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Post by Admin on Mar 5, 2021 20:51:46 GMT
Here are the 9 Greatest Threats to Humanity’s Future, According to Scientistscuriosmos.com/here-are-the-9-greatest-threats-to-humanitys-future-according-to-scientists/When you think about the end of times, what comes to mind first? Do you see humanity becoming extinct because of nuclear weapons and catastrophic wars? Will Artificial intelligence take over and exterminate us all like in Hollywood movies? Or will Global Warming cause Earth to become inhospitable, causing the extinction of the planet? This article brings you the nine most likely ways humanity could be wiped out, according to the Swedish non-profit Global Challenges Foundation. Global Catastrophic Risks report is based on scientific data and research as well as contributions by numerous academic experts that have come together to “create a deeper understanding of catastrophic risk, and thereby to spark a discussion of how the management of such risks can be developed and improved.” The report aims to incite a deeper understanding of global risks and promote greater discussion on how they are collectively managed. “We fret about familiar risks – air crashes, carcinogens in food, low radiation, etc. – and they’re all intensely studied,” wrote Martin Rees, UK Astronomer Royal and co-founder of Cambridge’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk.
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Post by Admin on Mar 6, 2021 18:42:33 GMT
MARCH 5, 2021 Full-Spectrum ExtinctionBY PAUL ATWOOD www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/05/full-spectrum-extinction/Last week General Tod Wolder, top gun of the U.S. European Command, declared that “Russia remains an enduring existential threat to the United States and our European allies.” On February 23 President Biden’s choice for Central Intelligence Director, William Burns, testified that “adversarial, predatory Chinese leadership poses our biggest geopolitical test…out-competing China will be key to our national security in the days ahead…requiring intensified focus and urgency.” Newly minted Secretary of Defense, former 4-star General Lloyd Austin, chimed in that China posed the “most significant threat” to the U.S. Military. Well, which malicious “adversary” is it? Will the Putinoids shortly sink the next American vessel to transit the Black or Barents Seas? Are the ever more malevolent Chinese aiming their new supersonic missile ship killers at the next U.S. carrier to transit the straits of Taiwan? The Pentagon’s push for “full spectrum dominance” was extolled in the 1990s and it has proceeded full speed. Peace President Obama , having won the Nobel prize before doing anything peaceable, soon asserted his “pivot to the east” in fear of growing Chinese economic and military power. He also initiated the $1 trillion nuclear expansion program, stage managed the bombing and destruction of Libya, and armed the Saudi war in Yemen. Trump may have come close to nuclear war with North Korea but that issue is still on the burner. Not long ago the Pentagon called for a $100 billion development of missiles better able to carry and target nuclear weapons. Last week the U.S. Airforce dispatched B-1 Bombers to Norway that now overfly the Russian base in the Baltic and earlier deployed combat Marine units there as well. Recall that American armed forces are now stationed along Russia’s very borders and the NATO Alliance has essentially encircled Russia and now keens that it must urgently confront the Chinese peril. It is estimated that the United States spends 40% of the global total devoted to arms purchases. The real military budget is far in excess of the official figure, given numerous secret projects off limits to Congressional inquiry or oversight. Washington easily outspends Russia and China combined. What evidence exists that these two “adversaries” plan any military actions against the U.S.? While we are at it let’s consider the fact that no enemy has invaded the U.S. since 1812, nor is it possible for any country to do. So, what IS the threat? Why are the national security mandarins fixated on military threats? What else could their deliberate employment of the term “existential” mean, especially when their response is to mount and deploy more military hardware to the national boundaries of the antagonists they cultivate? Russia has sought to dominate its respective sphere for a millennium and China for at least four millennia, both without any indication they are intent on military global dominance. The U.S. has been doing the same in the Western hemisphere by contrast for slightly more than two centuries and, like a punk adolescent, now believes itself the toughest guy on the geo-political block. The fact of the matter is that neither U.S. opponent threatens the U.S. They don’t station troops on the Mexican border or sail their fleets within sight of Guantanamo or build bases and station troops all over the planet. Primarily they oppose the declared American agenda of global dominance economically and politically, and they certainly are rapidly developing their own capacities for military response to the threat they perceive from the U.S. They do arm and support their own allies, and so does Washington and far more of them. The only real existential jeopardies to Americans and the rest of the world are the proliferated nukes and from climate change and the stream of critical emergencies for all societies that are sure to ensue, and the intergroup violence that will exacerbate nationalist paranoias and provide fuel for more war. The current Pentagon call for improved nuclear missiles should illuminate, but woefully does not, the very authentic existential menace that imperils us more critically by the hour. That is if the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is to be taken seriously. But who pays attention to them? Obviously neither Russia nor China are innocent of crimes against other peoples. But crucially for our collective future is full acknowledgement that neither is the United States. The American public education system writ large teaches most students that their government has been opposed to both Russia and China for the last century because their communist or otherwise totalitarian system deprives their citizens of the freedoms and rights Americans value most and has always posed “threats” to the American way of life. How many pupils have ever learned of the military incursion ordered by President Wilson in tandem with Britain and Japan into Russia in 1918 in hope of strangling the communist infant in its cradle? Had Russian troops ever been on U.S. soil youngsters would learn that fact on the first day of the first grade. How many learn of the incursion of American forces in China at the dawn of the 20th century to throttle a Chinese rebellion against ever increasing western occupation of their land? How many become aware that the U.S threatened to nuke China during the Korean War? Why should we be surprised that both nations have employed their resources to attempt to match and contest the threats they feel from the U.S.? Flashback to 1940. FDR, the president of the “neutral” U.S., orders covert naval actions in the North Atlantic in support of the British war against the Nazis. He anticipates that if an American vessel is attacked, or sunk, the outrage will tip the public toward acceptance of war. Earlier he has deployed the Pacific Fleet to Hawaii knowing full well that Japan will see this as a threat to the empire it is building in East Asia and so demands its withdrawal from China (or else!) and embargoes Japanese oil and steel, certain that the land of the rising sun will be forced to seek the indispensable fuel and other resources in the Dutch East Indies and French IndoChina. These measures are intended to provoke war. “Sooner or later” he avers, “the Japanese will make a move that will lead to war. “ In fact, American cryptographers have broken large parts of Japanese secret ciphers and know that Japan has decided on war. Key figures in the U.S. government have prior knowledge of the attack to come at Pearl Harbor. On November 25 FDR tells his top advisers that we are “likely to be attacked as soon as next Monday.” On December 6 the last coded transmission to Tokyo by Japanese spies reads” All clear…no barrage balloons (air defenses) are up…there is an opportunity for a surprise attack against these places.” That same evening before the attack at Pearl harbor Roosevelt tells his closest aid. “This means war.” No warning of imminent assult is sent to commanders in Hawaii. The sacrifice of more than 2000 American lives, and subsequently another 400,000, will be the