[dohboi]

This Changes Everything: Naomi Klein Is Right, Unchecked Capitalism Will Destroy Civilization

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/0 ... m-climate/

1) Because we have ignored the increasingly urgent warnings and pleas for action from climate scientists for a quarter century (!) now, the incremental or evolutionary paths to avert catastrophic global warming that we might have been able to take in the past are closed to us.

2) Humanity faces a stark choice as a result: The end of civilization as we know it or the end of capitalism as we know it.

3) Choosing “unregulated capitalism” over human civilization would be a “morally monstrous” choice — and so the winning message for the climate movement is a moral one.

...our 25-year dawdling has made the diagnosis (and prognosis) unimaginably graver and thus made all cures look politically implausible, as the pessimistic...

"There is a huge procrastination penalty when it comes to emitting carbon into the atmosphere”: the longer we wait the more it builds up, the more dramatically we must change to reduce the risk of catastrophic warming.

...we might have been able to avert catastrophe (stabilize near 2°C or 3.6°F total warming) using “significant evolutionary” strategies if we had acted at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit or perhaps even if we had acted around the year 2000, but now only “revolutionary” strategies will work.

...humanity constructed the grandest of Ponzi schemes, whereby current generations have figured out how to live off the wealth of future generations...

Unchecked capitalism is a Ponzi scheme that must collapse.

[Newfie]

Doh,

If you look up the definitions of "capitalism" and "consumerism" and compare them to our reality I think you will find consumerism a better fit.

No matter the name, what we are doing is cultural suicide at which we will succeed.

[Ibon]

Take it a step further and imagine all the world leaders holding a summit and all the divisions over climate change etc. being resolved and all 7 billion of us agreeing that we must change course.

What is the base line of consumption that would still be required to maintain 7 billion plus. We would all still have to eat shit and move around. We all have to maintain an economic system that provides employment. Even the basic essentials require vast amounts of transport and fuel consumption from the growing of food, transportation etc. We would be the arbiter of what luxuries would be permitted and for whom?

We have been calling for action for 40 years. Have we ever really thought through what the procedures are once taking action becomes a global consensus? I am talking procedures that apply to 7 billion plus and not some symbolic act of planting an urban garden.

Do we even have a clue?

[Newfie]

Nope, nada.

[GHung]

Ibon:

I am talking procedures that apply to 7 billion plus and not some symbolic act of planting an urban garden.

7 billion of us plant a garden? Most of what we ate for dinner last night was from our garden. It was quite symbolic. Quit worrying about what the other 7+ billion are doing.

Changing human behavior, one human at a time,, or not.

[Ibon]

Ibon:

I am talking procedures that apply to 7 billion plus and not some symbolic act of planting an urban garden.

7 billion of us plant a garden? Most of what we ate for dinner last night was from our garden. It was quite symbolic. Quit worrying about what the other 7+ billion are doing.

Changing human behavior, one human at a time,, or not.

Ghung, I understand both the potential and limitations of what individuals and localism can provide for themselves. The hard truth is a very very large part of backyard gardening is largely symbolic and rarely reaching more than 15-20% subsistency especially when you consider the whole year and how much carbohydrates one can store to get through the winter for example on what you locally grow.

I do not worry so much as study the whole systemics of our global population. Trying to tease out all of the myriad parameters affecting how our global population moves forward is actually the challenge here. I studied bio-geography in the university and my strength as an amateur naturalist is actually the distribution of species and the factors through deep and recent times that affect speciation, populations and distribution. I can't help but apply my studies and life time curiosity about natural ecosystems and apply this in a systemic way to our own species, especially since the abrupt punctuated novel change that happened with the onset of the industrial revolution where we went from a half billion to 7+

We are all familiar with the rough studies that calculated that a sustainable population of humans on the planet without drawing down resource sinks would be about 1 billion. Let's assume this is an accurate number understanding of course that consumption per capita is a major factor in determining carrying capacity.

If we strip away all non essential consumption and collectively attempt to correct the imbalances like climate change etc., is this possible at current population levels. Demographers have calculated that our global population is heading to 9 billion even if we enact draconian birth control because of the high percentage of our population not yet of reproductive age. So barring an ebola type epidemic correction we are heading there.

