Science and social crisis in 2019

A series of major scientific breakthroughs demonstrate the potential for the progressive development of humanity, even as capitalism drags mankind into war and barbarism.

Source: Science and social crisis in 2019 – World Socialist Web Site

http://www.wsws.org

Bryan Dyne

19 January 2019

In the opening days of the new year, a series of major scientific breakthroughs have demonstrated humanity’s immense capacity for understanding the world and using this knowledge to solve the many social ills plaguing modern life:

• On January 1, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule. It was the second astronomical body observed by New Horizons, after Pluto, and the most distant asteroid ever observed by a robotic explorer launched from Earth. The data sent back by the probe, through the combined efforts of an international team of hundreds of scientists and engineers, has already begun to inform the research describing the early history of our Solar System.

• On January 3, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) lunar exploration mission Chang’e 4 achieved the first soft landing on the far side of the Moon and successfully deployed its rover Yutu-2. The scientific payloads were developed and are operated in tandem with researchers in China, Germany, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia and Sweden. It sent back the first closeup images of the less explored half of the Moon via a relay satellite positioned so as to be able to communicate with Earth and the lander simultaneously. Both New Horizons and Chang’e 4 are among the dozens of spacecraft, landers and rovers that are currently studying the Earth, Sun, Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, asteroids, comets and even the regions immediately outside our Solar System.

• On January 4, plant scientists from the United States Department of Agriculture and the University of Illinois showed that it is possible to make genetically engineered plants that fix a “glitch” in photosynthesis. This flaw sometimes causes plants to produce toxins within themselves that must be expunged. Crops grown without this flaw could improve their productivity by 40 percent, which has the potential to help mitigate climate change and abolish world hunger.

• On January 14, scientists operating Chang’e 4 announced the successful germination of food and clothing crops on the Moon, under the very low gravity of that body and after being bathed in solar radiation. Cotton, potato and rapeseed were all grown inside a miniature, artificial self-sustaining environment that was launched as part of the spacecraft’s scientific payload. While the experiment has reportedly reached the end of its lifespan, it was a critical step towards establishing and maintaining human life on the Moon, Mars and beyond.

• Concurrently, machine learning and artificial intelligence are becoming more and more integrated with aspects of modern life, including medicine, transportation and manufacturing. Computer scientists are constantly exploring new ways to use this technology and they have encountered as yet no limits. Whole cities are steadily becoming powered by AI. Self-driving cars are on the verge of mass implementation.

Each of these advances demonstrates the potential to alleviate the need for backbreaking labor, to vastly reduce the time and human resources needed to build homes, schools and hospitals, to roboticize farming and transportation and to develop breakthroughs in medicine and human health. They are powerful rebukes to the incessant contemporary glorification of irrationalism, whether through the cultivation of backwardness and religious prejudice or the promotion of postmodernism and its rejection of objective truth. They stand as a mighty vindication of the materialist understanding of the world, that there are objective laws of nature and that humans can comprehend them and through practice based on that understanding, shape the world to improve human life.

These breakthroughs, on the other hand, contrast sharply with similar developments in society that have heralded 2019:

• The most recent data collected from UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the World Bank show that one in nine human beings, 815 million people, face malnourishment or hunger and 9.1 million people starve to death annually. These figures include 150 million children who are hungry and 3.1 million children who starve to death each year.

• There are currently 68.5 million people fleeing war, persecution and oppression. The UN estimates there are an additional 210 million people who have been displaced as a result of climate change.

• Fascist and extreme right ideologies are once again being promoted by the political establishments in every country. Far-right parties are part of the governments in Italy, Austria, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Japan, Finland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Philippines and Greece. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been welcomed into German parliament committees and their policies on refugees and internal security have been adopted by the German state. In France, President Macron has openly praised the country’s World War II-era fascist dictator Marshal Philippe Petain.

• Thousands of scientists at NASA, NOAA, the NSF, the USDA and the National Institutes of Health are currently furloughed as a result of the government shutdown. Dozens of long term experiments that are critical to monitoring Earth’s climate, agriculture and public health are being increasingly disrupted. This disaster for scientific research comes as both Democrats and Republicans agree that the latest developments in modern technology, including drones and sensors, should be deployed against desperate refugees fleeing US-backed oppression and poverty in Central America.

