Tag: economics

Human Society – Going the Way of the Dinosaur?

Dinosaurs didn’t go extent. They just flew away!

The word sustainability has almost lost all meaning in environmental discussions, as it has been applied to all manner of human activity. Many are inclined to drop this word and use others in their stead.

Resilience, sustainability, adaptability. I hesitate to throw away any words, as words have meaning and reducing our vocabulary creates a depauperate language.

The word “sustainable” is particularly difficult because it is used to opposite meanings in economics and biology. Sustainable in classical economics means: “making decisions and strategic investments to sustain the community over the long-term.” In biological terms, sustainable means “making decisions and strategic investments that are not harmful to the environment or deplete natural resources, and thereby support long-term ecological balance.”

The concept I’m searching for is a quality of human society that allows it to continue indefinitely into the future without reducing the carrying capacity of the biosphere that sustains it. This concept embraces sustainability, resilience and adaptability.

Adaptability is a particularly slippery concept, because humans do not adapt to the world in the biological sense that others species adapt through the process of biological evolution. Rather, humans actively adapt the environment to human needs and desires. We do not grow fur to live in northern latitudes, we take from natural resources to invent fitted clothing and insulated houses. We do not grow gills and flippers to fish in the sea, we invent boats and fishing tackle. We change our environment to suit our needs. We are an impatient species, with no time for mundane evolution to bring us into conformity with existing conditions.

What is needed rather than adaptability is forbearance, the quality that Scots call ”let-a-be,” that Taoists call “wu-wei,” allowing the world to rise of itself, rather than to shape it into predetermined human patterns.

What would a “wu-wei” human economy look like? Such an economy would take no more resources than are naturally replenished, leaving sufficient resources to support all life. Wastes would not be produced in greater amounts than are naturally assimilated through existing geophysical processes. Food for humans would be grown within existing cycles of resource availability and biodiversity.

In short, human societies would exist in a dynamic equilibrium with all other species, subject to natural cycles of resource availability. Humans would a be a part of, not apart from, the non-human world.

Non-human species have lived this way all the time. Those that fouled their nests or outgrew their food supplies declined or went extinct (or adapted and flew away). The process continues today, with the addition that non-human species must now adapt to the human propensity to ignore evolution and demand dispensation from adaptation.

Human economies are created and maintained to suit human desires and needs. They are a mental constructs subject to human construction and modification. We “Homo sapiens” invented our way into the environmental mess that our economies have created. We have the capacity to invent our way back into a cooperative, co-evolutionary relationship with non-human species that will benefit all and ensure our species’ place on this planet in the future.

If only we would.

Classical Economics Dismissed

Talking about climate change in human economic terms is like talking about bicycles in terms of fish. The one has nothing to do with the other.

Economists are trained at an early age to strain at gnats and swallow camels. Environmental consequences of human activities are passed off as “externalities.” “Natural resources” (note the human centered term) are free and available for usurpation and profit by individuals and their corporate persons. When resources become scarce, the “invisible hand” of the market place will bring forth substitutes that will allow The Economy to grow indefinitely.

This, of course, is bollocks.

There really are limits to human growth, and we are stretching them as thin as spider webs. Many are convinced that we have already overshot the carrying capacity of the Earth for “Homo sapiens.”

The influence of human activity on natural climate variation is unknown quantitatively, but the qualitative effects of the human presence on this planet are plain for all to see. No obtuse economic justification can deny the effects of human pollution, habitat destruction and resource exploitation.

Things that can’t go on forever, don’t.

What do you have when you chain 1,000 economist to the ocean floor? A good start.

San Lorenzo Valley Water District eyes cap-and-trade program

The Santa Cruz Sentinel printed this article today, as straight news, not even in the comics section. 

BOULDER CREEK — Surveying will begin next month on about 1,600 acres of land in Boulder Creek, Zayante and Olympia to find out how much carbon those forests contain, with the San Lorenzo Valley Water District hoping to fetch a princely sum in the state’s newly launched cap-and-trade program.

Earlier this month, the district’s Board of Directors approved spending $45,000 on the “carbon sequestration” project, which will be headed by the Alameda-based forestry consulting firm Buena Vista Services. Work is expected to begin within the next 30 days, and “by the fall, we’ll have the inventory number locked down,” said Jim Mueller, district’s general manager. 

That number will be certified by an independent third party, and soon after, the district will be able to enter the cap-and-trade auctions.
During a meeting to discuss the project several months ago, Joe McGuire, a principal with Buena Vista Services, estimated the district’s lands contain up to 850,000 tons of carbon, and that those credits can be sold for a total of $550,000 during the next 12 years. 

