weakened human communities? Which can/should never compete with the unattainable illusion of the glitz and tinsel, Hollywood, and the latest whatsit!
7. At the modern fear of (human) death? The belief that the preciousness of life should be measured by how many of us there are, how many can be “saved”, how many are like us, how many offspring we can have, and the hope of living “young” forever. We need to die to make room for our children. Like products we need to die to adapt and change; that is the mechanism of evolution that got us here in the first place! (Is it fear or death-defying arrogance?)

Our institutions (banks, businesses, governments, health education, etc) are continuing to fail and collapse at an alarming rate. We are seeing the rise of other institutions to fill the gap e.g. climate action groups, religions, new political parties etc. It is my view that all of these things together are not keeping pace with the fundamental driver which is degradation of our biosphere of which atmospheric CO2 is a part.

We need to work on all of these issues simultaneously, holistically, and with sufficient vigour to quickly reverse at least a hundred years of what is now mockingly called “industrial progress”. We need to replace industrial with environmental progress. And social progress needs to be in terms of quality and equity (if not equality) rather than in terms of quantity (we are already too many) or bizarre heroic feats like moon walks.

Robbert

Renewables

This is from a USA power company on the web:

“With all the hype about wind and solar, it's easy to forget that hydropower remains by far the world's largest source of renewable energy. In the U.S., for example, hydro provides more than 16x as much energy as wind and solar power combined. Power Engineering says that hydro will increase its lead over wind, solar, and other renewables due to the scores of projects planned or in progress. Unlike wind and solar, hydro output is predictable and steady. In contrast to coal and nuclear, hydro can operate efficiently at low loads and can be brought from low to full output in seconds.”

Like most advertising it is rubbish!
I seriously doubt that hydro outweighs firewood, camel dung and other renewable biomass (but someone might fill me in on that detail).
The amount of power from any hydro-generator is determined almost entirely by the amount of rainfall and the height of the dam above the generator.
An empty dam produces no power and a full dam can’t store more water. There are limits both ends. Whereas the output of a spinning turbine is predictable, the supply of water and the consumer demand is not.

The true benefit of this technology, as stated, is that it can quickly modulate output to match demand (up to its max of course, but only if the dam is quite full, otherwise less).
The storage benefit of falling water can just as easily be applied to wind or solar by pumping water to a high dam till it’s needed and you don’t need to interrupt a river. Simple really!

NB the pollution of coal and nuclear was quietly overlooked, as were the large quantities of waste heat they produce. (what a surprise(?))

Robbert

Manifesto for a better climate

I imagine everyone agrees what the big issues are, so it probably doesn’t matter who lists them. Here are some of my words:

1. Cut coal consumption: Repudiate the concept that electricity supply is right and available in any quantity to anyone who will pay for it. Expand the powers of the EPA for instance for CO2 pollution. Immediately remove all direct and indirect subsidies on fossil based energy especially to heavy emitters like electricity generators and aluminium smelters. Place an excise on fossil energy prices. When price rises follow consumers can vote with their wallets if they want their dirty products! Under no circumstances protect them!!! Dirty emitters will shape up or perish. Consumers will cut back and/or buy alternatives! Compensate the ‘needy’ through income support, remove energy subsidies. Permit coal (etc) industry lobbying only in large open forums like this one, not behind closed doors.

2. Support clean industry. Establish and support dedicated ‘industrial parks’ with tertiary institutions and a renewable investment bank like the European model. Fortify the CSIRO solar/renewables division. Remove the gag on so many government experts in this area.

3. Educate the community including government and industry. Fund a few independent peak bodies to report to government on community attitudes to CC. Enquire into emissions rates of all industrial and commercial processes and provide penalties or rationing for (say) 20% of the poorest practices in each field this will dismantle intransigent operators and dirty industries.(much of this stuff is already public or well know to the relevant industries.) Foster the arts, family, and no fuel sports, etc as better ways of “self actualisation” than consumption.

4. Stop logging old growth forests. Let’s demand that paperless office they promised us.

5. Cut industrial scale consumption. Regulate advertisers in all media to detail direct and indirect full lifecycle carbon cost of every service or good being sold and/or promoted, or Provide billions of dollars for massive advertising campaigns, larger than all other advertising combined, to drown out the all the advertising that encourages spending (and wasting everything).( I don’t miss much by not reading, watching or listening to any commercial media at all. And I now save more than when I was working)

6. Expect, plan for and encourage LOWER employment rates, supported by major increases in efficiency. (Households who spend their second income mostly on two cars are common.)