price of entry into World War II and the consequent prize of American ascendancy. Of course, at the war’s outset no American planner believed that the entire planet was in existential danger and they also were positive that the U.S. would not suffer the invasions or aerial bombings faced by all the other belligerents. The real reasons the U.S. decided on war, all blather about human rights and “democracy” to the contrary, involved the danger to the American economy in a world shut off to American capital penetration at the moment then of the world’s most critical economic slump. The minor measures of social democracy enacted throughout the Great Depression had failed so war production was the answer. The Third Reich and Japan posed every probability of creating autarkic zones that would all but shut out American access to markets, resources and cheap labor. The Soviet Union had already done too much of that and since the late 19th Century the U.S. had visualized the “Great China Market.” Japan’s takeover of East Asia precluded that blueprint and threatened to forestall the “American century.” Well, we know the outcome. Although Japan was seeking surrender so long as the Emperor would not be tried as a war criminal, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vaporized anyway. FDR had condemned the deliberate targeting of civilians by the other belligerents before the U.S. entered the war but that was then. What the Brits called the “Great Game” of empire proceeds apace. Americans certainly learned little from the most dangerous conflict in the species history. Soon to follow: Korea, Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and many others now all but forgotten. Daniel Ellsberg in an interview with The Real News two years ago asserted that it was not the Allied bombing campaign over Germany that thwarted Nazi development of the atomic bomb but, startlingly, that Hitler himself ordered the nascent project to be dropped. Why? Because he grasped the essential fact that the development of such weapons, what Ellsberg calls the ”Doomsday machine” writ large, would lead to all out nuclear war and the cessation of the human experiment on our planet, and necessarily his plans for the 3rd Reich. Apparently he was still naïve enough to think another emerging power would not initiate the preparations for the final day of reckoning, soon to be followed by nine other players, more than enough nukes to accomplish the mission. These questions beg the real issues, which are that both Russia and China are much the same economic and power obstacles to the “liberal world order” that Germany and Japan did Washington has always claimed to desire and promote but which serves as camouflage and decoy for the real ambition which, to repeat, is Full Spectrum Dominance, a fool’s errand if ever there was. There is nothing humane or liberal about the global order the U.S. desires since the term is proclaimed to mean that democracy and human rights and “free trade” are the paramount values at stake. Tell that to a long list of those who have been favored with America’s paternal care since 1945 wherein the total numbers of deaths are in the millions. As for “existential threat,” the only real such hazard is the increasing probability that the mounting preparations for conflict in the immediate spheres of our “enemies” will result in some spark that will trigger all out war and escalation to species extinction. The geo-political adolescents who wield the power in our country are consumed with its arrogance and all but negate the authentic existential millstone that hangs weightier by the day. Since our leaders learned nothing from the Cuban Missile Crisis (and many other near misses like the Able Archer war “game” of 1983) ought we be surprised that neither have the mass of the American people. That truly existential crisis is all but forgotten. Few of my undergrads can speak accurately of it, and more than a few have never even heard of it. I still carry the sense of dread I felt as a 15 year old during those 13 days in October 1962. I recall the words of then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that he went to bed on the last night of the crisis fearing that he, and we, would not live to see the dawn. Members of the “defense” establishment do know something of the extreme and awesome powers they wield. As even former U.S. SecDef William Perry warns, we are far closer to a nuclear holocaust than ever. Do we stand at the brink of Full Spectrum Destruction? Paul Atwood is the author of War and Empire: the American Way of Life.
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Post by Admin on Mar 7, 2021 17:17:35 GMT
History March 7, 2016 A Historian's Disturbing Take on Why a Civilization Breaks DownBy Daniel Lattier 2 ½ min www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/historians-disturbing-take-why-civilization-breaks-down/In his famous work A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee examines why some civilizations break down. Interestingly, he concludes that the reason for civilizations breaking down is contained within the very reason for their growth: “[T]he very process by which growth is sustained is inherently risky: the creative leadership of a society has to resort to social ‘drill’ in order to carry along the uncreative mass, and this mechanical device turns against its masters when their creative inspiration fails.” Let me explain… According to Toynbee, civilization first comes to be through the activities and contributions of a creative minority of people. However, this creative minority immediately faces a difficulty: how to move the rest of men and women forward with them. There are two options for this: 1) The one that respects personal freedom: “the ‘strenuous intellectual communion and intimate personal intercourse’ that impart the divine fire from one soul to another…” 2) The one that depends upon drilling the creative minority’s values and vision into the majority. Civilizations have tended to go with second option: “The world in which the creative personality finds himself, and in which he has to work, is a society in which his fellows are ordinary human beings. His task is to make his fellows into his followers; and Mankind in the mass can only be set in motion towards a goal beyond itself by enlisting the faculty of drill; and the dull ears that are deaf to the unearthly music of Orpheus’s lyre are well attuned to the drill-sergeant’s raucous word of command.” But problems inevitably arise with this mechanical method of building a civilization. The “machine” that the minority creates to train the majority—such as, for instance, an education system—eventually turns against its masters. It begins to fall apart when the majority starts to questions its principles, methods, and effectiveness. The creative minority become less creative—falling prey to “the hypnotism which they have deliberately induced in their followers”—and become increasingly despotic as they seek to fortify the machine by force. Thus, ironically, the very means by which the minority propped up a civilization in its early stages eventually becomes the means of its destruction. Do you see the pattern Toynbee describes being repeated in America? www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/historians-disturbing-take-why-civilization-breaks-down/
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Post by Admin on Mar 9, 2021 21:22:42 GMT