Betsy Herbert, the district’s environmental analyst, said the team will take samples from trees in different sites, and that data will then be crunched to get an estimate on how quickly the forests will grow during the next 12 years, she said. The study will be updated in 2025, and every 12 years thereafter, she said.

How much more absurd can this be? The forest is standing there, growing, breathing in CO2 and breathing out O2, as it has for centuries. Now some upstart snert in the water department can make money off it by selling “carbon credits,” as if the Department was responsible for making the trees do their natural thing.
The other side of the story, not included here, is that someone, whoever is buying the “carbon credits,” is buying the right to pollute.
This is why economics is a fantasy discipline. It has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with human audacity. Who would have thought of such a thing but an economist?
Chaining them to the ocean floor is too good for them.

Coming to the wrong conclusions about Peak Oil


This article from Australia Demand for oil to outstrip supply within two years conflates Peak Oil with energy demand, assuming that Peak Oil means oil demand exceeds supply. Peak Oil actually means that point at which oil production irreversibly declines. Current projections, based on rather iffey reserve estimates, suggest that global Peak Oil will be realized some time in the next five years.

The article in “Perth Now” reaches the following conclusions:

“Energy will be king in the coming decades, and we must exploit our (bountiful) resources wisely, while preparing ourselves for much higher prices and potentially lower domestic economic activity (aside from coal and LNG exports).”

Energy has always been king in human societies, whether it was for hunting mammoths, domesticating animals, building steam engines or flying across the Atlantic. Our major human “revolutions:” agricultural, industrial and informational have all revolved around and been inspired by energy concerns.

As to exploiting “our” bountiful resources, it seems there’s been too much of that going on around our poor beleaguered planet of late. Who says they’re our resources to exploit in the first place, anyway? Seems like us Johnny-Come-Latelys on the evolutionary scene owe a bit of forbearance to those species who preceded us and made it possible for us to keep on evolving, if indeed, we ever did.

Economic activity and prices are inventions of this one particular species egotistically called Homo sapiens. They’re not real, at least in the same way that air and water and sun and photosynthesis are real, important and essential. We got along quite well for 100,000 years or so without economics and prices. Seems like the neighborhood has gone rapidly downhill since their invention.

Can we get along with “much higher prices and potentially lower domestic economic activity?” Sure we can. We did quite well during World War II. Prospered even. Well, some of us did anyway. That’s part of the problem.

The whole idea of steadily increasing domestic activity is oversold, and a bad deal to begin with that never got any better. It may have temporarily lined the pockets of a few, while others, including furred and feathered and scaled others, two-legged, four legged and finned, have done rather poorly. Their prospects don’t look any better for the future.

Unless, of course, we get off this obsession with growth for growth sake and devolve back to some semblance of balance, real balance, not the right-wing “I get more balance than you do” concept. “Much higher prices and potentially lower domestic economic activity” will help considerably in that regard, of course, encouraging folks to consume less, stay at home, walk and bicycle more, work fewer hours, grow gardens full of good food and flowers, increasingly contemplate the natural scenery of their neighborhoods with sublime satisfaction. Gather up all the growth maniacs and put them on a secluded island somewhere, ringed with all of our excess military hardware so they cant’ escape. Let ’em grow there, in isolation.

Energy will indeed become king in coming decades, but in terms of saving it rather than expending it. The relaxing “clop,clop” of horses hooves will replace the mind-altering roar of captive automotive horses, with sound systems set on stun. Our streets will return to the commons, where we will meet with our neighbors for convivial conversation, where our dogs will bask undisturbed in the sun, where trees will provide welcome shade, moisture and beauty, where the edges will be marked with flowers and grass rather than hard concrete curbing.

With the End of the Age of Oil we will also come to the End of the Age of Automomotive Oppression.

A Vision of the Future

In this article on Common Dreams, a 93 year-old woman has provided a vision of the future – from the past. Dr. Grace Lee Boggs shows us how Detroit is a vision of the future, a city that “no longer has to adhere to the usual capitalist mantra of growth and expansion because it is absolutely clear that the industrial system is finished. This fact allows citizens to respond by starting something new all over again.”

We are witnessing the final failure of capitalism, as gleefully predicted by Socialists everywhere. Even official economists are beginning to admit that the whole idea of free market capitalism is failing, that traditional methods of propping up the capitalist economy have failed to budge the current growing recession, even unto “wars” (read: invasions and occupations) waged on two fronts.

