Regular Fare:
The Never-Ending
Inflationary Conundrum. By Viktor Shvets of
Macquarie
Key Points:
·
Base effect will drive CPI higher, but this trend
should moderate into 2022.
·
LT inflation will be constrained by
technology, financialization & efficiencies.
·
Winners will be those at the cutting edge,
driving returns while lowering CPI
·
Inflation debates are heating up. New age
themes will stay relevant
While we have been arguing that MMT-style policies are the future, we do
not believe that, politically or socially, the time for MMT has arrived yet,
requiring either further dislocations, five- to ten-year demographic
transitions or a mix of the two. This leaves base effect and greater capacity
constraints as key inflationary drivers.
Covid-19 has
cost global workers $3.7tn in lost earnings, says ILO
A third of all
small business owners say they can't pay rent
"Based on this analysis, it's clear to see that COVID's negative
affects are becoming more widespread as we start 2021,"
A Disappointment
Of Growth And Disinflation
As we head into 2021, there is a large consensus that the massive
monetary interventions in 2020 will lead to an explosion of economic growth,
inflation, and higher interest rates. We suspect that the outcome of more
debt-driven spending will lead to a disappointment in growth and disinflation
instead. … There are several reasons why expectations may fall short of
reality. …. As monetary interventions increased, the “transmission system”
became more fractured as the “wealth gap” expanded. Despite perennial hopes
that economic growth and inflation would arise from lower rates, more
government spending, and increased “accommodative policies,” each iteration led
to weaker outcomes. …. The problem is government spending has shifted away from
productive investments. Instead of things like the Hoover Dam, which creates
jobs (infrastructure and development), spending shifted to social welfare,
defense, and debt service, which have a negative rate of return…. Deflation
remains the risk… There are no real options for the Federal Reserve unless they
are willing to allow the system to reset painfully.
Bubble Fare:
Baupost’s Seth
Klarman compares investors to ‘frogs in boiling water’.
Ritholtz: Late Cycle
Bubblicious?
Consider the universe of things we do not currently know about this
market & economy, but will likely understand with great clarity 10 years
from now. Is this a bubble? When will the market crash? How will the
pandemic end? Will there be another US insurrection? What other surprises await
us?
We are incapable of answering those questions today (with any degree of
confidence), but they will look obvious in the future.
Worse, our hindsight bias will allow us to convince ourselves that we
knew the answers all along.
Cory Doctorow: Understanding
/r/wallstreetbets
COVID-19 notes:
‘A wakeup call’: How resilient new coronavirus variants could prolong the pandemic
Health experts warn new COVID mutations could prolong the pandemic for another year – as South African super-COVID variant that could be vaccine resistant is discovered in South Carolina - and daily death toll hits 4,011
New clinical
trials raise fears the coronavirus is learning how to resist vaccines
Few Health Care
Workers Think the Worst of Pandemic is Over
Sex differences
in immune responses
Evidence increasingly indicates that male sex is a risk factor for more
severe disease and death from COVID-19. Male bias in COVID-19 mortality is
observed in nearly all countries with available sex-disaggregated data, and the
risk of death in males is ∼1.7 times higher than in
females (1). Aging is strongly associated with higher risk of death in both
sexes, but at all ages above 30 years, males have a significantly higher
mortality risk, rendering older males the most vulnerable group.
COVID-19 May
Hide in Brains and Cause Relapses
Deaths of
despair and the incidence of excess mortality in 2020
The spread of COVID-19 in the US has prompted extraordinary steps by
individuals and institutions to limit infections. Some worry that ‘the cure is
worse than the disease’ and these measures may lead to an increase in deaths of
despair. Using data from the US, this column estimates how many non-COVID-19
excess deaths have occurred during the pandemic. Mortality in 2020 significantly exceeds the total of official COVID-19
deaths and a normal number of deaths from other causes. Certain characteristics
suggest the excess are deaths of despair. Social isolation may be part of the
mechanism that turns a pandemic into a wave of deaths of despair; further
studies are needed to show if that is the case and how.
