Posted on 02/02/2006 7:40:25 AM PST by ZGuy
Our economic system is unsustainable by its very nature. The only response to climate chaos and peak oil is major social change.
There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. We cannot sustain earth's life-support systems within the present economic system.
Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with.
Power concentrates around wealth. Only by breaking up corporate power and bringing it under social control will we be able to overcome the global environmental crisis.
Supermarkets are over. We cannot have such long supply lines between us and our food. Not any more. The very model of the supermarket is unsustainable.
We are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of climate change and peak oil. Once we pass the planetary oil production spike (when oil begins rapidly to deplete and demand outstrips supply), there will be less and less net energy available to humankind. Petroleum geologists reckon we will pass the world oil spike sometime between 2006 and 2010. It will take, argues peak-oil expert Richard Heinberg, a second world war effort if many of us are to come through this epoch.
Catch-22, of course, is that the very worst fate that could befall our species is the discovery of huge new reserves of oil, because the climate chaos that would unleash would make the mere collapse of industrial society a sideshow bagatelle.
You can either have capitalism or a habitable planet. One or the other, not both.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
You most certainly CAN have economic prosperity and a clean planet.
We'll simply wait for the "under-developed world" to either kill each other, die of horrible dieases or resort to cannibalism, then ship our dirty industries off to the unoccupied territory,closer to the sites of raw matierals, leaving our cities pristine and Starbucks-afficianado safe.
Ah, makes you proud to be have been born in the Western Tradition!
You DO need to read "Rainbow Six", though. Much more sinister people! I think I'll read it again.
You're exactly right, capitalism is what we do because we are free to do it. How would this guy propose to gain this massive social change? Only total all-out war would accomplish that. People like him should appreciate the inventive people, produced by the incentive nature of capitalism. There WILL BE alternate energy sources more available soon. I don't think the oil industry can stop it.
I think it was supposed to be a slap at Martin Sheen. ("Plays the President on TV")
Saving your excellent post for salted nut balls everywhere.
There are numerous technical solutions on the horizon, technology will trump every negative prediction this guy believes. We wil have abundant energy and resources in the future, far more than we have presently.
Just look at recent history as your guide, every prediction of resource or energy scarcity turns out laughably false.
Heh, didn't even think about Martin Sheen, but then I never watched "The West Wing", so it never occurred to me.
Can you believe this crap? This clown makes a statement, with no facts whatsoever, then makes an argument based on entirely false and debunked premises.
This guy has obviously never heard of economies of scale. Do you have thousands of tiny farms, meaning thousands of tractors, small combines, irrigation systems, etc., or do you have a couple hundred farms, each farmed with humongous, highly-efficient combines and trucks to ship 40 tons of cheaply-produced food at a time?
Besides, somebody already tried the "everybody's a farmer" approach, with all food grown locally. It was Pol Pot, and millions died.
This is the fantastic mentality of the left. One can only stand in stunned awe of it.
Incorrect on all counts. First, it's socialism which is unsustainable, which is a parasite that requires capitalism as a host on which to feed for its own sustenance. Second, capitalism is not an ideological model with set rules as socialism is - it is merely a description of the free use of one's personal resources, invested singly or pooled with others, by choice, as the owners of those resources see fit. Third, capitalism is not a "central organising principle," but an individual choice, diffused diversely without govenment direction throughout the population. Socialism OTOH is the intricate totalitarian top down system, necessarily directed by central governmental authority, which spawned the odious term "central planning."
People have a tendency to view the world through their own prejudices, socialists and liberals seem to be more transparent in this than most. OTOH, many of them are aware of the falseness of arguments such as the above, but cynically put them forward anyway, without honesty.
Excellent points. His article is nothing more than a sequence of unsubstantiated tripe masquerading as argument. The caliber of the writing alone is quite telling.
Capitalism simply means the private ownership of property.
I think this guy's problem is that he believes that an ever increasing standard of living and technological progress is unsustainable. No wonder he doesn't like capitalism.
This article is beyond cognitive dissonance. The petulance and sheer arrogance of this individual, and environmental wackos like him, is laughable. We couldn't destroy the earth even if we tried, but it is nonetheless a tool these wackos use to amass power and control.
Charlton Heston said it well during an interview with Rush Limbaugh in 1995:
You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time.
It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. Might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. You think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine.
When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. Hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us. link.
Seems like Peak Oil would automaticaly take care of Global Warming. Problem does not exist, and is self-correcting if it does exist.
FReepmail me to be added or removed to the ECO-PING list!
Don't normally use the ping list for such pure stupidity but its important to hear the enemy.
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