Interesting. It is also interesting that the per capita analysis does show that the elite white men who own the means of production themselves use the most energy and produce 25% of carbon emission and damage.I look foreword to understanding more about nitrogen.
Yes, that's a really fine essay, thrilling to read. But to just to position myself, I define myself as a macrofutilist, so I'm also always saddened by those still thinking that they are fighting the "class war," like the Japanese army loners who hid out in caves fighting World War II when it long been officially declared over.
There isn't a class war - it's been a class slaughter for at least five decades in the US, with all the institutions fully aligned with the rules of petrochemical finance capital.
How can "environmentalism" be a movement when it isn't even capable of being defined in material reality? What could constitute a environmental program when oil is the blood in our ultrasocial veins?
Humans should never have allowed themselves the use of fire, but here we are, generation after generation of mounting ungovernability presaging self-induced, yeast in a vat extinction.
Yes, we can draw up an ancestral imaginary that places our precursors in halcyon epochs of balance and ecological humility, but they are all dead, nothing that is dead can be retrieved into life, and we living humans are governed by ineluctable imperatives to keep and find and produce and use.
Yeah, exactly. Very well said. "What could constitute a environmental program when oil is the blood in our ultrasocial veins?" -- No answer from me; all I know is that what we have is an utter failure, and only serves to reinforce the very systems that are degrading the earth. A key part of that failed environmentalist movement is an overemphasis on population numbers, which is effective because it plays on racist sentiment and distracts us from the true causes of environmental degradation. I wouldn't call everyone who makes those populations arguments "a racist" -- not looking to judge people in that way -- but that argument is racist and wouldn't be a part of an effective environmentalist movement, whatever that would look like.
I agree that the class war has been won by them and lost by us, and we've lost a habitable planet in the process. There's some element of idealism in clinging on to that war--there needs to be some idealism to motivate the writing and the work, even if it's not reflective of our political reality. From your first comment, I strongly suspected that we agree more than we disagree, and I'm glad we got to the place where that is clear.
In the famous example of yeast over-multiplying in a vat to eventually consume their own bases for life, as highlighted by William Catton in his book “Overshoot,” are you ready to call the observers of this self-induced extinction calamity, and all the other analogues in nature, “racist”?
Well, we're not really "consuming our own bases" for life, are we? Absent industrialization, we'd never run out of food and water and shelter--the earth would be able to provide for all animals indefinitely. The problem isn't that we're running out of stuff, but rather that we live in the condition of constant catastrophe that is set to get worse and worse because we are burning oil, and also producing plastic and ammonia, which should properly be considered petroleum products.
What we are consuming in excess is Oil. Oil is not running out, and if it was, that wouldn't really be an existential crisis for us as a species, but rather just another excuse to gouge prices. Rather the problem is that we are being murdered by oil. (I'm supposed to properly say "Oil coal and gas" but that gets tiresome, which is why I've reverted to rhetorical shortcuts.)
The question is not one of CONSUMPTION. It is one of PRODUCTION.
On the contrary, it is an incontrovertible truth that humanity is “consuming our own bases for life,” just as Catton foresaw. Soil, water, air, other species, habitable ecologies - all fully imperiled by over-production and its identical twin, over-consumption, as the yeast example indicates.
Scarcity as a famine-causing problem may be delayed for now, but are you confident that an ungoverned global supersystem will find substitutes for all the necessary substances for this hyper-complex civilization, including phosphorous?
There’s plenty of “racism” in conservative anti-environmentalism, but you make a specific charge of racism in liberal environmentalism that you have not backed up.
Humanity is a crime against humanity. Oil, fire, agriculture, war, enmity, stupidity, civilization, capitalism, racism - take your pick, but they are all involved.
Totally agree that humanity is a crime against humanity. But there are very specific people that do the most crime, and the most damage by making decisions that make them rich. My goal is to get people to point their fingers in the right direction, and that's upward -- as always, there's no war but the class war.
Did you read the liberal environmentalism essay? No pressure, but I'd be interested to know what you think.
Once upon a time--in the somatic energy regime--it would not have been possible to imagine running out or using up the soil/land, water, and air. These were things that were contained within a stable, closed, complex system, which included a relatively stable human population, and therefore conserved within that system. Water would move through the water cycle, but it would not be taken out of circulation. Drought would occur in places, and that shaped people's movements etc, but that whole period of human history, when humans were merely animals, the holocene, was relatively ecologically stable until the industrial revolution. That complex system was radically destabilized by the onset of industrialization, and that stable system develops all sorts of radical misalignments and contaminations and now you're living in a world where water can be used up -- because it can be toxic through contamination with petrochemicals and algae blooms caused by nitrogen and more and more of it is toxic every day, and because of global warming causing increased droughts (causing imbalances in the hydrological system, but not a change in the total amount of water in the biosphere.
Phosphorus is the great exception, we will use up phosphorous because we have not found a way to synthesize it. We have not found a way to make it out of oil, coal, or gas. Back in the somatic energy regime, there was a natural phosphorous cycle that has been disrupted by industrialism and industrial agriculture, and technology failed to find a way to manufacture it. None of the destabilization/acceleration, including the population increase, would have happened without the fuel at the bottom of the enterprise. You have to view population as labor power, as another input into the system. You have to choose to look at the cause of a thing, and not only its product.