The West's Greed
Could Come Back To Haunt It
A global initiative was launched to ensure that poorer countries would
also have fair access to vaccines for the coronavirus once they were developed.
Instead, the West is panic-buying the available stocks – and that could be
devastating, politically, economically and in terms of human lives.
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Too many
boardrooms are climate incompetent
There is a striking lack of directors with expertise in climate change
and ESG issues
Green groups
raise concerns over Carney carbon credits plan
Campaigners say system risks becoming greenwashing exercise unless loopholes
closed
Warming Seas Are
Accelerating Greenland's Glacier Retreat
28 Trillion
Tonnes of Ice Have Melted Since 1994, on Track With Worst-Case Scenarios
The Climate
Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try.
How President
Biden’s Executive Orders Impact The Oil Industry
This week President Biden followed that action up with Executive Order on
Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad. The biggest takeaway from this
order was an indefinite “pause on new oil and natural gas leases on public
lands” until a comprehensive review on the climate change impacts can be completed.
The sound bite for many from this executive order was that President Biden had
banned fracking as a consequence of this action. But as with the previous
order, fracking isn’t mentioned in this executive order. Further, if an
operator has an existing lease and permit but haven’t drilled yet, they can
still drill the well and frack it. The order does potentially impact some
future fracking operations, but Biden did reiterate before he signed it “Let me
be clear, and I know this always comes up, we’re not going to ban fracking.”
But what Biden can’t do by executive order is an overall ban on fracking,
because most fracking takes place on private land. A complete ban would have to
be passed by Congress, and that looks like a longshot.
The litmus test for an effective climate policy is that it must keep
enough fossil fuels in the ground to prevent global temperatures from rising
more than 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the target set
by the Paris agreement. The Biden administration’s climate plan, centered on
clean energy standards and infrastructure investment, will be a step in this
direction. But whether it will manage to hit the target is another question.
Quotes of the Week:
Yves Smith, on “the fatuous uproar about RobinHood and GameStop”: “let’s put the atmospherics to the side. This
episode, including the grotesquely disproportionate amount of attention it is
getting, is an indictment of American capitalism.”
Noland: “Yet another week for the history books. For posterity: GameStop
gained 400%, AMC Entertainment 278%, Express 235%, Siebert Financial 122%,
Cel-Sci 75%, Novavax 74%, Vaxart 68%, Fulgent Genetics 60%, Vir Biotechnology
59%, National Beverage 54%, and Fossil 47%. Ominously, the VIX Index spiked to
~38.”
Bill Blain: “It’s not just me that thinks the market is a bubble that should
burst. There isn’t a single reputable name out there saying anything except
this is dangerous. I listen to these guys because they suffer from experience.
I’ve seen this in 1987, 1992, 1998, 2000, 2008 and today. I’ve seen this
before.”
Grantham: “When you have reached this level of obvious super-enthusiasm, the
bubble has always, without exception, broken in the next few months, not a few
years.”
Grantham again: “For positioning a portfolio to avoid the worst pain of a major bubble
breaking is likely the most difficult part. Every career incentive in the
industry and every fault of individual human psychology will work toward
sucking investors in.”
Vids of the Week:
Outplayed; and fun at the Toronto Zoo
Tweet of the Week:
Guelph property market is pure madness at the moment. 2 yrs ago
these were in the mid to high $500k
EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:
Excess [economic] fare:
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” says Peter Thiel’s
Founders Fund, expressing a sort of jaded disappointment with technological
progress. (The fact that the 140 characters have become 280, a 100% increase,
does not seem to have impressed him.)
Thiel, along with economists such as Tyler Cowen (The Great Stagnation) and Robert Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth), promotes a “stagnation
hypothesis”: that there has been a significant slowdown in scientific,
technological, and economic progress in recent decades—say, for a round number,
since about 1970, or the last ~50 years.
