Capitalism as we know it is over. So suggests a new report commissioned by a group of scientists appointed by the UN Secretary-General. The main reason? We’re transitioning rapidly to a radically different global economy, due to our increasingly unsustainable exploitation of the planet’s environmental resources.This report by Ahmed accurately reflects the tone and substance of the report (which I read) issued by the UN appointed scientists from Finland. Ahmed also provides other sources to corroborate the findings of the Finish scientists--notice especially one source who is a famous capitalist.
Climate change and species extinctions are accelerating even as societies are experiencing rising inequality, unemployment, slow economic growth, rising debt levels, and impotent governments. Contrary to the way policymakers usually think about these problems, the new report says that these are not really separate crises at all.
Rather, these crises are part of the same fundamental transition to a new era characterized by inefficient fossil fuel production and the escalating costs of climate change. Conventional capitalist economic thinking can no longer explain, predict, or solve the workings of the global economy in this new age, the paper says.
New scientific research is quietly rewriting the fundamentals of economics. The new economic science shows decisively that the age of endlessly growing industrial capitalism, premised on abundant fossil fuel supplies, is over.
The long-decline of capitalism-as-we-know-it, the new science shows, began some decades ago, and is on track to accelerate well before the end of the 21st century.Some scientists believe that it is already too late to save humans as a species. I believe that regardless of the latter suspicion, we must make every effort to survive. Contrary to what Ahmed writes, there is no alternative form of "capitalism-as-we-know it". Therefore we must end the capitalist system as fast as possible and create another system that can live in harmony with nature and each other.
With capitalism-as-we-know it in inexorable decline, the urgent task ahead is to rewrite economics to fit the real-world: and, accordingly, to redesign our concepts of value and prosperity, precisely to rebuild our societies with a view of adapting to this extraordinary age of transition.
What is developing are new major EU fault lines around the economic lifeline of energy, explicitly of natural gas energy. On the one side is the axis between especially Germany but also Austria, France and other EU states currently tied to major Russian gas supplies. Now emerges clearly the opposed axis of Poland allied with Washington. How this plays out in the next months and years will have major implications for war and peace not only in Europe.
The challenge facing human civilization is sobering. But the challenge appears more manageable when it is connected to a narrative that is prepared to confront existing ownership relations. The struggle for democratic control of energy (and other key sectors) is today crucial for many reasons. Achieving such control over energy production, distribution, and use is a means (but not the only means) to confront the expansionist dynamics of the political economy while at the same time reconfiguring our approach to defining and meeting human needs on the basis of a more equitable distribution of wealth and a qualitative extension of democratic control over major economic decisions.
Energy systems controlled by ordinary people in partnership with well-run and accountable public agencies have the potential to manage and reduce energy demand for certain economic activities while providing electrical power to everyone for basic needs and truly sustainable forms and levels of human and social development.I recommend that you view the following 5:26m video by them (via YouTube) entitled "This Is What Energy Democracy Looks Like":
The Department of Interior released its Proposed Resource Management Plan and Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Buffalo planning area in north-central Wyoming. The Bureau of Land Management currently manages 780,000 acres of surface lands and 4.8 million acres of federal minerals in the Buffalo planning area under a 30-year-old management plan. The updated plan authorizes the production of 10.2 billion tons of coal, estimated to produce nearly 17 billion tons of carbon pollution, and thousands of new oil and gas wells. Not included in the updated plan are reclamation plans for old, idle, or abandoned wells and mined lands, consideration of the climate impacts of new fossil fuel development, and adequate conservation measures to protect vulnerable wildlife populations and their habitats....
...Russia and Turkey have completed the landmark deal to begin deliveries of Gazprom Russian gas via a new “Turkish Stream” pipeline into and across Turkey through a pipeline now in construction. Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller announced on May 7 that, “An agreement has been made on the beginning of exploitation and deliveries of [Russian] gas along the Turkish Stream in December 2016.” The statement came following Miller’s meeting earlier in the day with Turkish Energy and Natural Resources Minister Taner Yıldız. The new pipeline will travel through Turkey to a gas hub on the Turkish-Greek border for further distribution to European customers.
...the idea of a self-regulating market is based in mythology. It has never existed. The market is never free or fair. It brings us booms and busts. It concentrates power. It only focuses on the short term. Most importantly for this essay, it does not (and I would add cannot) monetarily value the complex ecological systems that sustain life on this planet. We cannot “green” the market.Read the article to see how he argues for a public good politics of energy and against the politics of private accumulation of wealth derived from energy under the capitalist system. But then, shouldn't all important needs of our society be governed by the same principle? If your answer is "yes", then doesn't it follow that we need a new system whose basic tenets requires the public good over private advantage?
Yet sometimes our climate and energy politics implicitly assumes we can. In our neoliberal age of market idolatry, it becomes harder to realize when the logical outcome of our critiques reproduce market logics. I will lay out three common refrains in left energy politics that are themselves based on reasserting competition in a market.
Russia’s economic freefall and isolation from the West has made it increasingly eager to build its relationship with China, even at the cost of lost leverage with Beijing.
