<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On 2013-11-20, at 8:16 AM, Jaime R Vergara wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><font color="black" size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><font size="4" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;">Ken,</font></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman', Times, serif" size="4"><br></font><font color="black" size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">
<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Might you shoot this to the listserv?</font><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> </span><font size="4" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;">Longish but sobering.</font></div>
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<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><font size="4">On the particle content in the air, where one is the recommended normal content, and four is beyond the danger zone, we hit 40 in Harbin 4 hrs. by train north of us here in Shenyang last week. We might have registered a count of 20 here guessing from the number of face masks worn around!</font></div>
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<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><font size="4">I might have avoided Fukushima's radiation in Saipan but with the pollution in China's northeast, I just traded cancer for asthma!</font></div>
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<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><font size="4">Jaime</font></div>
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Published on Friday, November 15, 2013 by <a target="_blank" href="https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/110/sleepwalking-extinction.html">Adbusters</a></font>
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<h2 class="">'Sleepwalking to Extinction': Capitalism and the Destruction of Life and Earth</h2>
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by <a target="_blank" href="http://www.commondreams.org/author/richard-smith">Richard Smith</a> </div>
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<div style="font-size: 10pt;"><span class="" style="width:540px"><img alt="" src="http://www.commondreams.org/sites/commondreams.org/files/imce-images/adbusters_110_sleepwalking_to_extinction_s.jpg" style="width: 540px; height: 310px;" title="(Image: STEVE MEISEL / AFP)" border="0"></span></div>
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<div><font size="3"><span class="" style="width: 540px;"><span class="">(Image: STEVE MEISEL / AFP) </span></span>When,
on May 10th, scientists at Mauna Loa Observatory on the big island of
Hawaii announced that global CO2 emissions had crossed a threshold at
400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in millions of years, a
sense of dread spread around the world and not only among climate
scientists. CO2 emissions have been relentlessly climbing since Charles
David Keeling first set up his tracking station near the summit of Mauna
Loa Observatory in 1958 to monitor average daily global CO2 levels. At
that time, CO2 concentrations registered 315 ppm. CO2 emissions and
atmospheric concentrations have been rising ever since and have recently
passed a dangerous tipping point: 440ppm.</font></div>
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</font></div>
<div><font size="3">For all the climate summits, promises of “voluntary restraint,”
carbon trading and carbon taxes, the growth of CO2 emissions and
atmospheric concentrations have not just been unceasing, they have been
accelerating in what scientists have dubbed the “Keeling Curve.” In the
early 1960s, CO2 ppm concentrations in the atmosphere grew by 0.7ppm per
year. In recent decades, especially as China has industrialized, the
growth rate has tripled to 2.1 ppm per year. In just the first 17 weeks
of 2013, CO2 levels jumped by 2.74 ppm compared to last year.</font></div>
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</font></div>
<div><font size="3">Carbon concentrations have not been this high since the Pliocene
period, between 3m and 5m years ago, when global average temperatures
were 3˚C or 4˚C hotter than today, the Arctic was ice-free, sea levels
were about 40m higher and jungles covered northern Canada; Florida,
meanwhile, was under water along with other coastal locations we now
call New York, London, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Sydney and many others.
Crossing this threshold has fuelled fears that we are fast approaching
converging “tipping points” — melting of the subarctic tundra or the
thawing and releasing of the vast quantities of methane in the Arctic
sea bottom — that will accelerate global warming beyond any human
capacity to stop it.</font></div>
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</font></div>
<div><font size="3">“I wish it weren’t true, but it looks like the world is going to blow
through the 400 ppm level without losing a beat,” said Scripps
Institute geochemist Ralph Keeling, son of Charles Keeling.</font></div>
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</font></div>
<div><font size="3">“At this pace, we’ll hit 450 ppm within a few decades.”</font></div>
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</font></div>
<div><font size="3">“It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” said Maureen E.
Raymo, a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a unit of
Columbia University.</font></div>
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</font></div>
<div><font size="3">Why are we marching toward disaster, “sleepwalking to extinction” as
the Guardian’s George Monbiot once put it? Why can’t we slam on the
brakes before we ride off the cliff to collapse? I’m going to argue here
that the problem is rooted in the requirement of capitalist production.