We do have to look beyond the call to arms and criticisms of the status quo and ask the hard question on what happens if we succeed in mobilizing governments to address sustainability seriously. So we Check unchecked capitalism and we Check non essential consumerism and then where are we.

That would be an excellent study to attempt to quantify.

My intuition tells me we are still way beyond carrying capacity even with enlightened economic policies.

[GHung]

Ibon:

My intuition tells me we are still way beyond carrying capacity even with enlightened economic policies.

So what's the point? In that light, seems like planting a garden is about the most sane thing you can do.

[KaiserJeep]

Another thread to discuss irrelevent topics.

I don't care what name applies to your economic system, it is a label for the way we exchange goods and labor, keeping score with currency.

I don't care how much carbon is spewed into the air, that is a symptom of too many humans living on the planet.

Hydrocarbon depletion itself is a symptom of too many humans consuming hydrocarbons.

Food, water, energy, etc. shortages are a symptom of too many people consuming limited resources.

Some of these problems are huge. We will solve some of them, and fail to solve others. Those that we fail to solve eventually grow into fatal problems that kill people.

It's like playing Whack-A-Mole in an arcade - no manner how hard or fast you whack them, more pop up, ever faster. All you can do is strive for a higher score, you can't stop the moles from multiplying. Not at least until the game ends.

I would submit to you that if unchecked Capitalism were not in place, then unchecked Marxism or Buddism or unchecked Tribal Warfare or something else would Destroy Civilization. Because the only checks that matter are those that reduce the human population over time.

If you want to benefit the world, then have one kid and stop. Teach that kid to do the same. Make sure that they understand that upon any part of this planet, unchecked human population growth is the only problem of any consequence whatsoever.

If you have two or more children, congratulations, planet killer. YOU ARE THE PROBLEM, regardless of your personal beliefs, regardlless of how much of your own food you grow, or what your lifestyle is.

It's really very simple. Your personal responsibility for the end of the Earth is proportional to how many people you caused to be added to the planet. Your lifestyle and beliefs about anything including all the topics at PO.com are irrelevent.

GAME OVER, MAN.

[KaiserJeep]

I have one kid. But I claim no status from that, at that time in my life I wanted more, just couldn't have any.

Decades later, I recognize that most basic biological urge as the root cause of all our troubles.

They say mother nature is cruel. Her way was to have small clans of humans preyed upon by lions, tigers, and bears.

It'll never fly, but one way to get out of the mess we were in would be to let predators multiply across the globe, eating people. Make it a capital crime to kill a predator, take us omnivores down a notch to our natural position which is one step down from the apex of the food chain.

Imagine that, humans would start evolving again.

[americandream]

Doh,

If you look up the definitions of "capitalism" and "consumerism" and compare them to our reality I think you will find consumerism a better fit.

No matter the name, what we are doing is cultural suicide at which we will succeed.

Capitalism is a set of social relations of which consumerism is a fundamental function. It brings together unitised labour, the unitised consumer, all in the pursuit of the capitalists accumulation, with resulting infinite growth.

[furrybill]

Agree that capitalism will destroy civilization, but I think it'll be more of a matter of destroying the biosphere, which in turn will destroy civilization [all fantasies about domes and red jewels in our palms to the contrary ].

But I do hold out a slight hope [<1%] that a cascading change in human thought/behavior could occur and we'll make it through this bottleneck. A few years ago was sitting with a group of international folks, some from Latin America, a couple from India. Long story short summed up in this quote: "We all know that this way of life is insane and we're heading straight for extinction, BUT WE ALL STILL WANT TO BE LIKE YOU BILL." In other words, the only way collapse will be averted is if America changes. And the only way that can happen is if a certain percentage of Americans change their way of life and somehow convince everyone else in the country to change.

So you don't have to reorganize 7+ billion people, you just have to change 50-100 million Americans. What could be easier?

Yeah, we're toast.

[Newfie]

"...resulting infinite growth."

[Ibon]

Ibon:

My intuition tells me we are still way beyond carrying capacity even with enlightened economic policies.

So what's the point? In that light, seems like planting a garden is about the most sane thing you can do.

Nor real argument there. Just understand its potential and limits being a more and more important adaptation going forward.

[Ibon]

If you have two or more children, congratulations, planet killer. YOU ARE THE PROBLEM, regardless of your personal beliefs, regardlless of how much of your own food you grow, or what your lifestyle is.

