Green service economy won't work

SUBHEAD: A techno-optimistic hipster, vegan, green start-up lifestyle is not sustainable.

By Vijay Kolinjivadi - Daniel Horen Greenford 12 January 2020 for Uneven Earth -
(http://unevenearth.org/2019/08/why-a-hipster-vegan-green-start-up-service-economy-lifestyle-cannot-be-sustainable/)


Image above: A latte bar in the area of the proposed MIL section From original article.

Dematerialized service economies, industrial veganism and hipsterized eco-aesthetics will only On the borderlands of Montreal’s well-to-do Outremont district and the ultra-hipsterized Mile End district lies an expanse of land near the Canadian-Pacific Railroad line.

This space separates these two districts from Parc-Extension (Parc-Ex for short). One of Canada’s poorest and most densely populated neighbourhoods, Parc-Ex is a port of call for many newly arrived immigrants. This is a place where affordable housing is increasingly hard to come by, and where eviction rates are on the rise.

Walking along Avenue du Parc and its adjacent streets, one begins by passing vegan chain restaurants, hip vintage clothing joints, and coffee shops jostling for space among long-time Greek and Hasidic Jewish community establishments, before eventually arriving at Parc-Ex, with its small immigrant-owned grocery stores, halal boucheries, and community centres of a very different kind of neighbourhood.

It is here, on the periphery of these stark socio-economic separations, that the University of Montréal plans to construct its science campus MIL, with an emphatic commitment to ‘sustainable development’.

Sustainability for the new MIL campus means constructing LEED certified buildings to reduce environmental impact, establishing rainwater collection infrastructure, energy-efficient lighting and heat recycling, prioritizing electric vehicles and bikes, the planting of trees—all part of broader efforts to achieve carbon neutrality.

This ethos of eco-efficiency is also shared by the new campus’ neighbours—tech firms, a Microsoft headquarters, and AI research laboratories loosely affiliated with the university. Fusing technological innovation with eco-efficiency, the MIL campus epitomizes the spirit of eco-modernism.

Underlying the emerald green image of this new campus development is the assumption that capital and economic growth will naturally follow suit.

This means ‘revitalizing’ neighbourhoods with student housing, condominiums, hip bars with micro-brews and vegan nibbles, soy and almond milk latte bars designed for socioeconomically advantaged students and professors to enjoy.

Green is gold within this logic, creating countless opportunities for advocates of Parc-Ex’s revitalization to pursue profit without the guilt.

But this modern ‘green’ vision of economic growth, hipness, and eco-conscious diets is far from regenerative. On the contrary, its success depends on creative destruction. This is what capitalism does best, and such destruction is anything but green. 

In what follows, we aim to highlight the dangers of a political-economic system that continues to profit under the veil of a greener, more efficient capitalism, all while reinforcing inequality and still harming the environment.

In this way, projects like the revitalization of Parc-Ex are a continuation of Canada’s deeply colonial tradition of dispossessing First Nations of their ways of life and networks of community in favour of whatever the market dictates, however ‘green’ the market may be..

The MIL campus at Parc-Ex is just one piece of the global story behind capitalism’s ‘greening.’ To understand how they connect, we need to retrace our steps back to 1992. Against the backdrop of Soviet Union’s recent fall, the UN Earth Summit that year opened up a new global frontier for unrestrained capital.

Under the auspices of the term ‘sustainable development’ introduced at the summit, capitalism was able to tap into a panoply of ‘social’ and ‘green’ values and use them for its own ends.

In the years that followed, governments, businesses and techno-optimists teamed up with would-be environmentalists to envision a greener world that nevertheless kept efficiency at the core of its growth-oriented mandate.

Environmentalism became neutralized as a technical-managerial concern for an elite cadre of policy experts, economists, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, for whom new markets and techno-fixes would repeatedly affirm the exceptionalism of modern humanity.

Soon enough, environmentalism was all but depoliticized for the purposes of expanding profit under a green economy.

This depoliticization of environmentalism is what drives today’s unquestioning acceptance of the idea of dematerializing ‘green’ economic growth through more efficient lifestyles, technologies, and service-based economies.

While efficiency improvements in and of themselves are certainly to be applauded, they cannot be viewed in isolation from the economic and political structures of capital expansion from which they emerge.

For those unfamiliar with the technical details of the debate, green growth is predicated on ‘decoupling’, that is, our ability to disengage or detach economic growth from environmental impact, through things like dematerializing production or employing people in ‘cleaner’ industries (which we’ll soon explore in greater detail).

Many who have scrutinized green growth closely have concluded that the potential for decoupling by making improvements in technology—how we produce, and recycle and dispose of waste from our economy—is highly limited.

While relative improvements have been made and more are attainable still, there are hard physical limits to the extent to which our economy can be dematerialized.

Far from being the panacea that would allow unabated ‘sustainable growth’ as many green capitalists so desperately cling to, decoupling is one more siren song advanced industrial economies need to resist if they’re to avoid collapse.

Under capitalism and its relentless pursuit of growth, environmental considerations are inevitably reduced to the question of maintaining efficiency, while still expanding productive and consumptive throughput.

In turn, people concerned with minimizing their ecological footprint are led to believe that they only have one course of action: improving their own efficiency in their everyday lives by, for example, eating less meat, driving electric vehicles and biking to work.

While all these choices are constructive, focusing our efforts for systemic change through atomized personal consumption choices undermines the transition. Indeed, what green capitalism doesn’t want you to realize is that collective action is more than a collection of individualized actions.

Depoliticized environmentalism is rife in the fabulously hipsterized startup enclaves emerging in cities around the world, especially in the Global North.

Far from achieving ‘green’ efficiency, the jobs that fuel these high-tech start-ups, together with other professions of the creative class (artists, musicians, academics, graphic designers, among others), all rely on a high degree of resource demands whose impacts span the world over.

Those who argue that growth can be accompanied by a dematerializing economy typically hold the assumption that these knowledge and creative classes of the service economy have somehow lower environmental impacts than those engaged in agriculture or manufacturing (so called ‘dirty’ jobs).

But is the service economy really any cleaner and greener? The creative class and the knowledge economy are sustained by the material basis of agriculture, housing, construction, manufacturing, and other sectors.


Image above: A project sign at the site of the proposed MIL facility with the graffiti "Social Housing" spray painted over the names of the partners involved with building the MIL.

The technology that enables the knowledge economy is also far from immaterial. At the current rate of growth, internet-connected devices could consume one-fifth of global electricity demand in just 6 years from now.

While the on-site impact of an office is comparatively low to a factory or field, the cars, gadgets and food being produced in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors are mostly consumed by those employed in services.

A forthcoming study by Horen Greenford, student of Prof. Damon Matthews at Concordia University in Montreal, and colleague Tim Crownshaw at McGill, uses economic input–output modeling to reveal the impacts associated with the consumption of those employed in services.

By treating household consumption by employees as an extension of the industries that employ people, in much the same way we might analyse the environmental consequences of car production by factoring in the steel used to build them, the far-reaching impact of the service economy becomes clear.

When we observe the economy through this holistic lens, the service sector’s impact doubles in greenhouse gas emissions, triples in land use, and quadruples in water consumption, emerging as the primary driver of these three major environmental impacts.

When measured in environmental impact per unit production (impact per dollar or euro), the service sector is no ‘cleaner’ than agriculture, manufacturing, or any other sector.

Instead, all sectors approach similar levels of environmental impact per unit production when we take the household consumption of those employed in these sectors into consideration.

This isn’t to say people shouldn’t be employed in services, but that we must acknowledge the role of income and affluence as the main human driver of environmental degradation. To put it simply: Employing people means paying wages.

The higher the wages, the higher the consumption. Since people consume roughly the same per unit income, high wage jobs with low on-site impact still contribute to resource depletion and pollution just as much as those ‘dirtier’ industries. It’s just a matter of whether you see the impact or whether you distance yourself from it.

This forthcoming study hopes to dispel the illusion that there are cleaner, greener jobs found in things like high tech services. And it’s not the only one attempting to do so.

