As a global-warming agnostic – not having had the time or the inclination to study the issue closely enough to feel competent to address it – I have no particular comment or opinion on the recent leaked-email flap, so I won’t endorse this piece (CHT Ken MacLeod), but it’s certainly worth a read.
Roderick-
I used to agree precisely with your climate change agnosticism, and I agree with the general tone of scientific caution and political scepticism in what you’ve written. If my own views have changed, it is primarily because of a learned trust in New Zealand’s intellectual atmosphere. I don’t know anyone here who doesn’t accept climate change as scientific fact, and this impresses me greatly in a country where I’ve flatted with ‘average’ working class women whose grasp of chemistry is better than mine. The debate here is over how bad the effects will be and what should be done to prevent it; the National government clearly believes in its reality. And, also unlike America, the governing class is as a rule competently educated and routinely revises policy in light of honest findings in both natural and social science. High-ups debate papers and statistics on their web sites and do not talk much about God.
Obviously I’m no scientist, so my judgment is based on my sense of when to trust a given society as intellectually functional. It seems obvious to me at this point that *climate change* is real, whether or nor *anthropogenic* climate change is real. Satellite photos are difficult to fake. Fishing and shipping companies would not fight it out for rights to the water under the arctic sea ice without good reasons to believe they would profit from that investment. There’s a worldwide shift in species’ range towards the poles and to higher elevations.
But even if climate change were conclusively shown to be utterly false (goddess, I may hope- if that happens I think I will forget the emotion of guilt forever), the larger point that environmentalists have made that we have falsely habituated ourselves to a psychology of limitless resources is supported by a wide range of examples. We’ve devoured 90% of the world’s fish stocks, and are currently simply bulldozing the sea floor to catch the rest- it’s utterly barbaric, like burning a forest to flush out rabbits. The forests, to mention them, are half gone (remember that something like half the people who have ever lived are living now… the rest could go in a historical heartbeat). The oil is half gone. I recently found out that some of my furniture was made from Indonesian wood. The forests of Indonesia are disappearing at some absurd kind of rate- something like 4% of the logging operations are certified as sustainable, and that’s by groups whose incentives are to err on the side of negligence. Unsustainable activites by definition cannot be sustained. Either they change, or they crash.
And I look at my own psychology, and the mind and lives of those around me, and it all makes too much sense. My carbon footprint is actually still smaller than the average Westerner, mainly because I walk everywhere to keep fit. But it’s not on principle. Between the inertia of the system and the utterly rational priorities of the overwhelming majority of humankind to acquire a humane standard of living (we should be *cheering* the entry of millions of Indians and Chinese into something x middle-class lifestyles), I can’t imagine how any of this would stop. And if it did, it likely be by some horrible kind of religious/altruist/statist shift that would devastate the human experience as badly as any genocide.
A friend of mine recently got a sweet job as a petitioner for Greenpeace. Some of his coworkers are volunteers. It’s terrible to talk with them. They have this urgent, eager, nervous, frightened, desperate, screaming, look in their eyes. They petition at Lambton Quay, Wellington’s posh shopping right next to Parliament, since that’s where the most people are. And they stand there all day, with grab lines like “how long do you think it takes to destroy the planet?”. I’ve had a few conversations with them, which they’re glad for… because no one else stops to talk with them. All the businesscrats in their corpware are rushing by, busy busy busy to meetings and hair appointments. They likely nearly all accept the reality of climate change and yet they don’t stop, because it’s not part of the logic of the system which determines the premises of their careers. They just walk by. They… just… don’t… care. Or, more precisely, as individuals they may deeply care, at least enough to show the signs of it- everyone goes around with green shopping bags here. But not in their systematic capacity, because the system runs to run (http://antiwar.com/radio/2009/11/25/gareth-porter-71/), and one of its rules is consumption for the sake of consumption.
I gather these issues are on your own mind to some degree, given what you wrote in “On Making Small Contributions to Evil”. I found that essay… disturbing.
I don’t know if you’re still close enough to Rand to consider yourself an egoist, but the question that haunts me greatly is this: assuming the basic facts of the case for environmentalism are correct, how can it possibly be in any lone individual’s self-interest to make the radical lifestyle changes which seem necessary to preserve industrial society and hence liberal civilisation? I can see myself voting for public policies which change the rules for everyone equally. But I am not giving up showers, laundry, travel, all the pretty lights, etc., unilaterally to make my 0.00001% difference.