How imagining our own extinction may save uswww.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-imagining-our-own-extinction-may-save-us-1.5933282In Mary Shelley's 1826 novel, The Last Man, a pandemic threatens humanity in the late 21st century Pauline Holdsworth · Posted: Mar 04, 2021 4:57 PM ET | Last Updated: March 4 In 1816, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley looked out at a darkened sky and contemplated the end of life on earth. While sheltering from the storms caused by the global fallout of a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, they produced some of the first English-language literature about the threat of human extinction. "I think it's the most important idea we've ever discovered," says Thomas Moynihan, the author of X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction. Since then, the looming threat of extinction has been woven into our art and politics, and is even more pertinent today in the face of catastrophic climate change. At the time, however, the thought that humanity could go extinct — not at the hands of a vengeful God, but because of a random disaster or our own actions — was an unfamiliar and destabilizing idea, says Moynihan. But it also gave new urgency to thinking about collective responsibility. An era of 'cosmic nonchalance' In pre-Enlightenment Europe, many leading thinkers were under the spell of the Principle of Plenitude, which held that any species that disappeared would eventually reappear in another time or place. Charles Lyell, a leading Scottish geologist, argued extinction was merely an "interval of quiescence" and that dinosaurs would someday return. "The huge iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaur in the sea, while the pterodactyl might flit again through the umbrageous groves of tree-ferns," he wrote. Moynihan calls this an era of "cosmic nonchalance." But during the Enlightenment, that comforting fiction began to fall away. As scientists studied mammoth bones, they began to understand that extinction was irreversible. Revolutions across Europe also contributed to the sense that the future could be radically different from the past. Philosophers began to see the universe as a place that was not inherently moral or just. And as writers grappled with the threat of extinction and feeling of precarity that goes with it, they also began imagining solutions. Lord Byron, for example, imagined that humanity might be able to develop technology to ward off incoming asteroids. Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man, about a pandemic that nearly wipes out humanity in the late 21st century, "emphasises the ways that … both what we do and fail to do in politics will inevitably shape the trajectory of a plague and its many consequences," says Eileen Hunt Botting, author of Artificial Life After Frankenstein. Shelley also juxtaposes the selfish behaviour of the populist leader Ryland, who flees to save himself, with the "more cosmic perspective" of the main character Verney. "I think all of us, like Verney, are faced with this big choice. Are we going to immerse ourselves in our nation and our selfish passions or desires, or are we going to try to think big and think for the good of the whole?" Botting says. When she wrote The Last Man, Shelley was also grappling with extinction on a personal level. Her husband, Percy Shelley, three of her children and Lord Byron had all died. In a journal entry in 1824, she described herself as "the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me." But according to Botting, Shelley used the novel and her journals "to write her way out of a dangerous fiction: that nothing can be done in the face of disaster." 'We cannot see as far as our weapons will reach' When Mary Shelley and Lord Byron were writing about extinction, the idea was still firmly in the realm of science fiction. But that changed forever in August 1945. "What the [nuclear] bomb did was that it made extinction into an actual pressing policy issue. It suddenly became something that was actually on the horizon for most people," says Moynihan. According to Austrian philosopher Gunther Anders, one of the chief barriers to preventing humanity from wiping itself out was our limited imagination. "His point is that humans may be very able to develop very destructive forms of technology, but not very able to imagine the consequences. That's what he calls apocalypse blindness," according to Eva Horn, author of The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age. "We lack imagination and that's why we would be behaving in a kind of irresponsible way, because we cannot see as far as our weapons will reach," Horn maintains. "[So] authors and filmmakers try to imagine that moment of global annihilation in many different ways." But many films from the early decades of the Cold War, like Dr. Strangelove, ended with a mushroom cloud — an image that she says fails to capture the true meaning of extinction. "It's overwhelming, it's huge, it's very abstract. It does not depict the true events and effects of an atomic explosion near your home in it in a real way." In the 1980s, new fictional representations of nuclear annihilation emerged — ones that rejected a bird's-eye view and instead illustrated the agonizing real-life consequences of a nuclear strike. The 1983 film The Day After, about how a nuclear strike affects the residents of a small town in Kansas, and the 1984 BBC movie Threads, about a nuclear strike on Sheffield, were two influential examples. "Some people are just fried or burnt. Others die from hunger, die from radiation, from cancer. It's a long, long, long, protracted nightmare. But that's what really brings atomic fear close to home," Horn says. 'Climate catastrophe …. is also a problem of the imagination' Today, Horn argues we continue to experience a form of the "apocalypse blindness" Anders diagnosed during the Cold War. "Even with robust climate science ... everybody's like, 'oh, yeah, the climate is changing. That's so bad.' Nothing is done about it. That is a very specific form of blindness that I would call knowing something without believing in it," she says. If all we have is dystopic narratives, we are surrendering our imagination. - Vandana Singh Today, the emerging genre of cli-fi — or climate fiction — often tries to make the consequences of humanity's current trajectory more visible. "Climate fiction is very much presentist. It's about addressing near-future implications for the current carbon emissions path," says Melody Jue, an associate professor of English at the University of California Santa Barbara. She's interested in how fiction — and "performative science fiction," like a 2009 underwater cabinet meeting in the Maldives held to illustrate the threat of rising sea levels — can "perform a future that could happen with the intention of trying to defer or to subvert that future from coming into being at all." But in our dystopia-saturated age, some of these warnings may have lost their power. "Dystopian literature can warn us. 'Look at what's coming, let's get to work, let's pay attention.' But if all we have is dystopic narratives, we are surrendering our imagination," asserts Vandana Singh, a physicist and writer of speculative fiction. "What I like to think about is how do we muddle through, figure out our ways through and beyond our current dystopic situations." Many of the short stories in Singh's collection Ambiguity Machines deal with the threat of ecological disaster. But they also illustrate other ways of living — like how a city could donate energy to the grid, rather than consuming it, or how societies could be built around a kinship relation between humans and non-humans. "Climate catastrophe, which is also a problem of the imagination, makes us think that whatever future is in store for us must necessarily be an extension of current ways of thinking, living, organizing societies. I call this the reality trap," says Singh. "Speculative fiction [shakes] us loose from this trap of the imagination so that we can think about other realities and other futures." 'An existential life raft' In 2016, Vandana Singh and her colleagues at the Centre for Science and the Imagination climbed up to the top of a mesa in Arizona. "We enacted the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's climatic moment when she and her friends gathered together in response to that very strange year without a summer. She wrote Frankenstein and Lord Byron wrote the poem Darkness, which is so, so very relevant to our times," says Singh. "On that mesa in the dark with the light of our cell phones, we read out Lord Byron's Darkness to each other. We made the pledge to write a story about our own much more dire climatic moment, which resulted in this book called A Year Without a Winter. Eileen Hunt Botting says that Mary Shelley's novel The Last Man also has a new resonance today. "I think she's throwing us an existential life raft in the middle of the second wave of our pandemic." "I think Mary Shelley would be with us spiritually today and just saying, 'Hold on. We're going to make it through this. We just have to use our imagination to find a way out.'" Guests in this episode: Thomas Moynihan is an intellectual historian at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. He is the author of X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction. Eileen Hunt Botting is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, and the author of Artificial Life After Frankenstein. Eva Horn is a professor of modern German literature and cultural history at the University of Vienna, and the author of The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age. Melody Jue is a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater. Vandana Singh is a speculative fiction writer and an associate professor of physics at Framingham State University. Her books include Ambiguity Machines: And Other Stories. *This episode was produced by Pauline Holdsworth.