An earlier study has also shown that there is no historical evidence that service-based economies are capable of decoupling from material throughput or environmental impact.

The key takeaway here? If we continue to grow the service sector without reducing how much we collectively produce and consume, increasing the number of these high wage jobs can only lead to increased demand for material goods and services, in turn increasing their attendant environmental impacts.

Instead of decoupling, growth-oriented efficiency improvements are more likely to present us with textbook examples of the rebound effect.

First described by economist Stanley Jevons in the 19th Century, rebound effects occur when improvements in efficiency lower prices, leading to an increase in demand that outpaces these gains in efficiency.

In growth-oriented societies, the resources and energy we save through efficiency improvements are inevitably ploughed back into further growth. In other words, as airplanes, cars, and electronic devices become eco-efficient, demand for them increases, ultimately leading to greater consumption of energy and resources—a capitalist’s dream!

The more we save, the more we can re-insert into new circuits of production.

The more efficient we are, the cheaper consumption gets, and so the more we consume. The environment will always be at the losing end of this logic.

In spite of evidence that the dematerialized service economy is little more than an alluring myth, why do so many remain enthusiastic about eco-modernist visions of innovative green cities?

Well, not only do our service economies fundamentally depend on the existence of manufacturing and intensive agriculture economies, but typically those that exist on the other side of the planet.

The further away that almond milk production is from a central London coffee shop, the less guilty we feel—out of sight, out of mind. This is not only the case with the resource use of service economies, but also the waste they produce.

Exports of e-waste currently represent the fastest growing solid waste stream. As Giorgos Kallis argues: ‘Energy use in the US is not increasing, not because a peak is being reached due to technological efficiency and dematerialization, but because the US economy imports its garments from China and has its servers in Norway.’

Thus, while the service economy may appear to be materially light compared to manufacturing and agriculture, its reliance on these other sectors for its own existence (made easier to ignore by being pushed further away from where final consumption takes place) invalidates the claims that we can decouple our economy from environmental impacts via a shift to services.

We also see that any actual efficiency improvements in the service economy are quickly swallowed up by shifting costs of increasing demand to other countries where labour and resources are cheaper to exploit.

We need to get out of the habit of looking at only a small part of the whole system, often by remaining captivated by notions of national borders, for which we clearly know that neither resources, energy nor capital flows abide by.

Once again, Kallis reminds us that we should not confuse declines in environmental impact per unit of production in a growing economy with absolute and per capita resource and energy demand increases over time.

As Kris De Decker of Low-Tech Magazine informs us, global resource and energy use keeps increasing annually, growing at an average rate of 3% a year—more than double the rate of population growth.

It is therefore crucial to recognize that being so far removed from actual production and consumption patterns around the world does not exonerate our service economies, meaning that their claims to embody ‘green’ principles are only very partially accurate if at all.

Once we start paying attention to these tactics, we begin to see them in other places. Much like the dematerialized ‘green’ service economy, the purported eco-efficiency of veganism also deserves our scrutiny.

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Dreams Die Hard

SUBHEAD: The world changes and sometimes profoundly enough to provoke flux and disorder.

By James Kunstler on 8 February 2019 for Kunstler.com-
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/dreams-die-hard/)


Image above: Still-frame of Alexandria Ortise-Cortez on MSNBC show MTP-Daily. From (https://www.msnbc.com/mtp-daily/watch/aoc-can-you-be-a-democratic-socialist-and-a-capitalist-it-s-possible-1439125059571).

Somewhere between the fevered Zzzz’s of American Dreaming and the blinding shock of being “woke,” there is a recognition that an awful lot about contemporary life is not working and can’t go on.

At the bottom of this discontent is the mistaken notion that the unwind of modernity can be arrested or mitigated by “smart” and “green” this-and-that.

The disappointment over it will be epic when we discover that the laws of physics override the bright ideas of politicians.

America has been blowing green smoke up its own ass for years, promoting oxymorons such as “green skyscrapers” and “clean energy,” but the truth is we’re not going to run WalMart, Suburbia, DisneyWorld, and the U.S. Interstate highway system on any combination of wind, solar, geothermal, recycled Fry-Max, and dark matter.

We’re just running too much stuff at too great a scale for too many people. We’ve blown through the capital already and replaced it with IOUs that will never be honored, and we’re caught in an entropy trap of diminishing returns from all the work-arounds we’re desperately trying.

For all that, there are actually some sound proposals in the mostly delusional matrix of the Green New Deal promoted by foxy front-person "AOC", Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez .

• Revoke corporate personhood by amending our Constitution to make clear that corporations are not persons and money is not speech.
  Right on, I say, though they have not quite articulated the argument which is that corporations, unlike persons, have no vested allegiance to the public interest, but rather a legal obligation solely to shareholders and their boards-of-directors.
 

• Replace partisan oversight of elections with non-partisan election commissions.     
  A no-brainer
 

• Replace big money control of election campaigns with full public financing and free and equal access to the airwaves.  
  Quite cheap and worth every penny. 
  
  
• Break up the oversized banks that are “too big to fail.”
  And while you’re at it, resume enforcement of the anti-trust laws. 
  
  
• Restore the Glass-Steagall separation of depository commercial banks from speculative investment banks.
  Duh….

Of course, a lot of the proposals above may be obviated when the money system we’ve been using, and its subsidiaries in markets, blows up, taking much of the world’s notional wealth with it, along with our hopes and dreams for replacing the fossil fuel economy with “Green technology.”

The Green New Deal may be an exercise in throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks, so let’s just assume that a lot of the “social justice” pander-jive in it will slide down the wall onto the floor and make its way to the dumpster.

Stuff like: “the right to full employment” (there is no such right), Free college and medicine (doesn’t pencil out with our capital gone, though the current odious rackets must go), “ending the war on immigrants” (how about ending the Democratic Party’s war on enforcing immigration laws?) (IB Publisher's 

There are two kinds of deadly narcissism at work in American culture these days: techno-narcissism — the belief that magical rescue remedies can save the status quo of comforts and conveniences — and organizational narcissism — the belief that any number of committees can lead a march of humanity into a future of rainbows and unicorns.

Both of these ideas are artifacts of a fossil fuel turbo-charged economy that is coming to an end.

Societies and economies are fundamentally emergent, non-linear, and self-organizing as they respond to the mandates of reality — which are not necessarily consistent with human wishes.

Circumstances in the world change and sometimes, when the changes are profound enough, they provoke episodes of flux and disorder.

A better index for our journey into the unknown frontier beyond modernity will not be what is “green” and “smart” but perhaps what is “sane” and “insane.”

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Where's the "eco" in ecomodernism?

SUBHEAD: A techno-green future of limitless abundance sounds great, but it's totally unsustainable.

By Aaron Vansintjan on 6 April 2018 for Red Pepper -
(https://www.redpepper.org.uk/wheres-the-eco-in-ecomodernism/)


Image above: Windmills under an overcast sky. Photo by Richard Walker. From original article.

If you hadn’t heard, despair is old hat. Rather than retreat into the woods, now is the time to think big, to propose visionary policies and platforms.

So enter grand proposals like basic income, universal healthcare, and the end of work. Slap big polluters with carbon tax, eradicate tax havens for the rich, and switch to a 100% renewable energy system.

But will these proposals be enough? Humanity is careening toward certain mayhem. In a panic, many progressive commentators and climate scientists, from James Hansen and George Monbiot to, more recently, Eric Holthaus, have argued that these big policy platforms will need to add nuclear power to the list.

In a recent issue on climate change in the Jacobin, several authors also suggested we need to consider carbon capture technologies, geo-engineering (the large-scale modification of earth systems to stem the impacts of climate change), and even GMOs make an appearance.

What’s more, one of the contributors, Christian Parenti, actually proposes that we should increase our total energy use, not reduce it.

Any critique of this kind of utopian vision is often dismissed as green conservatism. In her article, “We gave Greenpeace a chance”, Angela Nagle argues: faced with President Trump promising abundance and riches, greens can only offer “a reigning in of the excesses of modernity”.

