There won't be a bailout for the earth

[n2doc]

Johann Hari: There won't be a bailout for the earth
Friday, 26 November 2010

Why are the world’s governments bothering? Why are they jetting to Cancun next week to discuss what to do now about global warming? The vogue has passed. The fad has faded. Global warming is yesterday’s apocalypse. Didn’t somebody leak an email that showed it was all made up? Doesn’t it sometimes snow in the winter? Didn’t Al Gore get fat, or something?

Alas, the biosphere doesn’t read Vogue. Nobody thought to tell it that global warming is so 2007. All it knows is three facts. 2010 is globally the hottest year since records began. 2010 is the year humanity’s emissions of planet-warming gases reached its highest level ever. And exactly as the climate scientists predicted, we are seeing a rapid increase in catastrophic weather events, from the choking of Moscow by gigantic unprecedented forest fires to the drowning of one quarter of Pakistan.

Before the Great Crash of 2008, the people who warned about the injection of huge destabilizing risk into our financial system seemed like arcane, anal bores. Now we all sit in the rubble and wish we had listened. The great ecological crash will be worse, because nature doesn’t do bailouts.

That’s what Cancun should be about – surveying the startling scientific evidence, and developing an urgent plan to change course. The Antarctic – which locks of 90 percent of the world’s ice – has now seen eight of its ice shelves fully or partially collapse. The world’s most distinguished climate scientists, after recording like this, say we will face a three to six feet rise in sea level this century. That means the drowning of London, Bangkok, Venice, Cairo and Shanghai, and entire countries like Bangladesh and the Maldives.

more
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-there-wont-be-a-bailout-for-the-earth-2143876.html

[GliderGuider]

1. Ecological deflation

Note: I originally posted this in LBN in response to an article on Japanese deflation, but it's really more appropriate here.

I think the world is overdue for a bout of deflation. Not that we deserve one necessarily, except maybe as a comeuppance for believing the economists about the feasibility of perpetual growth in the first place.

The global economy is inextricably tied to the natural world: to the finite resources of the planet and especially to the underlying ecological base. If we overshoot in our use of those fundamental resurces, the situation cannot continue in perpetuity. According to the WWF and other ecological analysts, humanity has already entered overshoot. We are currently using perhaps 50% more of the ecosphere than is sustainable.

Money can be viewed simply as an abstraction of human activity. If human activity depends on the stocks and flows of the natural world, then by extension money is an abstraction of our use of the natural world. As a result, if we are in ecological overshoot it's the same as being in economic overshoot. It's only a matter of time before the real situation in the natural world is reflected in its economic abstraction. When that happens, the economic correction will be driven by, and will mirror, the underlying ecological correction. A deflationary reduction in human activity will be the inevitable result. How this reduction might unfold is still somewhat imponderable, but we are already seeing the signs in global warming, the physical and biological state of the oceans, the fact that Peak Oil has arrived, and the current global economic downturn.

While we may say "Oh, deflation is too terrible to contemplate," forces of nature tend to be a lot stronger than human forces. Such a correction in human activity (and potentially in numbers) may be painful but it's also inevitable. It's the way nature works, and we as a species are by no means exempt from that mechanism.

[pscot]

2. Rapa Nui

[GliderGuider]

3. The human guitar doesn't just go to 11, it goes all the way to 15...

The loudest sound on the planet is the caterpillar of humanity chewing its way relentlessly through the ecosystem.

[pscot]

4. It was bound to happen

At bottom we're just apes. Our primal urges are too powerful. Rationality is a more recent overlay, and is not strong enough to bind the beast.

[tama]

8. Apes

I don't see other apes destroying their own ecological niches, or even all human cultures doing so. Just the cultures that are called civilizations and especially this modern rational and technocratic civilization, child of rational enlightment and age of reason. What does this observation tell us about rationality?

[Nihil]

7. That is a keeper:

The loudest sound on the planet is the caterpillar of humanity
chewing its way relentlessly through the ecosystem.

:toast:

(Nice avatar BTW!)

[hatrack]

9. As Bernanke et. al. begin the process of erecting yet another giant stone head . . .

:shrug:

[Kennah]

5. So the climate won't be the beneficiary of quantitative easing?

[upi402]

6. No opposition to corporatism in the US, media is mere propaganda

Yeah, as the biggest user and abuser -this country's elites will piss in the pool AND crap in the bed. There will be nowhere to hide for the children and grandchildren of these sociopaths.

Bill Gates is putting his focus on this, and I would look at these players to be rational, not the US government.