Interesting. It is also interesting that the per capita analysis does show that the elite white men who own the means of production themselves use the most energy and produce 25% of carbon emission and damage.I look foreword to understanding more about nitrogen.
thanks for the read! Here's the nitrogen piece
https://apocalypse-confidential.com/2023/04/22/nitrogen/
eXtremely interesting.
Yes, that's a really fine essay, thrilling to read. But to just to position myself, I define myself as a macrofutilist, so I'm also always saddened by those still thinking that they are fighting the "class war," like the Japanese army loners who hid out in caves fighting World War II when it long been officially declared over.
There isn't a class war - it's been a class slaughter for at least five decades in the US, with all the institutions fully aligned with the rules of petrochemical finance capital.
How can "environmentalism" be a movement when it isn't even capable of being defined in material reality? What could constitute a environmental program when oil is the blood in our ultrasocial veins?
Humans should never have allowed themselves the use of fire, but here we are, generation after generation of mounting ungovernability presaging self-induced, yeast in a vat extinction.
Yes, we can draw up an ancestral imaginary that places our precursors in halcyon epochs of balance and ecological humility, but they are all dead, nothing that is dead can be retrieved into life, and we living humans are governed by ineluctable imperatives to keep and find and produce and use.
Yeah, exactly. Very well said. "What could constitute a environmental program when oil is the blood in our ultrasocial veins?" -- No answer from me; all I know is that what we have is an utter failure, and only serves to reinforce the very systems that are degrading the earth. A key part of that failed environmentalist movement is an overemphasis on population numbers, which is effective because it plays on racist sentiment and distracts us from the true causes of environmental degradation. I wouldn't call everyone who makes those populations arguments "a racist" -- not looking to judge people in that way -- but that argument is racist and wouldn't be a part of an effective environmentalist movement, whatever that would look like.
I agree that the class war has been won by them and lost by us, and we've lost a habitable planet in the process. There's some element of idealism in clinging on to that war--there needs to be some idealism to motivate the writing and the work, even if it's not reflective of our political reality. From your first comment, I strongly suspected that we agree more than we disagree, and I'm glad we got to the place where that is clear.
In the famous example of yeast over-multiplying in a vat to eventually consume their own bases for life, as highlighted by William Catton in his book “Overshoot,” are you ready to call the observers of this self-induced extinction calamity, and all the other analogues in nature, “racist”?
Well, we're not really "consuming our own bases" for life, are we? Absent industrialization, we'd never run out of food and water and shelter--the earth would be able to provide for all animals indefinitely. The problem isn't that we're running out of stuff, but rather that we live in the condition of constant catastrophe that is set to get worse and worse because we are burning oil, and also producing plastic and ammonia, which should properly be considered petroleum products.
What we are consuming in excess is Oil. Oil is not running out, and if it was, that wouldn't really be an existential crisis for us as a species, but rather just another excuse to gouge prices. Rather the problem is that we are being murdered by oil. (I'm supposed to properly say "Oil coal and gas" but that gets tiresome, which is why I've reverted to rhetorical shortcuts.)
The question is not one of CONSUMPTION. It is one of PRODUCTION.
On the contrary, it is an incontrovertible truth that humanity is “consuming our own bases for life,” just as Catton foresaw. Soil, water, air, other species, habitable ecologies - all fully imperiled by over-production and its identical twin, over-consumption, as the yeast example indicates.
Scarcity as a famine-causing problem may be delayed for now, but are you confident that an ungoverned global supersystem will find substitutes for all the necessary substances for this hyper-complex civilization, including phosphorous?
There’s plenty of “racism” in conservative anti-environmentalism, but you make a specific charge of racism in liberal environmentalism that you have not backed up.
Humanity is a crime against humanity. Oil, fire, agriculture, war, enmity, stupidity, civilization, capitalism, racism - take your pick, but they are all involved.
Totally agree that humanity is a crime against humanity. But there are very specific people that do the most crime, and the most damage by making decisions that make them rich. My goal is to get people to point their fingers in the right direction, and that's upward -- as always, there's no war but the class war.
Did you read the liberal environmentalism essay? No pressure, but I'd be interested to know what you think.
https://thespouter.substack.com/p/the-dialectics-of-liberal-environmentalism
Once upon a time--in the somatic energy regime--it would not have been possible to imagine running out or using up the soil/land, water, and air. These were things that were contained within a stable, closed, complex system, which included a relatively stable human population, and therefore conserved within that system. Water would move through the water cycle, but it would not be taken out of circulation. Drought would occur in places, and that shaped people's movements etc, but that whole period of human history, when humans were merely animals, the holocene, was relatively ecologically stable until the industrial revolution. That complex system was radically destabilized by the onset of industrialization, and that stable system develops all sorts of radical misalignments and contaminations and now you're living in a world where water can be used up -- because it can be toxic through contamination with petrochemicals and algae blooms caused by nitrogen and more and more of it is toxic every day, and because of global warming causing increased droughts (causing imbalances in the hydrological system, but not a change in the total amount of water in the biosphere.
Phosphorus is the great exception, we will use up phosphorous because we have not found a way to synthesize it. We have not found a way to make it out of oil, coal, or gas. Back in the somatic energy regime, there was a natural phosphorous cycle that has been disrupted by industrialism and industrial agriculture, and technology failed to find a way to manufacture it. None of the destabilization/acceleration, including the population increase, would have happened without the fuel at the bottom of the enterprise. You have to view population as labor power, as another input into the system. You have to choose to look at the cause of a thing, and not only its product.
Is that the book of yours you think I should read first?