It's really very simple. Your personal responsibility for the end of the Earth is proportional to how many people you caused to be added to the planet. Your lifestyle and beliefs about anything including all the topics at PO.com are irrelevent.

GAME OVER, MAN.

No real argument with your post. You have nailed the source of the problem. So if you conclude Game Over and I conclude that we are still in overshoot regardless of how enlightened our policies then one could conclude that we must surrender with total futility our fate.

And yet we have an emerging young generation who will increasingly recognize this fate but at the same time say F you Kaiser Jeep, F you Ibon, you old baby boomers who failed to fix this. We aren't going to simply roll over or bend over to this futile prognosis.

My point being that as we move through the brutal consequences of overshoot and as our death rate increases we are still going to produce young generation after young generation whose inherent optimism is going to move our culture in ways we cannot yet anticipate.

I don't care what name applies to your economic system, it is a label for the way we exchange goods and labor, keeping score with currency.

The basic accounting in an economic system will not change as I see it. I agree. But to what degree brutal consequences give rise to self regulation is an open question.

Put yourselves for a moment in the heads of the emerging young generations who will be born later this century rising up through the consequences and calamities of overshoot. As these generations mature I can imagine all kinds of self regulating rules emerging that are born from adapting to reality, not born from some ideology. After all, they will rise up through a global population going into decline due to overshoot. That is so radically different than the past couple of generations of growth.

Unregulatred capitalism bloomed and flourished during abundant resources. That was the external environment, the field so to speak, that capitalism was able to spread through in ways AD for example has made very clear. You cannot separate capitalism from the abundant resource base it was able to feed on.

Emerging generations later this century will adapt to a radically different constricting field. There will be very interesting cultural self regulation mechanisms applied to our economic system, our morals, our ethics.

That is worthy of contemplation.

One of the reason I say we need to lean into the consequences and embrace them is that they will be the teachers of our future generations.

KJ, you are obsolete and have no way to conceptualize how these future generations will move through overshoot. You are just too pissed off how we fucked everything up.

So am I. But I can still see through the hubris to a time up ahead where we implement self regulation. Imposed from consequences.

We are one of the most adaptive species on the planet. We did a F'ing great job of adapting to abundance.

We will do an equally amazing job in adapting to a world of increasing constraints.

We may end up truly worthy of being once again called human.

We are still however deeply into Kudzu Apedome

[Poordogabone]

Marxism is not a system, It's a critic of capitalism. The minute a system is not open to criticism like capitalism in the US, there simply is no room for improvement. You might as well call it a dictatorship.
Here is a marxian economist: Richard Wolff who has a monthly update called "global capitalism" on youtube. The guy is well spoken and very smart.
One of his recent lecture at Webster university that covers the history of capitalism, it is over 2 H long but worth the watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl4Z2zkzpFo

[americandream]

Marxism is not a system, It's a critic of capitalism. The minute a system is not open to criticism like capitalism in the US, there simply is no room for improvement. You might as well call it a dictatorship.
Here is a marxian economist: Richard Wolff who has a monthly update called "global capitalism" on youtube. The guy is well spoken and very smart.
One of his recent lecture at Webster university that covers the history of capitalism, it is over 2 H long but worth the watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl4Z2zkzpFo

Capitalism defines the social relations that take us from cradle to grave. Marx merely analysed those relations as might any academic.

[KaiserJeep]

I thought Marx also described the ideal collectivist society. One that has been tried multiple times in many variations, but which works even poorer than Capitalism.

[dohboi]

Thanks all for comments and for keeping the thread and its title bumped up to the top of the heap.

And within this thread, I'd say furrybill gets the laurel and kj as usual is in the dungheap.

[americandream]

Thanks all for comments and for keeping the thread and its title bumped up to the top of the heap.

And within this thread, I'd say furrybill gets the laurel and kj as usual is in the dungheap.

KJ is symptomatic of the deep doggy doo we are in as a species. Acculturated idiocy is widespread and in the majority on a planet fast approaching peril. These people are quite oblivious to that which is as clear as the rising sun.

[dohboi]

Thanks, ad. Note that even this astoundingly tepid critique of 'unchecked' capitalism (one wonders if some more benign forms of capitalism would be just fine for Romm or Klein ) brings out the howling rabid hordes.

Good luck moving on to more advanced and nuanced forms of critique of the current system.