Although it may seem to young people that we are “starting something new all over again,” we are really reviving what has always worked: local self-reliance, local politics, local economy, local social services. Victory gardens, allotments, cooperative child care, extended families, cooperative housing, flexible kinship systems, midwifery, and, most importantly, self-reliance and mutual aid, have always been the most effective social organizations to support the people at the local level. It is only when a professionalized central authoritarian government attempts to take control, supported by a professional constabulary and a standing army, that local social systems are broken down and forced to fail.

This doesn’t mean that capitalism, the private ownership of production, is bad in itself. It is only centralized capitalism that breaks down “normal” social relations, with the extension of the concept of a “free market,” which has never been free, outside the realm of economics. Social services can never be organized under free market auspices, which is intrinsically based on distinctions between haves and have-nots. In “free market” social serves, someone is always, by definition, left out.

The only social system that is historically documented to provide egalitarian social services is non-state, locally organized, bioregionally-based mutual aid. Call it (small c)communism, socialism, anarchism or what have you, the concept of local self-reliance based on mutual aid and local resources is the only demonstrably “sustainable” social form ever devised by human societies.

As our civilization, if that’s what it is, faces the unavoidable limitations of Peak Oil and climate change, David Brower’s advice becomes increasingly relevant:

Progress consists of turning around and taking a step forward.

The Unreal Deal

Dean Baker: What Was Actually Happening While You Led a Life: “The United States Since 1980”

As much as I despise economics, I’m beginning to think it’s the key to understanding what’s happening these days. Understand, of course, that economics is not necessarily about money, at least not all of it.

This article is fascinating and/or boring, depending on how you view economics as something real or not. Regardless of your view, it has some important points to make.

Even though you and I know that economics is not real, that it ignores all the really important things in Life, economics is where the people live who “run” this world. When the Bushies talk about the “reality culture,” they’re talking about those of us who don’t buy into economics as the prime mover of the world.

Be that as it may, economics is the prime mover of the part of the world that lies closest to the surface, the world that impacts people directly, like with bullets and bombs and famine and epidemics. These things don’t just happen, war doesn’t “break out,” like rain falling from the sky. Wars and famines and epidemics, to a large part, are caused by human action, within social systems such as governments and religious organizations. They are created on purpose, for a reason, and that reason is most often economics.

This is not about greed, exclusively, although greed plays a part. This is about power (measured in money and influence). This is about status. This is about control. This is about ideology and which ideology wins out in the end (coming soon to an Apocalypse near you).

So economists are the gurus these days, manipulating vast universes of data chasing around the globe twenty-four hours a day, conjuring up money from coursing electrons and febrile tangles of wires and transistors.

Economists on the one hand, militarists on the other, feeding each other in a frenzy that leads, ultimately, to economic collapse, the premature deaths of millions of humans, the destruction of the natural world (if there’s any left).

Bring ’em on, I say. Let’s get it over and done with, so we can all settle back into a steady state society, live as the animals we all are, and forget about all this frenzied progress, if that’s what it is.

Time to turn around and take a giant step forward.

The Real Deal

Politics fills our consciousness these days, with the grand distraction booming forth from every newsertainment source on the planet. If you’re not careful, you might begin to think it’s important.

Don’t worry, it’s just part of the carnival show.

The real deal takes place behind the curtain, in gatherings of (mostly) men in high places, the movers and shakers of the financial world, the meetings of the unimaginably rich and powerful, deciding for themselves how our world will be.

It’s been this way for more than a century, since the time of the great capitalist business tycoons in the late 1800s, the industrialists who made this country “great.” They learned long ago that “laisez-faire” capitalism doesn’t work in the long term, that is, from the perspective of those who seek power and control. Capitalism poops out over time, lost in its own internal contradictions.

Marx wrote about it, in epic tomes that defy comprehension these days, but it’s pretty simple and self-evident once you think about it. In capitalism, the means of production, that’s raw materials, land and capital (factories, etc.) are privately owned. In order for the owner to make a profit to reinvest in growing his or her business, he must create excess production over that required to break even. So if the factory must produce 100 widgets to break even, it must then produce 150 widgets to make a profit. Even worse, the workers in the factory can never make enough money to buy back all the widgets the factory produces, so those widgets must be sold somewhere else.

Thus, capitalism requires continued growth and an ever expanding market.

What’s happened now is there are few new markets to exploit (China is the latest), and the purchasing power of the employees at home is constantly shrinking due to inflation and fiscal and economic manipulation.

What to do, what to do?

The answer, since World War I, has been, every time: destroy a whole bunch of useless production so we can produce more, aka WAR.

War is the economists wet dream, growing the economy without requiring new consumers and new markets. Build it, blow it up, build more.

Furthermore, war changes power relationships among nations, as governments vie for access to raw materials, labor and markets.

What a deal!

“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

Think about this as you contemplate history, the present… and the future.