Despite all its failures, modernity freed us from the shackles of nature. Modernity promised a world without limits—and the environmentalist obsession with limits, she says, amounts to “green austerity.”

This argument is associated with an emerging body of thought called ecomodernism. Ecomodernism is the idea that we can harness technology to decouple society from the natural world.

For these techno-optimists, to reject the promise of GMOs, nuclear, and geo-engineering is to be hopelessly romantic, anti-modern, and even misanthropic. An ecological future, for them, is about cranking up the gears of modernity and rejecting a politics of limits.

Maxed-out modernism

Like it or not, this attitude actually fits quite well with the socialist tradition. For Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, modernity brought wonders and horrors. They argued the desire to go back to a feudal world of craftspeople and cottage industries was reactionary: their revolution would try to move beyond the present, not before it.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC), is the embodiment of this kind of maxed-out modernism, rebranded for the 21st century. But, given that we are fast approaching the planetary boundaries of the capitalist system, is it really that reasonable to suggest that now is the time to power up the automated factories?

In his article “Fully automated green communism”, Aaron Bastani, one of the main proponents of FALC, tries to respond directly to this kind of criticism. For him, eco-modernist socialism can be sustainable, too.

“[T]he idea that the answer to climate change is consuming less energy – that a shift to renewables will necessarily mean a downsizing in life – feels wrong. In fact, the trends with renewables would point to the opposite: the sun furnishes our planet with enough energy to meet humanity’s annual demand in just 90 minutes.

Rather than consuming less energy, developments in wind and solar (and within just a few decades) should mean distributed energy of such abundance that we won’t know what to do with it.”

For eco-modernists like Bastani, the problem is not technology itself: the problem is who owns it. When asked if his techno-optimism doesn’t understate the reality of climate change, Bastani responds that any tool can be turned into a weapon. Technology is only violent in the hands of a for-profit system.

Technology without context

The thing is, there’s very little “eco” in eco-modernism. Ecology is about the big picture: understanding the relationships between people, animals, plants, materials, and energy—how they co-evolve and are interdependent.

So, for an ecologist, any technology cannot be understood as separate from the context that created it. In contrast, eco-modernists see technology as simply a tool, which anyone could pick up and use. Their modernism becomes “eco” when we take the machines of modernity and use them to decouple society from nature.

This is certainly the case for nuclear power. Anti-nuclear activists point to the harmful effects of nuclear radiation and accidents, but, as ecomodernists point out, coal has killed more people historically and will kill many more if we don’t do anything soon.

The only thing that can save us, they say, would be to replace the fossil fuel-based energy system with one dependent on nuclear power—which in turn would require large state subsidies and centralized planning. We have the technology for a low-impact energy system, we just need the political will.

Sounds simple, but let’s look at the big picture. Nuclear power requires a regime of experts to manage, maintain, and decommission; a centralized power grid; large states to fund and secure them; and, then, a stable political environment to keep the waste safe for at least the next 10,000 years.

The technology is only 80 years old, modern states have existed for about 200, humans have only been farming for 5,000, and most nuclear waste storage plans operate at a 100-year time-span. To put it mildly, an energy grid dependent on nuclear means having lot of trust in today’s political institutions.

The problem with nuclear clearly isn’t technical, it’s political. The prospect of scaling up nuclear to the level needed to replace fossil fuels begs two questions.

First, are our political institutions robust enough?

Second, do we want the world that nuclear creates?

A world full of nuclear power plants is a world of highly centralised power, an energy system removed from people by an army of specialised engineers and, to protect it, a maximum-security state. To think that any technology can be grabbed out of the current system and scaled up without consequences is a profoundly un-ecological idea.

Similarly the idea of going 100% renewable and increasing total energy use, as advocated by ecomodern socialists like Aaron Bastani and Christian Parenti also has its faults. As Stan Cox points out,

“There’s nothing wrong with the ‘100-percent renewable’ part… it’s with the ‘100 percent of demand’ assumption that [scientists] go dangerously off the rails. At least in affluent countries, the challenge is not only to shift the source of our energy but to transform society so that it operates on far less end-use energy while assuring sufficiency for all. That would bring a 100-percent-renewable energy system within closer reach and avoid the outrageous technological feats and gambles required by high-energy dogma. It would also have the advantage of being possible.

The idea that there will be so much solar energy that “we won’t know what to do with it” also merits a second glance. True, solar energy is practically infinite. But unlike the alternatives, it’s dissipated and difficult to collect, transport, concentrate, and store.

It’s like trying to catch the rain when you’ve spent the last two hundred years drawing water from enormous underground reservoirs. It would mean more than democratising ownership of technology, but a total reboot.

And even if we were able to press that restart button, this luxurious future would require infrastructure, land, resources, and energy to build. These are unfortunately not super-abundant, but, by definition, limited. Simply grabbing technology from the machine of profit won’t solve this problem.

Energy or barbarism

It’s here that we’re forced to really think through the ecological position. Capitalism, as Andreas Malm argues, was built on coal and oil, and is inextricable from it.

The extraction and burning of coal made the creation of the working class possible, and it generated new forms of hierarchy and inequality. In other words, any technology developed in the current system isn’t neutral—by its very design, it shapes relationships between people and nature.

Being an ecologist today certainly doesn’t mean refusing to improve humanity’s lot, but it also means having a real conversation about the limits we face.

And if an alternative system is to be at all ecological, it would mean democratically weighing the costs and benefits of different technologies: which ones we want, and which ones we don’t. That’s not anti-modern, that’s a basic requirement for a better world.

So how do we get out of this mess? Now, more than ever, we need visionary proposals and new imaginaries. But, with the ecomodernists, this gesture to “think big” gets taken to the extreme: any “buts” and you’re branded as, basically, eco-Thatcher.

Today, breathless modernism—the refusal to collectively discuss limits—is no longer tenable. The dismissal of any political discussion of limits has real costs; Ironically, modernity without limits will send us back to the dark ages.

For Andreas Malm, there is only one option. If we want to avoid a new dark age, we can’t just collectivize the grid. We have to dismantle it and build a new, very different one. And if those driving the train of modernity can’t see the catastrophe up ahead, we’ll need to pull the emergency brake.

Politics is the collective deliberation of the future we want. It follows that we would also need to debate the things we really don’t want, the things whose price we refuse to pay.

Without this kind of discussion, we’ll never have a truly sustainable society. Talking about limits isn’t constraining, it’s liberating—perhaps paradoxically, it’s the basic requirement for building a ecological future of real abundance.

[IB Publisher's note: Nuclear power is no solution to the devastation we face with climate change and ecosystem collapse. The "ecological activists", like Stuart Brand (Whole Earth Catalog), James Lovelock (Gaia Principle), James Hanson (NASA scientist) and George Monbiot (Environmental author) among others, argue that nuclear power is the is the only energy source that can keep civilization going. That's only partially true. The only thing that can keep nuclear power going is fossil fuel driven technology like trains, cement trucks, semi-tractor-trailers, bulldozers, derricks, and all the other coal, oil and gas powered portable technology needed to build, maintain and dispose of nuclear power plants. Keep in mind the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear meltdowns have not been "fixed" because they are out of the headlines. In human terms all the inevitable future nuclear accidents are "forever".  There is no way to clean them up. You can only try to tightly contain or widely distribute the damage. Alternative energy (wind, solar, dams, ocean wave) will never run the industrial system we have now. At best they may sustain a much smaller human population at a level of worldwide consumption last seen in the early 18th. We could still maintain the fine arts, libraries and universities in an agrarian setting, but forget about all those air-conditioned glass-sealed seaside skyscrapers.]

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Magical Thinking of Ecomodernism

SUBHEAD: Do high-consuming nations, like the USA need to keep growing their GDP forever?

By Jason Hickel on 4 April 2018 for JasonHickel.org -
(https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/4/4/the-magical-thinking-of-ecomodernism)


Image above: On November 5, 2017, at the beginning of COP 23, the activist organization Attac and the alliance Ende Gelände demonstrated against lignite-fired power generation in the Rhenish lignite mining district not far from Bonn. From (http://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-04-05/the-magical-thinking-of-ecomodernism/).