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Post by Admin on Apr 12, 2021 7:04:49 GMT
Is Our Civilization Going to Be a Blip In History?We Need to Go to the Deep Past to Find a Way Back to the Future eand.co/is-our-civilization-going-to-be-a-blip-in-history-1d3314180b12There’s a question that echoes in my head these days. Maybe in yours, too. Surveying the mess we seem to have made of things, I can’t help but wonder: is our civilisation just a blip in history? Now, the way we tell the story of “civilization” — not just ours, but the idea of one — goes like this. Civilization is the natural destiny of human beings, and our civilisation is the logical endpoint of all those which have gone before. It’s better in every way, superior. It’s technologically advanced and more moral and just and wise and noble and so on. Our civilisation is the epitome of a thing called by Americans “human progress,” and its shining, glorious ideal. Only in our civilisation have these things called freedom and justice and equality really ever existed. You know that picture of how primates evolved into us? Civilization evolves in the same way, too — and our civilisation is the homo sapiens of them all, the endpoint, the apex, and the pinnacle. Only the deeper I look into history, the more that story seems to be, well, a fairy tale. A modern myth. A fable, told, as such stories are, to gratify and maybe even propagandise, or at least self-aggrandize. Let me explain what I mean. Our civilization is a few hundred years old. At most. If we had to name it, I’d call it industrial-capitalist civilization. I’ll come back to that point. Do you know how old indigenous cultures are? Multiple millennia. The aborigines in Australia have been there for 40,000 years or more. That is the oldest continuous way of life — aka living civilisation in the world. Do you know how long Native Americans have been there? For at least ten millennia, if not longer. That’s ten thousand years. And that way of life continued largely unchanged until, well, we arrived to annihilate it. And almost totally succeeded. Luckily, plenty of Native cultures and tribes still exist, with living memories of the old ways. Do you see the point I’m trying to make? Let me make it more explicit. Our civilisation is barely a few centuries old. But the world’s oldest civilisations are orders of magnitude older than that. Our civilisation is on the precipice. If not of outright disaster, then at least the “ghastly future” that so many scientists are warning of. You can add economists like me to the roster of minds deeply concerned about whether or not our civilisation can survive. It doesn’t feel like it, does it? Why is that? Why did indigenous civilisations last multiple millennia, easily, until we arrived — while we’ve barely lasted a few centuries, and already stand on the implosive brink of decades of self-made calamities, from climate change to mass extinction to ecological collapse? Because they thought and acted in almost opposite ways to us. It’s hard to put into words, though, precisely because we don’t have good words anymore, which gives away that our civilisation is poor in a certain way. They lived in harmony. They saw the world as an interconnected family. They acted to minimise the harm they did. They saw a living planet around them, which nurtured all beings in its bosom. They were the children of the earth. We are…what are we? We’re the children of machines. Of money. Of bits, digitising us into avatars. We are completely, shockingly, horrifyingly indifferent — at least to them — at the total annihilation of the living world. When I say annihilation, I mean it. Here’s a startling statistic. In terms of biomass, 36% is human, 60% is livestock, and just 4% is wild. That means that 36% of the biomass on earth — us — is killing another 60%. And just 4% is allowed to live free. Is it any wonder there’s a mass extinction going on? We exist in an egocentric way. Me, me, me. As long as I get my designer jeans or internet-enabled treadmill, I don’t care what harm I do. Never mind the fact that I could just go for a walk in the woods, probably. No, I need to live in a certain way to feel good about myself — I need to have status through power over. Power over other living things. People. Animals. Plants. Oceans, rivers, forests. The more of these that I consume, the more powerful I am, the better I feel about myself. In contrast, they lived — and live — in an allocentric, an all-centric way. Who comes first? Not me. The tribe does. The ancestors do. The skies and forests and rivers and oceans do. We think that’s so much gobbledy-gook. But is it? We’re the ones who think there’s a magical father in the sky who’s going to send everyone else who doesn’t believe — including every living thing — to a place of eternal flames. Tell me that’s not a myth to make people behave themselves in anonymous, impersonal societies, a children’s fable. Tell me that seeing the world as alive doesn’t make more sense than imagining some magic person in the sky is going to save you, no matter how much suffering you’ve caused in this life. Tell me. Because I want to know. We think that when indigenous people say: “this forest or this ocean or this river contains the spirits of my ancestors, and I have to respect them,” that they’re being “irrational.” And so we go out and we chop down the lungs of the earth and pollute the waters of life with our garbage to the point that our own survival is threatened. Tell me who the crazy one is. We think that the idea that a forest or a mountain or a river contains “spirits of ancestors” is foolish and childish. But those trees and those waters grow from the carbon of the dead. The dead they respect in a vast and beautiful cycle of life — who are allowed to live on in those ways, in the trees and plants and animals and so on, because every being has a right to live and die in dignity. Do you know what we do with our “spirits of the dead”? We drill for them, we extract them, and we burn them. They’re called oil and gas, they’re basically organic slush — and because we don’t respect the spirits of our dead, we’re turning the planet into an overheated cinder. Tell me who the crazy one is again. Meanwhile, this fossil-fuel based economy that industrial-capitalist civilisation is based on…you might think to yourself, well, at least we got rich. Wrong. Bzzt. We didn’t. We are a dismal failure as a civilisation: we destroyed the planet and annihilated life on it, and we didn’t even get rich. Our income as a civilisation is just $10K a person, and even that’s a statistical illusion, which masks the fact that half of humanity or more lives without decent sanitation or clean water or three meals a day. We can’t even take care of ourselves — despite the disrespect we’ve done to the planet and life on it and our ancestors and those to come after us — and yet we believe this strange and foolish fairy tale that our civilisation is the grand endpoint, the telos, of them all. Tell me we’re not the crazy ones. That’s a bit of a rant, I guess. Or is it? I don’t know. I’ve come to feel more strongly about this subject than I guess even I knew. Let me try and ground all that in a different way, then. We see our civilisation as the best because it’s the smartest. But the truth is that while we are the most technologically advanced, we are deeply impoverished in other, maybe more fundamental ways. What do I mean? Consider the way that indigenous peoples slaughter animals. They kill them with great respect. They thank them for their lives. They don’t