When I first heard the stagnation hypothesis, I was skeptical. The
arguments weren’t convincing to me. But as I studied the history of progress
(and looked at the numbers), I slowly came around, and now I’m fairly
convinced. So convinced, in fact, that I now seem to be more pessimistic about
ending stagnation than some of its original proponents.
In this essay I’ll try to capture both why I was originally skeptical,
and also why I changed my mind. …
The U.S. Economy
Excels at One Thing: Producing Massive Inequality
Excess [ESG] fare:
Death by 1,000
cuts: Are major insect losses imperiling life on Earth?
Forever
Chemicals Are Widespread in U.S. Drinking Water
Politically Incorrect Bubble Fare:
Chris Arnade: GameStop:
Intentionally Dying
…. At the very, very top of
our meritocracy is a big game called Wall Street, that the smartest and
cleverest get to play, and get paid big bucks for it. They get to choose their
character: Trader, Salesperson, Broker, or Lawyer. The traders get to choose
their weapon: Stocks, Bonds, Mortgages, Derivatives. Then they are off,
navigating different levels, slaying this and that company, currency, or
country. Below that is that vast landscape of losers who spend their days
building roads, growing food, flipping hamburgers, teaching kids, building
small businesses, landscaping yards, and their nights shooting hoops, or
reading books, or caring for kids, or going to church. Or, God forbid, playing
XBOX or PS4. Those are the worst. A lot of those losers, of every variety but
especially the people who play video games, also spend a lot of time on Reddit,
or Discord, or Twitch, live-streaming, shitposting, and just having fun.
When they were doing this,
some of them noticed that Wall Street was also just a game, and a very
profitable one. Sure, it was a little different than Zelda, or Grand Theft
Auto, or Demon Souls, but it was a game nonetheless. So they started dipping
their toes in and learning this pretty cool and serious game. Then they started
telling their friends about it, who told their friends and so on and so on.
Some made a little money here and there, others got run over, but hey, it was
just another game. Cool. Of course they were the outsiders, the losers, the
clowns fucking around for shits and giggles. They understood that. They knew
nobody treated them seriously. Hell, they had been called lazy losers all their
lives. Might as well embrace that. So they proudly named themselves
“Degenerates” and “Autistic Retards.”
Own the stigma, because you
ain’t gonna ever shake it or lose it no matter how hard you try. They dabbled
here and there, got a little better at it, and soon attracted a few serious
players with serious money into their fold. Wall Street players, slumming it,
who saw a community of misfits they could lead, teach, or scam, depending on
their ethics. So it went, and their numbers and ability grew, and then this
summer some of the cleverest Wall Street players, who specialized in making big
bets on companies failing, came after GameStop, something they had personal
views on. That perked up their interest. Making it even cooler, some
legitimately skilled Wall Street players who had joined their island of misfit
toys pointed out that GameStop was a good buy, not a good sell, and convinced
some of the degenerates to join them.
Also, this mob of shitposters and neophytes
was really learning the Wall Street game, and they noticed a flaw and weakness
in it. The big players going after GameStop had left themselves exposed. Really
exposed. So they did what any gamer does. They attacked by buying GameStop, and
hyped and hyped it until everyone smelled blood and joined the attack, and
bought GameStop.
It worked. Kind of, and
unexpectedly. GameStop, which was trading at $5 or so this summer is, as of
this writing, trading at $300, give or take $150. A head-turning move even by
Wall Street standards. The dog caught the car. The losers got to level twelve
of a game nobody, including themselves, thought they would get past level four
of.…
COVID Fare:
Dr. Hooman Noorchashm warns of an “almost certain immunological prognostication
that if viral antigens are present in the tissues of subjects who undergo
vaccination, the antigen specific immune response triggered by the vaccine will
target those tissues and cause tissue inflammation and damage.”
Noorchashm, M.D., Ph.D., is a physician-scientist and advocate for
ethics, patient safety and women’s health. He specializes in cardiothoracic
surgery and has taught and practiced medicine for nearly two decades.
