Walking away from the American Dream

I'm a millennial.  On the old side, to be sure, I was in high school when Y2K failed to end the world in fire (to my immense disappointment), but I am definitely in the line up when boomers shake their fists and complain bitterly about our entitlement and narcissism.

When you stop to think about it, the hypocrisy is staggering.  This, from the generation of Americans that turned imperialism into the national sport, launched a fleet of self-important pseudo-spiritual individualist movements, and put the finishing touches on wrecking the biosphere.

Thanks, pops.

It's probably evident already that this post is going to be heavily larded with a certain inter-generational hostility; and indeed, there's going to be a fair bit of that as this blog moves forward.  That's because my generation, and those that come immediately after, are the ones struggling most acutely with the collapse of industrial capitalism in the United States.  Obviously it's not biting exclusively along generational lines, but we're getting hit harder.

"The American Dream" is basically the narrative of how previous generations of Americans have scrambled for their cut of the booty of empire.  Land stolen from native peoples, labor value extracted from slaves, capital looted from the global south.  The United States has been able to maintain more or less constant economic growth for two centuries by riding the same fossil-fuel powered growth train the rest of the industrial world was riding, and then spring-boarding off of that by stealing most of  continent and then building a global empire.  The Dream culminated in the 20th century story that every American can and should live a lifestyle of, by global and historical standards, immense privilege and luxury, with a large home stuffed with technological marvels and a small family divorced from extended community ties, in which one could expect to live out many years of idle retirement funded by capital investments.

Profitable business, until you run out of shit to steal, and the wheels come off.

It's a lifestyle of immense opulence when compared to how the vast majority of people now, and throughout history, have lived.  The idea that an entire nation (let alone the entire world, if only they could get enough Freedom(tm)) could live this way is, and always was, farcical. 

And to our collective shame, Millenials are not increasingly rejecting the American Dream because it is gluttonous in the extreme, but because we missed our shot; the buffet is picked-over, the bill is due.  We are turning our backs on this narrative, not because it was always unsustainable, but because reality denies us our chance to participate in the delusion.

Increasingly, we see people turning to radical community as a way, not to wage class warfare, but to survive.  Small-scale social safety nets in the form of gofundme campaigns, a return of multigenerational households as NEETs return to the nest, and people not related or involved romantically living communally to reduce costs are all examples of pre-industrial social organization creeping back up in new forms like weeds growing through cracks in a sidewalk.  The atomized, alienated, nuclear-family centric mode of production and consumption that makes up the framework of the American Dream is falling apart, and in this we see opportunities for building a sustainable future, and fighting back against a repressive past.

This is another theme I'll be exploring in this here blog, whenever I'm not too busy struggling to survive, myself.

A few words about Dual Power

A couple of weeks ago, I left you with a phrase, as evocative as it is easily misunderstood: Dual Power. I'd like to unpack it a bit, because it basically sums up my approach, not just to political struggle, but to survival in general (to the extent that those are different things, at least).

Wikipedia has a reasonable entry on Dual Power, and it's worth clicking over to have a look if you want a more thorough historical treatment than I'm prepared to give here.

The tl;dr: "Dual power" was a phrase originally coined by V. I. Lenin during the early days of the Russian Revolution, when the Czar had fallen, but state power was contested between the Soviet worker's councils and the provisional government.  Lenin was describing a situation where two different governments, both new and unstable, were building their institutions and power bases in parallel and in opposition to one another; this was a really unusual situation, and what we're facing now bears little similarity to it.  More contemporary socialists have used the term to mean, basically, undermining state control by building alternative organizations that provide services and adjudicate conflicts; in a sense, robbing the current state apparatus of market share. 

In this sense, Lenin was describing a war, while we're describing an insurgency.

As a strategy of revolution, the idea of Dual Power is that the state derives its power from the legitimacy granted to its structures by the masses of people.  All of us, every day, interact with state apparatus, in everything from law enforcement to food stamps to road construction.  Because the state administers these things, we confer power and legitimacy on that state when we use them, whether we like it or not.  If we can find some way to avoid using these structures, we undermine the power of the state that administers them.

Our ability to simply boycott state structure is pretty limited, but we can, in many situations, set up alternatives.  For example, state-run food programs (EBT, TANF, "food stamps") provide a crucial service, but generally involve monitoring, reporting, and snooping into the lives of working class people in need that serve to enforce the power and social dominance of the state.  People are, indeed, disempowered by utilizing state aid programs, but it is not, as right wing advocates claim, because such aid disincentivizes work; it's because of the intrusive and humiliation "othering" that those in need suffer at the hands of the state bureaucracy in order to access aid (I speak from experience).

Community-run food banks, on the other hand, provide an alternative source of aid for neighbors in need; fulfilling a service that the state also provides, but doing it in a way that builds rather than undermines community solidarity and pride.  The people who receive the aid, and those that give it, belong to the same community, and both have a concrete example of a community solving a problem internally, without relying on a government agency that deliberately cultivates an air of superiority, of distinction, from the community it ostensibly serves. 

If this leads to a general realization that the state (in its current form or any form at all) is not necessary for living, that it simply maintains a de facto monopoly on the power to solve problems, a monopoly that can be undermined, we have an instance of Dual Power as a revolutionary act.  The Black Panthers' Free Breakfast for School Children program is an excellent historical example of this strategy at work.  The Panthers declared that black communities in the United States were not locked in poverty because of a lack of industry or ability on their own part, but because of policies of the state, and they proceeded to prove it by addressing a critical concern, child nutrition, with no resources from the state whatsoever.