And like most people doing better than starvation I *can’t*- the consumption is part of my job. And if we get to the point of eliminating specialised professions and luxury goods for the sake of the city then we have lost the battle anyway. For that matter, just the loss of public travel and urbanisation which Peak Oil promises will agrarianise and provincialise society and thus create some pretty nasty shocks; we’re talking a shift in power back from urban merchants to land barons (even if they’re the same people, their priorities and values and eventually the culture will change, certainly within a generation or two). People do not seem to understand that liesure, pleasure, travel are not just ‘selfish’ enjoyment but public goods which humanise and change the tone of society in ways that matter immeasurably for the average person. The popularity of travel and the status of the hospitality professions have risen greatly in New Zealand in the last two decades, and the cultural results contrast deeply favourable with both contemporary America and New Zealand’s own past.
The environmental crises are a threat to the human spirit as much as to human comfort. We still read by burning oil. People in colder homes shiver and complain and cease to laugh and explore. People stuck closer to home are forced to keep connexions with inherited families and can’t afford to let their habits and opinions become too different from those around them. The luxury of privacy- and it is still an unobtainable luxury for most of the world- is a necessity for intellectual independence; what stifles women’s lives more than anything else if deprivation of a room of one’s own and hence time to think for oneself.
A decline in standards of living will threaten all of this, and utterly devastate liberalised culture. The cliche is that hemlines rise and fall with the stock market; people’s tolerance for others’ pleasure turns to envy when they themselves go without, and they act is out by throwing rocks and laws and scapegoats. Nothing gets cut from household budgets more quickly than art and education, and nothing gets cut from the social budgets more quickly than freedom. Liberal democracy is built upon the industrial revolution and there is no historical precedent which suggests that a mass open society can be preserved without continual economic growth. Yes, the human mind can learn to do more with less with time, but the failure of our civilisation to reward these kinds of thinking (the pace of scientific invention today in nowhere near its XIX century level, especially relative to population and education levels) is itself a major cause of the environmental crises- actually, I think the environmental crash is to a large extent the crash of Atlas Shrugged in disguise.
Of course, it will be sold as a new dawning of virtue, and everyone will mouth the words of the slogans in public, hate their neighbours that much more for every smile. The history books will record it as a great dawning of morality and proclaim the immense suffering as the wages of the sin of that godless age known as the Industrial Revolution. Environmentalism may prove to be the new Christianity; worse, it may provide what will be taken as hard evidence for the social necessity of altruist-collectivist ethics, especially if the crash is hard.
And if climate change is true, then libertarianism and Objectivism not only worked hard to provide the intellectual ammunition for its denial, and thus measurably delayed measures which could make the difference as to the future of our species, but they more importantly found themselves wrong on a *scientific* issue for *ideological* reasons, thus earning an eternity in history next to Lysenko and William Jennings Bryan. We already have our labour camps in ‘export processing zones’ ideologically constructed by Chicago neoliberals within the libertarian intellectual orbit. What will history say about a movement which proved itself the intellectual bodyguard of the ruling class who desolated the Earth?
Please understand, to the degree that I can even consider theoretically adopting a Green perspective, it would be ‘bright Green’; the most sensible environmental policies I’m familiar with are Germany’s, where the emphasis is on scientific solutions and new technology. The mom tells me that the European environmentalist movement is more focused on science than morality and spirituality. I remain more than a little skeptical, given the significant environmentalist-fascist crossover (see this bastard, who has been a key player in the promotion of ‘national anarchism’). A large part of the reason I’ve become more friendly to establishment liberalism is simply that the only possible scenario for the survival of liberal civilisation in the face on the environmental-economic crises is to move quickly while a soft transition is still conceivable. It would be better for change to be made by statist means now than to refuse to change until the system is perfectly just, or for the system to change in the hands of either conservative or ecological moralists. Right-libertarians are driven by their logic to take simply impossible positions, and left-libertarians don’t really have any answer except (in a few cases) a worrying trend of encouraging localism (Carson) and altruist morality (Shawn Wilbur). The last alternative would result in institutionalised social control far more devastating to liberty than the hegomony of the relatively liberal bourgeoisie.
If my own views have changed, it is primarily because of a learned trust in New Zealand’s intellectual atmosphere. … Obviously I’m no scientist, so my judgment is based on my sense of when to trust a given society as intellectually functional.
Well, unless most New Zealanders are libertarians, they’re obviously not scientifically reliable in economic and social theory ….
we have falsely habituated ourselves to a psychology of limitless resources
I agree — though I’d say the government has caused most of the problem by making responsible behaviour artificially expensive and irresponsible behaviour artificially cheap.
I don’t know if you’re still close enough to Rand to consider yourself an egoist
I usually call myself a eudaimonist. I tend, these days, to think of egoism as a system that defines morality in terms of an independently-defined self-interest, rather than regarding morality and self-interest as mutually defining à la eudaimonism. But there are other perfectly ok ways of using those terms.
