Category: Climate chaos

Do we need a Plan B for the fossil fuel industry?

Posted: 09 Feb 2013 02:15 PM PST
by Graeme Taylor

Is their any future for the oil and coal industries without doing what they do now: burning the stuff? In Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, Bill McKibben argues that:

We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it’s already economically aboveground – it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It’s why they’ve worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada’s tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.
If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn’t pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today’s market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you’d be writing off $20 trillion in assets. The numbers aren’t exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won’t necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can’t have both. Do the math: 2,795 is five times 565. That’s how the story ends.

I agree with his logic. Because corporations, governments, investors and pension funds will do everything possible to avoid bankruptcy, efforts by environmentalists to simply shut down fossil fuel production will inevitably meet enormous resistance. For this reason it is hard to imagine any scenario in which preventative action will be taken in time to prevent catastrophic climate change.
McKibben then concludes that because the pollution caused by the oil, gas and coal companies will destroy most life on Earth, they are our enemies. While I understand his frustration, I believe that his analysis is incomplete, with the result that he is making serious theoretical and strategic mistakes.

His theoretical error is to analyse the fossil fuel industry in isolation from the rest of the global industrial political economy: in reality ending the use of fossil fuels will stop most existing industrial processes. We cannot create an environmentally sustainable economic system without completely transforming our wasteful, polluting pyrotechnical system to one based on renewable, recyclable, non-polluting processes. This will require a whole-systems paradigm shift — of not only the energy sector but also transportation, manufacturing and consumption. The political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry comes from its essential role in maintaining the industrial economy: because poverty is not an acceptable option, almost everyone on the planet wants the global industrial system to continue growing and will oppose policies that threaten economic collapse.
His strategic error is to position the environmental movement in opposition to the fossil fuel industry. This win/lose approach fails to give the industry and its investors any alternative other than to directly or indirectly oppose environmental initiatives. This is a particularly inappropriate strategy given the relative strength of the two groups and the (ultimately common) need for a rapid resolution to the problem.

We are likely to be more successful if, instead of trying to force the energy industry to write off $20 trillion, we provide constructive alternative uses for their assets — ones that support the development of an environmentally, economically and socially viable global system.
We need to put “Plan B” — a strategy for creating a sustainable fossil fuel industry — on the global agenda. It will work if:

Technologies are developed to utilise hydrocarbons as feedstocks to manufacture fully recyclable products in non-polluting (e.g. non-aerobic) processes. Carbon based products (e.g. plastics, fibres, carbon nanotubes) could then be used to create much of our built environment and transportation infrastructure.
While these technologies already exist (e.g. steam-methane reforming), they need to be refined and scaled up to commercially competitive levels.
Using fossil fuels to produce manufactured products should add value in three ways:
instead of burning coal, oil and gas, it will be more profitable to use them to produce finished products;
through creating recyclable products, the life of finite resources will be greatly extended; and
the (ultimately catastrophic) environmental, health and social costs of pollution will be avoided.
An emergency approach is taken to developing and scaling up the new technologies (similar to that of war mobilisation).
An international regime of sanctions and rewards is used to encourage industries and consumers to make the transition from polluting to non-polluting products.

Dr Graeme Taylor is the coordinator of BEST Futures (www.bestfutures.org) and the author of Evolution’s Edge: The Coming Collapse and Transformation of Our World, which won the 2009 IPPY Gold Medal for the book “most likely to save the planet”.
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Dependence on coal a bad strategy with shift to renewables unstoppable

Posted: 04 Feb 2013 01:30 PM PST
By Richard Denniss, via The Conversation

Last week, Greenpeace released a report calling for a halt to Australia’s burgeoning coal exports and pointing to the catastrophic climate impacts they would cause.
In response, Mitch Hooke, chief executive of the Minerals Council of Australia, took a standard industry line: “the proposal to stop Australian coal exports won’t stop global coal use – it will just send Australian jobs offshore and deprive state and federal governments of billions in revenue”.
Arguments that the strength of the Australian economy is heavily dependent on digging up and shipping out as much coal as possible, as quickly as possible, are common. Of course, they also imply that economic arguments trump any concerns about contributions to climate change.