So, why am I harping on this so much in a blog about surviving climate change and peak oil?  Because Dual Power is a strategy with three distinct advantages in the situation in which we find ourselves:

1. It does NOT focus on the seizure of existing power structures (sometimes referred to in brief as "seizing State Power," another turn of phrase of comrade Lenin); as these power structures under capitalism are distinctly unsuited to addressing problems of peak oil and climate change--at least not without so much reworking as to make them essentially new structures.
2. It can win incremental victories on a variety of scales; Dual Power builds the components of a resilient and independent community, and those components are nearly as useful individually as they would be as part of a post-capitalist, whole system.  Whatever the outcome of the war, every battle won brings real and potentially permanent gains.
3. As a strategy, it is ideologically very inclusive.  All people need to have in common in order to pursue it together is a shared belief that the current system is inadequate to human needs, and can be replaced with one that is, piece by piece. Communists, socialists, libertarians, anarchists, people of a staggering variety of political outlooks can effectively work on Dual Power projects together.

As I've hopefully conveyed with this thumbnail sketch, Dual Power is a strategy with a rich history of theory and implementation, and not something I came up with on my own.  My understanding an implementation of it in my own work is hugely influenced by the teaching of my comrades and friends; it is the core strategy of our joint work in the pacific northwest.  One of the purposes of this blog is to serve as a laboratory notebook of our efforts to put this strategy into practice.  Hopefully it'll be as edifying to read as to write!

The future will be hard, but not bad: A change in tone.

It occurs to me that a brief interlude to set the tone of this reboot is probably in order.

Any frank discussion of the ecological limits of human civilization is going to come across as dark and cynical, because we live in a society that takes perpetual growth and technological advance as both given and ultimately desirable.  It's impossible to overstate how ubiquitous this is in western thought; everyone, and I mean everyone, from Democrats to Republicans to fascists to communists to lizard people, have internalized the narrative of perpetual growth to a significant extent.

When I say "industrial society is coming to a close", people hear "we're all gonna die", but what I really mean is "the current state of affairs can't continue, so something else is going to happen."  And given how much industrialism kinda sucks, I view this as a positive development on the whole.  The transition to that something else is likely to be a bumpy ride, because as I've stated here before, the transition is going to be uncontrolled and unplanned, but I actually have a great deal of optimism for where we'll wind up.  The Earth is a supremely adaptable system, and we as  species are without a doubt the most adaptable component of that system.

So while I have no doubt that industrial capitalism is headed for the dustbin, I also have no doubt that human culture, and humanity itself, are not.  Every so often I see someone say that humanity will be extinct in the next one hundred to five hundred years, and my response is always barely polite laughter.

Near-term human extinction is bullshit.  Short of a random cosmological event, a gamma-ray burst or truly massive asteroid impact, something that strips the Earth's atmosphere or liquefies the crust, I expect humanity to be able survive basically any conceivable insult.  Every lineage on the planet has survived at least six mass extinction events, including the dinosaurs (which were not actually wiped out 65 million years ago; I have one sitting on a perch not five feet from me as I type this), and none of those lineages had the ability to modify self and environment to the point of being able to colonize literally every biome on the planet.  Something would have to happen that is capable of sterilizing all multi-cellular life on Earth before humanity is rubbed out. 

I don't think even humanity is capable of causing human extinction;  even deliberate genocide failed to exterminate Native Americans, Jews, Armenians, Kurds, or Tutsis, to name but a few of the peoples who live on despite thorough attempts to eliminate them.  A carefully designed super plague might come close, but anything lethal enough to threaten the species will burn itself out without reaching the most isolated communities.  There are 7.5 billion of us, and with few exceptions, every one of those billions turn their considerable wit and adaptability to the challenge of survival, every day.

So there WILL be a future.  And humans being humans, that future will involve music, love, stories, and booze, so it'll be pretty neat, all told.  The transition will be hard, and weathering it with as many of our friends and loved ones as possible is the topic of this blog, but I'm not pessimistic, and I hope you aren't either.

The 2016 Election: This is why we're fucked.

As old followers of this blog (or folks who've perused the archives) likely know, I used to be a member of the Communist Party, USA. When I left that organization in late 2014, it was largely over disagreements with how the organization itself was led (I prefer my democratic centralism with some democracy, thanks); however, there were some pretty dramatic disagreements over strategy, as well, and leaving the CPUSA has giving me and my comrades here in the Pacific Northwest a chance to develop our own.

In a nutshell, the strategic disagreement is this: the CPUSA's main line of attack against capitalism is trying to encourage incremental change through support of Democratic candidates against Republican ones. Recognizing that a third-party electoral challenge is not, at the moment, likely to be successful, the CPUSA has elected to go the "lesser of two evils" route by supporting a party that, while pro-capitalist, is at least on paper in favor of some social programs. They hope that these programs can be expanded into socialism, a strategy frequently referred to as "reformism".

My last post four years ago was actually something of a crosspost; it was a piece I co-wrote for the People's World, the newspaper of the Communist Party, USA. The "Why We Fight" essay was an attempt to describe how a second term Obama Presidency would finally take substantial action on climate change; it was, in other words, a defense of a reformist strategy.

Well, President Obama did win reelection, and the linchpin of his climate change agenda is the Paris Agreement, signed by an overwhelming majority of countries just last week. It is indeed an impressive feat of international horsetrading, and it's clear that President Obama made it a significant priority for his administration. That's not nothing. The agreement calls on signatory nations to make an effort to limit global mean temperature increase to 2 ̊C by the end of the century, which is a laudable goal.

However, the agreement is nonbinding. There is no enforcement mechanism. The Fifth Assesment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in late 2013, predicts that a 2 ̊C anomaly by the end of the 21st century is almost certain; the Paris Agreement is DOA.

Democratic policy is, as it so often is, "feel good" policy.

Greg and I spent a good portion of the "Why We Fight" piece describing the different rhetoric of the two US political parties around climate change, and we were correct; the Republicans continue to act as if climate change is not a problem, while the Democrats (especially, this time around, Bernie Sanders) publicly wring their hands about it. But there is no reason to expect that another Democratic President would be any more effective than Barack Obama has been at taking meaningful action.  Because the office of the Presidency simply does not have the power to do more than slap the occasional band-aid  on the problem, and even that requires a tractable congress and international cooperation.