Large corporations can’t help themselves; they can’t change or change
very much. So long as we live under this corporate capitalist system we
have little choice but to go along in this destruction, to keep pouring
on the gas instead of slamming on the brakes, and that the only
alternative — impossible as this may seem right now — is to overthrow
this global economic system and all of the governments of the 1% that
prop it up and replace them with a global economic democracy, a radical
bottom-up political democracy, an eco-socialist civilization.</font></div>
<div><font size="3">Although we are fast approaching the precipice of ecological
collapse, the means to derail this train wreck are in the making as,
around the world we are witnessing a near simultaneous global mass
democratic “awakening” — as the Brazilians call it — from Tahir Square
to Zucotti Park, from Athens to Istanbul to Beijing and beyond such as
the world has never seen. To be sure, like Occupy Wall Street, these
movements are still inchoate, are still mainly protesting what’s wrong
rather than fighting for an alternative social order. Like Occupy, they
have yet to clearly and robustly answer that crucial question: “Don’t
like capitalism, what’s your alternative?” Yet they are working on it,
and they are for the most part instinctively and radically democratic;
in this lies our hope.</font></div>
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<div><strong><font size="3">Capitalism is, overwhelmingly, the main driver of planetary ecological collapse</font></strong></div>
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</font></strong></div>
<div><font size="3">From climate change to natural resource overconsumption to pollution,
the engine that has powered three centuries of accelerating economic
development, revolutionizing technology, science, culture and human life
itself is, today, a roaring out-of-control locomotive mowing down
continents of forests, sweeping oceans of life, clawing out mountains of
minerals, pumping out lakes of fuels, devouring the planet’s last
accessible natural resources to turn them into “product,” while
destroying fragile global ecologies built up over eons of time. Between
1950 and 2000 the global human population more than doubled from 2.5 to 6
billion. But in these same decades, consumption of major natural
resources soared more than sixfold on average, some much more. Natural
gas consumption grew nearly twelvefold, bauxite (aluminum ore)
fifteenfold. And so on. At current rates, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson
says that “half the world’s great forests have already been leveled and
half the world’s plant and animal species may be gone by the end of this
century.”</font></div>
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<div><font size="3">Corporations aren’t necessarily evil, though plenty are diabolically
evil, but they can’t help themselves. They’re just doing what they’re
supposed to do for the benefit of their shareholders. Shell Oil can’t
help but loot Nigeria and the Arctic and cook the climate. That’s what
shareholders demand. BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and other mining giants
can’t resist mining Australia’s abundant coal and exporting it to China
and India. Mining accounts for 19% of Australia’s GDP and substantial
employment even as coal combustion is the single worst driver of global
warming. IKEA can’t help but level the forests of Siberia and Malaysia
to feed the Chinese mills building their flimsy disposable furniture
(IKEA is the third largest consumer of lumber in the world). Apple can’t
help it if the cost of extracting the “rare earths” it needs to make
millions of new iThings each year is the destruction of the eastern
Congo — violence, rape, slavery, forced induction of child soldiers,
along with poisoning local waterways. Monsanto and DuPont and Syngenta
and Bayer Crop Science have no choice but to wipe out bees, butterflies,
birds, small farmers and extinguish crop diversity to secure their grip
on the world’s food supply while drenching the planet in their Roundups
and Atrazines and neonicotinoids.</font></div>
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<div><font size="3">This is how giant corporations are wiping out life on earth in the
course of a routine business day. And the bigger the corporations grow,
the worse the problems become.</font></div>
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<div><font size="3">In Adam Smith’s day, when the first factories and mills produced hat
pins and iron tools and rolls of cloth by the thousands, capitalist
freedom to make whatever they wanted didn’t much matter because they
didn’t have much impact on the global environment. But today, when
everything is produced in the millions and billions, then trashed today
and reproduced all over again tomorrow, when the planet is looted and
polluted to support all this frantic and senseless growth, it matters — a
lot.</font></div>
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</font></div>
<div><font size="3">The world’s climate scientists tell us we’re facing a planetary
emergency. They’ve been telling us since the 1990s that if we don’t cut
global fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions by 80-90% below 1990 levels
by 2050 we will cross critical tipping points and global warming will
accelerate beyond any human power to contain it. Yet despite all the
ringing alarm bells, no corporation and no government can oppose growth
and, instead, every capitalist government in the world is putting pedal
to the metal to accelerate growth, to drive us full throttle off the
cliff to collapse.</font></div>
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<div><font size="3">Marxists have never had a better argument against capitalism than
this inescapable and apocalyptic “contradiction.” Solutions to the
ecological crisis are blindingly obvious but we can’t take the necessary
steps to prevent ecological collapse because, so long as we live under
capitalism, economic growth has to take priority over ecological
concerns.</font></div>
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<div><font size="3">We all know what we have to do: suppress greenhouse gas emissions.