A large part of the reason I’ve become more friendly to establishment liberalism is simply that the only possible scenario for the survival of liberal civilisation in the face on the environmental-economic crises is to move quickly while a soft transition is still conceivable.
Well, it depends what you mean by establishment liberalism. What I think of as establishment liberalism is so deeply in bed with the corporocracy that I wouldn’t hold my breath expecting any genuine environmental progress from them. So we end up in the paradox where the group that talks a good game on the environment isn’t doing too much to help it, while the movement whose program, if implemented, actually would help the environment is filled with kneejerk anti-environmentalists.
“I usually call myself a eudaimonist. I tend, these days, to think of egoism as a system that defines morality in terms of an independently-defined self-interest, rather than regarding morality and self-interest as mutually defining à la eudaimonism. But there are other perfectly ok ways of using those terms.”
The things, not the words, matter. Where are the boundary lines of eudaimonism? Is there something irrevocably wrong with Homer, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche that is not wrong with (say) Montaigne, Mill, and Beethoven? The latter three *cared*. What kind of concern must a eudaimonism have, inescapably, for compassion and kindness? Does virtue require a good alignment? Is that truly only a Christian ethic?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4BYOJ1tc-k
“So we end up in the paradox where the group that talks a good game on the environment isn’t doing too much to help it, while the movement whose program, if implemented, actually would help the environment is filled with kneejerk anti-environmentalists.”
Yes. The liberal establishment is part of the system and in institutional denial of this. It cannot escape the system’s logic and shares a (lesser) portion of responsibility for the harm it causes, including its foreseeably unstoppable trajectory of collective suicide.
But they keep some of their promises. As regards feminism, racism, LGBT rights, sexual liberty, they mean it. Where they do not mean it is in regard to any issue which would threaten their socioeconomic position. They are unable to do anything more than ameliorate the harshness of the class heirarchy and they are insufficiently able to address the ecological crises. The difference is precisely that the first can be changed by their individual use of words while the second set of problem require revolutionary material solutions. The progressive ‘new class’ ideology can sweep away irrational prejudice and soften the existing system somewhat. The Three draw on the One for their power.
My neo-father wants to make a documentary about the injustice of the Kiwi justice system. I’ve offered my time to help with the project, if the funds can be raised. It is possible that they can be raised.
[P]erchè, perchè, Signor, ah, perchè me ne rimuneri così?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6_jA_ZlN84
This universe is shrieking madness. The planets move to the music of matter in motion, which may uncaringly set inhabited planets on collision courses and move on. That is the logical structure of reality.
~~~~~~
To Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the history of the Creation, saying:
“The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain undeserved praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he tortured? He smiled inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be performed.
“For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed, from black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean, and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees, huge ferns springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away. And from the monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And Man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of life before Death’s inexorable decree. And Man said: `There is a hidden purpose, could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must reverence something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of reverence.’ And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And when he followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive him. But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until he invented a divine Plan by which God’s wrath was to have been appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the strength that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And God smiled; and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man’s sun; and all returned again to nebula.
“`Yes,’ he murmured, `it was a good play; I will have it performed again.'”
Wow, that the AGW-Alarmist psychological programming has such a robust defense mechanism as to inspire such hefty meme-generation in the pseudo-anonymous mass-man is quite impressive. The best mind control a global elite can buy indeed.
if I’m not mistaken, one can be an agnostic about particular claims while rejecting a given formulation of the cases for those claims. In other words, my agnosticism isn’t at stake when I say that I don’t know whether or not God or global warming are real, but that I’m quite confident your attempted proof of the existence of such has been compromised by [x, y, z] and fails.
Since I am not a climate scientist, I consider myself an agnostic with a strong inclination toward nonbelief in manmade catastrophic global warming. There appear to be too many holes in the warming theory. The emails are damning in at least one respect: Prominent scientists who claim manmade catastrophic global warming is occurring seem intent on keeping their data out of the hands of known skeptics among climate scientists. This attitude strikes me unscientific and enough to raise suspicion. I am also suspicious whenever I hear loud and repeated insistence that the scientific debate is “over,” that the “consensus” is now beyond questioning, and that doubters are either corporate shills or equivalent of Holocaust deniers.
I’m sure there are plenty of people on both sides who are motivated by ideological bias; in the tug of war between statocrats and plutocrats, promoting global-warming alarmism shifts the balance of power a bit toward the statocrats, and dismissing it shifts the balance a bit toward the plutocrats. But I personally know competent and informed scientists on both sides of this debate, and both strike me as honest and sincere — though each is sure that the other side is motivated solely by ideological bias.