It's past time to come to terms with the fact that global capitalism will not "solve" climate change. It will be destroyed by climate change. Whatever we build in the ruins, whatever we preserve for the future, will have to take into account the substantial changes to the Earth system that are now, for all intents and purposes, inevitable.

Which is why you won't find me talking about national politics on this blog very much from here on out. Until national collective action on climate change and peak oil appears possible, let alone likely, my focus will remain local.

Which brings me to that strategic disagreement I mentioned earlier. A vocal minority within the CPUSA was critical of reformist strategy, because one need only look at the trajectory of national US politics since 1980 or so to realize that both mainstream US political parties are tacking hard to the right, making any attempt at reformism a losing proposition. To a certain extent, picking the lesser of two options seems like a no brainer; no one was suggesting voting for Republicans. But the critics pointed out that if national politics (specifically the pit for money and volunteer energy that is a US Presidential race) offers you two options, "lose", and "lose worse", then maybe it's time to consider a different field of struggle entirely.

Several of us advocated for a grassroots strategy of building working class institutions to provide support and services that are being increasingly cutoff by both Republican and Democratic government officials. This is not an electoral strategy at all, but rather a community-based strategy: by helping working-class people build mechanisms of community support, be they free schools, cooperative childcare, food shares, or what have you, you simultaneously build a sense of agency and power in the working class, and reduce the dependency of that class on wages and handouts from the ruling class.

In short, you build a class with the consciousnesses and resources to challenge capitalist power directly, rather than in a two-party electoral struggle where everything is in the ruling class's terms.

You also build community resilience against climate change and peak oil, without relying on mainstream political efforts.

It's that last point that makes this whole topic relevant to the project of this blog. In coming posts I'll talk about specific projects my comrades and I pursue as part of our community strategy, which we've taken to calling Dual Power. More on this later!

Socialism or barbarism?

Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.
- Rosa Luxemburg, "Junius Pamphlet" 1916

Luxemburg's turn of phrase, while certainly apt in the tumultuous years of the First World War, take on a special significance for us in the 21st century. We are, indeed, at a crossroads.

Before its long hiatus, this blog spent a great deal of time laying out, in occasionally morbid detail, exactly why industrial society faces the end of business as usual.

To briefly recap: The explosive growth in technological advancement and productivity of the years since the Industrial Revolution were made possible by fossil fuels. It's been argued that the economic complexity of any society is directly proportional to the energy that is available to that society, all else being equal. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, all human societies were limited, ultimately, to the energy available from the sun. Less technologically sophisticated societies might be limited to human muscle power; more sophisticated to animal muscle power; and still more sophisticated might utilize mechanically amplified wind and water power. All of these societies, however, were ultimately limited by the amount of energy entering the Earth system each year from the sun, which provides the energy to grow crops to feed humans and animals, and ultimately drives the weather systems that bring wind and fill reservoirs.

The Industrial Revolution made available the Earth's fossil fuels, which represented literally millions upon millions of years of stored solar energy, in the form of fossilized plant matter from long-gone eras. Humanity, previously limited to finding more efficient ways to utilize a limited but (for our purposes) perpetual energy budget, had quite literally won the energy lottery. A gigantic, one-time sum of concentrated fuel, allowing humanity, for a time, to attain power levels far greater than the sum of available solar energy in the Earth system.

This paradigm-changing event was a qualitative change in human society. It's no coincidence that the latest great Revolution, the overthrow of Feudalism by Capitalism, was pushed over the edge by fossil fuels. The bourgeoisie, in its time a revolutionary class, sought to find more ingenious ways of harnessing this new energy, and a new, heightened level of exploitation it made possible. Fossil energy did for the exploitation of the laboring classes what the cotton gin did for slavery in the United States; it was possible to squeeze more productivity from fewer workers. This set the stage for the new class contradictions of the Industrial Age, the stage on which the drama of humanity has played ever since.

But while this bonanza of incredible energy has persisted long enough to completely alter the fabric of human society, long enough that no one now alive can remember when humanity was limited to the renewable power from the sun, and endless growth is central mantra of of our culture, it must come to an end, is coming to an end, as described in these pages and the sources we cite.

If capitalism is the result and vassal of nearly limitless fossil energy, what happens when we run out?

Socialism or barbarism.

In his analysis of the primary contradiction of capitalism, Marx pointed out that capitalism was a necessary predecessor of socialism, and ultimately communism, because it was through capitalism that the productive processes of human labor were centralized and organized, in a fashion that is necessary for a society managed for the common good. However, I don't think Marx fully realized the transitory nature of this; that the socialized production created by capitalism and necessary for communism was dependent on fossil energy, which by definition was always a limited resource.

If Marx was correct in presuming that socialism must be built on the substrate of a functioning capitalist economy, it may be too late. The classic revolutionary model of "seize state power and build socialism from the top down", already a strategy with a dubious history, is unlikely to be workable in any case as the central organization of production made possible by fossil energy flies apart in the face of climate pressure and peak oil.

Do we, then, consign ourselves to Luxemburg's barbarism, a Mad Max future of hideous wars fought over depleting resources? I'm not prepared to do that.

Which brings us to this here re-rebooted blog. I've been through a lot in the last four years, since my shared project with Kir'Shara ground to a halt amidst existential despair. Which was probably an inevitable result of a project that, let's be honest, fairly wallowed in doom-porn. Trying to convince people that society is fucked is not the most emotionally fulfilling thing to do with one's time, after all. And in that time, I've developed some ideas for what individuals and small groups of people can do to prepare themselves and their communities for the coming Dark Age.

Seldon's Gate is a name inspired by the notion that a relatively small handful of people can build something that will last into a future that, while grim, carries the promise of rebirth. It's a small project, a personal project, but it seems appropriate to chronicle it here. So this blog will be a mixture of personal log, theoretical sandbox, and practical guide to building community and hope in increasingly shitty times.

I don't know if you'll learn anything, but I hope you'll be entertained.