Stop over-consuming natural resources. Stop the senseless pollution of
the earth, waters, and atmosphere with toxic chemicals. Stop producing
waste that can’t be recycled by nature. Stop the destruction of
biological diversity and ensure the rights of other species to flourish.
We don’t need any new technological breakthroughs to solve these
problems. Mostly, we just stop doing what we’re doing. But we can’t stop
because we’re all locked into an economic system in which companies
have to grow to compete and reward their shareholders and because we all
need the jobs.</font></div>
<div><font size="3">James Hansen, the world’s preeminent climate scientist, has argued that to save the humans:</font></div>
<blockquote><font size="3">“Coal emissions must be phased out as rapidly as possible or
global climate disasters will be a dead certainty ... Yes, [coal, oil,
gas] most of the fossil fuels must be left in the ground. That is the
explicit message that the science provides. […] Humanity treads today on
a slippery slope. As we continue to pump greenhouse gases in the air,
we move onto a steeper, even more slippery incline. We seem oblivious to
the danger — unaware of how close we may be to a situation in which a
catastrophic slip becomes practically unavoidable, a slip where we
suddenly lose all control and are pulled into a torrential stream that
hurls us over a precipice to our demise.”</font></blockquote>
<div><font size="3">But how can we do this under capitalism? After his climate
negotiators stonewalled calls for binding limits on CO2 emissions at
Copenhagen, Cancun, Cape Town and Doha, President Obama is now trying to
salvage his environmental “legacy” by ordering his EPA to impose
“tough” new emissions limits on existing power plants, especially
coal-fired plants. But this won’t salvage his legacy or, more
importantly, his daughters’ futures because how much difference would it
make, really, if every coal-fired power plant in the U.S. shut down
tomorrow when U.S. coal producers are free to export their coal to
China, which they are doing, and when China is building another
coal-fired power plan every week? The atmosphere doesn’t care where the
coal is burned. It only cares how much is burned.</font></div>
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<div><font size="3">Yet how could Obama tell American mining companies to stop mining
coal? This would be tantamount to socialism. But if we do not stop
mining and burning coal, capitalist freedom and private property is the
least we’ll have to worry about. Same with Obama’s “tough” new fuel
economy standards. In August 2012 Obama boasted that his new Corporate
Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards would “double fuel efficiency”
over the next 13 years to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, up from 28.6
mpg at present — cutting vehicle CO2 emissions in half, so helping
enormously to “save the planet.” But as the Center for Biological
Diversity and other critics have noted, Obama was lying, as usual.</font></div>
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<div><font size="3">First, his so-called “tough” new CAFE standards were so full of
loopholes, negotiated with Detroit, that they actually encourage more
gas-guzzling, not less. That’s because the standards are based on a
sliding scale according to “vehicle footprints” — the bigger the car,
the less mileage it has to get to meet its “standard.” So in fact
Obama’s “tough” standards are (surprise) custom designed to promote what
Detroit does best — produce giant Sequoias, mountainous Denalis,
Sierras, Yukons, Tundras and Ticonderogas, Ram Chargers and Ford F
series luxury trucks, grossly obese Cadillac Escalades, soccer-kid
Suburbans, even 8,000 (!) pound Ford Excursions — and let these gross
gas hogs meet the “fleet standard.” These cars and “light” trucks are
among the biggest selling vehicles in America today (GM’s Sierra is #1)
and they get worse gas mileage than American cars and trucks half a
century ago. Cadillac’s current Escalade gets worse mileage than its
chrome bedecked tail fin-festooned land yachts of the mid-1950s! Little
wonder Detroit applauded Obama’s new CAFE standards instead of damning
them as usual. Secondly, what would it matter even if Obama’s new CAFE
standards actually did double fleet mileage — when American and global
vehicle fleets are growing exponentially?</font></div>
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<div><font size="3">In 1950 Americans had one car for every three people. Today we have
1.2 cars for every American. In 1950 when there were about 2.6 billion
humans on the planet, there were 53 million cars on the world’s roads —
about one for every 50 persons. Today, there are 7 billion people but
more than 1 billion cars and industry forecasters expect there will be 2
to 2.5 billion cars on the world’s roads by mid-century. China alone is
expected to have a billion. So, at the end of the day, incremental half
measures like CAFE standards can’t stop rising GHG missions. Barring
some technical miracle, the only way to cut vehicle emissions is to just
stop making them — drastically suppress vehicle production, especially
of the worst gas hogs.</font></div>
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<div><font size="3">In theory, Obama could simply order GM to stop building its humongous
gas guzzlers and switch to producing small economy cars. After all, the
federal government owns the company! But of course, how could he do any
such thing? Detroit lives by the mantra “big car big profit, small car
small profit.” Since Detroit has never been able to compete against the
Japanese and Germans in the small car market, which is already glutted
and nearly profitless everywhere, such an order would only doom GM to
failure, if not bankruptcy (again) and throw masses of workers onto the
unemployment lines. So given capitalism, Obama is, in fact, powerless.
