Our climate is being destroyed by unadulterated, free-market capitalism – an ideology that simply cannot be sustained on a small planet with limited resources. It is a system that has no interest in the greater good and that rewards inordinate capital and the few that have it, rather than the majority who don’t. It cares nothing for the environment or biodiversity and doesn’t give a fig about the fate of future generations. In fact, it is exactly the wrong economic system to have in place at a time of global crisis. The bankruptcy of the system is especially well upheld in the grossly asymmetric partitioning of carbon emissions between the rich elite and everyone else. This essay is adapted from An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity.] The migration isn’t going to happen because “it’s cheaper”. It won’t be cheaper to run E2.0 until it has enough time to optimize itself. E1.0 has had all of human history to become “efficient” (price efficient, so long as costs are externalized). Expecting E2.0 to be price competitive with E1.0 is unrealistic for a few decades to come.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse | naked capitalism An Inconvenient Apocalypse | naked capitalism

A lot of past talk of population control has been based in white supremacy, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the question of what’s a sustainable population. That’s the kind of thing that people have bristled against. We don’t have a solution. But the fact that there aren’t easy and obvious solutions doesn’t mean that you can ignore the issue.” Discusses the four hard questions that are essential to confront now. “What is the sustainable size of the human population?” And this could be done if we attend to what J&J call Ecospheric Grace. The Earth and its ecosphere have provided a home for all of Creation. We have not taken good care of our home. If we recognize this, from whatever perspective makes us comfortable – secular, religious, spiritual – the reset will be less onerous if no less difficult. And the quibble, “justice” and “sustainable” as concepts are not in need of modifiers, “social” and “ecological” included.We also have these incredible capacities for collaboration, cooperation, empathy, compassion, right? So human nature is real. but it’s variable. But there is what Wes and I, borrowing from our friend, Bill Veatch, call human carbon nature. That we’re also just organisms. We are biological entities. And Wes has long said, you know, probably the easiest definition of life on Earth is, life is the scramble for energy rich carbon. And human beings have just gotten incredibly good at getting at that carbon. Now, we can make choices to control the way we do it today. But we also have to realize that part of human nature is that biological desire to maximize our use of energy. Howard Odum called it the maximum power principle. And it’s not just a human creation, it’s part of life on this planet. Well, again, it doesn’t absolve everybody who’s doing bad things. It doesn’t mean that if you’re the CEO of an oil company, you get to say, “Well, that’s just the way it rolls.” We have to be accountable for our actions. And we have to understand the deeper forces that shape our actions. Both things are true.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse | NHBS Good Reads An Inconvenient Apocalypse | NHBS Good Reads

Thesis discussed. “Our thesis is that while not every individual or culture is equally culpable, the human failure over the past ten thousand years is the result of the imperative of all life to seek out energy-rich carbon.” If history was not shaped by the minor genetic differences that are associated with our ancestors’ region of the world, that leaves us with geography, climate, and environmental conditions, unless we want to argue that history is directed by God/Goddess or gods/goddesses, or is simply random. We really are one species.

Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen's

This cautious approach is a way of extending the adage “There but for the grace of God go I” beyond individuals to cultures. That phrase emerged from a Christian assertion of humility in the face of God’s mercy, but we use it here in a secular fashion. If one has lived an exemplary life, that’s great, but be aware that life might have been very different if some of the material conditions in which one lived were different. Those who believe they have accomplished something and made a positive contribution to the world should remember that a change in any one of the conditions in our lives, especially in our formative years, may have meant failing instead of succeeding. We are not suggesting that we have no control over our lives but simply that we likely don’t have as much control as many people would like to believe.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse - Notre Dame University Press