take more than they need. What do we do? We’re always trying to take more than we need. The whole point of our civilisation is for sociopathic billionaires to pile up money they can never spend in bulging bank accounts — and all that money is death: trees, animals, rivers, forests, which have already been destroyed. Think of factory farming. Do you thank the animal you just ate? Nope. Maybe you thank that father in the sky. But what did he have to do with it. Did he give his life for yours? Maybe you think so, but the truth is that animal actually did. See my point? I’m not trying to sound like some kind of radical vegan, although maybe that’s what I’m becoming. I’m just pointing out a set of flaws. We are technologically advanced, but we are deeply impoverished relationally and emotionally. Indigenous peoples have relationships — real ones — with the living world around them. We wouldn’t know what to say to the fox picking through our garbage desperate to exist in the world we’ve paved over with concrete and steel and glass. Older cultures than ours believed the entire world was alive, and felt things. Suffering, grief, joy, wonder, friendship. We’re amazed to “discover” that elephants can grieve and even more astonished to see that even though we keep them in cages, all kinds of animals would still be our friends — if we weren’t busy slaughtering them. It seems to me that we are busy “rediscovering” so, so many of the things that older cultures than ours knew intimately. The world is alive and feels deeply — from an elephant to a fox to a fish, all these things play and love and grieve and bond. The world is a “web” in our modern terms, or to use a simpler one, an older one, a family of life, bonded in love and pain, in need and grief, one life taken for another given. And our place in the world is not above everything else — but only beside it, like a friend. When we live as friends with all beings, then we respect the spirits of our ancestors, who taught us the wisdom of this way of living noviolently, which we call truth, dignity, nobility, beauty. Our civilisation is not what we imagine it to be. It is a marvellous predatory machine, that much is true. But it is annihilating itself to death. Soon, there won’t be a planet to live on, at least the way we’re accustomed to. Nature is already taking its revenge on us, throwing plague and fire and flood our way. The ancients would have said: the world is alive, and if you disrespect it, if you take more than you need, if you are violent and exploitative and predatory, if you live without gratitude for the truth of life and death, its fragility, then you will pay the price. The old gods will strike back. The fire will roar and the flood will pour and the plague will howl. Were they wrong? Or are we wrong? It’s true that science has helped us come a long way. No, I don’t want to live without antibiotics and chemotherapy. That is missing my point, and caricaturing it. The ancients were far more sophisticated than us, in certain ways. Morally and ethically. They were smarter than us, socially, relationally, emotionally. We laugh at all that, today, as “animism.” But there was more than a grain of truth in it. The world is alive, we’re shocked to discover. But we’re the idiots, for not seeing what was obvious, before our eyes: of course the world is alive. It’s a measure of our alienation that we think it’s some kind of novel and marvellous discovery that things apart from us can feel pain and grief and love and wonder, can empathize, know, bond, share, create. They always have. It’s a measure of our folly that we marvel at “learning” things the ancients always knew, all those millennia ago — like if we don’t care for our world, we die, or that the ancestors live on in the things around us, their carbon becoming tomorrow’s living beings, or its polluted skies, or that the first moral duty of any living thing is not to take more than one needs. I wonder, sometimes. Who is the civilized one at all? Like I said — they’ve been here for millennia, and they’re going to be around for millennia, too. But us? Those of us trapped in industrial-capitalist civilization, and it’s foolish games of materialism, desire, numbness, rage, isolation, hate? You tell me how long you think we’re really going to be around — and if treating the world and everything living on it, from the oceans to the forests to the animals to the rivers to the rest of us the way most of us do, like our garbage dump, like a body to violate, like a slave, with indifference, stupidity, cruelty, and violence…whether any of that is civilized at all. Umair March 2021
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Post by Admin on Apr 14, 2021 19:53:58 GMT
What Seaspiracy Gets Right About the Exploitative Fishing Industry BY SPENCER ROBERTS The slander against the Netflix documentary Seaspiracy says a lot about fishing industry influence in marine science. We have somehow allowed the fisheries industry’s own scientists to define sustainable fishing goals — it’s a disgrace leading to an ecological nightmare. jacobinmag.com/2021/04/seaspiracy-marine-science-fishing-industry-netflix
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Post by Admin on Apr 19, 2021 19:05:40 GMT
"...What the chart says is this. It’s X-axis is latitude, as in geographical latitude, and it’s Y-axis is “species richness,” a measure of biodiversity, how many species are found at a give latitude. The idea is to gain an picture of how life is distributed on planet earth, which, by the way, in these dark ages of billionaires hoping to flee to Mars, is still the only life we know of anywhere in the universe. So. How is life distributed on planet earth — and how is that distribution changing, and how fast? The authors of the study behind the chart tried to answer just that question. And their results are as stunning as they are terrifying. They discovered the following. Life on earth used to be distributed just the way you might expect on a healthy planet. There was less of it at the poles, where the number of species tapered — and there was more of it as you approached the equator, where the richest regions of life were found, rainforests and jungles and prairies. It looked like a bell curve, a smooth and gentle shape. That was the complex and beautiful dance of life on planet earth, in motion. But that’s what it used to be. What is it now? The distribution has collapsed. The middle has imploded. Now there are two new peaks emerging, as the distribution becomes “bimodal,” which is a fancy way of saying something more like a U-shape in the middle. That U-shape doesn’t look or feel right, it looks menacing and alarming, because it is. What the new distribution of life on planet earth tells us is this. Life is fleeing equatorial regions, and migrating north and south. That is because equatorial regions are simply becoming too hot to live in. Not just for a few species — but on such a massive level that the distribution of life on planet earth has been altered. We are ripping the heart out of life on planet earth..." eand.co/were-ripping-the-heart-out-of-life-on-earth-and-the-consequences-will-be-disastrous-da1d50c712bc
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Post by Admin on May 1, 2021 21:54:20 GMT
