Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Rees’s Thesis
James Glave, Vancouver Magazine
UBC professor William Rees believes we’ve got into a terrible mess by thinking of ourselves as divorced from nature rather than part of it. That’s why he developed the “ecological footprint” that’s become the global standard for measuring an individual’s impact on the environment
—
… Unfortunately, Rees’s most recent finding-that humanity may be inherently unsustainable, the theme of his upcoming book-isn’t earning him many friends in high places. Neither are his recommendations. In effect, he says, we need to do away with all the shopping, yesterday, and pull the emergency brake on runaway economic growth. And if we don’t? “We will trigger or disrupt something on a scale never before imagined, and take the whole system down,” he says matter-of-factly. “It may not be the end of life on Earth, but it will make it very difficult to have civilized life.”
While the underlying science may be sound, these are not terribly marketable ideas. Stop growth? What are you, nuts? Yet deep down, at least a few of our policymakers and business leaders may believe Rees is correct. That said, the required whole-system changes are so profoundly unsellable that they pretty much never hit the ground.
“Bill’s strength and force may have intimidated whole administrations against taking action, even though it may be clearly in their self-interest to do so,” says Mathis Wackernagel, who co-authored Our Ecological Footprint with Rees in 1996 and who heads up a California foundation that is persuading governments to use the scheme as a GDP-style measure of economic vitality.
“He makes a very consistent, strong, and overwhelming argument. And people go, ‘Wait, that means everything I know is wrong, and here I am without an exit strategy!’ And so, nothing happens.”
… But there is a glimmer of good news in this picture. At long last, as the man many call Dr. Doom enters his retirement years, increasing numbers of influential people appear to be getting on his page. More people are getting the gravity of the climate crisis-including the new president of the United States-and the economy is in a tailspin that vast injections of public capital have done little to slow. Even old-school economists might be privately conceding that the system is dysfunctional, and if Rees’s new ideas about how we got here and how we might escape catch on-well, we might be able to fix this mess before it’s too late.
(1 March 2009)
Reimagining Socialism
Barbara Ehrenreich & Bill Fletcher Jr., The Nation
If you haven’t heard socialists doing much crowing over the fall of capitalism, it isn’t just because there aren’t enough of us to make an audible crowing sound. We, as much as anyone on Wall Street in, say, 2006, appreciate the resilience of American capitalism–its ability to regroup and find fresh avenues for growth
… But this time the patient may not get up from the table, no matter how many times the electroshock paddles of “stimulus” are applied. We seem to have entered the death spiral where rising unemployment leads to reduced consumption and hence to greater unemployment. Any schadenfreude we might be tempted to feel as executives lose their corporate jets and the erstwhile Masters of the Universe wipe egg from their faces is quickly dashed by the ever more vivid suffering around us. Food pantries and shelters can no longer keep up with the demand; millions face old age without pensions and with their savings gutted; we personally are consumed with anxiety about the future that awaits our children and grandchildren.
… What is most galling, from a socialist perspective, is the dawning notion that capitalism may be leaving us with less than it found on this planet, about 400 years ago, when the capitalist mode of production began to take off. Marx imagined that industrial capitalism had potentially solved the age-old problem of scarcity and that there was plenty to go around if only it was equitably distributed. But industrial capitalism–with some help from industrial communism–has brought about a level of environmental destruction that threatens our species along with countless others. The climate is warming, the oil supply is peaking, the deserts are advancing and the seas are rising and contain fewer and fewer fish for us to eat. You don’t have to be a freaky doomster to see that extinction may be what’s next on the agenda.
In this situation, with both long-term biological and day-to-day economic survival in doubt, the only relevant question is: do we have a plan, people? Can we see our way out of this and into a just, democratic, sustainable (add your own favorite adjectives) future?
Let’s just put it right out on the table: we don’t. At least we don’t have some blueprint on how to organize society ready to whip out of our pockets. Lest this sound negligent on our part, we should explain that socialism was an idea about how to rearrange ownership and distribution and, to an extent, governance. It assumed that there was a lot worth owning and distributing; it did not imagine having to come up with an entirely new and environmentally sustainable way of life.
…. Responses
Immanuel Wallerstein, “Follow Brazil’s Example.”
Bill McKibben, “Together, We Save the Planet.”
Rebecca Solnit, “The Revolution Has Already Occurred.”
Tariq Ali, “Capitalism’s Deadly Logic.”
(4 March 2009)
Together, We Save the Planet
Bill McKibben, The Nation
I’m definitely not a laissez-faire, Ayn Rand, libertarian capitalist. (Is anyone anymore? Alan Greenspan is calling for nationalizing the banks.) But I’m not sure I’m much of a socialist either, because both those faiths seem to me rooted in an earlier moment–a moment when we had some margin. A moment when the problem was growth and how best to make it happen and share its fruits.
That’s not our problem anymore. Our problem is how to deal with a crisis that will define our world for the foreseeable future. In November the International Energy Agency announced that all its earlier rosy forecasts about oil supplies were wrong–in fact, the world’s oilfields are facing “natural declines” in yield of about 7 percent a year. The fuel for free-market fundamentalism and Marxism was fossil fuel, and we’re not going to have it. (Or to the extent we do, and that extent would be coal, we’re not going to be able to burn it without triggering even more climate chaos.)