The 2012 Election and Global Climate Change

This is Why We Fight.

 by Greg Rose and Steve McAllister      

     

Climate change is an irrefutable fact of our time. The monthly average temperature worldwide has been higher than the twentieth century average for 329 straight months. Global annual mean temperatures have broken records in eleven out of the last thirteen years. On August 28, 2012, the polar ice cap was smaller than it has ever been in recorded history.

Earlier this summer, 97% of the ice cover in Greenland was melting. The scientific community is essentially unanimous in its call for immediate and sustained action on the part of the world community to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, gases that are driving the increasingly calamitous extremes in the Earth’s climate. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change already projects that much of the United States will no longer be arable for food crops by the end of this century if current trends continue.

And to hear the Republican Presidential candidate tell it, nothing is wrong that more oil and coal extraction will not fix.

The contrast between Romney-Ryan and Obama-Biden on recognition of the importance of global climate change could not be sharper. In his acceptance speech at the Republican national convention Mitt Romney flippantly joked about the Democrat’s commitment to address climate change: “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. MY promise... is to help you and your family."

President Obama, in his acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention, was forthright in identifying the key difference between himself and Romney: “…climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They’re a threat to our children’s future. And in this election, you can do something about it.”

The problem is that failure to recognize and take action on global climate dooms billions of working class families here and abroad to poverty, misery, and death as the accumulated environmental disasters which capitalism has engendered continue to raise global temperatures and destabilize global climate patterns with increasing severity. That is the path Mitt Romney has chosen to endorse: superprofits for energy companies, disaster for the rest of us. We need jobs – the jobs a Green New Deal would create -- and Romney offers nothing.

It is not accidental that Romney has abandoned any pretense of scientifically-based policy making since his presidential ambitions loomed. While governor of Massachusetts Romney helped to create a regional cap-and-trade program to start to deal with greenhouse gas emissions; now cap-and-trade is presented by Romney as a plot by Obama to destroy American jobs. As the New York Times recently reported, Romney has hewn toward Republican orthodoxy – climate change denial – since recognizing the need to position himself further to the right to win the nomination. Under the influence of the massively-funded energy industry campaign to deny climate change, Romney’s chosen running mate, Paul Ryan, has been a mouthpiece for those energy industry interests since entering Congress, openly declaring climate change a hoax in a 2009 op ed; Ryan argued that global climate change resulted from "the hyperpoliticization of science" and "the use of statistical tricks to distort... findings and intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change."

It is useful to compare the 2012 national platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties on climate change to see just how radically different they are on this issue. The Republican platform mentions climate change only once in a paragraph laden with sarcasm about President Obama’s elevation of the issue to a major national security concern:

…the strategy subordinates our national security interests to environment, energy, and international health issues, and elevates "climate change" to the level of a "severe threat" equivalent to foreign aggression. The word "climate," in fact, appears in the current President's strategy more often than Al-Qaeda, nuclear proliferation, radical Islam, or weapons of mass destruction. (p. 40)

On the other hand, the Democratic platform addresses the issue with an appropriate seriousness:

We know that global climate change is one of the biggest threats of this generation -- an economic, environmental, and national security catastrophe in the making. We affirm the science of climate change, commit to significantly reducing the pollution that causes climate change, and know we have to meet this challenge by driving smart policies that lead to greater growth in clean energy generation and result in a range of economic and social benefits.

President Obama has been a leader on this issue. We have developed historic fuel efficiency standards that will limit greenhouse gas emissions from our vehicles for the first time in history, made unprecedented investments in clear energy, and proposed the first-ever carbon pollution limits for new fossil-fuel-fired power plants. As we move towards lower carbon emissions, we ill continue to support smart, energy efficient manufacturing. Democrats pledge to continue showing international leadership on climate change, working toward an agreement to set emission limits in unison with other emerging powers. Democrats will continue pursuing efforts to combat climate change at home as well, because reducing our emissions domestically -- through regulation and market solutions -- is necessary to continue being an international leader on this issue. We understand that global climate change may disproportionately affect the poor, and we are committed to environmental justice....

Our opponents have moved so far to the right as to doubt the science of climate change, advocate the selling of our federal lands, and threaten to roll back environmental protections that safeguard public health. They leaders deny the benefits of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts -- benefits like job creation, health, and the prevention of tens of thousands of premature deaths each year….

The national security threat from climate change is real, urgent, and severe. The change wrought by a warming planet will lead to new conflicts over refugees and resources; new suffering from drought and famine; catastrophic natural disasters; and the degradation of vital ecosystems across the globe.... [W]e will continue to champion sustainable growth that includes the clean energy that creates green jobs and combats climate change. (pp. 59-68)

The Romney-Ryan energy plan makes the implications of this difference clear. In this the Republicans demands an end to environmental regulation of fossil fuels extraction, puts forward a plan which amounts to little more than “drill, baby, drill” everywhere, and fails to mention even once the importance of global climate change or the relationship between fossil fuels and climate change. In the Romney-Ryan world climate change is a mad scientist’s fantasy. But the Romney-Ryan energy plan is based on an oil-imperialist’s fantasy: the Republican plan explicitly bases its clam to achieve “energy independence” by expropriating Canada’s oil reserves and abrogating the Mexican constitution to seize its reserves. What they call “North American” energy independence is unremitting dependence on energy monopolies controlling the resources of our neighbors at bayonet point if need be. Even at that, the looming intersection of peak oil and climate change is ignored completely, and nature will not allow the bayonets of American imperialism to hold that crisis indefinitely at bay.

By contrast, while the Obama administration’s plans embodied in the 2011 Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future did not go nearly as far as progressive advocates and climate scientists would have preferred, and the interim report, issued a year later, does not make enough progress even on the modest agenda of 2011, it still represents hugely more progress – and more movement in the right direction – than any Romney administration could conceivably accomplish. This is particularly true in that for the Republican Party climate change is the crisis that dares not speak its name.