There’s also the money issue. If there is no climate crisis, there’s probably doesn’t need to be a Climate Research Institute, and the raison d’etre for many of the researchers is in question. How many climate researchers can the world economy support?
Here’s an interesting site with pro & con on climate debate:
http://climatedebatedaily.com/
This post by Julian Sanchez from a while back seems apropos here.
http://www.juliansanchez.com/2009/04/06/climate-change-and-argumentative-fallacies/
If one notices while strolling on the beach that the waves seem to have pulled out to sea and animals seem to be scurrying to higher ground that indeed something bad might be about to happen.
If armed with foreknowledge one might go: Aha, a tsunami approaches – must get to higher ground.
The climate debate can be approached much the same way. You needn’t read every policy paper and pore over mountains of research data which even the best scientists inputing data into the fastest – trillions of calculations per second!- computers say provides and incomplete result to understand what you should believe about it.
Most governments around the world are spending real dollars planning for the changes to come (sea-level rise, stronger storms, etc.). That notorious bastion of liberal hippies, The Pentagon, has released two reports (“leaked” to the press) that show they are making it an extremely high priority in their security planning. There are entire island nations planning now to relocate their entire populations because of sea-level rise. Glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate.
Lastly, the sun has been in a prolonged solar minimum (no sunspots) and has slowed the warming recently.
“Most governments around the world…..”
Yes. Of course most governments around the world have believed incredibly silly things in the past, especially when established churches and state ideologies are involved. But climate change couldn’t be that kind of ideology for anyone except radical environmentalists, who control few governments.
Animals scurrying to higher ground aren’t always right. But most of the animals whose senses I trust are scurrying most feverishly, except for those who are libertarians. I have a really, really bad feeling that this time the ideological problem is with what some statists call ‘market fundamentalism’.
If so: Nazis? Communists? By the XXII century their democides may look like small change. What if a future Conquest writes the Black Book of Market Individualism? The totalitarians of the twentieth century murdered a hundred million. We will have destroyed the world.
And if you wished to find a single writer whose style of thinking epitomises the causes of the ecological crises it would be hard not to pick Ayn Rand.
Thoughts like this will not stop screaming.
~~~~
I am fairly hopeful that the human species is rational and flexible enough that all systematic structural conflicts of human interest could (with enough time, money, and philosophy) be worked out within a libertarian framework. But the same does not apply to human exploitation of nonhuman nature. I don’t see how the market can possibly take care of global public bads.
~~~~~
I’m starting to read through the links here and elsewhere (Wendy McElroy, for instance) to see if I can judge the climate skeptic case for myself. If they’re convincing I’ll throw them at various Kiwi friends. I would certainly rather be embarrassed by being wrong on this issue. Ecological disaster will teach the world that everything I love is irrevocably and intolerably evil in a way that will not be forgotten for a thousand years.
“You are not free whose liberty is won by the rigour of other, more righteous souls. Your are merely protected. Your freedom is parasitic, you suck the honourable man dry and offer nothing in return.
You who have enjoyed freedom, who have done nothing to earn it, your time has come. This time you will stand alone and fight for yourselves. Now you will pay for your freedom in the currency of honest toil and human blood.”
– Inquisitor Czevak’s Address to the Council of Ryanti, 41st millennium.
Some relevant links:
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php
http://www.realclimate.org/
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=886
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/11/23/the-knights-carbonic/
I still deeply distrust the environmentalist movement insofar as their leading intellectuals articulate premises which are implicitly hostile to the essentials of an open society. Environmentalism has inherently conservative tendencies insofar as it is emphasises constrained visions and doubts our ability to qualitatively improve the human conditions. At the same time, it seems clear that most environmentalists on the ground are liberal and more rational and tolerant than the average human being. My suspicion is that the ‘push’ of this movement is ultimately as much practical as philosophical: the environmental movement gains momentum because its theories and observations are empirically reliable; the values-oriented intellectuals within the movement are trying to take control of this shift but are not fundamentally causing it. In which case, the rational thing to do is to support the larger social movement while it’s still liberal and without giving aid and comfort to the antimodernist intellectuals.
Like the libertarian movement, the environmentalist movement has been the target of entryism by various groups of racists and reactionaries. Nick Griffin of the British National Party is trying to pass his faction off as a green, and the Sierra Club had a serious internal dispute when an anti-immigration faction attempted to take over. But in both cases the opposition has been large, loud, principled, organised, well-positioned, and reasonably funded, and the typical environmentalist firmly distinguishes herself from the nativist/localist Right. Greens remain better than average on civil liberties and social citizenship issues. By all social logic environmentalism should be hostile to the artists and intellectuals who profit most from commercial society, but they’re not, most likely simply because many prominent environmentalists are artists or intellectuals (or have ties to the entertainment industry), and they watch out for their own collective interests.
