Saturday, September 21, 2019

Green Work Deal

Not In Workforce,

 Any actual sustainable human economy will involve small-holder subsistence farming as it's foundation. It is really efficient at meeting human needs for food, activity, meaningful livelihood, social engagement and cooperation, and it is how we all got here over the past several thousand years. Fossil fuel fired industrialization is a blip. Anybody can learn to do things easier, but it's a one way street, and we're near the end.
 That's my thesis. 
 We are deeply ill-at-ease because we sense that things are unstable, won't last, and we can't see how to prepare for what is next.
We can see, actually, but we know we can't do the work needed to live like Chinese farmers did for thousands of years, on the same little family farms.
 It is reassuring to be told that trillions of dollars will be spent on a Green New Deal, allowing us to have a better and eco-friendly standard of living.
"You can't get there from here" might be the best answer, because all of those projections omit what it takes to accomplish them, and overlook our recent past performance, as well. 
We just added solar and wind power onto everything else. It's actually really hard to replace natural gas fired power plants with anything, except hydroelectric, and that has all been spoken for.
It requires fossil fuels and mines to make solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. All the minerals to make batteries will run out way before we get enough batteries, and we already have a problem with used batteries, which will become huge.
Did you grow up in a world where not every family had a car, and nobody had air conditioning yet? I started there, and wonder how I could cope without the AC in Texas these days, though we all did in those days. It was hard to sleep at night in the summer. Those box fans only do so much. School classrooms had really big fans and open windows, and let out for the summer.
 Less, a whole lot less, less than any of us remember, unless we have traveled to "poor countries"; that's what we will have to work with.
We can make preparations now, prepare ourselves, prepare our gardens, repair our bicycles and ride them for at least a few hours per week, maybe figure out how to get groceries home... 
That's not making the jump, but it is getting into a position to understand it better. It's possible.
Look for the Green New Deal to start advertising "Green Job Guaranty" instead of "universal income". That will be the marker for something real.
 A further thought came to me this morning in the okra rows: Rulers don't really need the consent of ALL of the ruled. 
Rulers do need full cooperation from the productive workers, though. 
What will be the necessary productive work in 2029? 
Okra will be part of it, I think. I've got lots of okra right now.

Randy sent me this (better) review of Naomi Klein's new book by Bob Jensen:
The Danger of Inspiration: A Review of On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal
Naomi Klein's new book is essential reading, but does it go far enough in confronting the grim realities we truly face?

​ At the conclusion of these 18 essays that bluntly outline the crises and explain a Green New Deal response, Klein bolsters readers searching for hope: “[W]hen the future of life is at stake, there is nothing we cannot achieve.” 
It is tempting to embrace that claim, especially after nearly 300 pages of Klein’s eloquent writing that weaves insightful analysis together with honest personal reflection.
The problem, of course, is that the statement is not even close to being true. With nearly 8 billion people living within a severely degraded ecosphere, there are many things we cannot, and will not, achieve. A decent human future—perhaps any human future at all—depends on our ability to come to terms with these limits.
   

​You can't buy what doesn't exist on the planet. Not even Daddy Warbucks can.
​ Most scientists, politicians, and business leaders tend to put their hope in technological progress. Regardless of ideology, there is a widespread expectation that new technologies will replace fossil fuels by harnessing renewable energy such as solar and wind. Many also trust that there will be technologies for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and for “geoengineering” the Earth’s climate. The common denominator in these visions is the faith that we can save modern civilisation if we shift to new technologies. But “technology” is not a magic wand. It requires a lot of money, which means claims on labour and resources from other areas. We tend to forget this crucial fact.
 I would argue that the way we take conventional “all-purpose” money for granted is the main reason why we have not understood how advanced technologies are dependent on the appropriation of labour and resources from elsewhere. In making it possible to exchange almost anything – human time, gadgets, ecosystems, whatever – for anything else on the market, people are constantly looking for the best deals, which ultimately means promoting the lowest wages and the cheapest resources in the global South.
 It is the logic of money that has created the utterly unsustainable and growth-hungry global society that exists today. To get our globalised economy to respect natural limits, we must set limits to what can be exchanged. Unfortunately, it seems increasingly probable that we shall have to experience something closer to disaster – such as a semi-global harvest failure – before we are prepared to seriously question how money and markets are currently designed...
​ ​This dependence of technology on global social relations is not just a matter of money. In quite a physical sense, the viability of the steam engine relied on the flows of human labour energy and other resources that had been invested in cotton fibre from South Carolina, in the US, coal from Wales and iron from Sweden. Modern technology, then, is a product of the metabolism of world society, not simply the result of uncovering “facts” of nature. 
 https://theconversation.com/a-globalised-solar-powered-future-is-wholly-unrealistic-and-our-economy-is-the-reason-why-118927

​ ​Consciousness of selfhood, of our place in the universe, and of our relationship with all living things, comes at a cost: the certainty of our demise and, what is often worse, the demise of others. This uniquely human grasp of the inevitability of death, and of the fact it can occur without warning, embodies the potential for immense psychological distress – we share with all animals, after all, the drive for self-preservation – but it also carries the potential for a richly meaningful and purposeful life, and research appears to support this.
​ ​A growing body of experimental evidence derived from Terror Management Theory, an approach that emerged from within existential social psychology, suggests increased awareness of mortality leads, correspondingly, to increased investment in those resources that provide meaning – social and cultural structures such as family, community and social identities – and that this in turn reduces the fear of death.