"Primatologist Jane Goodall said that humanity must "drastically change our diets" and our treatment of wild and farmed animals if we want to avoid future pandemics after COVID-19 subsides. "Our disrespect for wild animals and our disrespect for farmed animals has created this situation where disease can spill over to infect human beings," Goodall said on June 2 in an online event hosted by the campaigning group Compassion in World Farming, The Guardian reported." "If we do not do things differently, we are finished," she said. “We can’t go on very much longer like this." Jane Goodall: Humanity is doomed if we don't change after this pandemic By Nicoletta Lanese - Staff Writer 11 months ago Habitat loss, factory farming and wild animal trade could fuel the next pandemic. www.livescience.com/jane-goodall-change-food-systems-after-covid19.html
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Post by Admin on May 3, 2021 23:34:33 GMT
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Post by Admin on May 9, 2021 12:31:19 GMT
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Post by Admin on May 12, 2021 17:31:54 GMT
MAY 12, 2021 Poisoning the Planet’s Web of Life BY ROBERT HUNZIKERFacebookTwitterRedditEmail The Web of Life is under attack but almost nobody is aware because it’s happening mostly below surface. Scientists have identified a rampant worldwide Bugpocalypse that’s methodically killing the planet’s most significant and most crucial life support system, and it’s intentional! The victim is soil, which is the life source for 95% of the foods we cram down our throats three times per day, 365 days per year. A new landmark study has identified the killer of nature’s greatest achievement of all time, soil. Based upon this major new research only recently released, the culprit or soil killer is agricultural pesticides, as follows: “Study after study indicates the unchecked use of pesticides across hundreds of millions of acres each year is poisoning the organisms critical to maintaining healthy soils,” Donley added. “Yet our regulators have been ignoring the harm to these important ecosystems for decades.” (Source: Tari Gunstone, et al, “Pesticides and Soil Invertebrates: A Hazard Assessment,” Frontiers in Environmental Science, May 4, 2021) “Below the surface of fields covered with monoculture crops of corn and soybeans, pesticides are destroying the very foundations of the web of life,’ said study co-author Nathan Donley, a scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity… A handful of soil contains an estimated 10 –100 million organisms belonging to over 5,000 taxa… Soils contain an abundance of biologically diverse organisms that perform many important functions such as nutrient cycling, soil structure maintenance, carbon transformation, and the regulation of pests and diseases,” Ibid. All of which prompts a troubling thought: What impact does pesticide have, not only on the organisms within the soil, but on the entire network from industrial farming to food processors to supermarkets with packaged goods that people buy to satisfy hunger and/or just plain ole gluttony, binging, gorging, or on occasion pigging out? Answer: It’s not a pretty picture. It should be noted that the study is classified as “the largest, most comprehensive review of the impacts of agricultural pesticides on soil organisms ever conducted.” (Source: Pesticides Threaten the ‘Foundations of the Web of Life,’ New Soil Study Warns, EcoWatch, May 4, 2021) By all appearances, this is a monstrous scandal that’s hidden from sight within the world’s soil as well as hidden behind lackadaisical, slipshod regulations. Worse yet, after years of unbridled poisoning, nobody seems to care enough to do anything about it because it’s not on the “Save the Planet” top ten list. Moreover, similar to other toxins spread throughout the world, like nuclear radiation exposure, it takes many years for the harmful impact to be fully recognized, e.g., according to the Ukraine Health Ministry, three decades after the fact, there are 2,347,863 Chernobyl-related cases, including 453,391 malformed and/or diseased children, not yet born in 1986. Their parents were children when Chernobyl’s nuclear core melted down. (Sources: BBC special report: The True Toll of the Chernobyl Disaster d/d July 26, 2019 and USA Today, Chernobyl’s Legacy: Kids With Bodies Ravaged by Disaster, April 17, 2016) Hopefully, this landmark study, which clearly proves massive poisoning of the web of life, arrives in the public’s hands early enough, and is taken seriously enough, to do something about an impending crisis like no other crisis throughout all of human history, i.e., universal toxicosis. The study concludes that sweeping changes are needed to protect the web of life: “It’s not just one or two pesticides that are causing harm, the results are really very consistent across the whole class of chemical poisons… Co-author Tara Cornelisse, an entomologist at the Center for Biological Diversity, concurred that ‘it’s extremely concerning that over 70% of cases show that pesticides significantly harm soil invertebrates,” Ibid. According to statements by the researchers: “The paper constitutes a comprehensive review of the impacts of agricultural pesticides on soil invertebrates. We found that pesticide exposure negatively impacted soil invertebrates in 70.5% of 2,842 tested parameters from 394 reviewed studies.” Those percentage results for invertebrate loss interestingly jive with a recent report of vertebrate loss issued September 10th 2020 by the World Wildlife Foundation, in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London entitled: “The Living Planet Report 2020,” which shows a loss of 68% of vertebrate life in less than 50 years. Figures like that are within earshot of extinction-type numbers from millions of years ago. These extraordinarily high percentage losses of life make it nearly impossible to grasp the true gravity of the situation. These are ‘off the charts’ numbers of destruction of the most basic forms of life, gone forever. How long can this persist? The Gunstone study “Pesticides and Soil Invertebrates: A Hazard Assessment,” which is the subject of this article, conducted 51 studies within Europe, 30 in the United States, eight in Australia, seven in Canada, and five or less in Argentina, Brazil, Cameroon, Columbia, Egypt, India, Japan, Madagascar, Mexico, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and Yemen confirming the conclusion that “from these data it is apparent that, as a set of chemical poisons, pesticides pose a clear hazard to soil invertebrates,” Ibid. “The United States Environmental Protection Agency does not have sufficient testing requirements or tools in place to quantify risk to soil dwelling organisms. The European honeybee is the only terrestrial invertebrate included in mandatory ecotoxicological testing of pesticides. The practice of using the honey bee as a surrogate underestimates harm to many taxa and often results in narrow efforts to mitigate pesticide impacts solely to honey bees and other pollinators, not soil organisms,” Ibid. The entire planet has become a chemical enterprise. Sixty-five hundred (6,500) different man-made chemicals are used in the production, formulation, preservation, and packaging of our modern food supply. (Source: Julian Cribb, Food or War, Cambridge University Press, 2019) “Rachel Carson blew the whistle on global poisoning in her 1962 book Silent Spring, which focused on one particular chemical, DDT, leading to a worldwide ban in 1972. (Ed. If it had not been banned, today only airplanes would be flying in the sky, maybe) Since she wrote her book, worldwide production and use of pesticides in agriculture has more than quadrupled, exceeding 5 million tonnes in 2017.” (Cribb) “In recent years, a growing flood of scientific papers has reported