He’s locked in to promoting the endless growth of vehicle production,
even of the worst polluters — and lying about it all to the public to
try to patch up his pathetic “legacy.” And yet, if we don’t suppress
vehicle production, how can we stop rising CO2 emissions?</font></div>
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<div><font size="3">In the wake of the failure of climate negotiators from Kyoto to Doha
to agree on binding limits on GHG emissions, exasperated British climate
scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows at the Tyndall Centre,
Britain’s leading climate change research center, wrote in September
2012 that we need an entirely new paradigm:</font></div>
<blockquote><font size="3">Government policies must “radically change” if “dangerous”
climate change is to be avoided “We urgently need to acknowledge that
the development needs of many countries leave the rich western nations
with little choice but to immediately and severely curb their greenhouse
gas emissions... [The] misguided belief that commitments to avoid
warming of 2˚C can still be realized with incremental adjustments to
economic incentives. A carbon tax here, a little emissions trading there
and the odd voluntary agreement thrown in for good measure will not be
sufficient ... long-term end-point targets (for example, 80% by 2050)
have no scientific basis. What governs future global temperatures and
other adverse climate impacts are the emissions from yesterday, today
and those released in the next few years.”</font></blockquote>
<div><font size="3">And not just scientists. In its latest world energy forecast released
on November 12, 2012, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warns that
despite the bonanza of fossil fuels now made possible by fracking,
horizontal and deepwater drilling, we can’t consume them if we want to
save the humans: “The climate goal of limiting global warming to 2˚C is
becoming more difficult and costly with each year that passes... no more
than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior
to 2050 if the world is to achieve the 2˚C goal...” Of course the
science could be wrong about this. But so far climate scientists have
consistently underestimated the speed and ferocity of global warming,
and even prominent climate change deniers have folded their cards.</font></div>
<div><font size="3"><br>
</font></div>
<div><font size="3">Still, it’s one thing for James Hansen or Bill McKibben to say we
need to “leave the coal in the hole, the oil in the soil, the gas under
the grass,” to call for “severe curbs” in GHG emissions — in the
abstract. But think about what this means in our capitalist economy.