I recently wrote an article for Fast Company explaining why “green growth” is not a thing. I looked at three high-profile studies showing that even aggressive taxes and rapid improvements in technological efficiency will not be enough to cut global resource use as long as we keep growing the world economy.

 Right now we are consuming about 85 billion tons of material stuff per year, exceeding the sustainable threshold by 70%. According to the UN, our resource use will rise to at least 132 billion tons per year by 2050, and possibly as high as 180 billion tons.

It is on this basis that scientists have concluded that absolute decoupling of GDP from aggregate resource use is not possible. But the ecomodernists at the Breakthrough Institute aren’t convinced.

Linus Blomqvist wrote a blog post responding to my article, arguing that focusing on aggregate material flows is “misleading”, and that in reality absolute decoupling “is still a very real possibility.”

The stakes are high. After all, decoupling is the central objective of ecomodernism. No decoupling, no ecomodernism.

Blomqvist seems to agree that absolute decoupling of GDP from aggregate material use is not possible; or at least he doesn’t dispute the point.

But we needn’t worry about this fact, he says; it doesn’t matter if we keep using more and more resources each year, because aggregate material use is not a meaningful proxy for environmental impact.

 Industrial and construction materials, for instance, “account for a pretty small portion of environmental impacts like greenhouse gas emissions or land use,” and while biomass use keeps growing, land use has peaked (at least for now).

But this is cherrypicking indicators. Industrial and construction materials may contribute relatively little to greenhouse gas emissions and land use, but anyone who has ever seen (or lived next to) an open pit mine will know that they are ecological disaster zones in all sorts of other ways.

 Plus, Blomqvist’s claim about emissions and land just isn’t true (and he provides no evidence for it): cement production alone contributes 10% of anthropogenic CO2, and the transport, production and use of industrial materials is clearly linked to fossil fuel consumption.

As for biomass: let’s not pretend that land use is all that matters here. Our current method for extracting higher yields from land involves aggressive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which have already pushed us well over the planetary boundaries for biogeochemical flows.

 And those same chemicals are causing insect populations – including pollinators – to collapse, and bird populations along with them.

 Indeed, the inputs involved in industrial agriculture are a major driver of biodiversity loss, regardless of whether or not more land is being used. They are also a major driver of soil depletion, which in turn drives greenhouse gas emissions from farmland.

This is the thing about ecology, you see: everything is connected. The biomass bone is connected to the biogeochemical bone is connected to the insect bone.

And that’s why aggregate material flows are in fact an important indicator of what’s happening to our planet. Sure, some material use has more dramatic impact than others.

 But no material use is impact-free. You can’t keep increasing aggregate material extraction and consumption indefinitely without increasing environmental impact right along with it. To believe that doubling or tripling our existing aggregate resource draw isn’t going to cause problems is magical thinking.

Blomqvist’s next move is similar to the first. He says that while absolute decoupling of aggregate resource use may not be possible (and sadly even relative decoupling of emissions has come to a halt), there are some happy isolated cases where it does seem to be happening.

Water extraction has peaked in the US, for example. And several pollutants (like sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide) have peaked or declined globally. Blomqvist says this counts as “significant progress”.

If this is the best the ecomodernists have to offer, I despair. First of all, you can’t look at nations (and particularly rich nations like the US) in isolation, because they have outsourced much of their environmental impact abroad.

If you count all the water extraction involved in producing and shipping the imports that the US consumes, American water use is going up, not down. As for sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide – yes, there have been gains, and we should celebrate them. But pollutants like these constitute one of the few examples where the much-misunderstood Environmental Kuznets Curve actually works.

Ecologists have pointed out for years that the EKC doesn’t hold for most other impacts. So as a defense for endless growth, I’m afraid Blomqvist’s example just won’t do.

I agree with Blomqvist that we should strive to accelerate resource efficiency. Of course we should! We need all the efficiency gains we can get. But unfortunately it’s not going to be enough, in and of itself – and we need to face up to this fact.

Tellingly, Blomqvist doesn’t engage with my claim about the rebound effect, nor about the physical limits to efficiency gains (the paper I cite by Ward et al concludes that “permanent decoupling is impossible for essential, non-substitutable resources because the efficiency gains are ultimately governed by physical limits”). We can’t just ignore these realities.

If absolute decoupling isn’t a thing, then ultimately we’re going to have to scale down global economic activity. Blomqvist doesn’t actually explain why he dislikes this conclusion so much. All he says is that degrowth “seems far-fetched”.

 I have no idea what he means by this. But could it really be more far-fetched than achieving what is physically impossible? Perhaps Blomqvist – or anyone at the Breakthrough Institute – could explain why they think that rich, high-consuming nations (like the US, for instance) need to keep growing their GDP (forever?), when we know that additional growth is not generating any better social outcomes.

Given how powerful the scale effect of growth is when it comes to driving ecological breakdown, it just doesn’t make sense to take it off the table.

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Heal the Planet for a Profit

SUBHEAD: Billionaires have solution to "How To Make A Profit From Defeating Climate Change”

By Raul Ilargi Meijer on 16 December 2016 for the Automatic Earth - 
(https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2016/12/heal-the-planet-for-profit/)


Image above: Men saving the Earth by exploring space - Composite photo of Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) and Elon Musk (Spacex). From (http://share.cat/up-up-away-back).

If you ever wondered what the odds are of mankind surviving, let alone ‘defeating’, climate change, look no further than the essay the Guardian published this week, written by Michael Bloomberg and Mark Carney. It proves beyond a moonlight shadow of a doubt that the odds are infinitesimally close to absolute zero (Kelvin, no Hobbes).

Yes, Bloomberg is the media tycoon and former mayor of New York (which he famously turned into a 100% clean and recyclable city). And since central bankers are as we all know without exception experts on climate change, as much as they are on full-contact crochet, it makes perfect sense that Bank of England governor Carney adds his two -trillion- cents.

Conveniently, you don’t even have to read the piece, the headline tells you all you need and then some: “How To Make A Profit From Defeating Climate Change” really nails it. The entire mindset on display in just a few words. If that’s what they went for, kudo’s are due.

These fine gents probably actually believe that this is perfectly in line with our knowledge of, say, human history, of evolution, of the laws of physics, and of -mass- psychology.

All of which undoubtedly indicate to them that we can and will defeat the problems we have created -and still are-, literally with the same tools and ideas -money and profit- that we use to create them with. Nothing ever made more sense.

That these problems originated in the same relentless quest for profit that they now claim will help us get rid of them, is likely a step too far for them; must have been a class they missed. “We destroyed it for profit” apparently does not in their eyes contradict “we’ll fix it for profit too”. Not one bit. It does, though. It’s indeed the very core of what is going wrong.

Profit, or money in general, is all these people live for, it’s their altar. That’s why they are successful in this world. It’s also why the world is doomed. Is there any chance I could persuade you to dwell on that for a few seconds? That, say, Bloomberg and Carney, and all they represent, are the problem dressed up as the solution? That our definition of success is what dooms us?

Philosophers, religious people, or you and me, may struggle with the question “what’s the purpose of life?”. These guys do not. The purpose of life is to make a profit. The earth and all the life it harbors exist to kill, drill, excavate and burn down, if that means you can make a profit. And after that you repair it all for a profit. In their view, the earth doesn’t turn of its own accord after all, it’s money that makes it go round.

The worrisome thing is that Mark and Michael will be listened to, that they are allowed a seat at the table in the first place, whereas you and I are not. A table that will be filled with plenty more of their ilk, as the announcement of Bill Gates’ billionaire philantropist energy fund says loud and clear:

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and a group of high-profile executives are investing $1 billion in a fund to spur clean energy technology and address global climate change a year after the Paris climate agreement.

Gates launched the Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund on Monday along with billionaire entrepreneurs such as Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg, Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma and Amazon.com chief Jeff Bezos. The fund seeks to increase financing of emerging energy research and reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to help meet goals set in Paris, according to a statement by the investor group known as the Breakthrough Energy Coalition.