more and graver health impacts as a result of the chemicalisation of our food supply, for example, in 2018 Irva Herzz-Picciotto and colleagues reported brain damage to unborn children and adult deaths resulting from exposure to organo-phosphate pesticides, which are widely used in agriculture all over the world… what consumers often fail to understand is that many of these toxic chemicals used in food production do not just vanish after they have been used and continue to cycle through the natural world, lingering in the soil and concentrating up the food chain to result in doses often times many times stronger by the time they reach humans.” (Cribb) The Gunstone paper is a landmark study that exposes a frightening side to the world that has been hidden from public view for decades. But, what can be done? Are there “save the soil” advocacy groups? Soil is alive, a complete self-sustaining ecosystem with 10-to-100, 000,000 organisms per handful! Whereas, dirt does not support life, with few, if any, minerals, no nutrients, or living organisms, no worms, no fungi, and lacking texture and structure. Poisoning the planet’s soil, or its web of life, turns it into dirt. Who would’ve ever guessed that agricultural practices would turn soil into dirt? The paradox is beyond breathtaking, but it does fill some open slots within ”The World is Insanely Stupid” jigsaw puzzle. “Someday we shall look back on this dark era of agriculture and shake our heads. How could we have ever believed that it was a good idea to grow our food with poisons?” (Jane Goodall, Harvest of Hope, 2005) Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com. www.counterpunch.org/2021/05/12/poisoning-the-planets-web-of-life/
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Post by Admin on May 23, 2021 18:53:29 GMT
#AnthropogenicMass #societal A team of researchers from Weizmann Institute of Sciences, Israel, recently published a study that compared human-made mass – aka anthropogenic mass – with all the living mass, or biomass, on the globe. They revealed that for the first time in human history the former has either surpassed the latter or is close to doing so in coming years. The limits of science have never been more glaringly apparent when trying to solve this conundrum. Reliance upon green technological solutions alone is flawed because the focus is still based on new stuff and more use – not to alter lifestyles or business models that handed us this problem in the first place. Even if we can replace all fossil fuel-based vehicles with electric ones, for example, cities are already struggling to take road space from cars and electric vehicles have their own footprint on the world's resources due to the materials needed to build them. The Covid-19 has reminded us how fragile and unprepared human civilization is when it comes to even known knowns like a pandemic. It has also taught us that human behaviour can be modified with minor actions like wearing mask to mitigate the intensity of global tragedies. The passive approach to proliferation of anthropogenic mass is not merely due to the lack of knowledge about its impact, but in general, it has also to do with human inclination to dismiss facts that don't fit their worldview. Humans are naturally disposed to disregard issues that are not challenging their daily lives or those which dilute their convenience. Our impact on the planet is much is deeper than carbon footprints or global warming. It points to a future where the effects of anthropogenic matter will take over – if it hasn't already – the identity of the Earth and its life. In the face of this, humans themselves might lose out in the evolutionary race. Eliminating materials like concrete or plastic or replacing them with alternatives is not going to address the fundamental problem with human attitudes and our unparalleled appetite for more. This is exactly where materialism can seamlessly transform into a known unknown risk factor in global catastrophe. The myriad of ways in which it can turn this planet into a mundane world is something our civilization has never experienced before. Could humans really destroy all life on Earth? www.bbc.com/future/article/20210520-could-humans-really-destroy-all-life-on-earth
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Post by Admin on Jun 14, 2021 9:06:57 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 27, 2021 11:33:05 GMT
LEAKED IPCC DRAFT CLIMATE REPORT ‘READS LIKE A 4,000-PAGE INDICTMENT’ OF HUMANITY’S FAILURE By Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams. June 26, 2021 | EDUCATE! popularresistance.org/leaked-ipcc-draft-climate-report-reads-like-a-4000-page-indictment-of-humanitys-failure/“This Is A Warning Of Existential Risk. Of Survival. Of Collapse,” Said Extinction Rebellion. Agence France-Presse reported Monday on the contents of a leaked draft of a United Nations intergovernmental climate panel report which warned that devastating effects of a warming world are set to hit far sooner than previously thought, with impacts including an additional tens of millions of people facing hunger by 2050. “This is a warning of existential risk. Of survival. Of collapse,” said climate movement Extinction Rebellion in response to AFP‘s reporting on what the draft contained. The draft Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) document warns of sweeping impacts on weather events, food, ecosystems, and disease—changes expected even if global temperature rise is kept under the Paris climate agreement’s second threshold of 2°Celsius. It also calls for systems-wide changes to avert a worst-case climate scenario. “By far the most comprehensive catalogue ever assembled of how climate change is upending our world, the report reads like a 4,000-page indictment of humanity’s stewardship of the planet,” reported AFP. The final document is set to be released in February at the end of the formal review process. IPCC responded to the media reporting with a statement indicating the draft document is likely based on the Second-Order Draft of the Working Group II report, which was circulated for review by governments and experts in December and January. Because it is a confidential working document, the IPCC said it would not comment on the draft. In a lengthy Twitter thread responding to the reporting, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe called the draft’s assessment rightly “blunt” though unsurprising given that it’s a synthesis report. Referring to scientists, she added: “We’ve realized that if we don’t spell out the fact that it’s our civilization we’ve put on the chopping block ourselves, in words that everyone can understand, emphasizing risks that matter to everyone on this planet, who will?” “Climate change isn’t just one more priority on our already over-crowded list,” Hayhoe wrote. “It is a threat multiplier that affects every single other priority already on it, from the air we breathe to the food we eat.” Despite the draft’s grim assessment, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg found reason for hope. Speaking to AFP, she said the document “confirms what we already knew”—that “the situation is very dire and that we need to act right now.” “At least I find that it’s very hopeful,” she said, “that many people are becoming more and more ready to tell it like it is,” because “we can of course not face this crisis unless we tell it like it is, unless we are adult enough to tell the truth and to face the reality.” She added that “this could be something that could… wake people up, which is very hopeful.”