Most of us, even passionate environmental activists, don’t really want
to face up to the economic implications of the science we defend.</font></div>
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<div><font size="3">That’s why, if you listen to environmentalists like Bill McKibben for
example, you will get the impression that global warming is mainly
driven by fossi- fuel-powered electric power plants, so if we just
“switch to renewables” this will solve the main problem and we can carry
on with life more or less as we do now. Indeed, “green capitalism”
enthusiasts like Thomas Friedman and the union-backed “green jobs” lobby
look to renewable energy, electric cars and such as “the next great
engine of industrial growth” — the perfect win-win solution. This is a
not a solution. This is a delusion: greenhouse gasses are produced
across the economy not just by power plants. Globally,
fossil-fuel-powered electricity generation accounts for 17% of GHG
emissions, heating accounts for 5%, miscellaneous “other” fuel
combustion 8.6%, industry 14.7%, industrial processes another 4.3%,
transportation 14.3%, agriculture 13.6%, land use changes (mainly
deforestation) 12.2%. This means, for a start, that even if we
immediately replaced every fossil-fuel-powered electric generating plant
on the planet with 100% renewable solar, wind and water power, this
would only reduce global GHG emissions by around 17%.</font></div>
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<div><font size="3">What this means is that, far from launching a new
green-energy-powered “industrial growth” boom, barring some tech-fix
miracle, the only way to impose “immediate and severe curbs” on fossil
fuel production/consumption would be to impose an EMERGENCY CONTRACTION
in the industrialized countries: drastically retrench and in some cases
shut down industries, even entire sectors, across the economy and around
the planet — not just fossil fuel producers but all the industries that
consume them and produce GHG emissions — autos, trucking, aircraft,
airlines, shipping and cruise lines, construction, chemicals, plastics,
synthetic fabrics, cosmetics, synthetic fiber and fabrics, synthetic
fertilizer and agribusiness CAFO operations.</font></div>
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<div><font size="3">Of course, no one wants to hear this because, given capitalism, this
would unavoidably mean mass bankruptcies, global economic collapse,
depression and mass unemployment around the world. That’s why in April
2013, in laying the political groundwork for his approval of the XL
pipeline in some form, President Obama said “the politics of this are
tough.” The earth’s temperature probably isn’t the “number one concern”
for workers who haven’t seen a raise in a decade; have an underwater
mortgage; are spending $40 to fill their gas tank, can’t afford a hybrid
car; and face other challenges.” Obama wants to save the planet but
given capitalism his “number one concern” has to be growing the economy,
growing jobs. Given capitalism — today, tomorrow, next year and every
year — economic growth will always be the overriding priority ... till
we barrel right off the cliff to collapse.</font></div>
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<div><strong><font size="3">The necessity of denial and delusion</font></strong></div>
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<div><font size="3">There’s no technical solution to this problem and no market solution
either. In a very few cases — electricity generation is the main one — a
broad shift to renewables could indeed sharply reduce fossil fuel
emissions in that sector. But if we just use “clean” “green” energy to
power more growth, consume ever more natural resources, then we solve
nothing and would still be headed to collapse. Producing millions of
electric cars instead of millions of gasoline-powered cars, as I
explained elsewhere, would be just as ecologically destructive and
polluting, if in somewhat different ways, even if they were all run on
solar power.</font></div>
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<div><font size="3">Substituting biofuels for fossil fuels in transportation just creates
different but no less environmentally-destructive problems: converting
farm land to raise biofuel feedstock pits food production against fuels.
Converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas or grasslands to produce
biofuels releases more CO2 into the atmosphere than the fossil fuels
they replace and accelerates species extinction. More industrial farming
means more demand for water, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. And
so on. Cap and trade schemes can’t cut fossil fuel emissions because
business understands, even if some environmentalists do not, that
“dematerialization” is a fantasy, that there’s no win-win tech solution,
that capping emissions means cutting growth. Since cutting growth is
unacceptable to business, labor and governments, cap and trade has been
abandoned everywhere.</font></div>
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<div><font size="3">Carbon taxes can’t stop global warming either because they do not cap
emissions. That’s why fossil fuel execs like Rex Tillerson, CEO of
ExxonMobil (the largest private oil company in the world) and Paul
Anderson, CEO of Duke Energy (the largest electric utility in the U.S.)
support carbon taxes. They understand that carbon taxes would add
something to the cost of doing business, like other taxes, but they pose
no limit, no “cap” on growth. ExxonMobil predicts that, carbon tax or
no carbon tax, by 2040 global demand for energy is going to grow by 35%,
65% in the developing world and nearly all of this is going to be
supplied by fossil fuels. ExxonMobil is not looking to “leave the oil in
the soil” as a favor to Bill McKibben and the humans. ExxonMobil is
looking to pump it and burn it all as fast as possible to enrich its
shareholders.</font></div>
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</font></div>
<div><font size="3">Hansen, McKibben, Obama — and most of us really — don’t want to face
up to the economic implications of the need to put the brakes on growth
and fossil fuel-based overconsumption. We all “need” to live in denial,
and believe in delusions that carbon taxes or some tech fix will save us
because we all know that capitalism has to grow or we’ll all be out of
work. And the thought of replacing capitalism seems so impossible,
especially given the powers arrayed against change. But what’s the
alternative? In the not-so-distant future, this is all going to come to a
screeching halt one way or another — either we seize hold of this
out-of-control locomotive, or we ride this train right off the cliff to
collapse.</font></div>
<div><font size="3"><br>
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<div><strong><font size="3">Emergency Contraction or Global Ecological Collapse?</font></strong></div>
<div><strong><font size="3"><br>
</font></strong></div>
<div><font size="3">If there’s no market mechanism to stop plundering the planet then,
again, what alternative is there but to impose an emergency contraction
on resource consumption?</font></div>
<div><font size="3"><br>
</font></div>
<div><font size="3">This doesn’t mean we would have to de-industrialize and go back to
riding horses and living in log cabins. But it does mean that we would
have to abandon the “consumer economy” — shut down all kinds of
unnecessary, wasteful and polluting industries from junkfood to cruise
ships, disposable Pampers to disposable H&M clothes, disposable IKEA
furniture, endless new model cars, phones, electronic games, the lot.