But leaving that aside, how true is it? Would slowing or halting Australia’s coal exports really deprive Australians? What would it mean for Australian jobs?
Research by The Australia Institute suggests that slowing down the pace of coal exports would actually result in enormous benefits to the Australian economy. It would allow our other key export industries – including manufacturing, tourism, education and agriculture – to expand, employing more people and paying more tax.
Because these industries are all far more labour intensive than mining, less subsidised and mostly better taxpayers than mining, it would lead to more jobs and increasing state and federal revenue in the long run.
It’s no accident that the unprecedented expansion of mining in Australia has been accompanied by a sharp decline in many of our most important long-term export industries.
The relentless stream of manufacturing job losses, decline in tourist arrivals and overseas students, and declining agricultural exports are the collateral damage of allowing a breakneck mining expansion without regard to its impact on the rest of the economy.
The problem is that the more mining you have, the less you have of everything else.
For two decades from the early 1980s, exports from Australia’s non-mining industries were steadily increasing as a percentage of our GDP. This was a sign of an increasingly healthy diversified economy, better able to pay its way in the world. Then in the early 2000s, with the onset of the mining boom, something changed, and these industries have been heading south ever since.

The reason is that mining “crowds out” other exporting industries, which flows onto the rest of the economy, creating what we call the “two-speed economy”.
It has done this primarily through driving up the exchange rate, and creating an acute skills shortage.
The unprecedented rise in the Australian dollar is primarily driven by increasing commodity prices, and the massive $260 billion influx of foreign capital to fund the construction of mines and gas fields.
A further cause is that Australia has high interest rates relative to other developed countries, which means it attracts more overseas investment and further drives up the dollar. The Reserve Bank has cited the mining boom as a reason for every interest rate rise since 2005.
This has had a devastating impact on our non-mining exporters. Manufacturers who were receiving $100 for a product sold into the American market a few years ago now receive less than $70 for the equivalent item. The dollar has also appreciated by a similar amount relative to most of our other markets. Hotel rooms, meals and tours and university courses are similarly more expensive for those thinking of visiting Australia.
Australian tourism visitors have dropped by around 250,000 over the last decade, as more Australians holiday overseas, and overseas tourists go elsewhere. This is during a 20% boom in global tourism over the last decade.
Since the beginning of the mining boom, Australia’s rural sector has lost $43.5 billion in export income. This includes $14.9 billion in 2010-11 alone. These losses have occurred because the mining boom has forced the Australian dollar to historic highs. The beef industry took a $2 billion dollar hit last year alone.
Manufacturing job losses are announced with depressing regularity, with well over 120,000 manufacturing jobs disappearing since the GFC.
Adding fuel to the fire, the mining boom has created an acute skills shortage. This is simple supply and demand. If you plan to build $260 billion dollars’ worth of mining projects at once, it will create enormous demand for a narrow set of skills that are also important to other industries. This makes it much harder for other businesses to recruit and retain employees.
These businesses will also have to compete with the inflated wages being offered by the miners. The economic consultants for Clive Palmer’s China First mine acknowledged this impact alone would cost around 3000 jobs in manufacturing and tourism, and that’s just one mine!
Hooke’s concern about Australian jobs is especially interesting when you consider that the coal mining industry is highly capital intensive, and a very small employer. It employs around 38,000 people nationally, less than a third of one percent of the workforce, compared to around one million in manufacturing, half a million in tourism and 327,000 in agriculture.
With a capital-intensive industry crowding out labour-intensive industries, it seems likely that the net effect of the expansion of the coal industry will be job losses for Australia as a whole.

Crowding out of these industries also means a loss of tax that these industries would have been paying. The mining industry pays an effective corporate tax rate of around 13.9%, compared to the industry average of 21%.
To take the latest year available, 2009-10, mining companies paid $6.8 billion in company tax, amounting to just 2.2% of government receipts.
The coal industry also pays around $4 billion dollars a year in royalties to the states. Although royalties are technically considered taxes, the minerals are the raw materials of mining in the same way that wheat is for a baker, or bricks to a builder. Bakers and builders pay market prices for their raw materials, and the costs are not considered as a tax.
The difference is that the Australian people own those minerals, and the state government sells the minerals to mining companies on our behalf. It is hard to imagine that if the minerals were owned by a private company, like bricks or wheat, they would be sold for around 7% of their market value. This special treatment of the mining industry could be seen as a huge subsidy in itself.
As it stands mining is highly subsidised, to the tune of at least $5 billion dollars a year, which makes subsidies to manufacturing look modest.
Mitch Hooke’s claim that “the proposal to stop Australian coal exports won’t stop global coal use” is true, as far as it goes. But no one would seriously suggest that it would. Other countries will continue to export coal.
What it will do is drive up the coal price considerably, because Australia is the world’s largest coal exporter. In fact, Australia has a larger share of the world’s coal exports than Saudi Arabia does of oil, and no one would doubt the effect on global oil prices of Saudi Arabia reducing its oil exports.
This will have the effect of our customer countries – primarily Japan, Taiwan and India – reconsidering investing in coal for their energy infrastructure.
Luckily they already are. India has had to scrap huge coal power plants due to coal price fluctuations and difficulties in securing enough coal that have led to massive blackouts. This has led to rapid ramping up of solar targets to 10GW by 2017.
This shift to renewable energy is gaining pace around the globe with renewable energy investment exceeding fossil fuel in 2011. This is an unstoppable trend, and is great for the developing nations who will be able to avoid dependence on volatile and ever increasing fossil fuel prices, and the myriad of health and pollution problems associated with burning coal.