“Dr. Noorchashm’s prognostications of harm in elderly individuals with
cardiovascular disease coincides with the numerous reports of unexplained cardiovascular deaths following COVID-19
vaccination in Norway, Germany, the UK, Gibraltar and the U.S.,” said Lyn
Redwood, RN, MSN, director and president emerita of Children’s Health Defense.
Redwood noted that J. Patrick Whelan, M.D., Ph.D., sent similar concerns
to the FDA on Dec. 8, 2020.
Whelan raised even more worrisome questions, Redwood said, in that he
cited research showing that in addition to the heart, ACE-2 receptors are also
present in microvasculature of the brain, liver and kidney.
“Ignoring these valid and scientifically supported warnings from leading
physicians may result in hundreds of millions of people suffering potentially
deadly injuries or permanent damage following vaccination,” Redwood said. “It
will also further erode the dwindling confidence that our country has in our
federal regulatory agencies to protect the health of all Americans.”
Dolores Cahill, PhD., Professor of
Translational Research and Molecular Genetics, School of Medicine, University
College Dublin
I suppose there are potentially
three adverse reactions (from messenger RNA vaccines—Moderna, Pfizer).
Beginning with anaphylaxis
(severe, potentially life-threatening allergic reaction) in the first
week. Therefore, these vaccines
shouldn’t be given in the 2nd dose.
Then the real adverse events
will happen, against whatever is the real mRNA in the vaccines, and when the
person vaccinated comes across (this coronavirus) sometime later …. what
happened in the animal studies, 20% or 50% or 100% of the animals died!
Among people over 80, maybe
about 2.5% will experience severe side effects, adverse events where people
cannot work or live life normally.
Then with the 2nd
vaccination it could be 1 in 10, or ten percent. For the over 80-year-olds, I would think that
80% of them would have life-limiting reactions or die when they come across the
messenger RNA again.
For others (not elderly) it
could be half of the people who could be severely harmed.
What it does is… this gene
therapy or medical device is setting up an autoimmune disease chronically. It’s like injecting people who have nut
allergies with peanuts.
It’s anaphylaxis in the
first wave. It’s anaphylaxis + allergic
reaction the 2nd wave. But the 3rd
reaction occurs when you come across whatever the messenger RNA is against
(virus, bacterium, etc.), and now you have stimulated your immune system to
have a low-grade autoimmune disease, not immunity to yourself per se because
the mRNA is expressing a viral protein.
Now you made yourself a
genetically modified organism, and so the immune system that is meant to push
the viruses or bacteria out… now the autoimmune reaction is attacking your body
low grade.
Now (months later) when you
come across the virus that stimulates the immune system to get rid of the virus
and when it (the immune system) sees that you have viral proteins in your own
cells and organs, then about a week later (the adaptive immune system kicks in,
the mechanism that makes specific long-term memory antibodies against a
pathogen) and you go into organ failure.
Because your immune system is killing your own organs. Those patients will present as sepsis
initially. Then (later) you die of organ
failure.
If you have one or two
co-morbidities, the energy the immune system requires to boost your immune
system will make the older person very tired and exhausted and they don’t have
the capacity to survive if you have underlying conditions.
Normally, because the mRNA
is in every cell of their body, it’s almost unstoppable. It destroys the heart, or the spleen, or the
lungs, or the liver because the mRNA is expressing the protein in every cell.
Just as a solution, what we
urgently need, just as a repository, 1 in 100, or 1 in 200 vaccine vials
injected, to be set aside, especially into the elderly in the care homes. They
need to be stored in a biorepository of the vaccine vials randomly, so when the
people start to die, we can actually see what is in this vaccine. We should be doing this now.
I am concerned that there
are maybe multiple mRNAs in this vaccine, not just something for
coronavirus. If it is influenza or other
viruses, we would be priming these people to other natural (cold and flu) viruses
that are circulating.