Herman Daly’s work was actually recognized and then promptly dismissed by one Lawrence Summers of the World Bank, who maintained that placing the “economy” within the ecosphere was “not the way to think about it.” No surprise there from the John Bates Clark Medal awardee of 1993. John Bates Clark was a teacher of Thorstein Veblenat Carleton College in the 1870s. This little fact makes me smile. The problem of inequities in the world. “But Phillips’s quip is a reminder of the point we will continue to emphasize: wealth and power, along with the responsibility for ecosystem degradation, are not distributed uniformly in the world. Some people take more and therefore should be more accountable for the effects of their taking.” Discusses the heart at the ecological crises. “At the material level, we face a crisis of consumption. In aggregate terms, the human population has too much stuff. That stuff is not equally or equitably distributed among the population, of course. But no matter the level of fairness and justice in societies, the ecological costs of the extraction, processing, and waste disposal required to produce all that stuff is at the core of our ecological crises.” If that migration is to occur, it’ll happen because enough people decide it’s worth it to suffer the cost, inconvenience, and dislocation of the initial phases of E2.0. The nature of all living organisms, so this book argues, is to go after 'dense energy,' resulting eventually in crisis. If that is so, then the human organism is facing a tough question: Can we overcome our own nature? Courageous and humble, bold and provocative, the authors of An Inconvenient Apocalypse do not settle for superficial answers." —Donald Worster, author of Shrinking the Earth

Recent Items

Well, I do worry about it. And in fact, I’ve been talking to a new friend who’s writing a book on ecofascists, and you know, hanging out in their chat rooms. And they’re pretty scary people. And he asked me, “If you sound some of the same alarms as they do, don’t you worry?” And I said, I worry about not sounding the alarm. So let me explain what I mean. If ordinary people can sense that, you know, this bright, shiny future of wind turbines, and solar energy, and electric vehicles that were being sold isn’t really honest. That is, there are problems beyond those high-tech solutions. If ordinary people sense that, and I think are starting to sense it, and will increasingly sense it in the future, and the progressive left people with concerns about inequality, injustice, which I have deeply and have always tried to act on. If people like us don’t talk about that reality, then essentially, we cede that turf to the right and to the ego fascists. Maybe we start by banning land ‘ownership’ by corporations? Nationalize agricultural land (National Farms?) and institute a program of long-term leases (100 years?) to small farmers? Ban the practice of separating the top layers of land and the ‘rights’ to the minerals beneath it? By supporting getting rid of technology which creates food production,you and your children will starve’ Yeah. And of course, keeping people alive requires resources. It requires incredible amounts of energy and technology. And what happens when that energy and technology is no longer available, or available only to the most wealthy? You know, these are not only difficult personal questions, or incredibly difficult social questions. Yet, I think they’re questions we’re going to have to face. You know, one way you can think about this is that the future of all of us is going to be a kind of triage. So most people know that when doctors are working on a battlefield or come into a natural disaster, or if the emergency room is full of patients after a crisis, doctors have to make some pretty hard decisions about how to prioritize care. And it means often letting the most ill, the most injured die because the resources are better spent trying to keep a lot of people who are not quite as ill, or quite as injured. Well, that’s, you know, doctors are trained to do this. We allow doctors to do that, because we trust that training. But there’s going to be a time when we’re going to be engaged in a kind of cultural triage. How do we take limited resources and try to use them for the collective good? And how do we accept these limits, including limits on the length of our lives? Well, you might remember when the Republican Party accused the Democrats of wanting to create death panels. You know, to kill grandma and grandpa early, you know, to save money. And the culture went bananas over that. Now, of course, the Democrats hadn’t proposed death panels, but that’s where we’re heading. And at this point, nobody in the mainstream political arena is willing to even talk about it. And of course, you can’t solve problems if you can’t talk about them. Right now we don’t seem to have the inclination or the ability to structure our basic econ sub-systems (ag, energy, materials, mfg’g) such that they repair and replenish .vs. degrade and disperse.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson, Robert Jensen An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson, Robert Jensen

Confronting harsh ecological realities, this book explores the roots of social injustice and offers a down-powering path to “fewer and less.”Full Book Name: An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity The book reads well. It’s infused with provocative questions and existential philosophy. The authors are reasonable and highly sensitive to social justice.