Double or Nothing: The US is Making Escalating Bets

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/31-3




If life in the first two decades of the twenty first century were a game of poker, continuous double or nothing bets against the house by a wealthy participant would be routine. Life, however, is not a game, and the US is making escalating bets in the areas of finance, the environment, the international economy, and foreign relations. These systems pose significant risks in themselves, and their interactions with each other threaten to unleash positive feedback loops of indeterminate magnitude that may overwhelm us.


With the Obama Administration’s still threatening another risky military intervention in the unstable Middle East, foreign relations are now the most obvious areas where doubling down appears to be the option of choice. In language reminiscent of Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback, Howard Friel argues: “To the extent that a threat [to the United States] exists today, it is homegrown, incubated in Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex”—today a military-intelligence-surveillance-complex—which, as we've recently learned, is ominously inwardly focused. This wealth-robbing, rights-robbing, multifarious machine, which appears to wag the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, and the press—the entire constitutional scheme—makes serial war of one sort or another around the world. That, in turn, fuels the hatred that engenders the terrorism that creates the security obsession that sells more war. As Mailer warned, it is the positive feedback loop of a totalitarian state.”

Dangerous as is this feedback loop, it has several companions. Other systems are both potent in themselves and just as ominous in their interconnections. The oil/carbon/climate change cycle poses a dire risk. Nonetheless, as climate scientists converge on models that highlight increasingly dangerous feedback loops, the hydrocarbon industry is focused and reliant on the most dangerous energy sources, such as shale oil. As more shale oil is burned, global temperatures increase and the polar ice caps melt, releasing dangerous methane gas, further exacerbating the process.

It is almost as if the articulation of climate risk intensifies commitment to the forces that cause that risk. Part of the reason why may lie in the relation of the climate cycle to other feedback loops.