Picking winners

Governments have often been criticised by business for trying to pick winners. This is because business regards making mistakes (which they can bury with bankruptcy and other peoples’ losses) as their domain, and likewise making a success (resulting in nice, private, pocket-stuffing profits) also as their domain. Governments have been so afraid of the former and buoyed by the latter that they mouth the ‘winner-picking’ mantra and are so cowed that business is seen as smart and self-correcting whereas governments are impugned as incompetent, irrelevant obstacles to ‘good’ business. The practice of business continuously offering fatter salaries to poach significant talent away from governments without even blushing is a great underlying mystery. Does doubling one’s pay make one twice as smart?

Unpacking the picking. Picking a winner refers to placing a bet on a horse based on ‘form’ or sometimes based on nothing. This is supposed to be good for business but not for government. The ‘good’ element thus is clearly related to how the losses are buried and profits flaunted.

Having accepted their cowering position, governments have become very pliable when big business has some particular difficulty and ‘needs’ a subsidy, grant, market support, research institute and/or major project to reinforce, the ‘goodness’ of that business, and the ‘goodness’ of the government for supporting them. The continuous stream of assistance, bailouts, etc over time turns out to be a permanent bias towards the merit based losers and directed against merit based winners. The community has a very clear idea of the difficulty of establishing a small enterprise against entrenched big business and has an endless appetite for new solutions; if there is merit on a level base we will pick winners. Our situation could hardly get worse. Big business now successfully eggs on governments to pick losers (themselves) and castigate the real winners. Might makes right!

We need to view the list of losers supported by big business and governments through the prism not only of merit but also of where the money goes. The losers on merit include:

• Uranium mining; short term money for us, fuelling a dying industry, but no responsibility for world-wide waste handling. (I am of the view that all waste should be returned to point of origin on a continuing basis and buried by the original miners. After all they know all about digging holes and processing, and this inserts waste costs into the original decision to mine.)
• Carbon capture and storage; hugely expensive, definitely not as safe as Phar Lap, and no result likely in this generation if at all. All the money goes to prop up the old losers.
• Existing coal mining and electricity generation; heavily subsidised with harbours, roads, rail, transmission lines, research and cash, etc, exemptions from consequences of atmospheric pollution, and what’s even worse, subsidies to assist them to comply in the future!

The argument is particularly vehement and clear in the Feed-in-Tariff debate where the financial support required for domestic PV is huge precisely because it needs to overcome the heavy subsidies supporting the coal industry. Here we have both sides heavily subsidised against each other. The taxpayer loses all round on the dollars and the environment loses all round on failure to conserve energy. Where does the vast majority of the money go? The coal industry.

So, if our governments are not going to pick winners could they at least stop spoon-feeding these ‘spiffy’, ravenous, decrepit, ungrateful, profligate losers!

If they can’t reassert the primacy of government by the electorate not business, and stop squandering our dwindling money on junk, in a recession, during global warming, in a drought, with galloping population growth, under threat of collapse of our major energy exports, and when heavy investment is required in a renewable future, then they should resign.

Robbert

Who got conned by globalisation? Ordinary Americans want out!

Dear all,

Let us keep a clear view of where this battle needs to be won.
Churchill complained about how slow and unwieldy democracy was in a crisis.
David Spratt grapples with the same thing when he wonders what has to be done politically to trigger an Emergency response.
Declarations of wars or emergencies usually invoke the temporary suspension of a bundle of democratic rights and processes.
How many people need to be convinced that there “is” a war?
In Iraq it was just 1, yes, just 1; John Howard! So we went!
How many people need to be convinced that there is a climate crisis? All of us? A referendum? Get real!!!

What we face now makes all the wars we can think of look like a picnic! Why don’t we have a process or a government to join the dots.

Can we do it with market forces? (link below)

For those of you who believe that ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ has the stomach for open markets and globalisation here’s your antidote.

Note their take away messages;-

• ‘smash stuff’!
• China = ‘commie’ = bad
• Where there might have been a discussion about consumerism there is a void
• Up with Parochialism for American jobs and markets
• Up with Globalisation for foreign markets and resources (no hint of an ethical conflict)
  
• Sell it with bikinis, sledge hammers, patriotism and fear.
  
• A fact or 2 may be useful but Sell! Sell! Sell!
• (There’s more garbage if you can be bothered)

Then again, we in Australia like to have our big banks and miners but we don’t like exporting jobs either.

I see no problem at all in the 3rd world reaching parity with us; (But not just China, India, Brazil)
The problem is that that target parity meeting point needs to much lower than where they are aiming at.
The corollary of that is that we must do our bit, by massive reductions to meet them “halfway”.

Then there are the really big bogeys: They are making most of the same mistakes we made.
No.1. is individualism; cycle of accelerating private consumption, personal freedom vs. public vandalism, consumerism, waste, pollution.
No.2. Is endless growth. There is no plan for them to stop once parity is reached.