We urgently need quality
control to randomly require doctors to give 1 in 100 vaccine vials to a
repository and someone like me could forensically analyze what’s in these
vaccines. So, when the elderly start
dying, we will know. We should be
knowing now what’s in them.
It’s absolutely a dangerous
gene therapy. Should not be given to the elderly.
.. Now imagine if we could
have cut the death-, infection- and misery toll in half. And that’s just what
sufficient vitamin D levels promise to do. Ivermectin promises much more. We
could have saved millions of lives, a manifold of that in hospitalizations and
all-over suffering, we wouldn’t have needed to kill our societies and
economies, no lockdowns, no facemasks, no overloaded health care systems.
Imagine that.
But we didn’t. Fauci and his
peers all over the globe simply ignored the science. And replaced it with
something that *they* called “the science”. Which they can do because they have
degrees and are considered scientists. And are in a position to crowd out other
scientists.
Just vitamin D, zinc,
ivermectin and HCQ. They wouldn’t perhaps have prevented and solved every
single case, but the burden on society would have been so much less. And the
deaths. And the misery.
…
Please note that none of
this means that the various vaccines are completely useless, it just means the
urgency to roll them out by the billions wouldn’t have been there. We could
have had proper research, peer review, all that. But we didn’t. We now have
mRNA vaccines, never tested on humans, being tested on millions upon millions
of them. And there was never any reason for that. It was always just an induced
panic, that very simple and cheap substances could have made obsolete.
Antihistamines and azithromycin as a treatment for
#COVID-19 on primary health care – A retrospective
observational study in elderly patients
The latest
international testing of hydroxychloroquine treatment of coronavirus shows countries that had
early use of the drug had a 79% lower mortality rate than countries that banned
the use of the safe malaria drug:
HCQ for COVID19. Studies galore; also Ivermectin. Vitamin D. Zinc. Vitamin C. Remdesevir.
Some key findings from the
report:
·
Big pharmaceutical companies
are not responsible for most major breakthroughs in new drugs. Rather,
innovation is driven in small firms, which are often spun off of
taxpayer-funded academic research. These small labs are then purchased by giant
firms after they've assumed the risk needed to develop a blockbuster drug;
·
Instead of producing
lifesaving drugs for diseases with few or no cures, large pharmaceutical
companies often focus on small, incremental changes to existing drugs in order
to kill off generic threats to their government-granted monopoly patents; and
·
Mergers in the
pharmaceutical industry have had an overall negative effect on innovation,
taking what little competition existed in the industry and completely
destroying it.
COVID QOTW:
“Are you tired of COVID? I
fucking am.”
from: The Virus
Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Catastrophe
In the last three months,
several super-variants have emerged that are 30 to 70 per cent more infectious
than the original Wuhan strain.
The old COVID-19 doubled its
numbers every 40 days under a particular set of restrictions; under the same
conditions, the variants double every 10 days. That means they can outrun any
vaccination campaign.*
That means if you haven’t
eliminated — or almost eliminated — cases in your region, you are going to
learn the meaning of grief.
These highly-contagious
variants have emerged in jurisdictions with high infection rates: the U.K.,
Brazil, South Africa and California. They became global tourists months ago,
before you read about them.
Meanwhile, governments still
do not understand the threat at hand.
To illustrate it, British
mathematician Adam Kucharski recently compared a virus mutation that was 50 per
cent more deadly with one that increased transmission by 50 per cent.
With a reproduction rate of
about 1.1 and a death rate of 0.8 per cent, current strains of COVID-19 now
deliver 129 deaths per 10,000 infections.
A virus that is 50 per cent
more lethal will kill 193 people in a month. A variant that is more
transmissible wins the game with 978 deaths in just one month.
Political Fare:
Joe Biden. Joe Biden. Joe fucking fucking motherfucking Biden. In a
country of 328 million people the guy that gets elevated to the top is
literally one of the very worst human beings in the entire population. That’s
the “democracy” you’re being told is under attack.