But new economic data from China shows that Russia has succeeded in capturing a larger share of the massive – and growing – Chinese oil import market.
What are the right questions? The first, already noted, is: What kind of society can up-to-date renewable energy sources power? The second, which is just as important: How do we go about becoming that sort of society?Unfortunately, he eventually arrives at only a very timid answer to his very important questions:
As we’ll see, once we begin to frame the picture this way, it turns out to be anything but bleak.
...it’s fair to assume that this overall shift would constitute the end of consumerism (i.e., our current economic model that depends on ever-increasing consumption of consumer goods and services). Here again, there are more than a few people who believe that advanced industrial nations consume excessively, and that some simplification of rich- and middle-class lifestyles would be a good thing.This same, strange phenomenon is also found in another article posted on Resilience, an associated website, entitled "A New Theory of Energy and The Economy - Part 1 - Generating Economic Growth" authored by another long-tine expert on issues of energy--Gail Tverberg. This is another overly complicated essay exploring the relationship between energy and the economy in which the economic system is a given, sort of a natural fact of history, instead of a system created by a class of people who imposed it on others. She writes:
The economy is a self-organized system. In other words, it grew up gradually over time, one piece at a time. New businesses were added and old ones disappeared. New customers were added and others left. The products sold gradually changed. Governments gradually added new laws and removed old ones. As changes were made, the system automatically re-optimized for the changes.This strange avoidance of recognizing the actual economic system by both authors suggests to me that they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated in capitalist controlled academia that they cannot see the obvious. In college sociology courses I learned that this was due to "trained incapacity". Herman Kahn gives a lengthier explanation of this phenomenon. Of course, there is another possible explanation--self censorship to protect their careers.
It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive. History has shown that civilisations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today.” [quoted in The Guardian]
I’d like to address the outright crash of the oil market this past week. The hope was the Saudis would cut back on production to stabilize prices somewhere in the $80+ range. This was not to be as Saudi Arabia announced no cutback whatsoever …oil then fell over 10% in one day on Friday and actually traded to a $65 handle. First and most importantly, oil is THE biggest and most widely used commodity on the planet. For a market of this importance to outright crash or rise over 10% in one day, unintended consequences not seen or anticipated can be expected at some point.
John Cowsill is a socialist and environmental activist. He lives in Islington, London. After a 20 year career as a systems analyst and programmer, he changed tack and gained an MSc in Architecture: Advanced Energy and Environmental Studies at the University of East London and the Graduate School of the Environment in Wales. He was the principal researcher on storage and Vehicle-to-Grid technology for the ZeroCarbonBritain (2007) report.Cowsill in this article is writing about some irrationalities that have been showing up in the UK over energy used to supply their National Grid. Lately it appears that they have had an oversupply of energy which ruling class authorities have dealt with by shutting now renewable energy sources. They provided cover for this irrational action by claiming the shutdowns were for many phony reasons. Cowsill has spotted the real reason.
Just like the housing bubble of the early years of this century, the fashion for fracking is also heading towards a cliff. Once the attractive spots have been milked, production will slump and many wells will not even take off at all, following the example of Poland where drilling dozens of wells has led to nothing.These are the conclusions that an independent Irish journalist reaches regarding the much ballyhooed shale oil fracking that has produced so much oil and gas recently in the US. His article explains the reasons for this conclusion.
It’s obvious that a few years from now, fracking will be seen as this period’s equivalent of the tulip and dot-com convulsions. The environmental legacy will be felt in the US for a considerable period, but markets will, doubtlessly, swiftly move on to the next fad.
To be, or not to be, that is the question—
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
As the reality of loss is hard to face, one of the first reactions to follow the loss is Denial. What this means is that the person is trying to shut out the reality or magnitude of his/her situation, and begins to develop a false, preferable reality.Thus, they keep indulging in fantasies like migrating to other planets, or promising that technology will come up with new sources of cheap energy. One of their favorite fantasies is fusion energy--but the reality of cold fusion is far different. As physicist Tom Murphy expressed the enormous problems of fusion energy so well:
No one can truly say whether we will achieve fusion in a way that is commercially practical. If teams of PhDs have spent over 60 years wailing on the problem while spending tens of billions of dollars, I think it’s safe to use our fusion quest as the definition of hard. It’s a much larger challenge than sending men to the Moon. We have no historical precedent for an arduous technological problem on this scale that ultimately succeeded to become a ho-hum commercial reality. But for that matter, I don’t think we have any precedent for something on this scale that has failed. In short, we’re out of our depths and can’t be cocky about predictions in either direction.
The narrow extractivism/anti-extractivism counter position has been used to foster divisions among social movements, weakening the unity needed for radical change to achieve radical change.
There is ample evidence to show that foreign governments and NGOs have been working to stoke, rather than resolve, tensions among the regions’ diverse social movements. Such forces are happy to promote “anti-extractivism” if it serves to bring down popular governments and roll back changes.This website has now produced two other views on this issue in a current article entitled "Two views of ‘extractivism’ and ‘buen vivir’".