So we live in fear.
So we need to grow as fast as them. What??
The change we need is not in nuts and bolts, subsidies, FiTs, grants, trading schemes,etc, all of which encourage people to race to the bottom.
The change we need is in new (or old) ways of finding satisfaction, so we won’t respond to, “Your car (house, phone) is not fast (big, good) enough!”

Viewing: http://www.breitbart.tv/bikinis-sledgehammers-ipods-reasontv-takes-on-buy-american-sloganeering/

Robbert

Green Wreckers & Copehagen

I believe, that for some in the green movement, wrecking the economy is the actual main point. For them ‘wrecking the economy’ is not an unfortunate consequence or side effect, but the essential window of opportunity to rationality.

What many others do not understand is this; supporting the current economy in any form necessitates accepting perpetual growth which is self-evidently suicidal.

It is incumbent on capitalism (not on greenies) to demonstrate that capitalism can flourish or even survive with “negative growth” before the environment movement even needs to listen. Huge swathes of giveaway neighbourhoods half full of empty houses throughout America’s rust belts clearly demonstrate that capitalism gobbles or dies! It cannot shrink! The wall St crash of 1929, and the dot com crash etc made it even clearer. Grow it or blow it!

If suicide is the best we in the west can offer why should the rest of the world listen?? If Industrial Death is the very best kind of reduction that modern western democracies can produce, so be it; we will have to suffer it!!

I believe there may be a better way but the necessary conditions include:-

1. annual global contraction (of say 3 % p.a) starting last year for at least 10 years followed by endless zero growth, accompanied by
2. Global redistribution of wealth to reduce inequality (by say 4 % p.a) for at least 10 years.
   

That implies reductions in the west of around 6 to 8 % pa and 3rd world growth of a few %. The US right now is struggling with just a few %pa fall.

As for Copenhagen: Bugger selling the sizzle! Sizzle is the problem! That is why we were so dissatisfied with the steak we got! We wanted one as big as the sizzle sounded. Look at the height of the ‘big Mac’ in the advert; compare it with the shrivelled faggot you get at any outlet.

All we will have left soon is 7 billion people with a huge appetite for sizzle and enough steak for just 5% of us! I’m an Aussie, so I’m rich, but I haven’t had a steak for at least 6 months; But as you go right ahead and enjoy yours, do you feel you deserve it, or privileged, or like a thief?

I actually support the Copenhagen initiative, for now, because I believe it should and will fail! Bush could not adapt to beat Obama, and Howard could not adapt to beat Rudd. And clearly we still have even bigger changes to make. I believe whatever the outcome, the turpitude of the industrial west will become painfully manifest and a new and more radical movement will overwhelm us. At some point a movement (or chaos) will assert, coherently or otherwise, the benefits of survival and will push us suicidalists aside.

History is not peppered with revolutions of this magnitude which proceed peacefully. The nearest thing that springs to my mind is the destruction of Rome and the onset of the dark ages. That is what the barbarians, Goths, Visigoths, etc thought of the ‘Pax Romanica’ the gobbling, grinding, self-glorifying globalisation of their time.

The longer we wait or just dawdle, (Copenhagen) the more resources we squander,(e.g. on CCS) the weaker we become and the hungrier the barbarians become. Going slow is giving up! We must abandon our raw power and show strength of character and real leadership instead. Stealing candy from the emerging third world is becoming downright dangerous.

The psychotic lords of modern industry (and their servants in government) are not capitulating in droves. Bush, Cheney, Howard, Turnbull et al. Some will do the same as in the middle ages: Repent AFTER they retire rich, then expect forgiveness (Greenspan) They cling with their dying breath to their magical dreams of growth and try to impregnate the rest of us. Gee thanks. (Check out Ziggy Switkowski’s latest suicidal offerings!) . . . He is the guy who was recommended to us by the Australian government! On behalf of you and me! Seems like only yesterday).

If WE don’t neutralise them and celebrate their burial who will? If these few selfish obstinate obsolete specimens survive in power the rest of us are inexorably doomed! Those who will not put the fortunes invested in their education and privilege, to the service of the global community, are not worth saving, they need cauterising. This is the ultimate zero sum game. They are eating our cake and our children can’t have it! We cannot stop losing because they cannot stop stealing.

They will fight their rearguard actions for as long as they stand, and then be trampled. But, those bastards are mortal, and their adversaries grow stronger every day! So you see, there is certainly hope!

If you think this is just propaganda check out what the planet is doing. In 50 years my tomatoes and wisterias have never before stayed green through winter.

Robbert