Yes, many of the same folk and/or their minions were sitting at the table with Trump on Dec 14. To see if there are any profits to be made. When a profit is involved they have no trouble sitting down with the same guy they insulted and warned against day after grueling day mere weeks ago. They have no trouble doing it because they insulted him for a potential profit too. It’s business, it’s not personal.

Billionaires will save us from ourselves, and make us -and themselves- rich while doing it. What is not to like? Well, for one thing, has anybody lately checked the energy footprint of Messrs. Bloomberg, Gates, Ma, Zuckerberg, Bezos et al?

Is it possible that perhaps they’re trying to pull our collective wool over our eyes by pretending to care about those footprints? That maybe these ‘clean energy’ initiatives are merely a veil behind which they intend to extend -and expand- said footprints?

The ones in that sphere who wind up being most successful are those who are most convincing in making us believe that all we need to do to avert a climate disaster is to use some different form of energy. That all the talk about zero emissions and clean energy is indeed reflecting our one and only possible reality.

That all we need to do is to switch to solar and wind and electric cars to save ourselves (and they’ll build them for a subsidy). That that will end the threat and we can keep on doing what we always did, and keep on growing it all and as the cherry on the cake, make a profit off the endeavor.

None of it flies even a little. First of all, as I said last week in Mass Extinction and Mass Insanity, there are many more problems with our present lifestyles than ‘only’ climate change, or the use of carbon. Like the extinction of two-thirds of all vertebrate life in just 50 years leading up to 2020. There’s -close to- nothing wind and solar will do to alleviate that.

Because it’s not oil itself, or carbon in general, that kills; our use of it does. And the rush to build an entire new global infrastructure that is needed to use new energy forms, which will depend on using huge amounts of carbon, is more likely to kill off that globe than to save it. “Carbon got us in this, let’s use lots more of it to get us out”.

The trillions in -public- investment that are would be needed will make us all dirt poor too, except for the gentlemen mentioned above and a handful of others who invent stuff that they manage to make us believe will save us. Still convinced?

The lifestyles of the last 10 generations of us, especially westerners, are characterized more than anything else by the huge increase in the use of energy, of calories and joules. As we went from wood to peat to coal to oil and gas, the energy return on energy investment kept going higher. But that stopped with oil and gas. And from now on in it will keep going down.

“Free carbon excess” was a one-off ‘gift’ from nature. It will not continue and it will not return. Different forms of carbon have offered us a one-time source of free energy that we will not have again. The idea that we can replace it with ‘clean energy’ is ludicrous.

The energy return on energy investment doesn’t even come close. And you can’t run a society with our present levels of complexity on a much lower ‘net energy’. We must dress down. No profit in that, sorry.

We built what we have now with oil at an EROEI of 100:1. There are no forms of energy left that come remotely close, including new, unconventional, forms of oil itself. Peak oil has been a much maligned and misunderstood concept, but its essence stands: when it takes more energy to ‘produce’ energy than it delivers, there will be no production.

This graph is a few years old, and wind and solar may have gained a few percentage points in yield, but it’s still largely correct. And it will continue to be.

We have done with all that free energy what all other life forms do when ‘gifted’ with an excess of available energy: spend it as fast as possible, proliferate to speed up the process (we went from less than 1 billion people to 7 billion in under 200 years, 2 billion to 7 billion in 100 years) and, most of all, waste it.

Ever wonder why everybody drives a car that is ten times heavier then her/himself and has a 10% efficiency rate in its energy use? Why there’s an infrastructure everywhere that necessitates for every individual to use 1000 times more energy than it would take herself to get from A to B on foot? Sounds a lot like deliberately wasteful behavior, doesn’t it?

The essence here is that while we were building this entire wasteful world of us, we engaged in the denying and lying behavior that typifies us as a species more than anything: we disregarded externalities. And there is no reason to believe we would not continue to do just that when we make the illusionary switch to ‘clean’ energy.

To begin with, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says there’s no such thing as clean energy. So stop using the term. Second, that we call wind and solar ‘clean energy’ means we’re already ignoring externalities again.

We pretend that producing windmills and solar panels does not produce pollution (or we wouldn’t call it ‘clean’). While enormous amounts of carbon are used in the production process, and it involves pollution, loss of land, loss of life, loss of resources (once you burn it it’s gone).

An example: If we want to ‘save’ the earth, we would do good to start by overthrowing the way we produce food. It presently easily takes more than 10 calories of energy -mostly carbon- for every calorie of food we make.

Then we wrap it all in (oil-based) plastic and transport it sometimes 1000s of miles before it’s on our plates. And at the end of this process, we will have thrown away half of it. It’s hard to think of a more wasteful process.

It’s a process obviously devised and executed by idiots. But it’s profitable. There is a profit to be made in wasting precious resources. And there is a key lesson in that. There is no profit in producing food in a more efficient way. At least not for the industries that produce it. And perhaps not even for you, if you produce most of your food – it takes ‘precious’ time.

It would still be hugely beneficial, though. And there’s the key. There is no direct link between what is good for us, and the planet, on the one side, and profit, money, on the other.

What follows from that is that it’s not the people whose entire lives are centered around money who are the most obvious choices to ‘save the planet’. If anything, they are the least obvious.

But in an economic and political system that is itself as focused on money as ours is, they are still the ones who are allowed to assume this role. It’s a circle jerk around, and then into, a drain.

Mankind’s only chance to not destroy its planet lies in diverging from all other species in that not all energy available to it, is used up as fast as possible. But that’s a big challenge. It would, speaking from a purely philosophical angle, truly separate us from nature for the first time ever, and we must wonder if that’s desirable.

We would need to gain much more knowledge of who we are and what makes us do what we do, and why. But that is not going to happen if we focus on making a profit. Using less energy means less waste means less profit.

Yes, there may be energy sources that produce a bit less waste, a bit less pollution, than those that are carbon based. But first, our whole infrastructure has been built by carbon, and second, even if another energy source would become available, we would push to grow its use ever more, and end up initially in the same mess, and then a worse one.

I stumbled upon an excellent example of the effects of all this today:


Image above: Rush Hour in Los Angeles, California, on the uncrossable twelve lane Interstate Route 405 (or San Diego Freeway). From (https://www.bluewin.ch/fr/infos/faits-divers/2015/8/3/heure-de-pointe--vues-aeriennes-du-trafic-de-los-angeles.html).

The Shattering Effect Of Roads On Nature
Rampant road building has shattered the Earth’s land into 600,000 fragments, most of which are too tiny to support significant wildlife, a new study has revealed. The researchers warn roadless areas are disappearing and that urgent action is needed to protect these last wildernesses, which help provide vital natural services to humanity such as clean water and air. The impact of roads extends far beyond the roads themselves, the scientists said, by enabling forest destruction, pollution, the splintering of animal populations and the introduction of deadly pests.

An international team of researchers analysed open-access maps of 36m km of road and found that over half of the 600,000 fragments of land in between roads are very small – less than 1km2. A mere 7% are bigger than 100km2, equivalent to a square area just 10km by 10km (6mi by 6 mi).

Furthermore, only a third of the roadless areas were truly wild, with the rest affected by farming or people.

The last remaining large roadless areas are rainforests in the Amazon and Indonesia and the tundra and forests in the north of Russia and Canada. Virtually all of western Europe, the eastern US and Japan have no areas at all that are unaffected by roads.


It’s a good example because it raises the question: how much of this particular issue do you think will be solved by the promotion of electric cars, or windmills? How much of it do you think can be solved for a profit? Because if there’s no profit in it, it will not happen.

One more for the philosophy class: I know many people will be inclined to suggest options like nuclear fusion. Or zero point energy. And I would suggest that not only do these things exist in theory only, which is always a bad thing if you have an immediate problem. But more than that: imagine providing the human race with a source of endless energy, and then look at what it’s done with the free energy available to it over the past ten generations.

Give man more energy and he’ll just destroy his world faster. It’s not about carbon, it’s about energy and about what you yourself do with it. And no, money and profit will not reverse climate change, or any other detrimental effects they have on our lives. They will only make them worse.