While the Obama administration is still emphasizing increasing U.S. petroleum and natural gas supplies rather than embracing a full Green New Deal to transition beyond fossil fuel dependence and create the hundreds of thousands of jobs such a New Deal would entail, it is embracing stricter regulation of fossil fuel extraction, funding development of next generation fuel technologies, and energy markets as well as promoting the 54.5 mpg standard for fuel economy by 2025.

Romney’s response is “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet.”

We need jobs, jobs created by non-fossil-fuel technologies, jobs created by a national campaign to weatherize all buildings in this country to higher, more fuel-efficient standards. We are not going to get those jobs with a Romney administration.

With the situation presented by a reelected Obama administration, organizing science, organized labor, broad sectors of American working people, and elements of the ruling class who can see that climate change dooms humanity to take decisive action – the wide popular front we are precisely building in our electoral strategy – we will have set the stage for the next level of struggle: the struggle to create full employment and defeat the energy monopolists. No one claims that an Obama administration will not have to be goaded by mass action to take the necessary steps to enact the Green New Deal and other measures which meeting the challenge of climate change necessarily entails.

But a Romney administration, propelled by the pseudo-scientific know-nothingism of the ultraright, will present progressives with a stunning retrenchment and place working people entirely on the defensive at a time when we most need to be moving forward to confront the crisis of global climate change.

This is what is at stake in the 2012 election.

This is why we fight.

Steven McAllister is chair of the Climate Change Working Group of the Communist Party USA.

Greg Rose is a member of the Climate Change Working Group of the Communist Party USA.

Originally posted at Political Affairs

This is what peak oil looks like

A Chevron refinery burns in
Richmond, CA on August 6, 2012.
Lance Iverson, AP

A California oil refinery burst into flames yesterday, and it's telling that the majority of articles on the subject don't even pause to talk about injuries or fatalities (few and none, as far as I can tell) before speculating on the effect this will have on gas prices.

They're right to be concerned, evidently:

"Watching the national average rise since last week, one might have expected war broke out in the Middle East or a major hurricane shutting down production, neither of which happened, yet gasoline prices spiked." -Patrick DeHaan, senior petroleum analyst for the price watch websites run by GasBuddy.com, emphasis mine.

Yes, these spikes in prices are caused by lapses in refining capacity, and not supply of crude oil per se, yet there was a time when there were sufficient stockpiles of fuel in the petroleum production chain that hiccups in refining were smoothed out before disrupting the fuel supply. And yet according to the LA Times, California's stocks of gas and diesel are down 14.7% and 13.7% from this time last year. Any interruption of fuel delivery, whether due to burst pipelines or damaged refineries, is now being immediately felt at the pump. Like a diabetic whose blood sugar just crashed.

New Foundations

Good morning folks! Hopefully not too many of you have removed this blog from your RSS feeds (people still use those, right?), because I'm rebooting Seldon's Gate. When Kir'Shara decided to take a step back from the project, he was the only regular contributor, and so naturally expected to be turning out the lights on the way out. He offered me the chance to continue the work, though, and I figured it was time to make good on my promise to myself that I would post more.

Maybe now, as the driver, I won't be able to make any more excuses!

When Kir'Shara founded this blog, he drew his inspiration from a series of novels written by Isaac Asimov. The Foundation series recounts the fall of an interstellar empire, predicted by a mathematician who develops a model for the behavior of human societies that is accurate at large scales, although prone to error at small scales--ironically similar to climate change models. Foreseeing the collapse of his society, Hari Seldon founded a group of individuals called the Foundation whose purpose was to preserve the collected knowledge of humanity, and to work to ameliorate the effects of the collapse, because preventing it had become impossible.

Sound familiar?

John Michael Greer, of the Archdruid Report, states accurately that what we face is a not a problem (problems have solutions), but rather a predicament, a situation that must be endured, that requires adaptation rather than solution. I think that Seldon's Gate has done an excellent job chronicling the continuing catabolic collapse of our industrial society, step by step and stone by stone, in the face of escalating energy costs and climate change. Anybody who reads through our archives will see the inescapable pattern of current events, drawn in strokes both broad and subtle by Kir'Shara. With my turn in the driver's seat, I'd like to turn out attention to building our own Foundation, to action in the face of this slow disaster we now know so well.

For we are not powerless. Yes, climate change will almost certainly exceed 4° C, and the trail off of fossil fuel production will result in inevitable and painful contraction of the world's industrial economy. But we need not watch it all fall down around our ears; even facing an unstoppable catastrophe with inadequate resources and ineffective leadership, the crew of the Titanic still saved a third of the people on that doomed ship. With luck, we can do better.

End of line: Seldon's Gate, signing off

Santa Cruz County, Arizona, June 1972.
Photo by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Preserved and stored by
the National Archives and Records Administration
of the United  States.

To quote the less than memorable near-final words of Captain James T. Kirk: it was fun. Except for when it wasn't. Life is like that.

This blog has come to an end. I might leave it up for a while, although I don't really know why. The number of regular readers has dropped to about two. The words fall in the woods and no one hears them, so for practical purposes they don't exist.

Not that they should. Somewhere along the line I lost my voice. Maybe that's not a bad thing. There is a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.

Or listen to voices that aren't mine, until I remember again how to write something that's true. And worth listening to for a while.

From Ursula K. LeGuin:

   Only in silence the word
   Only in dark the light
   Only in dying life
   Bright the hawk's flight
   On the empty sky


From the Joss Whedon that was, before The Avengers:

   You can't take the sky from me.


From memory: the ones who are lost. Maybe part of a voice to be found, now that the old one is dead.

Things to come, in voices of the ghosts

Click the above to hear a 15 minute audio recording of various radio broadcasts from the Second World War. They cover roughly the second half of 1941. During this period, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. And the American arsenal of democracy began gearing up -- not only to annihilate the Axis governments but to achieve military dominance over the entire planet. That dominance continues to this day.