And this isn’t even prime Joe Biden. This is coming out of retirement for
a half-assed exhibition match Joe Biden. This is way past sell-by date Joe
Biden. This is Joe Biden with missing pieces. That’s the sort of animal that
rises to the highest elected office in US “democracy”.
The inauguration was a whole internet of liberals performing amazing mental
contortions to forget that Joe Biden is a disgusting piece of shit. Now
everyone has forgotten who Joe Biden is, including Joe Biden. A nationwide
dementiafest.
Obama campaigned on Hope and Change and delivered nothing but neoliberal oppression and imperialist mass murder. Biden campaigned on “Fuck you, no” and people think he’s somehow going to deliver something positive.
People are so cute.
Canadians
Against War on Yemen Block Shipment of Armoured Vehicles Headed to Saudi Arabia
The direct action in Hamilton, Ontario coincides with hundreds of events
to pressure the new Biden administration and other world governments to stop
arming Saudi Arabia.
The
‘Humanitarian’ Left Still Ignores the Lessons of Iraq, Libya and Syria to Cheer
on More War
More CIA-generated Geopolitical B.S. Fare:
Eva Bartlett: The Navalny
Protests Charade: More Western Interference
& Disinfo on Russia
Big Thoughts:
"Excessive debt
gradually becomes its own tyrant, the past rules
exclusively, trampling on the future."
Joe Costello on debt, democracy, and the sad state of our politics. Via
Yasha Levine.
Taibbi: The Echo Chamber Era
Trust in media is down, but if journalists don't listen to critics
anyway, why should they care?.
Much Bigger Thoughts:
Once we can see them, it’s too late
This month Robin Hanson, the
famous and controversy-prone George Mason University economics professor who
I’ve known since 2004, was visiting economists here in Austin for a few weeks.
So, while my fear of covid considerably exceeds Robin’s, I met with him a few
times in the mild Texas winter in an outdoor, socially-distanced way. It took
only a few minutes for me to remember why I enjoy talking to Robin so much.
See, while I’d been moping
around depressed about covid, the vaccine rollout, the insurrection, my
inability to focus on work, and a dozen other things, Robin was bubbling with
excitement about a brand-new mathematical model he was working on to understand
the growth of civilizations across the universe—a model that, Robin said,
explained lots of cosmic mysteries in one fell swoop and also made striking
predictions. My cloth facemask was, I confess, unable to protect me from
Robin’s infectious enthusiasm.
…
To cut to the chase, Robin
is trying to explain the famous Fermi Paradox: why, after 60+ years of looking,
and despite the periodic excitement around Tabby’s star and ‘Oumuamua and the
like, have we not seen a single undisputed sign of an extraterrestrial
civilization? Why all this nothing, even though the observable universe is
vast, even though (as we now know) organic molecules and planets in Goldilocks
zones are everywhere, and even though there have been billions of years for
aliens someplace to get a technological head start on us, expanding across a
galaxy to the point where they’re easily seen?
Traditional answers to this
mystery include: maybe the extraterrestrials quickly annihilate themselves in
nuclear wars or environmental cataclysms, just like we soon will; maybe the
extraterrestrials don’t want to be found (whether out of self-defense or a
cosmic Prime Directive); maybe they spend all their time playing video games.
Crucially, though, all answers of that sort founder against the realization
that, given a million alien civilizations, each perhaps more different from the
others than kangaroos are from squid, it would only take one, spreading across
a billion light-years and transforming everything to its liking, for us to have
noticed it.
Robin’s answer to the puzzle
is as simple as it is terrifying. Such civilizations might well exist, he says,
but if so, by the time we noticed one, it would already be nearly too late.
Robin proposes, plausibly I think, that if you give a technological
civilization 10 million or so years—i.e., an eyeblink on cosmological
timescales—then either
1.
the civilization wipes
itself out, or else
2.
it reaches some relatively
quiet steady state, or else
3.
if it’s serious about
spreading widely, then it “maxes out” the technology with which to do so,
approaching the limits set by physical law.