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A cynical "eco-friendly" US Army

SUBHEAD: The US military continues to prepare for war as it hides behind green smokescreen of environmentalism.

By Jon Letman on 5 October 2016 for Truth-Out -
(http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/37872-a-cynical-environmentalism-protecting-nature-to-prepare-for-war)


Image above: The U.S. Navy has rolled out the Rivereen Command Boat, the first military vessel designed to run on  algae based fuel making it "eco-friendly" even with four automatic gun mounts. From (https://www.wired.com/2010/10/navy-debuts-first-eco-friendly-ship-a-mean-green-riverine-machine/).

Painfully aware that the internet now delivers the carnage of war onto our screens in real time, the US military has made a concerted effort to redefine itself as a "helping" force, offering disaster relief and defending the weak and vulnerable. Increasingly, this includes protecting the environment.

By rebranding itself as a guardian of nature, the military improves its own public image and achieves a veneer of unassailability while bolstering its primary mission, which is, of course, the ability to wage war. In reality, war's brutal and merciless goal of domination and control is the furthest thing imaginable from nurturing or preservation.

"The number one priority of the Army is readiness. We have to be ready for war," said Dr. Christine Altendorf, director of the Pacific Region US Army Installation Management Command. "Readiness requires training, and training requires environmental stewardship, which goes hand in hand. Sustaining the ability to train requires protecting the environment."

Altendorf was speaking on September 5 in Honolulu, Hawaii, at a panel discussion hosted by the US State Department entitled "Department of Defense Conservation: A Good News Story."

The event was held at the US Pavilion of the World Conservation Congress (WCC), a gathering organized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This year's WCC, attended by over 10,000 conservationists, scientists, government leaders, NGOs and members of civil society from 192 countries, also included representatives of the Army, Navy and Air Force who were eager to talk about caring for the natural world.

A Good News Story
With more than 12.4 million acres of Army-controlled land that, according to Altendorf, include 156 installations, 1.3 million acres of wetlands, over 82,000 archaeological sites, 109 Native American sacred sites and 223 endangered species, there's plenty of environment for the Army to protect.

Altendorf said the US Army spends between $1 billion and $1.5 billion annually for renewable energy, water and waste programs, as well as the cleanup of former Department of Defense sites.

The impact of the US military can be found in places like South Korea; Okinawa, Japan; Guam; the Philippines; the Marshall Islands and Hawaii, where contamination from fuel spills, chemical weapons, depleted uranium, unexploded ordnance and bomb blast craters have become part of the landscape.

The day before the opening of the WCC, as President Obama arrived in Honolulu to speak to Pacific Island nation leaders about the expansion of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, protesters demonstrated on the campus of the University of Hawaii against issues ranging from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to military testing and live-fire training.

When Obama spoke about the world's largest protected marine area, he did not mention the broad exemptions for the military to operate within the newly expanded conservation area in the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

The Elephant in the Room
The WCC offered a dizzying array of more than 1,300 panel discussions, workshops, meetings, talks and exhibitions considering everything from the Amazon rainforests and biocultural conservation to world heritage and zoos, but there was very little discussion of how militarism, conflict and war impact nature and people.

When asked whether the WCC is an appropriate venue for discussing the environmental impacts of the military, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Victoria Tauli-Corpuz told Truthout, "Of course it's relevant because a lot of the bases are really polluting. These are the ones that are causing heavy metal, toxic poisoning and all that. But I'm not sure that IUCN is dealing with this issue at all."

In 2012, when the WCC convened on South Korea's Jeju Island, environmental and human rights defenders were angered as the IUCN met just miles from where South Korean police were arresting protesters trying to stop the construction of a large naval base, which opponents said was being built at the expense of the environment and the island's culture.

Retired US Army Colonel and diplomat Ann Wright attended this year's WCC and told Truthout that it is crucial to address the destructive effects of military operations on nature.

"The heavy funding the IUCN gets from governments is undoubtedly the rationale for not addressing this 'elephant in the room' in a conference for the protection of the endangered planet -- a tragic commentary on a powerful organization that should acknowledge all pressures on the planet," Wright said.

Why Do We Care?
Also talking up Department of Defense conservation was Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Installations, Environment and Energy Miranda Ballentine, who spoke of a "good news/bad news story."

"Essentially, what we've done is built perfect islands of habitat within the [military base] fence line," Ballentine said. This limits the range of threatened and endangered species, which "could encroach on the military mission." For this reason, she said it's important to expand conservation efforts beyond the base with the goal of "protecting a species from a landscape perspective and enhancing the military mission."

Spanning 9 million acres globally with 115 species documented among 161 installations and 44 range complexes, threatened and endangered species on Defense Department land, Ballentine said, are five times denser than on US Fish and Wildlife Service land.

"Why do we care about conservation on military bases?" Ballentine asked. "It comes down to natural infrastructure. Just like we invest in our built infrastructure, we invest, protect and conserve our natural infrastructure [which] provides services back to us as human beings."

Need for a Critical Space
Among those challenging the military's environmental claims at the WCC were Okinawan and Japanese delegates who ran a booth sharing information about how the forced construction of a new US Marine air base on reclaimed land at Cape Henoko in northern Okinawa threatens coral, coastal and terrestrial ecosystems and tramples human rights.

The outspoken mayor of Okinawa's Nago city, Susumu Inamine, came to the WCC to present Okinawa's case against a plan that would require dumping 21 million cubic meters of sand and dirt imported from seven Japanese locations into Oura Bay to reclaim land for the proposed base. The bay is recognized by environmental and scientific organizations as one of the most biologically rich marine environments in East Asia.

Hideki Yoshikawa -- the international director of the Save the Dugong Campaign Center, an NGO seeking to protect a vulnerable sea mammal threatened by the planned construction -- is working with Okinawan officials to challenge a Japanese government environmental impact assessment. Yoshikawa is also petitioning the IUCN to take a stronger position on the Henoko base. "The IUCN needs to create a critical space in which the environmental impacts of war, military exercises and [bases] are seriously discussed," Yoshikawa told Truthout.

Dr. Mariko Abe, a coral reef biologist with the Nature Conservation Society of Japan has been monitoring Okinawa's coral reefs since 1998. Her organization has been petitioning the IUCN to issue recommendations in support of dugong conservation since 2000. Abe explained that the land reclamation project threatens to introduce invasive species and would irreversibly alter the biodiverse bay, which is home to at least 34 noteworthy recently reported species and 262 threatened and endangered marine species.

Abe said support for conservation work should go directly to scientists rather than be routed through the military.

Professor John Knox, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, said military base construction and associated activities should be held to the same requirements under human rights laws as other potentially environmentally damaging enterprises, such as extractive industries like mining, oil and timber.

This should include fully informed participation by affected local people, participation in decision-making, remedies for violations and the ability to exercise rights of free expression and association.

"You should absolutely be able to protest and get together with other people to protest and not worry about being thrown in jail as long as you do it peacefully," Knox said.

Our Mission Is Clear
In keeping with its slogan, "Stewards of the Sea: Defending Freedom. Protecting the Environment," Rear Admiral John W. Korka said the Navy's mission is clear:

"We have a global presence to project power from the sea and at sea, to preserve our freedom of the United States. But we also value trust and have a responsibility to preserve our environment through good stewardship."

That mission includes training exercises in over 4.4 million square miles of sea and along 500 miles of coastline where 70 global naval installations serve as launching platforms to deploy military forces. Korka said the Navy spends some $30 million a year for marine mammal protection programs.

He described monitoring marine mammals, turtles, seabirds and invertebrates using sophisticated underwater acoustic technology and satellite tracking systems to determine the impacts of naval activities. In July 2016, the Ninth Circuit court ordered the Navy to limit its use of long-range sonar, which could severely harm marine mammals.

Korka also spoke of a program to relocate Laysan albatrosses and their eggs from their chosen nesting site near a runway at Kauai's Pacific Missile Range Facility with the goal of protecting the birds and preventing aircraft bird strikes.