That said, I really do think that those in the libertarian movement who are motivated by reason should take another look at climate change, in particular at the nature of the corporate promoters of climate skepticism. It will look really bad if libertarians have taken the wrong side on this. Yes, the most plausable proposals for remedying climate change (carbon taxes, renewable energy, sustainable technologies) are market-friendly and probably compatible with at least a broadly defined minarchist libertarianism. But the libertarian movement, including and perhaps especially its most truly individualist elements, has deeply affiliated itself with climate skepticism. More unnerving is the psychological relationship between the demand for unlimited liberty and the expectation of unlimited resources; cultures of expanding liberty have historically been built on boom times. The end of an era of plentiful resources cannot help but be an era more suspicious of freedom, as each person looks on every other’s indulgence as a danger to group survival.
A libertarianism which entrenches itself into a position at odds with scientific reality and the survival of the human species will not itself survive. There is still time for a political philosophy centred on individual liberty to adapt itself to the reality of the environmental crises, primarily because the environmentalist movement itself is still (thank goddess) predominantly liberal. That may change. It will certainly be a disaster if the history books put down libertarianism as the philosophy which stood in the way of an environmentalist shift at the cost of unknown numbers of human lives.
Libertarianism is neither popular enough nor consequential enough to stand in the way of much of anything.
Of course the history books might be written any number of ways, no matter what happens.
As a student I was always amazed by the propensity of leftist academics to analyse their society as if they themselves had no power and played no part within it. Most strange was their habit of rigourously insisting that their students, over whom they did hold power, share this picture of the world, one which included their own powerlessness.
It’s all a question of standpoint. Of course I’m content to be entirely harmless myself. The cute spray bottle and the silk bag sitting on my nightstand agree with me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olduvai_theory
Now this is just nightmare fuel.
Pish posh
This theory sounds plausible . . . if you assume continued reliance on the same finite sources of fuel from now till eternity. Kind of like the Malthusian/Ehrlichian fore warnings of population crash that assume sustainable grain production per acre never changes. For evidence that contradicts these implicit assertions, see history.
A more likely scenario predicts the rising prices of increasingly scarce, finite resources will shift the comparative advantage to alternative fuel sources already in development, the most practical being the one that lets you mooch juice off that big fusion reactor in the sky. You know, that thing that powers NATURE. Environmentals shouldn’t have a problem with that strategy, however much they disapprove of nuclear reactors being build on earth (even though there’s been a grand total of One large scale nuclear plant disaster in history, and which was more a result of the kind of political and economic systems that people like Jared Diamond are likely to advocate).
Recent developments toward that goal include solar panels incorporating multi-crystalline silicon to reduce cost, and a new ceramic sodium-sulfur battery from MIT that will decrease cost and increase longevity over the existing lead-acid batteries by several orders of magnitude. The latter are set to begin commercial testing in 2011, btw.
In other words, the scientists have finally pulled their heads out of their collective asses and started to seriously consider marketability. Which is good, because in that case they might actually be able to beat the crash to the punch, so that we don’t to suffer declining standards of living for several generations before regaining stride. I figure once household-scale solar setups drop into the single digit thousands, they’ll have no trouble out competing natural gas and liquid dinosaurs. Solar will be especially appealing to the developing world, because societies that don’t already have fully-constructed electricity grids won’t have to incur the additional cost of building ones.
You like economic growth that allows people, especially women, to kick the traditional elites to the curb and seek their own independent lives? This will accelerate the process, and the people in those societies will not be forced to choose between industrializing or sustainability. I imagine they’ll like that solution much better than the current environmentalist fixations which, among other things, include glorifying AIDS and pesticide-ban enabled malaria epidemics as forms of “natural population control”. Seriously, look it up.
Of course, this isn’t a fully sustainable solution either. We’ve only got about a half-billion years before the sun boils the oceans and turns “Mother Earth” back into the lifeless rock she used to be. Long before that happens, though, most of human civilization will have floated out past the asteroid belt in their fleet of O’Neill cylinders on a quest to steal sweet He-3 candy from Roman gods and feed it to their pet stars.