Radio broadcasts from 1941 chronicle the passage that resulted, of a whole civilization into a history-wrenching storm. There have been many such storms in the time of the human species on Earth. Few affected every human being in existence immediately, all at the same time. The fall of the Romans, for example, did not immediately unleash its consequences upon the cultures across the Atlantic. It took a thousand years for those consequences to unfold, in the genocidal gunfire and plagues brought by the ships of the Roman successor states, which one historian called "the Mongols of the sea."

The Second World War was different than the earlier storms, because it unfolded in the period when human civilization had become a single, world-spanning entity. Still divided culturally, but increasingly integrated by technology and economics, to a degree never before imagined. The war brought a global maelstorm that immediately affected the lives of almost every society on Earth.

The radio archives of that period give an unmatched sense of the drama and reality of world-shaking events now regarded as dull facts to be memorized by school children preparing for Leave Our Child Behind. Or: to be used as mythology, justifying choices made today, by people with the power over war and peace.

The broadcasts are useful not only as a reminder of things past. They can give us a harbinger of what it will be like when the current crisis of planetary ecology finally breaks in its full fury upon the global culture that required 200,000 years to make. There will be anxious voices in the air, with tidings of the unimaginable made real and loss too great to bear and readiness for a stand.

The largest fire in New Mexico history: year 2

Gila National Forest, New Mexico, May 25, 2012

For the second year running, a wildfire in the forests of New Mexico has become the largest ever in the history of the state. The Whitewater-Baldy Fire Complex, the firefighters call this year's epic foreshadowing of Wyrmwood. It has burned an area of the state larger than New York City and shows no sign of slowing down. The entire American West faces another inferno summer of horizon spanning flame, with record forest fires expected as the region enters a period of long-term drought.

Meanwhile, government officials and business leaders, near from the smoke or far, routinely assume that disappearing water supplies, incinerated ecosystems, and accelerating climate change will naturally fail to hinder their plans for indefinite expansion of cities, commerce, and population.

Congress, for its part, stands ready to implement budget cuts that will shrink national firefighting resources in the face of drastic increases in fires. Funding for carrier battle groups, counter-insurgency troops, and drone armadas may or may not be subject to cuts of their own.

The lead story on Yahoo News declares: "Diff'rent Strokes star to divorce." Young amateur baseball players in towns gutted by WalMart prepare for the major league draft. Superheroes on screens made of silver save New York from an alien armada thousands of times before the weekend is done. And, we are told by the grave intoning of a foreign policy web site, that Obama's drone war has not gone far enough.

Toward Bethlehem, to be born.

Ecocatastrophe and the final frontier: 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson

I haven't read it yet, but one of my top items for scheduled summer reading is the new science fiction novel 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson is best known for the novels of his Mars trilogy, which trace human settlement of the Red Planet through the early twenty third century.

Thinking about today's global ecological crisis, my working assumption has been that climate change and resource depletion will put a permanent end to space travel sometime in the next few centuries, and possibly in this one. It's hard for me to imagine how the coming permanent exhaustion of fossil fuels and strategic minerals would permit future societies to build the massive, energy-intensive, raw-material-hogging infrastructure necessary to launch and sustain human colonization of the solar system. The virtual inevitability of runaway climate change and ecosystem collapse, it seems to me, seal the coffin even more tightly on dreams of future space colonization. Thus, over the last decade I came to believe that the future Robinson described in his Mars books was just about as feasible as traveling to Middle Earth.

2312, apparently, stands for the proposition that I'm wrong. Which, frankly, would make me very happy. From perusing various reviews, I can tell that Robinson's book postulates a near-collapse of civilization in the twenty first century, thanks to the various eco-horrors I just referenced. But in KSR's future, space colonization gets underway even so. By the early twenty fourth century, human societies are well-established throughout the Solar System, from Mercury to the asteroid belt and outer planets. From what I can tell, Earth itself remains a broiling, desert-wrapped hell hole of super-storms and rising oceans, embroiled in its ancient plagues of racism, hierarchy, and violence. But humans on other worlds flourish, branching out into new pathways of cultural experimentation -- and technology-enhanced biological and cybernetic evolution.

That's a long winded way to say I'm going to buy this book and scrutinize the underlying assumptions about how its imagined future polities and cultures came to be and how space travel enabled humanity to transcend the ecological devastation of its home planet. This intention of mine creates some personal irony, because the author once told me (in a face-to-face interview that I incompetently and unforgivably never managed to publish) that he did not intend his books to be read in this fashion. In so many words, he said that the technological and social speculation in his novels are simply stagecraft, not to be taken as academic commentary, serving strictly dramatic purposes. They are not the point of his books. They simply enable him to tell stories about interesting characters. And so they do, and so the characters are. But I can't help but read his books for my own purposes, even so.

My purpose is to imagine the future not of individual, imaginary characters but of our species as a whole. For some reason, it is emotionally important to me to imagine that the possible future histories of humanity that might unfold after my death are not uniformly apocalyptic. A human future out among the stars has always been part of those dreams. It's my own personal religion, and I seem to need it (not by bread alone). Perhaps especially now. One year of law school has left me, to be frank, desolate. Emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and in all other ways empty. I've been to that place many times, in a lifelong cycle between hope and despondency. Somehow my esoteric personal religion always helps the cycle return to hope, along the trails through imaginary worlds and all the wonders that could be.

One more time.

* * * * *

Early reviews of KSR's book are positive, hinting at greatness. One of my favorites is here.

Long time passing: NASA on the fate of the Milky Way

NASA simulation of future night sky on Earth.

Data from NASA's Hubble space telescope reveals that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide with each other, beginning about 4 billion years from now. The two galaxies will merge into one, over the course of the subsequent three billion years. By which time, Earth will have been swallowed by its aging red giant sun.

The night sky in the few million years before the collision will look like the picture above, according to NASA. The swirl of light is the Andromeda galaxy, filling our sky, stretched by gravitational forces to a much different shape.

Whether through evolution or catastrophe, human beings won't be around to see the sight. But we imagined it, in the time we had.