In cases 1 or 2, the
civilization will of course be hard for us to detect, unless it happens to be
close by. But what about case 3? There, Robin says, the “civilization” should
look from the outside like a sphere expanding at nearly the speed of light,
transforming everything in its path. ….
Tweet of the Week:
Greenwald: The media incuriosity over
why Washington continues to be utterly militarized, why none of the supposedly
planned January 20 day violent protests at state capitols happened, and whether
this threat is being exaggerated to justify the Draconian security proposals,
is stunning.
Quotes of the Week:
Johnstone: “There is absolutely no
way the Democratic Party makes the drastic changes we will need to avoid
climate collapse or nuclear war. In policy it only promotes slow incremental
change, and in practice it promotes no change whatsoever. You’re throwing money
and energy into armageddon. People who think we can be saved by a
counter-revolutionary party which never does anything but bolster the status
quo have no understanding of how bad things are and how rapidly they are
deteriorating.”
A passage from Tana French’s novel, “The Likeness,” from 2008. Hat tip W.J. Astore.
“Look at the old wars, centuries ago: the
king led his men into battle.
Always. That was what the ruler was:
both on a practical level and on a mystical one, he was the one who stepped
forwards to lead his tribe, put his life at stake for them, become the
sacrifice for their safety. If he had
refused to do that most crucial thing at that most crucial moment, they would
have ripped him apart—and rightly so: he would have shown himself to be an
impostor, with no right to the throne.
The king was the country; how could he possibly expect it to go into
battle without him? But now…Can you see
any modern president or prime minister on the front line, leading his men into
the war he’s started? And once that
physical and mystical link is broken, once the ruler is no longer willing to be
the sacrifice for his people, he becomes not a leader but a leech, forcing others
to take his risks while he sits in safety and battens on their losses. War becomes a hideous abstraction, a game for
bureaucrats to play on paper; soldiers and civilians become mere pawns, to be
sacrificed by the thousands for reasons that have no roots in any reality. As soon as rulers mean nothing, war means
nothing; human life means nothing. We’re
ruled by venal little usurpers, all of us, and they make meaninglessness everywhere
they go.” (pages 320-21)
Pic Quotes of the Week:
Pic of the Week:
No-Fun Fare:
Green Capitalism
Is Losing the War for the Planet
Around the world, politicians herald the growth of renewable energy – but
the bitter reality is that green capitalism is failing to overcome fossil
fuels. To save the planet, we need a break from the market.
Op-Ed: Collapseologists
are warning humanity that business-as-usual will make the Earth uninhabitable
William Rees: “it seems that some form of global societal collapse is
inevitable, possibly within a decade, certainly within this century,”
The most pressing proximate cause of biophysical collapse is what he
calls overshoot: humans exploiting natural systems faster than the systems can
regenerate. The human enterprise is financing its growth and development by
liquidating biophysical “capital” essential to its own existence. We are
dumping waste at rates beyond nature’s assimilative capacity. Warming
temperatures, plunging biodiversity, worldwide deforestation and ocean
pollution, among other problems, are all important in their own right. But each
is a mere symptom of overshoot, says Rees.
The message we should glean from the evidence is that all human
enterprise is ultimately determined by biophysical limits. We are exceptional
animals, but we are not exempt from the laws of nature.
…
Will Steffen singles out the neoliberal economic growth paradigm — the
pursuit of ever expanding GDP — as “incompatible with a well-functioning Earth
system at the planetary level.” Collapse, he told an interviewer, “is the most
likely outcome of the present trajectory of the current system, as
prophetically modelled in ‘Limits to Growth. ' "
Avoiding a
‘Ghastly Future’: Hard Truths on the State
of the Planet
A group of the world’s top ecologists have issued a stark warning about
the snowballing crisis caused by climate change, population growth, and
unchecked development. Their assessment is grim, but big-picture societal
changes on a global scale can still avert a disastrous future.