Meanwhile, far to the west, in the Northern Mariana Islands, environmental defenders -- Indigenous Chamorro and others -- are fighting to prevent small islands, identified by the IUCN as hotspots of biodiversity, from becoming live fire test ranges.

Speaking specifically about Guam, Pågan and Tinian islands, Korka talked about inviting public comment, adding, "I do think [the Navy's] transparency and commitment to the environment is pretty sincere and pretty honest and open."

Dr. Michael Bevacqua, an assistant professor of Chamorro studies at the University of Guam, called statements like Korka's "a perfect example of greenwashing;" portraying them as an attempt by the military to distract onlookers from the deeper reality of environments poisoned by the military.
"If these military activities are so good for the environment, why don't they do them in Yellowstone or near Mt. Rushmore?" Bevacqua asked.

A Toxic Legacy
Speaking about the Navy's environmental legacy on Guam, Victoria-Lola Leon Guerrero, co-chair of the Independence for Guam Task Force said, "A significant portion of over 10,000 comments on the Navy's Environmental Impact Statement expressed serious concerns about continued environmental injustice and land taking."

"Our community is burned out from continuously being asked to give what are essentially powerless comments. The Navy has proven time and again that our people and environment are not their priorities."

Leon Guerrero's family land was contaminated by the US military after World War II when she said it was used to bury war waste. In 2008, the Army Corps of Engineers assessed the property and, three years later, told her family they found total petroleum hydrocarbons as oil, benzo(a)pyrene, arsenic, lead, mercury, pesticides and PCBs in the surface soil and metals and pesticides in the subsurface soil.

 "They unearthed drums of chemicals but ran out of money midway through the project and abandoned it," Leon Guerrero said. Today, her family still doesn't know the specific levels or amounts of contamination, the volumes of toxicity or the associated health risks.
She and others on Guam have expressed concerns about plans for new live-fire testing ranges that will accompany a buildup of US Marines in the region.

But Ballentine said, "very precision weaponry" meant that on Air Force ranges "we actually damage, when we're testing bombs, less than 10 percent of the range which is why ranges have become some of the most pristine natural habitat left in the United States."

Today, US military presence is expanding across the Asia-Pacific region, an area already drastically altered by war. From Subic Bay in the Philippines to the Korean Peninsula, Okinawa, Japan, Guam, the Marshall Islands and Hawaii, the United States military has created countless opportunities to clean up and restore damaged landscapes.

As recently as 2015, civilians were  injured in Oahu's Makua Valley, where unexploded ordnance from military testing remains. Last May, in the Marshall Islands, a nation used by the US for nuclear testing, a woman was killed by a World War II-era munition on Mili Atoll.

During President Obama's August visit to Laos, he committed to contribute to that country's ongoing efforts to clear cluster bombs dropped by the US, which still cover roughly one-quarter of the entire nation -- the same percentage that cover the Hawaiian island of Kahoolawe, formerly used by the Navy for testing bombs.

But even as the US military invests billions of dollars in environmental conservation, their efforts are met with skepticism by those who wonder if protecting the environment in order to more effectively wage war is true conservation.

The Air Force's Ballentine said the bottom line is: "It's absolutely essential that your United States military has the opportunity to test and train in real-world situations and hopefully that's all we do and we never actually have to take that into a real-world war situation."

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Review of "Dark Age America"

SUBHEAD: No, we aren’t going to work cooperatively to painlessly transition to a brave new green economy.

By Mary Wildfire on 28 September 2016 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-09-28/dark-age-america-review#)


Image above: Detail of cover of John Michael Greer's new book "Dark Age America" From original article.

John Michael Greer’s latest nonfiction book looks at the likely trajectory for North America over the next five centuries. It’s too late, he says, to avert a collapse and ensuing dark age. Perhaps if we had embraced the alternative technologies that Greer himself was involved in exploring in the 1980s we could have avoided this fate, but instead we chose Ronald Reagan, Morning in America, and a continued addiction to fossil fuels and economic growth.

Now a combination of climate change and resource depletion, together with the cultural changes that reliably go along with a failing empire, guarantees that we will follow the time-honored path of previous collapsing civilizations.

As with Greer’s previous books, I have to take his word for these historical patterns as I’m not enough of a student of history to have my own opinion; but he does cite sources for many of these claims. These citations in turn link to a reading list. As with the last Greer book I reviewed on this site (Decline and Fall: the end of empire and the future of democracy in 21^st century America), those readers who closely follow his writing will not find a great deal that’s new in this book.

But for anyone who doesn’t follow the Archdruid Report faithfully, there is much food for thought here—and despite the similar theme, little overlap with Decline and Fall. Greer spends little time persuading the reader that “a hard rain’s a-gonna fall”—instead he focuses on the likely outcomes over the next five centuries, after which he thinks a renaissance of some kind may come. He looks especially at North America, but much of his history-informed theorizing will apply to Europe and elsewhere too.

The titles of the chapters provide a pretty good overview of the themes: The Wake of Industrial Civilization is the first chapter and introduction, followed by the Ecological Aftermath, the Demographic Consequences, the Political Unraveling, the Economic Collapse, the Suicide of Science, the Twilight of Technology, the Dissolution of Culture; and the Road to a Renaissance.

The Ecological Aftermath focuses on climate change while acknowledging other environmental assaults of our society, notably upon the oceans, but he also mentions topsoil loss and “the long-term consequences of industrial America’s frankly brainless dumping of persistent radiological and chemical poisons”… the results of that last one will outlast the dark age.

He projects that North America will mostly dry out, with deserts overtaking all of the US Southwest and into the central plains, whose grassland will extend all the way to the Allegheny Plateau.

The most habitable areas, he thinks, will be in New England, the Eastern seaboard (that is, the new seaboard after rising seas take out the cities of the current coastline) the Great Lakes region, and some of the Pacific coast. He bases this on historical patterns when our continent was warmer than today.

This leads into the Demographic Consequences. Without the fossil fuel subsidy, our land will support nowhere near today’s population, and the ecological damage will reduce its carrying capacity further. Large-scale migration is also inevitable.

The Political Unraveling covers familiar terrain; you could call it class struggle. He refers to the time of “elite senility” in which those who run our world for their own benefit lost the ability and inclination to respond to crises. This opens the way to the warbands who will eventually rise to take power after some crisis… not a pleasant scenario but all too realistic.

The Economic Collapse looks at what Greer calls “intermediation” which is the habit of inserting specialists and bureaucrats between producers and consumers. With the breakdown will come “disintermediation” or a reduction in complexity. Much of this has to do with the end of the subsidy provided by fossil fuels.

The Suicide of Science, on the other hand, has more to do with the mistakes of scientists and those who speak for them. He includes here the complete change in what we are told about nutrition, the venal manipulation of studies by the pharmaceutical industry, and the arrogance of prominent atheists.

This is compared with the fate of intellectuals of earlier civilizations in decline—the association between these intellectuals and the elite led to their victimization.

The Twilight of Technology might not be what you’d expect, after that. Instead, Greer insists on looking at technologies individually, and asking whether they are affordable, useful, and actually improve lives. Many fashionable ones fail this test, once you take externalities into account.

Here Greer makes the important point that to be useful, technologies often need to have a suite of associated technologies supported, and so it would be very useful to think through which technologies are worth preserving and therefore looking into maintaining the associated suites (he didn’t mention it, but it strikes me that bicycles are said to be the most efficient means of transportation known; what can we use for tires in the deindustrial future?)

The final chapter is, as you might expect, the one where he talks about solutions.

First he dispenses with the notion that some technical miracle will allow us to continue living in accustomed, wasteful ways—or that some apocalypse will end the whole show and free us from having to do anything about anything.

His advice amounts to two things: to protect yourself and ease the transition, “collapse now and avoid the rush.” In other words, transition to a lifestyle that doesn’t depend on a global economy, money, and fossil fuels.

Perhaps, he suggests, it’s already too late to move to the country, grow your own food and so forth unless you are already well along with that program. But finding ways to do for yourself and your family, and to produce something your neighbors will need, is a sensible course.