None of which has anything to do with ecological crisis or the other topics of this blog. Except maybe in the broad, philosophical sense. Nothing lasts forever. Not the stars, or the sky, or those who look up.

A million moving north, forever: CBS News on the impact of climate change

The video linked above is a two-minute editorial by M.A. Sanjayan, chief climate scientist at The Nature Conservancy. Sanjayan's piece ran recently on The CBS Evening News.

It's a great example of how to make the most of a visual medium to convey complex scientific information quickly. I could quibble with aspects of Sanjayan's commentary, but overall I found it an effective message for a general audience. If mainstream media organizations like CBS ran this sort of piece more often, such a steady stream of information might eventually begin to influence the dynamics of public opinion and political debate on climate change.

For now, that's not the case. Eventually, though, physical reality will become too great deny. The way our society talks about climate and the future will begin to change, because in the end physical reality can't be ignored. Perpetual motion machines don't work. Perpetual attempts to believe in a free lunch come to naught. Unending insistence that the weather isn't changing will be defeated by the manifest changing of the weather. The passing of summer into autumn can't be willed away. The change in the air becomes too great not to notice, and so too the change in color of the leaves. People notice, and stories that the change is all a great lie will become not credible. So too with the stories that the change is limited, something we can control, nothing we haven't seen before, no cause here for alarm. Past a certain point, as the trees go bare and the skies turn gray and the snows begin to arrive on the wind, the stories of endless summer become ludicrous.

Things that can't go on, don't.

For now, the denial continues. The insistence on normalcy prevails. But the weather is changing, a harbinger of the new era, coming inevitably but we known not when. Perhaps soon.

Sanjayan's commentary hints at the scale of what's happening already. My favorite anecdote from his report is about Texas. Withering under a brutal drought that shows no sign of ending, ranchers in the broiling dead plains of the Texas interior have begun sending their cattle north. One million head of cattle, Sanjayan relates, have now left the state for literally greener pastures, over the horizon to the north. Those cattle, he notes, will not be back.

A harbinger. Eventually, human beings living in the great arid, dying expanses of the American Southwest will face the same choice.

* * * * *

The question remains, haunting like a spirit: what are we going to do? What happens when an ending is preordained, as catastrophic, planet-reshaping climate change has now become? When multiple related catastrophes stemming from human energy and expansion are arriving at the same time?

In the face of such an outcome, perhaps a certain kind of denial is to be expected. Maybe even welcomed. Individual human lives must face the reality that each life will end. Human beings have always found a way to exist with this knowledge, for as long as they've been on the Earth. We live in foreknowledge of death. And we go on with life anyway. Loving each other, or losing ourselves in petty conflicts, doing something to pass the time. Until the time is no more.

Our civilization flatters itself that it has transcended the limits faced by human individuals. Human beings die, we say, but human civilization will continue, evolving and expanding forever. Outliving the limits once imposed by the Darwinian constraints of life on the Earth.

Except the harbingers tell us this isn't true. What now? Some communities have begun searching for answers. Sub-cultures devoted to simpler living speak of living within limits, adapting to the age beyond abundance. Some of the technical specialists who supervise the infrastructure of a global civilization quietly confer on what it will mean to face a multi-meter sea level rise; or annual weather patterns where the storm of the century happens every year in a hundred places and more; or water supplies ancient beyond reckoning have simply gone away.

What are we going to do? Almost two years since I started to write here and I still don't know. No one does, really. But in some places, the answers are sought.

For now, that will have to be enough.

An economy that works -- without "jobs"

Cleveland, Ohio, home of the Evergreen Cooperatives.
.From Wikimedia Commons

From Frank Joyce, President of the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights, an argument that widespread, permanent unemployment in America is creating a new underground economy based on new forms of labor and production.

Examples are to be found, Joyce points out, in old Rust Belt cities like Detroit.

The stark reality is that the problems are structural and cumulative. The old job system isn’t coming back to Detroit. Ever. The stark reality is that Detroit is not some one-off fluke. Detroit is just the canary in the coal mine. Virtually every dynamic that was in play in Detroit over the last several decades is now at work planet wide. Paralyzed “leadership”; persistent racism; and growing inequalities of wealth, income and power and shrinking democracy aren’t just features of Detroit. They apply to the nation and many other places throughout the world.  

Help from the system that is failing is definitely not on the way. All the superficial debates about high taxes or low taxes, individual mandates or no individual mandates, big government or small government, contraception or no contraception will not put Humpty Dumpty together again.  

For many this is understandably both depressing and disorienting. But for others it is liberating. “Solutionaries” are creating a different kind of economy. There may be no jobs, but there's plenty of work to be done. Victimology is not welcome here.  

Since a Reimagining Work conference held in Detroit last fall, new economy energy and enthusiasm have intensified. There are growing efforts in food production and distribution, education, media, supporting the formerly incarcerated, transportation, community policing and manufacturing. 

Wright describes the emergence of worker-owned cooperatives as a key response to poverty and the disintegration of the conventional economy. Wright points to Cleveland's Evergreen Cooperatives as a notable example. They're a pilot project launched by universities, hospitals, and non-profits in Cleveland, with help from the city. Only a few dozen people work there for now, but the participants hope the project will offer a model for future work programs that can be scaled up. 

Since there is likely never going to be a second New Deal, or anything close, people have to help themselves locally. Models for how to do that exist. They will be needed as the corporate-dominated mainstream economy continues to leave more and more Americans behind.  

Drought slashes Mexico food production 40 percent

Drought relief station, Chihuahua, Mexico, April 2012
From New America Media

From Climate Progress, citing Latin American sources:

While the Texas drought has gotten much of the attention in this country, what has happened in Mexico is equally devastating. Since Mexico is projected to suffer even worse warming-driven Dust-Bowlification in the coming decades — and that will certainly have consequences for the United States — it’s worth looking in a little more depth at what’s happening to our neighbor to the south:

The severe drought affecting 22 of Mexico’s 32 states has caused a 40 percent drop in agricultural production, opening the way for food shortages over the next few months, the National Peasants Confederation, or CNC, said….