This article was co-authored by Mark Ogge. Mark is the Public Engagement Officer at Canberra-based think tank, The Australia Institute. His work involves communication of key research findings about the impacts of the mining industry on other crucial sectors of the Australian economy, especially manufacturing, tourism, education and agriculture.
Richard Denniss is Executive Director of the Australia Institute. The Australia Institute is funded by memberships and donations from philanthropic trusts and individuals to our Research Fund. Where particular pieces of research are commissioned, this information is disclosed as part of the research.
The Conversation
This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Battery-powered intercity trains possible, says government study

Research for Department of Transport reveals trains could travel 600 miles on single charge if fossil fuel prices trigger demand
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Peter Walker

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 3 February 2013 13.51 GMT

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Research indicated battery-powered trains could travel up to 600 miles on a single charge if fuel costs and environmental issues required it. Photograph: Dual Aspect/Alamy

If for some an intercity express will always resemble an oversized toy then this is perhaps just one stage further towards an extravagant childhood dream: a battery-powered train capable of travelling 600 miles on a single charge.

Such a technology is now possible, if not immediately likely to pull into a local station, according to government-commissioned research. The study was ordered by the Department for Transport with the significantly more serious purpose of examining ways trains could run on difficult-to-electrify lines if fossil fuel prices and environmental worries make diesel power too expensive.

The experts, working on behalf of the Transport Research Laboratory, looked into two options, the first of which would see a relatively small battery – still weighing up to two tonnes – with a shorter range, which would be mechanically swapped at stations.

The other notion was seen as more feasible: a single, eight-tonne battery, which could propel a train service for around 600 miles at a time, using a super capacitor or flywheel for the varying power requirements of the route.

Using digital models of real, if shorter, rail trips – Stratford-upon-Avon to Birmingham, for example – the experts were able to model how such a train could run. The conclusion – battery power is “a feasible option for providing electric traction on parts of the rail network where full route electrification is not viable”.

The big caveat, one known all too well by owners of electric cars, is the lifespan of the hugely expensive battery, with the eight-tonne rail version anticipated to cost around £0.5m a piece. While a diesel train would cost around £160,000 a year to run on a daily 600-mile service, the battery version would be more than £240,000 a year, of which £150,000 alone would be set aside for battery replacement.

Diesel prices would need to more than double for battery-only trains to become viable, said John Molyneux from the rail arm of the Lloyd’s Register group, who led the report.

“I don’t think we’ll see these trains in my lifetime,” he said. “But they may eventually come, out of necessity rather than of choice. It would be because of fuel prices and the environment.”

Battery technology could improve, but less quickly than some people thought, he said: “It’s all relative. Lithium ion has been around for 20-odd years and there isn’t much that’s better than that. And it’s still got its problems. With any next-generation batteries you’re still limited by electro-chemistry, which is a big limitation. You can’t get much better than we have now.”

However, one more immediate use of the technology could be smaller batteries to propel trains through short sections of difficult-to-electrify routes.

“The problem with electrification is things like tunnels, bridges and stations,” he said. “They’re the killers because you’ve got to break the overhead and you can’t have a continuous run.

“One thing we looked into was whether we could supply enough power on a small battery just to get you through the critical bits. Like an electric-electric hybrid. But there’s got to be an awful lot of will driving even that.”

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Obama faces Keystone dilemma after Senate urges pipeline approval

No reason to deny project, bipartisan majority says, but others in Congress press Obama to back up climate change commitment
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Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 January 2013 17.34 GMT

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North Dakota senator John Hoeven shows the Keystone pipeline and proposed expansions. Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Barack Obama faced intense pressure to break with his inauguration day promise on climate change on Thursday, after a bipartisan majority in the Senate urged approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.