The other focus here is what you can do for humanity, to preserve the good parts of our culture for a future civilization that will emerge after the dark age. Here he mentions his own project of getting into letterpress printing, as books can be a durable way to preserve information.

The difference between Greer’s works and those of authors covering similar terrain is that Greer refuses to sugarcoat anything. No, we aren’t going to painlessly transition to a brave new green economy; and no, we aren’t going to work cooperatively to bring all of humanity (not to mention other life forms) through the coming crises with as little pain as possible.

For a reader willing to face hard realities, this book is well worth reading.

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Nuclear power and climate failure

SUBHEAD: Evidence suggests entrenched commitments to nuclear power may actually be counterproductive.

By Andrea Germanos on 22 August 2016 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/08/22/new-study-shows-how-clinging-nuclear-power-means-climate-failure)


Image above: Calder Hall in Cumbria, England was the world’s first nuclear power station (and UK nuclear weapons development site). It is now decommissioned and is used  primarily for support decommissioning of other historic plants, and reprocessing fuel from UK and international nuclear reactors (and weapons). From (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/nuclearpower/10392686/A-new-dawn-for-nuclear-power.html).

While it's been touted by some energy experts as a so-called "bridge" to help slash carbon emissions, a new study suggests that a commitment to nuclear power may in fact be a path towards climate failure.

For their study, researchers at the University of Sussex and the Vienna School of International Studies grouped European countries by levels of nuclear energy usage and plans, and compared their progress with part of the European Union's (EU) 2020 Strategy.

That 10-year strategy (pdf), proposed in 2010, calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by least 20 percent compared to 1990 levels and increasing the share of renewable energy in final energy consumption to 20 percent.

The researchers found that "progress in both carbon emissions reduction and in adoption of renewables appears to be inversely related to the strength of continuing nuclear commitments."

For the study, the authors looked at three groupings. First is those with no nuclear energy. Group 1 includes Denmark, Ireland, and Portugal.

Group 2, which counts Germany and Sweden among its members, includes those with some continuing nuclear commitments, but also with plans to decommission existing nuclear plants.

The third group, meanwhile, includes countries like Hungary and the UK which have plans to maintain current nuclear units or even expand nuclear capacity.

"With reference to reductions in carbon emissions and adoption of renewables, clear relationships emerge between patterns of achievement in these 2020 Strategy goals and the different groupings of nuclear use," they wrote.

For non-nuclear Group 1 countries, the average percentage of reduced emissions was six percent, and they had an average of a 26 percent increase in renewable energy consumption.

Group 2 had the highest average percentage of reduced emissions at 11 percent, and they also boosted renewable energy to 19 percent.

Pro-nuclear Group 3, meanwhile, had their emissions on average go up three percent, and they had the smallest increase in renewable shares—16 percent.

"Looked at on its own, nuclear power is sometimes noisily propounded as an attractive response to climate change," said Andy Stirling, professor of science and technology policy at the University of Sussex, in a media statement. "Yet if alternative options are rigorously compared, questions are raised about cost-effectiveness, timeliness, safety, and security."

"Looking in detail at historic trends and current patterns in Europe, this paper substantiates further doubts," he continued. "By suppressing better ways to meet climate goals, evidence suggests entrenched commitments to nuclear power may actually be counterproductive," he said.

The new study focused on Europe, and Benjamin Sovacool, professor of energy policy and director of the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex, stated, "If nothing else, our paper casts doubt on the likelihood of a nuclear renaissance in the near-term, at least in Europe."

Yet advocates of clean energy over on the other side of the Atlantic said the recent plan to close the last remaining nuclear power plant in California and replace it with renewable energy marked the "end of an atomic era" and said it could serve as "a clear blueprint for fighting climate change."

NRDC president Rhea Suh wrote of the proposal:

"It proves we can cut our carbon footprint with energy efficiency and renewable power, even as our aging nuclear fleet nears retirement. And it strikes a blow against the central environmental challenge of our time, the climate change that threatens our very future."

The new study was published in the journal Climate Policy.
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Burning Man sucks!

SUBHEAD: Your desert party produces about the same amount of greenhouse gas as the nation of Swaziland.

By Katie Herzog on 21 August 2015 for Grist Magazine -
(http://grist.org/article/hey-burning-man-your-desert-party-sucks-for-the-rest-of-us/)


Image above: An aerial view of the Burning Man site looks like a uncontrolled oil rig fire. From original article.

Get ready, folks! The most magical time of year is almost upon us (August 30th to September 11th 2015).

That’s right: Burning Man.

Lest you mistake me for a tech billionaire with a penchant for fuzzy boots, hula hoops, group showers, and dudes named Dusty Unicorn — au contraire.

The reason I love Burning Man is because it’s the time of year when Burners gather up their MDMA (ecstasy)  and their body paint and commence to building tiny houses out of garbage or whatever it is they do out there in the desert.

It’s like the all the world’s performance artists get sucked up to Black Rock Heaven and the rest of us get a whole week without hearing about how Burning Man changed your life.

Even better — now that Burning Man has become a destination for wealthy brogrammers and venture capitalists instead of old freaks, it’s also the best time of year to visit the city with the highest concentration of Burners: San Francisco. See you soon, SF!

Now, nobody needs a reason to hate Burning Man; it can just be a feeling you have, like the way you hate strawberries or The Wire. But, if you ever need to justify your loathing of the annual pilgrimage to Black Rock City, here’s a great reason: Burning Man is bad for the planet.

This year, 70,000 people will land in Black Rock City (that is, if the apocalyptic bug infestation doesn’t change some minds). That’s 70,000 people who are traveling from all over the world, and they ain’t taking sail boats.

Plus there’s the actual burning man, a 100-plus-foot sculpture that is doused with gas and lit up while thousands of white people dance around it. So, just how much carbon does Burning Man burn?

Hard to know exactly, but last year LA Weekly unearthed a 2007 website called Cooling Man, where concerned Burners calculated the carbon footprint of the event. According to Cooling Man:

Burning Man 2006 generated an estimated 27,000 tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This figure includes emissions from participant and staff travel to and from Black Rock City, as well as on-Playa power generation, art cars, fire art and, of course, burning the man. Dividing ~27,000 tons by ~40,000 people yields an estimated ~0.7 tons per Burning Man participant.

LA Weekly reported that 0.7 tons is actually double the weekly national average per person. And if we assume that the yield per Burner hasn’t changed enormously since 2006 (although it probably has now that Mark Zuckerberg and his buddies get helicoptered in) and update the numbers to reflect the 2015 crowd estimates, this year’s event will spew a minimum of 49,000 tons of greenhouse gases.

How much is that? About the same that the nation of Swaziland (population 1.2 million) produces in a week. I mean, it’s not the Olympics or a presidential race or anything, but it does seems like a lot just to get naked in the desert and talk about your chakras.

Ironically, Burning Man’s single most important tenet, according to every Burner ever, is leave no trace. From Burning Man itself:

"Leaving No Trace" is arguably Burning Man’s most important principle (see http://burningman.org/culture/philosophical-center/10-principles/). If we don’t uphold that one, no more Black Rock City. But Leaving No Trace is not just about the playa; it’s our ethic about the whole planet. Burners are environmentalists. It’s just our nature.

Uh huh. While I fully believe Burners are more likely to drive Teslas than your average Texan, Burning Man has come a long way from its nature, and its roots. What was a small, radical gathering of genuine weirdos in 1986 is now just another wealthy man’s getaway.

Besides, environmentalism isn’t just about cleaning up after yourself: It’s about your carbon footprint.

And Burning Man’s isn’t small. Your art car is still a car, Burners. Think about it.


Image above: "The Burning Man finale: “Your first Burn Night is the ignition of a brand new meaning of self & community, where we collectively celebrate our ancient pagan, primal and tribal selves in a ritual to the funeral pyre of the old and our rebirth as a phoenix from the flames.” To us it looks like a crashed alien saucer in a farmer's field. From (http://www.campawesomeness.org/).

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