That [future] world is necessarily going to be tougher. We will have to focus on essentials, like food and energy, far harder than in the past. I think we’ll need to find our livelihoods more locally, reducing the inherent vulnerabilities that go with a heavily globalized economy. At the moment less than 1 percent of America works on the farm–that’s a number that must rise. To the extent that government can help, it will be by pushing us away from the fossil fuel that underwrites our danger: a stiff cap on carbon will make the transition we require happen more quickly, though it will be tough to endure.
In fact, the only way to endure the transition will be with a renewed sense of community. The real poison of the past few decades has been the hyper-individualism that we’ve let dominate our political life–the idea that everything works best if we think not a whit about the common interest. In the end, that has damaged our society, our climate and our private lives.
(4 March 2009)
The Revolution Has Already Occurred
Rebecca Solnit, The Nation
… The revolutions that have mattered since [the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua] have been less interested in seizing and becoming the state than circumventing it to go straight to becoming other people doing other things without state permission. The fifteen-year-old Zapatista revolution, which never sought state power and (though badgered constantly) was never defeated, is the revolution for our times, or really only the most dramatic of countless thousands involving Native Americans and Indian farmers and South African cooperatives and Argentinian workplaces and European utopian communities.
In the United States the most obvious realm in which this has transpired is food and farming. Organic, urban, community-assisted and guerrilla agriculture are still small parts of the picture, but effective ones–a revolt against what transnational corporate food and capitalism generally produce.
… “Do we have a plan, people?” Ehrenreich and Fletcher ask. We have thousands of them, being carried out quite spectacularly over the past few decades, for gardens and childcare co-ops and bicycle lanes and farmers’ markets and countless ways of doing things differently and better. The underlying vision is neither state socialist nor corporate capitalist, but something humane, local and accountable–anarchist, basically, as in direct democracy.
(4 March 2009)
Follow Brazil’s Example
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Nation
… What we want from Obama is not social transformation. He neither wishes to, nor is able to, offer us that. We want from him measures that will minimize the pain and suffering of most people right now. That he can do, and that is where pressure on him may make a difference.
The middle run is quite different. And here Obama is irrelevant, as are all the other left-of-center governments. What is going on is the disintegration of capitalism as a world system, not because it can’t guarantee welfare for the vast majority (it never could do that) but because it can no longer ensure that capitalists will have the endless accumulation of capital that is their raison d’être. We have arrived at a moment in which neither farsighted capitalists nor their opponents (us) are trying to preserve the system. We are both trying to establish a new system, but of course we have very different, indeed radically opposed, ideas about the nature of such a system.
Because the system has moved very far from equilibrium, it has become chaotic. We are seeing wild fluctuations in all the usual economic indicators–the prices of commodities, the relative value of currencies, the real levels of taxation, the quantity of items produced and traded. Since no one really knows, practically from day to day, where these indicators will shift, no one can sensibly plan anything.
In such a situation, no one is sure what measures will be best, whatever their politics. This practical intellectual confusion lends itself to frantic demagoguery of all kinds. The system is bifurcating, which means that in twenty to forty years there will be some new system, which will create order out of chaos. But we don’t know what that system will be.
… So, to resume: work in the short run to minimize pain, and in the middle run to ensure that the new system that will emerge will be a better one and not a worse one. But do the latter without triumphalism, and knowing that the struggle will be tremendously difficult.
(4 March 2009)
Transition towns
Ruth Ann Smalley, Daily Gazette (Connecticut)
I’m thinking we’re about due for another “British Invasion.”
This time, instead of fresh musical influences, look for the entrance of the Transition Towns movement, a set of exciting ideas for creating and organizing social change in response to the challenges of peak oil and global warming.
The Transition Town movement has been gaining momentum, with 146 places — cities, towns and villages — in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Chile, the U.S., and several European countries now officially designated. Another 600 worldwide are in the process of “mulling it over.” You can find out about these forward thinking communities at www.transitiontowns.org. Some, like Portland, Maine are so freshly minted, their content hasn’t arrived at their website yet.
Rob Hopkins, a permaculture teacher, is a prime mover behind this grassroots effort, starting primarily in Ireland and England. His book, “Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependence to Local Resilience” has just become available in the U.S. from Chelsea Green, a spunky, small, independent publisher.
The book takes on the prospect of decreasing oil supplies and a warming planet with refreshing optimism, and offers itself as a tool for ordinary people. Transition Town initiatives start from the premise that “If we collectively plan and act early enough there’s every likelihood that we can create a way of living that’s significantly more connected, more vibrant and more in touch with our environment than the oil-addicted treadmill that we find ourselves on today.”
(4 March 2009)
Lost Generation
metroamv, YouTube
I am part of a lost generation
and I refuse to believe that I can change the world
I realize this may be a shock but
“Happiness comes from within”
is a lie, and
“Money will make me happy”
So in 30 years I will tell my children
they are not the most important thing in my life
… I do not concede that
I will live in a country of my own making
In the future
Environmental destruction will be the norm …
(30 November 2007)
Clever and surprisingly moving. Based on an awared-winning Argentinian political advertisment: Truth (Upside – Down). -BA