Soviet-
This one was merely nightmare fuel, as I said. The theory’s specific predictions are falsified by the simple fact that we are not over the cliff of any crash as yet. And I absolutely agree with you that too many environmental writers show plague spots of wanting the crash to happen, with the wanting an epiphenomenon of a moral distaste for human ambition and human desire. They are attracted to inconvenient truths because they with to see Faustian liberated humanity inconvenienced. I merely wish to point out that the typical libertarian response amounts to a willful blindness to inconvenient facts, something which should alarm anyone with respect for reason and science.
As I’ve mentioned previously I have a suspicion that the environmental crises are actually the götterdämmerung of Atlas Shrugged in disguise. The Objectivists are correct when they claim that our available pool of resources expands as human knowledge and technological capacity improve. A commitment to an industrial society is inevitably a matter of trying to stay on top of a wave- one must discover new resources at a pace equal to one’s use of existing resources. So when I look at the current problems of sustainability and carrying capacity I suspect the problem is that the creative element of the creative-destruction cycle is failing to keep pace. An ecological collapse is not a sign of our failure to be humble before nature but of our failure to be rational in regards to nature’s reality. Failing societies lose the capacity to produce to match their habitual levels of consumption, and the process of trying to hold on to effects without causes sets everything afire with debt and inflation. But this time, the civilisation burning its way out is global, and the consumption could tear through not a national treasury but the biosphere.
I agree intensely that the only way out is forward. Humanity needs to work smarter increase its demands and standards by an order of magnitude if it it going to get past this nasty bottleneck. But I look at the mentality of the social classes who make the relevant decisions and I tremble. The modern corporation has locked itself into a pervasive business model which demands absolute shortsightedness; the culture of management is one which rewards one’s ability to play social games with little regard for competence or anything beyond a narrow instrumental rationality. The ruling class symbolised by Bush, Blair, and Obama, is floating out of touch, and quite willing and able to gamble the world’s future for the sake of staying in the game for one more financial quarter or election cycle. It’s not a matter of individual evil but of a self-referential system of murderously senseless incentives stuck in the position depicted on the first editions of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy.
One could hope that the system will change when it realise that its disfunctionality will come at the cost of its own survival. But I’m not placing my chips on the numbers in accordance with hope, and I don’t think one needs hope to pursue happiness. Interesting times may be a curse but they’re none the less terribly fascinating, and if you’re going over a cliff there’s no reason not to enjoy the free-fall… all… the… way… down. And Hegel was right that it’s only at the end of the cycle that you get to a place with the grand view.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akoukq5DvAE&feature=PlayList&p=9ACB959B4DF2084A&index=0&playnext=1
~~~~~~
So what other shiny valuables besides He-3 lie beyond the crystal sphere?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYW50F42ss8
As Julian Simon would point out, everything in the universe is a potential resource; the only question is one of discovery. Saepere Aude.
Aster: This one was merely nightmare fuel, as I said. … An ecological collapse is not a sign of our failure to be humble before nature but of our failure to be rational in regards to nature’s reality. Failing societies lose the capacity to produce to match their habitual levels of consumption, and the process of trying to hold on to effects without causes sets everything afire with debt and inflation. … I agree intensely that the only way out is forward. … But I look at the mentality of the social classes who make the relevant decisions and I tremble. … One could hope that the system will change when it realise that its disfunctionality will come at the cost of its own survival. But I’m not placing my chips on the numbers in accordance with hope, and I don’t think one needs hope to pursue happiness.
Well, maybe not, but if you’re worried about this, why not work on building an alternative for yourself and your neighbors, to the extent that you can under current conditions? I don’t know how the cost of the components varies in New Zealand, but in the U.S., you can get the basics for building out a partial off-the-grid home power system (which can be expanded out on the margin, to take over more and more capacity, as you get the money and the experience with the system) for a few hundreds of US$, and can set it all up with off-the-shelf parts with the help of a DIY manual or two. (I can point you to some resources, if you’re curious. The notion that off-the-grid home power systems cost tens of thousands of dollars is the result of the Green State trying to insist on all-at-once rather than piecemeal solutions, and, especially, on sending people to professional “certified installers” who charge thousands of dollars for the labor.)
Of course, getting up your own home energy production won’t solve the big problem just on its own. But if you’re worried about losing electricity, it will solve that part of your little end of the problem, and that’s something.
I have no hope at all for any global or national systems to change. But I do have a lot of hope for changing things by getting out of global or national systems. And, perhaps, for helping others along the way to doing the same.
Rational modes of production begin at home….
Aster: I look at the mentality of the social classes who make the relevant decisions and I tremble. The modern corporation has locked itself into a pervasive business model which demands absolute shortsightedness; the culture of management is one which rewards one’s ability to play social games with little regard for competence or anything beyond a narrow instrumental rationality . . . willing and able to gamble the world’s future for the sake of staying in the game for one more financial quarter or election cycle.