Plus all the banking, advertising, junk mail, most retail, etc. We would
have completely redesign production to replace “fast junk food” with
healthy, nutritious, fresh “slow food,” replace “fast fashion” with
“slow fashion,” bring back mending, alterations and local tailors and
shoe repairmen. We would have to completely redesign production of
appliances, electronics, housewares, furniture and so on to be as
durable and long-lived as possible. Bring back appliance repairmen and
such. We would have to abolish the throwaway disposables industries, the
packaging and plastic bag industrial complex, bring back refillable
bottles and the like. We would have to design and build housing to last
for centuries, to be as energy efficient as possible, to be
reconfigurable, and shareable. We would have to vastly expand public
transportation to curb vehicle use but also build those we do need to
last and be shareable like Zipcar or Paris’ municipally-owned “Autolib”
shared electric cars.</font></div>
<div><font size="3"><br>
</font></div>
<div><font size="3">These are the sorts of things we would have to do if we really want
to stop overconsumption and save the world. All these changes are
simple, self-evident, no great technical challenge. They just require a
completely different kind of economy, an economy geared to producing
what we need while conserving resources for future generations of humans
and for other species with which we share this planet.</font></div>
<div><font size="3"><br>
</font></div>
<div><strong><font size="3">The spectre of eco-democratic revolution</font></strong></div>
<div><strong><font size="3"><br>
</font></strong></div>
<div><font size="3">Economic systems come and go. Capitalism has had a 300 year run. The
question is: will humanity stand by and let the world be destroyed to
save the profit system?</font></div>
<div><font size="3"><br>
</font></div>
<div><font size="3">That outcome depends to a great extent on whether we on the left can
answer that question “what’s your alternative?” with a compelling and
plausible vision of an eco-socialist civilization. We have our work cut
out for us. But what gives the growing global eco-socialist movement an
edge in this ideological struggle is that capitalism has no solution to
the ecological crisis, no way to put the brakes on collapse, because its
only answer to every problem is more of the same growth that’s killing
us.</font></div>
<div><font size="3"><br>
</font></div>
<div><font size="3">“History” was supposed to have “ended” with the fall of communism and
the triumph of capitalism two decades ago. Yet today, history is very
much alive and it is, ironically, capitalism itself which is being
challenged more broadly than ever and found wanting for solutions.</font></div>
<div><font size="3"><br>
</font></div>
<div class=""><font size="3">Today, we are very much living in one of those pivotal
world-changing moments in history. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say
that this is the most critical moment in human history.</font></div>
<div class=""><font size="3"><br>
</font></div>
<div><font size="3">We may be fast approaching the precipice of ecological collapse, but
the means to derail this train wreck are in the making as, around the
world, struggles against the destruction of nature, against dams,
against pollution, against overdevelopment, against the siting of
chemical plants and power plants, against predatory resource extraction,
against the imposition of GMOs, against privatization of remaining
common lands, water and public services, against capitalist unemployment
and precarité are growing and building momentum.</font></div>
<div><font size="3"><br>
</font></div>
<div><font size="3">Today we are riding a swelling wave of near simultaneous global mass
democratic “awakening,” an almost global mass uprising. This global
insurrection is still in its infancy, still unsure of its future, but
its radical democratic instincts are, I believe, humanity’s last best
hope.</font></div>
<div><font size="3">Let’s make history!</font></div>
<div><font size="3"><br>
</font></div>
<div><em><font size="3">This article is an excerpt from Smith's essay, "Capitalism and
the destruction of life on Earth," published in the Real-World Economics
Review.</font></em></div>
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