The letter from 53 senators said there was no reason for Obama to deny the pipeline – as campaigners are demanding – because the project had now undergone exhaustive environmental review.

The letter, signed by Democrats as well as Republicans, underlined the high political cost to Obama of living up to his promise to act on climate change.

Campaign groups have made the pipeline their signature issue, saying the project to pump crude from Alberta’s tar sands to refineries on the Texas Gulf will unlock vast stores of carbon. Protesters plan a day of civil disobedience on February 17.

But Senators are also ratcheting up the pressure, demanding Obama move swiftly to approve a project they say will boost energy supplies and add jobs.

“Because the pipeline has gone through the most exhaustive environmental scrutiny of any pipeline in the history of this country, and you already determined that oil from Canada is in the national interest, there is no reason to deny or further delay this long-studied project,” the Senators wrote. “We ask you not to move the goalposts as opponents of this project have pressed you to do.”

Other Democrats in Congress are pressing Obama to back up his new commitments on climate change. But they are not making the Keystone XL the defining issue, as campaigners have done. Two Democrats who have led on environmental issues, senator Sheldon Whitehouse and congressman Henry Waxman, set up a bicameral taskforce on climate change on Thursday. The letter asked Obama to “expand on your vision for tackling climate change” and offered suggestions – but these did not include blocking the pipeline.

In comments to reporters, Waxman dismissed the campaigners’ argument that Keystone was a make-or-break issue for Obama – even though he also opposed the pipeline.

“This is only a small issue compared to the overall objective that the president and we want to achieve,” Waxman said. “What would you like me to do? Should I say to the president, ‘If you don’t agree with me on Keystone, I’m not going to work with you on solving the climate change issue’? That would be a little bit childish and counterproductive.”

Meanwhile, the pro-pipeline forces appeared to be gathering strength. The Washington Post, whose editorial board tends to discount the dangers of climate change, also came on board on Thursday. “Obama should ignore the activists who have bizarrely made Keystone XL a line-in-the-sand issue, when there are dozens more of far greater environmental impact,” the newspaper said in an editorial.

TransCanada, the company building the pipeline, noted in an email to reporters that the endorsement followed a meeting between the company’s chief executive and the editorial board.

The state of Nebraska withdrew its objections to the project this week, after TransCanada Corp revised its pipeline route to avoid ecologically sensitive Sandhills region.

That left Obama without political cover for delays in the project. With Nebraska on side, the administration now has the final say over the pipeline.

Construction has already begun on the southern portion of the pipeline, from Oklahoma to the refineries on the Texas Gulf coast. But the State Department must still rule on whether the project is in the “national interest”. That decision will likely fall to John Kerry, as the incoming secretary of state.

Kerry has a strong record on climate change, and led the effort to try to pass a climate law in the Senate. He told his confirmation hearing on Thursday that the US would be defined in part by its global leadership on climate change.

Obama rejected a cross-border permit for the pipeline last year, citing Nebraska’s objections to the original route.

The State Department said this week it expected to complete review of the new route in the spring.

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Connecting the dots to local climate impacts is a key to community engagement

Posted: 21 Jan 2013 03:52 PM PST
by Graeme Taylor

Notwithstanding Australia’s record-smashing heatwave, the impacts of climate change are often perceived to be distant in time and space.
Most Australians do not yet understand the scale and urgency of what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calls the climate emergency—the most serious threat facing humanity. The reasons are many, including the poor performance of much of the media, and the complacency of political and business leaders. The most broadly disseminated view is that climate change is a distant and very long-term problem; an international problem (and therefore too big and complex for you or me to influence); and something that can and will be eventually managed with adaptation and new technologies.
Our challenge is to find ways to overcome these myths, mobilise communities, and then build a national movement for a paradigm shift in Australian climate politics.
One key path to catalyse this process is to help local communities understand how climate and health and livelihood issues are intertwined, and why the current global climate change trajectory menaces their futures.
Such an approach could see Australian environmental and climate action advocates focus on helping communities that have already experienced serious climate change damage understand the critical threats they face in the coming decades. These campaigns will work with residents to develop clear, powerful narratives capable of mobilising their communities in support of emergency action. The success of these local initiatives will help lay the foundations of a wider, national movement.
The campaigns should focus on high profile issues — such as dying coral reefs, coastal inundation, extreme heat, bushfires and droughts as a threat to both health and livelihood — and the communities that these issues will affect first and foremost: exemplar communities that are in the unfortunate position of “canaries in coal mines”. A priority is selecting communities and regions that are iconic in nature, that are vulnerable to climate change; and where there is a close relationship between regional environmental and economic damage. Exemplars could include:

Cairns and neighbouring communities and the Great Barrier Reef. Half the reef has died since 1985 and most of the rest will disappear in the next 30 years. Have residents been fully informed of the threat and its causes? Have they been asked: Is the loss of the GBR acceptable to you? How will this affect the economy of the region? How will this affect you personally? Will your community and way of life survive? Are governments aware of this? Should they take immediate action to save the GBR? What do you think the community should do? (This approach is being used to some extent in campaigns against the expansion of the Queensland coal export industry.)
Communities that are at particular risk of bush fires increasing in frequency and intensity. This campaign could focus first on building awareness among emergency personnel (such as volunteer fire fighters) of projected weather changes over the next 40 years — increasing heat, dryness and wind — and ask them questions such as: How will a constantly worsening climate affect your quality of life and your work and work safety? Are these changes acceptable to you, your children and your communities? Will your community and way of life survive? Are your political representatives and government officials aware of this? What will you do to help stop global warming?
Urban communities and workers at particular risk from global warming and heat waves. This campaign could focus first on building awareness among emergency personnel (ambulance, fire, police and hospital staff) and vulnerable groups such as the elderly of the threat to both health and the quality of life of projected weather changes over the next 40 years. How will constantly rising temperatures and increasingly extreme weather affect public health, the quality of life of your community, and your work? At what point will your city become unliveable during summer months? Are these changes acceptable to you, your children and your communities? Are your political representatives and government officials aware of this? What will you do to help stop global warming?
Agricultural communities particularly at risk from increasing bush fires, droughts, extreme heat and diminishing access to irrigation. This campaign could focus first on building awareness among farmers of the threat to both their incomes and the quality of life of projected weather changes over the next 40 years. They could be asked questions such as: How will constantly rising temperatures and increasingly extreme weather affect your production, increase your risks and costs, and negatively impact both your work and the quality of life of your community? At what point will farming become unviable? Are these changes acceptable to you, your children and your communities? Are your political representatives and government officials aware of this? What will you do to help stop global warming?

Dr Graeme Taylor is the coordinator of BEST Futures (www.bestfutures.org) and the author of Evolution’s Edge: The Coming Collapse and Transformation of Our World, which won the 2009 IPPY Gold Medal for the book “most likely to save the planet”.

Climate change and the myth of human progress

Posted: 14 Jan 2013 05:33 PM PST
Illustration by Mr. Fish, TruthDig
Note: On present climate policy settings, the world is headed to 4 degrees C of warming by 2100, perhaps as early as 2060. We’ve known that for at least the last five years, but in the last year its become almost polite to recognise the fact, with the World Bank chiming in, amongst many others. There is even a conversation about adapting to 4 degrees.
Last week, Climate Commission scientist Prof. David Karoly told ABC News: “We are expecting in the next 50 years for two to three degrees more warming”, and that is on top of the almost 1 degree C that the world has warmed since the industrial revolution.That’s up to 4 degrees C of warming by 2060.
In the same week Paul and Anne Erlich asked, “Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?”, in a new, well-referenced, peer-reviewed paper: “Environmental problems have contributed to numerous collapses of civilizations in the past. Now, for the first time, a global collapse appears likely. Overpopulation, over-consumption by the rich and poor choices of technologies are major drivers; dramatic cultural change provides the main hope of averting calamity.

In this post, Chris Hedges says complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves, and human society risks retreating into what anthropologists call “crisis cults”, where “the powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.”

The Myth of Human Progress
by Chris Hedges, via TruthDig

Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.
The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planet-wide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 United States since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates. Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.
“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada. “They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today—about 2 billion—is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.”
“If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later,” he said. “If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide, but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”
Wright, who in his dystopian novel “A Scientific Romance” paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.
Modern capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book “What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,” derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had crippled them; in fact the Aztecs beat them the first time around. If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, if it had not been able to occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas, Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems, making further subjugation, plundering and expansion possible.
“The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever,” Wright said. “It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.”
And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults”. The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.
“Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away,” Wright said. “There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable—the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun—would disappear.”
“We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring,” Wright said. “It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we are letting oil and gas exploration rip when we know that expanding the carbon economy is suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change.”
“If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea,” Wright said.