The "Free" Market is not so free

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Friedmanist free market economics is only applied in other countries. It’s alive and well, and growing, in the united States today.

I’ve been lead drummer on the anti-corporatist bandwagon for some time, as well as accompanist for the Close the Pentagon Glee Club, but I didn’t understand until recently the economic pressures that underlie both of these social institutions.

Think back with me to the halcyon days of 1989, when the Soviet Union “collapsed,” the Cold War was over and the “Peace Dividend” had legs… with the people. Of course, this movement had to be quashed, lest the military-industrial complex grind to a much deserved halt. Friedmanists were dispatched off to Moscow to squelch incipient democratic movements, while the security establishment at home sought diligently amongst the bushes for an enemy, any enemy, to hold up to public obloquy. This movement coalesced in Washington, DC, resulting, lo these many years later, in the Bush & Co. Neoliberal coup d’etat.

As it turns out, the Soviet Union did not so much collapse as have its economic carpet pulled out from under it by Boris Yeltsin and the Chicago School economists. Milton Friedman student Jeffrey Sachs was in the room in the Kremlin when Yeltsin announced the end of the Soviet Union, and he had been lobbying Yeltsin on free-market economics for some time. The next few years were characterized by a feeding frenzy of global marketeers grabbing up as much of Russia as they could carry away with both hands. Harvard was even sanctioned and fined for allowing its economist to double dip in the newly privatized Russian economy. Harvard, alma mater of George W. Bush and his economic adviser, Al Hubbard.

So, the uS lost its Enemy Number 1, that had served so well during the Cold War. What to do, what to do?

9/11 served up the perfect crisis for the imposition of Friedmanist economic reform in the uS, not to mention an out of control police state organized under the Teutonic appellation: Homeland Security. The Bush economic shock troops are working diligently on privatization of everything in the uS from Social Security to education, all the while building a culture of fear and dependency. Today, the “War on Terror” serves as the one-size-fits-all excuse for economic deconstruction and reassembly in a jigsaw puzzle of global free market capitalism.

Fortunately, as the Friedmanists knit new free market economies under the chins of manufactured dictators on one end of the Global Economy quilt, the other end is unraveling into populist democracies. Our greatest hope, as we move into the Age of Peak Oil and Climate Change, is that our neighbors to the south will help us out when the “Global Economy” collapses and the uS government abandons their people as they pursue the last dregs of Middle East crude. The tide of history will turn, turn, turn as the south rises once again.

That’s South America, not Dixie, y’all.

The Shock Doctrine

There are many conspiracy claims flying about these days: 9/11 government complicity and such.

Then there are real conspiracies.

I’m still reading The Shock Doctrine, but I’ve read enough to say, “Oooooooh, so that’s what that was all about!”

I was always puzzled about why there were so many revolutions in South America (“Governments in South America are measured in revolutions per minute”), why Allende, Mossadegh, and so many others were deposed by the US government, why Pinochet was so oppressive to his own people, why the Chinese killed so many at Tiananmen Square.

Now I understand.

It really is a conspiracy. Worse yet, it’s a conspiracy by economists!

What’s at stake is not oil, or land, or water, even though these are important things. What’s at stake here is an economic theory that is being tested on billions of people around the world, trying to prove that Milton Friedman was a genius and not a madman.

What’s at stake here is a vision of society based on free market capitalism that favors corporations over living things and the environment in which we all live. What’s at stake here is the vision that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” the “trickle down theory” of economics, Reagan’s “Voodoo Economics,” NAFTA, GATT, the IMF and the World Bank.

This vision is threatened by democracy, self-determination, freedom of choice, the “Welfare Society,” mixed economies, social programs, socialism (true socialism, not the Stalinist distortion), Marxism, and, worst of all, anarchism.

The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and soon to be Iran is not about oil in the deepest sense. Yes, oil is important, but only as a product. Saddam Hussein was a threat to the united States, not because he attacked Kuwait, but because he refused to knuckle under to the IMF and the World Bank; because he refused to sell out his country to the forces of global economic hegemony; because he threatened to nationalize Iraqi oil companies and build an economy to support his own people in his own country. Any leader who dared to defy Milton Friedman and the Chicago School economists was quickly brought down and forced to kneel before the alter of free market capitalism.

Fortunately, several new South American leaders rose off their knees and led their countries back to developmentalism and economies geared to support their own people. They are defying the Chicago School hegemony and building their own alliances to maintain their own economies, free of IMF and World Bank manipulation. Time will tell if they can continue to hold out until the world goes into deep global recession.

Read The Shock Doctrine, then look around with clear eyes. You will be shocked!