New age of global unrest in full swing as industrial civilization transitions to post-carbon reality

[unhappycamper]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/01/new-age-of-global-unrest-in-full-swing-as-industrial-civilization-transitions-to-post-carbon-reality/



New age of global unrest in full swing as industrial civilization transitions to post-carbon reality
By Nafeez Ahmed, The Guardian
Saturday, March 1, 2014 8:53 EST

If anyone had hoped that the Arab Spring and Occupy protests a few years back were one-off episodes that would soon give way to more stability, they have another thing coming. The hope was that ongoing economic recovery would return to pre-crash levels of growth, alleviating the grievances fueling the fires of civil unrest, stoked by years of recession.

But this hasn’t happened. And it won’t.

Instead the post-2008 crash era, including 2013 and early 2014, has seen a persistence and proliferation of civil unrest on a scale that has never been seen before in human history. This month alone has seen riots kick-off in Venezuela, Bosnia, Ukraine, Iceland, and Thailand.

This is not a coincidence. The riots are of course rooted in common, regressive economic forces playing out across every continent of the planet – but those forces themselves are symptomatic of a deeper, protracted process of global system failure as we transition from the old industrial era of dirty fossil fuels, towards something else.