The drought has ravaged Indian communities, destroying crops and forcing thousands of peasants to leave their ancestral lands and head to the cities.

“As of last November, corn production was at barely 42 percent of the volume projected for 2011, and bean production was only 41 percent,” CNC president Gerardo Sanchez said.
Corn and beans are staples in the Mexican diet and shortages could lead to speculation, sending the prices of these commodities soaring, the CNC said.

“Of the 4.2 million people who fell into food poverty from 2008 to 2010, nearly 75 percent (about 3 million)” live in rural areas, the CNC said.

Species extinction foreshadows threat to human food supply

Honey bee at work, from Wikimedia Commons.

According to the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, current models suggest that at least 40 percent of species in nature will be driven extinct by the year 2100 at our current emissions pace (to four degrees Celsius or more above pre-industrial levels).

From Grist and the Pesticide Action Network, an example of how the loss of a single species can threaten the viability of an entire sector of human agriculture.

Although news about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has died down, commercial beekeepers have seen average population losses of about 30 percent each year since 2006, said Paul Towers, of the Pesticide Action Network. Towers was one of the organizers of a conference that brought together beekeepers and environmental groups this week to tackle the challenges facing the beekeeping industry and theagricultural economy by proxy.

“We are inching our way toward a critical tipping point,” said Steve Ellis, secretary of the National Honey Bee Advisory Board (NHBAB) and a beekeeper for 35 years. Last year he had so many abnormal bee die-offs that he’ll qualify for disaster relief from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

In addition to continued reports of CCD — a still somewhat mysterious phenomenon in which entire bee colonies literally disappear, alien-abduction style, leaving not even their dead bodies behind — bee populations are suffering poor health in general, and experiencing shorter life spans and diminished vitality. And while parasites, pathogens, and habitat loss can deal blows to bee health, research increasingly points to pesticides as the primary culprit.

Hansen on national climate policy

New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, September 11, 2005
From U.S. National Weather Service.

 

From yesterday's New York Times, James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, on what the correct overall approach to a national climate change policy would look like:

We need to start reducing emissions significantly, not create new ways to increase them. We should impose a gradually rising carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, then distribute 100 percent of the collections to all Americans on a per-capita basis every month. The government would not get a penny. This market-based approach would stimulate innovation, jobs and economic growth, avoid enlarging government or having it pick winners or losers. Most Americans, except the heaviest energy users, would get more back than they paid in increased prices. Not only that, the reduction in oil use resulting from the carbon price would be nearly six times as great as the oil supply from the proposed pipeline from Canada, rendering the pipeline superfluous, according to economic models driven by a slowly rising carbon price. 

But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true costs, leveling the energy playing field, the world’s governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions of dollars per year. This encourages a frantic stampede to extract every fossil fuel through mountaintop removal, longwall mining, hydraulic fracturing, tar sands and tar shale extraction, and deep ocean and Arctic drilling. 

President Obama speaks of a “planet in peril,” but he does not provide the leadership needed to change the world’s course.

IMF study acknowledges peak oil as energy factor for next decade

Fawley Oil Refinery, United Kingdom. December 17, 2005
From Wikimedia Commons.

A report published under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund concedes that geological conditions will have an influence on the future price and availability of oil, possibly in the next decade. The report does not represent the views of the IMF, only the authors. But it is another indication that talking openly about physical limits on oil supply, rather than assuming they will expand indefinitely for all time to meet all human needs, is no longer taboo in mainstream circles.

The abstract of the report:

We discuss and reconcile two diametrically opposed views concerning the future of world oil production and prices. The geological view expects that physical constraints will dominate the future evolution of oil output and prices. It is supported by the fact that world oil production has plateaued since 2005 despite historically high prices, and that spare capacity has been near historic lows. The technological view of oil expects that higher oil prices must eventually have a decisive effect on oil output, by encouraging technological solutions. It is supported by the fact that high prices have, since 2003, led to upward revisions in production forecasts based on a purely geological view. We present a nonlinear econometric model of the world oil market that encompasses both views. The model performs far better than existing empirical models in forecasting oil prices and oil output out of sample. Its point forecast is for a near doubling of the real price of oil over the coming decade. The error bands are wide, and reflect sharply differing judgments on ultimately recoverable reserves, and on future price elasticities of oil demand and supply.

ABC news: journalists and scientists increasingly see climate change as existential threat to civilization

"Apocalypse," by Albert Goodwin, 1903.

 
From ABC reporter Bill Blakemore:

Global warming’s “risk to the collective civilization” (meaning global civilization) has been continually spoken of in secret or unofficial or private conversations among engaged climate scientists and government and policy leaders around the world.

Such terms — catastrophe, threat to civilization itself — have been commonplace in carefully worded private discussions among peer-reviewed experts that this reporter and other journalists have often experienced and sometimes engaged in.

Careful not to prompt destructive panic, nor to lose credibility, responsible experts have been careful to temper their public depictions of what the world’s climate science has been revealing about the worst effects — if humanity does not handle the problem immediately — of the rapid climatic and oceanic changes already under way.

But clearly, with so enormous and inclusive a truth as this one, the proven details of which are widely available to anyone with access to the Internet, “the truth will out, we see it day by day,” as English poet Geoffrey Chaucer wrote long ago.

And so, inevitably, experts and leaders around the world are beginning to be more open about the frightening prospects.

However, in doing so, they are also beginning to demonstrate how to hug this monster — to embrace the fear it instills. They need to have done so to speak with credibility...

As a growing number of professional journalists around the world are finding, the story of manmade global warming (and the other evil twin of excess carbon emissions, the rapid acidification of the oceans) is unprecedented in its scale, almost “too big to cover,” and frightening.

But there are now signs that, little by little, voices and personalities are beginning to emerge around the world who are starting to hug this monster, manage the fear, and turning the emotions it causes into action.