These are only some of the contradictions of life in the 21st century. Even as technology is used to probe deep space, develop higher forms of global coordination and unlock the potential of key biological processes, it is being used to increase militarization, censorship and oppression at home and abroad. Every advance made in space exploration is intertwined with increased militarization internationally and the growing threat of world war. For every rocket that is aimed to study the cosmos, many more are developed and built to destroy either a part or the whole of humanity. Crop science is not used to feed the tens of millions of starving humans on six continents but to increase the profits and market dominance of a few agriculture conglomerates and to develop biological and chemical warfare. Science under capitalism is used to increase, not decrease, social inequality.

Artificial intelligence plays a particularly sinister role. It is being increasingly used by companies such as Amazon, Uber and Lyft to track every move employees make and force them to work longer and harder. Tens of thousands of jobs will be eliminated as automation becomes more and more commonplace. And it has been deployed on a mass scale by Google, Facebook and other tech companies in conjunction with US military and intelligence agencies to impose censorship on left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist publications, track down immigrants with facial recognition, spy on virtually every human being and make war against the world’s population on an ever increasing scale.

Both factions of the US ruling elite are at war with science. Trump and the Republicans deny climate change and openly promote religious obscurantism. Official liberalism and academia are in thrall to the postmodernists who reject any conception of objective truth and the application of science to human thought, society, and culture, denying in particular the revolutionary role of the working class.

In contrast, Marxists insist that science can and must be applied to society itself, above all, to the socio-economic structures in which humanity is currently trapped. This means cutting through the ideological domination of the corporate elite, and studying the unfolding events from the standpoint of the class forces at work. This means taking up a study of Marxism, which bases its revolutionary politics on an analysis of objective reality and class interests, and it means a turn toward the working class, the only progressive, revolutionary and international social force on the planet.

The working class offers humanity an alternative to the war, poverty, and social misery that are endemic to capitalism. It is noteworthy that, in the ongoing Los Angeles Teachers strike, educators are demanding not only better pay and smaller class sizes, but the defense of public education from a capitalist oligarchy intent on gutting it. While the ruling elite is set on dragging society backwards, the working class, in the struggle for socialism, offers it a way forward.

Only in a socialist society can the vast scientific and technological achievements of mankind be transformed from cudgels for enforcing class exploitation and fighting war, to the instruments of securing a prosperous and fulfilling life for all people.

 

Over Population: One Their Plans To Destroy Us

Source: Over Population: One Their Plans To Destroy Us. | Video Rebel’s Blog

vidrebel.wordpress.com

by horse237

Posted on Jan 10, 2019

Warning! This article might at first glance appear to be depressing but there are solutions to these problems. But first we must get angry enough to do something. Wall Street despises us. Never forget that.

The people who own the government deliberately over populated America. Study the writings of Leon Walras and Wassily Leontieff. The latter won a Nobel Prize in economics for his study of the American economy. He studied the inputs and outputs of American industry. Starting with an extractive industry like mining which outputs coal and iron. These outputs become inputs to the making of steel as an output. This steel in turn becomes an input to the making of cars and washing machines.

Leontieff determined that American wages were a third higher than Europe because we had abundant natural resources to which we added value through the employment of skilled labor.

The fly in the ointment for the American economy was that when our population went above 150 million in 1950, we were supposed to cut wages every time we added a few million people through legal and illegal immigration. The people who owned the government decided to print money by the trillions to:

1) pay for foreign wars and the occupation of foreign lands

2) to buy things for free from overseas, such as, oil, cars, electronics,
food, toys, clothes and even vacations paying for it all with I Owe You Nothing Federal Reserve Notes. They did this so voters would not know that the Elite had planned to cut the value of their wages, pensions and savings. That future pay cut is coming soon.

3) to hire 31 million federal, state and local government workers including contractors to make it appear that Americans had high paying jobs with benefits despite over population.
China is dumping US Treasury bonds all over the world financing ports, railroads, and other projects. One day in the near future people overseas will refuse to sell for dollars. They will demand commodities, oil, gold, silver, foreign currencies or anything of value. Half of all US dollars are overseas. Their forced repatriation will double prices over night and permanently cut the value of wages, pensions and savings in half.