Yeah, but couldn’t environmental solutions be integrated into that cynical process?
Obama’s solution to the health care crisis played out as a candy grab for insurance companies. Couldn’t a similar strategy be taken with energy companies looking to cash in on a publicly-funded solar project, or that want strict environmental regulations designed to actually save the earth and that have the “side effect” of crippling upstart competitors?
For years, ethanol was touted as a safer and more practical alternative to gasoline. It was promoted by the US government mainly because they figures how to turn it into quarterly profits for some agribusiness giant. It was wasteful, inefficient and did nothing but hurt the poor by contributing to rising food prices, but it’s a fine example of how businesses and government can use the standard wheel-greasing scamolas for environmentalist ends.
It’s a well known fact that global warming proponents tend to accuse the skeptics of being pawns for the oil industry. It’s not so well known that the skeptics often accuse the believers of being funded by the nuclear industry. A strident AWG-skeptic that I once knew (Objectivist, btw) once told me that the reason most American news networks exhibit much more pro-AGW bias than FOX is because the same conglomerates that own them also own companies that receive a lot of government funding for “alternative energy development”, and therefore have just as much at stake in the debate as the oil and gas companies do. Regardless of who’s right in this, AGW proponents are wrong to think that no one on their side has dirty hands, or that big business has nothing to gain from national or global environmental solutions.
And if they can force us to overpay insurance companies for coverage we don’t want, I’m sure they’ll eventually figure out a way to use tax money to overpay GE for constructing and maintaining some wind farms that kill birds and wouldn’t pay for themselves if they were made out of cardboard. All the while making sure that the regulatory regime surrounding this process works to lock in the existing companies, keeps all their patents secure, stifles innovation and looks to everyone like the best possible alternative. That’s not a great solution, for lots of reasons, but it should buy us some time from incinerating ourselves until . . . ya know, we win.
Aster: So what other shiny valuables besides He-3 lie beyond the crystal sphere?
The gas giants are actually mostly hydrogen (included the isotope deuterium, which is another ingredient in fusion) along with helium, methane and some water vapor. There’s no real point in burning hydrogen when you have the ingredients for fusion instead. Fusion ion rockets will likely be the primary form of propulsion that far away from the sun. It should look something like Serenity.
Other than that, most of the moons and asteroids contain large amounts of frozen water. Silicates, volatiles, various kinds of metals . . . pretty much everything in the solar system will be able to exploited profitably and pay for itself, once certain broad prerequisite technologies are there. Cheap solar, 2H/He3 fusion reactors, and more efficient methods of manufacturing carbon nanotubes.
Oh, and it would help if the governments of the world need to stop acting like idiots and stifling this process at every turn. With present technologies, you could conceivable reduce launch costs by 96% by constructing a space elevator. It will cost about 10 billion dollars. Only 6 billion of that is actual construction costs, the other 4 billion will be spent just complying with international regulations.
Once all that bullshit’s out of the way, the process should look something like this:
10 years
– Permanent moon base(s). Start refining He3 from lunar regolith for experiment in new fusion reactor design. Assuming solar displaces other sources of power, including fission, this will supplant deuterium/tritium reactors as the primary focus of fusion research.
REAL WORLD update: A permanent moon base is looking much more practical now the the Indian space probe Chandrayan 1 discovered vast amounts of water ice all over the surface (actually NASA discovered it back in the 1970’s and just forgot to pay attention).
– Exploration and mining of near-earth asteroids, primarily for metals.
– Maybe explore the upper atmosphere of Venus.
20 years
– More asteroid mining.
– Construct long-term floating habitat in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Test sustainability of the internal environment, production of food, production of carbon nanotubes from the atmosphere and the construction of new materials, and test the use of solar sails for return trip to Earth.
30 years
– Expansion and connection of Venusian habitats. Mass colonization, mass production of carbon nanotubes. Stronger than diamond, more flexible than steel, and with properties as a semiconductor, Earth now has a replacement source for FUCKING EVERYTHING! From tiny supercomputers to even tinier, super-efficient batteries, to more efficient solar panels to paper-thin materials that can stop a bullet, to the cables used to construct space elevators, shoes that never wear out, toaster coils that toast the bread perfectly, TV remotes where the numbers don’t wear off the buttons, ceiling fans that don’t vibrate . . . carbon nanotubes fucking solve it all!
– Exploration of Mars and Mercury.