 The New Orthodoxy: Blasphemy, Heresy and the New Inquisition, Charles Hugh Smith​
​ ​ A corrupt Orthodoxy devoid of new ideas, an Orthodoxy devoted to maintaining the wealth, status and power of insiders regardless of cost, is a brittle, fragile, unstable system.
​ ​When the ruling Elites sense their control of the populace is waning, they seek to regain full control via the imposition of a strict Orthodoxy, enforced by an Inquisition. We are living in just such an era. Everywhere we turn, a New Orthodoxy reigns. Dissent is blasphemy, and any narratives outside the approved Orthodoxy are heretical and subject to suppression and punishment.
​ ​New Orthodoxies abound, and woe to those who fail to signal their virtue publicly. One New Orthodoxy is that one's sexual and ethnic characteristics are all-important signifiers of identity. This orthodoxy is critically important to the ruling Elites, as this fragments the populace into tribes warring over their relative degree of victimhood and indignation.
​ ​This orthodoxy insures the populace can never gain class consciousness, i.e. an awareness that the ruling Elites and their apparatchiks (the Federal Reserve, Big Tech, the security agencies, et al.) are their class enemies, as the Elites rule at the expense of everyone beneath them.
​ ​Questioning the ruling rentier "solution" to climate change--carbon credits that trade like CDOs, securities, etc.--marks one as a dangerous heretic. Anyone questioning the rentier skim of carbon credits is labeled a climate-change denier, and run through the media/social media Inquisition.

​ ​BRAZILIAN PRESIDENT JAIR Bolsonaro is planning to push industrialization and development in the interior of the country’s Amazon basin. It is far from a new project. For more than a century, a series of Brazilian governments have sought to move into the country’s interior, developing — or, to be more precise, colonizing — the Amazon. From the populist president-turned-dictator who made one of the early industrial pushes into the forest in the 1930s to the military dictatorship that ruled the country for two decades from 1964 until 1985, the justifications have largely been the same — economic gain and geopolitical paranoia​.

​George Monbiot advocates limits on individual (and corporate) "wealth". Within what context does "wealth" exist? Is it a healthy context?
What if Bill Gates owned the whole Amazon, despite all the humans, animals and plants composing the lungs-of-the-Earth ecosystem?​
​ ​A series of research papers shows that income is by far the most important determinant of environmental impact. It doesn’t matter how green you think you are; if you have surplus money, you spend it. The only form of consumption that’s clearly and positively correlated with good environmental intentions is diet: people who see themselves as green tend to eat less meat and more organic vegetables. But attitudes have little bearing on the amount of transport fuel, home energy and other materials you consume. Money conquers all.  

​Moon of Alabama: ​
The Crisis Over The Attack On Saudi Oil Infrastructure Is Over - We Now Wait For the Next One
The crisis about the Yemeni drone and cruise missile attack on two Saudi oil installations is for now over.
​ ​The Saudis and the U.S. accuse Iran of being behind the "act of war" as Secretary of State Pompeo called it. 
The Saudis have bombed Yemen with U.S. made bombs since 2015. One wonders how Pompeo is calling that.
​ ​The Yemeni forces aligned with the Houthi Ansarallah do not deny that their drones and cruise missiles are copies of Iranian designs. But they insist that they are built in Yemen and fired from there.
​ ​President Trump will not launch a military attack against Iran. Neither will the Saudis or anyone else. Iran has deterred them by explaining that any attack on Iran will be responded to by waging all out war against the U.S. and its 'allies' around the Persian Gulf.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/09/the-crisis-over-the-attack-on-saudi-oil-infrastructure-is-over-we-now-wait-for-the-next-one.html#more

​ ​Yemen's Houthis have announced at the end of a dramatic week following the early Saturday aerial attacks on two Saudi Aramco facilities which knocked out up to half of the kingdom's daily oil production their intent to cease targeting Saudi territories.
​ ​Pro-Houthi Al Masirah TV announced the news Friday, citing president of the rebels’ ruling council Mahdi al-Mashat, who said the group "will halt all attacks on Saudi territories with ballistic missiles and drones," as translated by Bloomberg.
However, the statement said it was conditioned on the Saudi coalition halting its own devastating airstrikes over Yemen as well, which have been a constant since Yemen's civil war brought Saudi military intervention in 2015. Houthi forces have "the right to respond to any aggression" the statement added.  


​ ​Benny Gantz, whose centrist bloc narrowly defeated Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party in a snap election, says he is forming a government that will exclude the current prime minister – signaling the end of Bibi’s era may be near.
​ ​The ex-IDF chief said on Thursday that he would not accept Netanyahu’s offer to discuss a unity government, keeping good on his campaign pledge to create a ruling coalition that does not include Bibi.

CNN has viciously attacked US Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson for discussing the 9/11 false flag operation on a radio show hosted by Dr. Kevin Barrett...
  In the 2012 appearance, Williamson agreed with host Dr. Barrett and said that questioning the factual history of the September 11, 2001, attacks was acceptable and no different than questioning the government account of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy...
  "Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more," Williamson responded. "And I think listen, to have questions about 9/11, to me, is no different than having questions about the Warren Commission. And I don't believe in the single bullet theory of the Kennedy assassination either."  

No comments:

Post a Comment