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.