50 years
– Colonization of Mercury. Think of it as a big asteroid, with a silicate surface and iron core. Profitable mining ventures. There’s ice water at the poles, hidden in craters that are permanently shielded from the sun. Permanent settlements are possible, and they could serve as bases for temporary mining excursions at night (which on Mercury lasts 143 days).
– Serious exploration and mining of the asteroid belt. Asteroids can be pull out of their normal orbit and placed in orbit around Venus or Mercury for more efficient mining. Unlike Earth, it won’t make much of a difference if you accidentally drop it on the surface. That could even be done deliberately to facilitate surface mining, or keep the useless rocky junk in orbit and use it to tether a skyhook to reduce launch costs, just as space elevators do on Earth.
60 years
– Start terraforming Mars. Nanites or bacteria are convert compounds on the ground into CFC’s and Nitrogen to thicken the atmosphere and cause a runaway greenhouse effect. CO2 ice sublimates and the feedback loop accelerates. This process could be expedited with the selective use of nuclear weapons to quickly sublimate ice at the poles.
As temperature and pressure rise, water ice is able to become liquid. Oceans form. At this point we’ll need to have some kind of giant shading mirror placed between Mars and the sun to substitute for the planet’s lack of a proper magnetosphere, otherwise solar winds will erode the atmosphere and ionize the water.
To complete the process, insert hardy plant life to convert excess CO2 to oxygen. 50-70 years after the process begins, humans can move in. It will be just like Earth, except colder, with a thinner atmosphere and about a third of the gravity. Plus it’ll be a frontier, so you any punk-ass bitch that crosses ya and afterwords enjoy a nice sex worker and some whiskey.
stuck in the position depicted on the first editions of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy.
Actually I think you mean Kevin’s second book, Organization Theory. (A rather trivial response to your comment, I know, but I’m in the middle of grading stacks of exams.)
SO,
I broadly agree with most everything you suggest. Generally speaking, with or without technological leaps in green energy, I definitely think it’s the case that decentralizing power production is both do-able for a surprising number of people under present circumstances. And that it’s certainly the best way by far to address peak-oil related concerns.
Soviet Onion: I imagine they’ll like that solution much better than the current environmentalist fixations which, among other things, include glorifying AIDS and pesticide-ban enabled malaria epidemics as forms of “natural population control”
I don’t think it’s fair to describe this kind of anthropocidal stuff as “current environmentalist fixations.” Any more than it would be fair to describe a Ra’s al-Ghul scale mass die-off of humanity as a “current Anarchist fixation,” even though I can think of some doofs who published calls for that sort of thing in Earth First! and other deep-ecology journals while self-identifying as Anarchists. The movement has a lot of different facets and shouldn’t simply be defined by its worst exponents.
Soviet: We’ve only got about a half-billion years before the sun boils the oceans and turns “Mother Earth” back into the lifeless rock she used to be.
Fortunately we apparently only need about 1,000,000 more years before we can all relocate to the Vorlon homeworld, anyway.
Roderick-
Yes. Apologies. It’s been a busy week.
Charles-
“Rational modes of production begin at home….”
Does this line of reasoning lead to taking away my toys? If so, I respectfully move to evade the issue.
“I have no hope at all for any global or national systems to change. But I do have a lot of hope for changing things by getting out of global or national systems. And, perhaps, for helping others along the way to doing the same.”
And I would wish your revolution well, if I thought that those like you were likely to be the major influences on the character of the society that will follow the collapse of the current economic model. I think it’s much more likely that we’ll crash back to patriarchal feudalism; liberal democracy is in a frighteningly precarious shape today even without the ‘long emergency’ which will be by far the most likely result of the environmental crises. It might be worth investing in preparations if they could make a significant difference towards sustaining the open society. But there’s nothing you can do to prevent the impoverishing and decivilising effects of a global loss of travel and trade. The shock to humanity’s collective self-esteem alone will be enough to repeat the effect of the First World War on the ‘Western’ psyche. And it seems inevitably that Promethean values will with too much justice take the blame for the crash. I can’t survive in a society whose degree of liberality retreats even one generation. I’ve lived under closed society conditions and I will do anything necessary to avoid returning to them. So I’ll make the best I can with the current order. And I like this world.
May I ask how long you give the corporate/state bourgeoisie? 2033?
Soviet-
It is a privilege to open one’s eyes and watch unrepentant arrogance resolve itself under focus into proper pride. There is nothing that I could wish more than to see the Rose Wilder Lane thing through and avenge the fall of America with the establishment of a literally universal civilisation. I can has Vega?
Of course, nuclear terraforming fleets are not allowed to land on developed planets. The Death Star however is perfectly safe to have around because it’s staffed not by barbarians but by educated civil servants devoted to the public welfare.