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Post by Admin on Jul 10, 2021 18:04:05 GMT
Why Are We Fueling Our Own Extinction? 'While the rest of us understand supply and demand theory, our politicians, slick from all that oil money gushing into their hands, seem unable to firmly grasp this basic theory.' www.commondreams.org/views/2021/07/10/why-are-we-fueling-our-own-extinctionIt seems abundantly clear that something any man, woman or child with a reasonable understanding of the scientific method will agree on is that we need to stop burning fossil fuels if we are to avoid the breakdown of ecosystems and runaway global warming. If you aren’t convinced, maybe the CEO of the world’s second-largest publicly traded oil and gas producer, Royal Dutch Shell, can convince you. In 2020, Ben van Beurden said “The future of energy needs to evolve as something else, and we find a role for ourselves in it.” This is the same company that knew its product was causing the planet to warm, and yet for decades spent vast sums obfuscating the truth by funding myriad climate change denying think tanks and lobbying politicians across the globe. Ben van Beurden himself admitted his company’s guilt when he said, “Yeah, we knew. Everybody knew, and somehow we all ignored it.” It was only in 2019 that Shell finally opted to leave the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers lobbyist group, citing an incompatible position on climate change as their reason for exiting. So, it is clear that we need to move away from burning any type of fossil fuel as a matter of urgency. Let’s try a little thought experiment. Imagine you are a world leader that deeply cares about your nation and its people, as we are all sure, our world leaders today do. It is your job therefore to transition your nation away from fossil fuels in a quick fashion in order to avoid planetary collapse. Which of these two courses of action would you take? A) Continue to subsidize fossil fuel companies in order to reduce the cost of their products and increase their consumption, or B) start to remove these subsidies in order to increase their cost and decrease their consumption while subsidizing the new energy sources that will replace oil, gas, and coal to make sure the population can afford them? You would think that most world leaders would opt for option B, knowing that this is the only way to reduce fossil fuel consumption However, this isn’t what is happening. Today, the global fossil fuel industry is subsidized to the tune of more than $5 trillion a year. Amazingly, at the high end, the annual investment needed to fulfill all the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals sits at exactly $5 trillion a year, less than the amount currently handed out to the industry that is causing the crisis and has lied to us for decades in order to keep our custom. Some will say that this view is simplistic, but the reality is very clear, we have to move away from fossil fuels as soon as possible. The way to do that is obviously not by making them cheap to use. If it sounds simplistic, it’s because it is a simple supply and demand theory. Increased price leads to decreased consumption and vice versa. Business 101. With this in mind, why are we still funding our own extinction by subsidizing the very industries to blame for our predicament? Could the answer be a simple case of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours?” In the 2020 election between Joe Biden and Donald J. Trump, the fossil fuel industry spent at least $359 million on federal campaign donations and lobbying. There is so much dark money entering the political sphere each year that the true amount is likely much more. Mr. Trump himself explained the system very well in his 2015 presidential campaign when he was questioned about his reasons for giving political donations to the Democrats. He answered: “You better believe it... I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that's a broken system.” So broken that in the 2016 election, Trump was handed just $361,000 by the mining industry for his political campaign and in return, the Obama era environmental regulations, intended to prevent discharge of toxic contaminants into river systems, were rolled back. The savings to the coal industry are estimated at $175 million. Money well spent and Trump, unsurprisingly comes cheap, as Mitt Romney was handed $1.5 million in the same campaign cycle. In 2020, Royal Dutch Shell contributed $5,550,000 to political lobbyists. It is unclear what they expected in return. InsideClimate News estimated that Exxon and other oil companies had spent more than $5 billion to sow doubt amongst the population regarding the certainty of climate science and to fight clean energy policies. Almost a billion dollars was spent on campaign contributions between 2000-2016. In total, the fossil fuel industry outspent renewable energy by more than 13-1. The right honorable Senator James Inhofe from Oklahoma, infamous for disproving climate science by brandishing a snowball on the Senate floor, received $2,239,385 from the interests he protects. These politicians, if nothing else, provide excellent Return on Investment (ROI). If you are wondering what fossil fuel interests get in exchange for these donations, you can probably guess. In the 113th Congress (2013-2014), the fossil fuel industry spent $350,587,282 on lobbying and campaign contributions. In the same Congress, $41,840,275,998 surged in the other direction in the form of federal production and exploration subsidies. This represents an 11,900% ROI. For every $1 spent by the industry, $119 in subsidies find their way back into the coffers of the industry. Can you imagine a better business model? The situation is similar in Australia which is the largest exporter of coal on planet Earth. Here, the company Mineralogy gave more than $83 million to the United Australia Party in 2019 to prevent Labor from winning the election. This was the largest ever political donation in Australia and it was given by Clive Palmer, a climate skeptic, whose company is pushing to open gigantic coal mine operations in Queensland’s Galilee Basin. Mr. Palmer was not alone as $867,000 flowed from mining and energy companies to political parties across the spectrum. Due to poor restrictions on dark money, it is estimated the actual figure could be five to ten times higher. In return for campaign financing, the Australian taxpayer lavishes billions on the industry in tax-based subsidies, direct contributions, loans, project approvals, and lax environmental laws. Research from Greenpeace U.K. identified the leading Conservative party was handed one million pounds of fossil fuel money in 2019 and the Liberal Democrats also received two large donations from the industry. Again, it was unclear what the industry expects in return, but the U.K. treasury has given the oil industry tax breaks worth £2.3 billion and energy subsidies of £12 billion. This might have something to do with it. Globally, it was found the richest twenty nations had promised more than $150 billion in investment towards the number one cause of the climate crisis, the fossil fuel industry, in the first six months of 2020 alone. The G20 represents 80% of global emissions and this money makes a mockery of any plans for a green recovery from the ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic. While the rest of us understand supply and demand theory, our politicians, slick from all that oil money gushing into their hands, seem unable to firmly grasp this basic theory that is taught in all high school economics classes. Isn’t it about time we re-educated them? Civil disobedience is a far better plan than funding our own extinction.
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