…
“In other words,” say 17 of the world’s leading ecologists in a stark new
perspective on our place in life and time, “humanity is running an ecological
Ponzi scheme in which society robs nature and future generations to pay for
boosting incomes in the short term.”
Thus, with more warming from now on, the “land carbon balance (solid blue
line in diagramme) will first weaken and ultimately reverse sign from carbon
sink to carbon source”, so that “temperature tipping point of the terrestrial
biosphere lies not at the end of the century or beyond, but within the next 20
to 30 years” for some vegetated landscapes. About 50 percent of the terrestrial
biosphere will reach temperatures above the threshold that limits
photosynthesis by mid-century, reports Bob Berwyn.
…
“The take-home point here”, says Mann, “is that once again we are
learning that the uncertainties are not breaking in our favor," he said.
"If anything, the impacts of climate change are proving to be worse than
we predicted."
We’re All Just
Temporary Passengers on Spaceship Earth.
I recently asked a scientist on Facebook how he copes with the knowledge
that we are destroying the planet within the geologic blink of an eye. Here is
his answer:
Pot helps! 🙂 But psychologically, I reread Catton’s Overshoot
recently, where he talks about how once humans started burning fossil fuels, we
evolved (devolved?) into detritivores, species that depend on dead organic
matter for our sustenance. This led me to think about Human Exceptionalism. The
classic view is that humans’ assumed superiority has caused us to not consider
the welfare of other species and blinded us in our ignorance to how our
lifestyles were jeopardizing life support systems worldwide (including for us);
I agree with this view. But I’ve also come to challenge another view of Human
Exceptionalism; namely, that we have the intelligence and capacity for
compassion to override what is every species’ imperative (humans and all other
species): that is, to continuously consume available resources with no concern
for future sustainability, with its concomitant and inevitable population boom
and bust. Thus, I try to cope by accepting, with sad resignation, that we’re
not any more special than other species – we’ve just lacked apex predators to
keep our population in check and have used hundreds of millions of years of
stored solar energy (i.e. fossil fuels) to temporarily shield ourselves from
our population crash. This final kicking us off our superiority pedestal has
helped me “let go” and inspired me to aspire to be more in tune with natural
processes (such as organic gardening, which also helps on a very small scale to
restore the soil biodiversity we’re regularly destroying with the Haber-Bosch
process). How do you cope? 🙂
I replied:
To cope, you first must know the truth. Our
modern global civilization is a heat engine, subject to the second law of
thermodynamics just as every civilization that came before. Our massive burning
of fossil fuels has not only blanketed the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases
and acidified the oceans, it has given humans the unfortunate ability to
disrupt all the major biochemical processes of the planet, thus making the
current civilizational collapse one of global proportions. There is no putting
that genie back in the bottle and the environmental disorder it has unleashed.
Thus we are firmly in the grips of entropy and no amount of techo-fixes, such
as walls to hold back the rising sea or geoengineering schemes to blot out that
fiery orb in the sky, will change this stark fact. As Jospeph Tainter argued,
further complexity only brings more unforeseen problems that must be solved.
Higher efficiency only leads to increased consumption (i.e. Jevons paradox). As
you say, humans are no different than any other organism in that they will
expand to consume all available resources until reined in by environmental
limits. Our superior problem-solving capabilities have allowed us to
dramatically overshoot the planet’s natural regenerative systems. And so it
seems that Ernst Mayr was correct when he said human intelligence is a fatal
mutation in the evolutionary process. According to Mayr, intelligence is a
double-edged sword, serving as a tool for our survival or rapidly carrying out
our own annihilation. How do I cope with all that? Other than adopting a stoic
attitude towards our predicament, there is no coping. It is what it is. Find
simple joys in nature while nature is still around. I love hummingbirds and
watch them at the feeder when I am home. Live in the moment when you can. Enjoy
mankind’s ability to create beautiful art. Be kind to your fellow human and
nonhuman. We’re all just temporary passengers on Spaceship Earth.
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