3 million Americans starved to death in the 1930s. We have added 225 million people to this nation since then. I think the Elite want us wake up one morning after the Dollar had Reset the Night Before. One that day the Uber Rich fervently hope the commoners awake on the Morning After to  a circular firing squad which kills everyone who is black, Latino or white. In their dreams the Billionaires are safely tucked away in underground fortresses.

Not likely. More than 100 million Americans could die. And they all will have had friends and relatives who did not make it. Worldwide the death count could easily pass 3 billion. Lots of angry people are in the futures of our Banking Elite.

Kamala Devi Harris wants a $76 billion to subsidize rents in states impacted by immigration. She spoke favorably on ABC’s The View of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’s plan to raise federal taxes to 70% which is 82 to 83%in total for residents of New York City or California. Liberals have failed to learn the lesson that the Uber Rich can exempt themselves through especially designed loophole legislation written for them by the finest Congress money can buy. That just means the tax collectors will target professionals with a salary in the 60% bracket and all skilled workers will be pushed into the 50% tax bracket. And the illegal aliens can collect benefits that are non-taxable.

Clearly, the Elite created a future that does not work for us.

There are three things (amongst others) that we can do.

First. The greatest scientist of the 20th century was Nikola Tesla. He died on January 7, 1943. He left behind 155 boxes and trunks of papers and lab equipment. His papers were evaluated by an MIT physics professor named John G Trump. Donald Trump is his nephew. If we are to survive, it would be helpful if someone inside the US government would release the hitherto Above Top Secret Tesla research that our scientists and engineers have never seen. Nikola Tesla died 75 years ago. If Tesla did invent cheap, if not free, energy, we could use it to heat our homes and to raise crops indoors and to eliminate pollution.

Second. We need to end our insane banking system. It caused 3 million Americans to starve to death in the Great Depression. The Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Warburgs gave us the Federal Reserve Bank. It gave Bankers the right to charge us interest on money they created out of nothing. This system generates Unpayable Debts which when cancelled en masse cause a Great Monetary Contraction or Depression. The next Depression could easily kill a few billion people worldwide.

Alternatively, we could arrest the Bankers and seize the money they stole from us and use those assets to fund Debt Cancellation. The world economy could recover in 90 days after the we complete the Great Cancellation. We could issue what Dr Irving Fisher called 100% money. It begins by issuing a non-interest bearing currency like President Lincoln’s Greenbacks. It also forbids fractional reserve banking which allows Bankers to loan out 10 times as much money as they have on deposit. This creates lot of Bad Debts which in turn, as I said, leads inevitably to another Great Depression.

I should mention in passing that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered on the 53rd anniversary of the first meeting in 1910 the Bankers held to draft the legislation that became the Federal Reserve. Maybe the Bankers were sending us a message by killing the President on that anniversary. Dr Martin Luther King Jr was murdered on the first anniversary of his anti-war speech at New York’s Riverside Church. Maybe their message was that no man should have enough power to go to Washington and shut down the town until the government stopped an unpopular war.

Third. We are heading into a Grand Solar Minimum. In the Maunder Minimum wheat prices rose 400% in the UK. Dr Valentina Zarkova noted that during the Maunder Minimum scientists counted fewer sunspots which resulted in an slight global cooling. But with modern technology we now know that the magnetosphere of both the sun and the earth are greatly reduced.  The sun’s reduced magnetosphere allows more cosmic rays to strike the earth. The earth’s reduced magnetosphere allows the Jet Stream to wander about dumping rain, hail and snow on one area and causing a drought in another. Clearly, we need Tesla technology so the poor don’t freeze to death and we can raise food indoors even if there is a blizzard raging outside.

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Life on Earth is Dying. Thousands of Species Cease to Exist. Homo Sapiens is the Cause

First published by Global Research on April 20, 2017

On the day that you read this article, 200 species of life on Earth (plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects, reptiles) will cease to exist. Tomorrow, another 200 species will vanish forever.

The human onslaught to destroy life on Earth is unprecedented in Earth’s history. Planet Earth is now experiencing its sixth mass extinction event and Homo sapiens is the cause. Moreover, this mass extinction event is accelerating and is so comprehensive in its impact that the piecemeal measures being taken by the United Nations, international agencies and governments constitute a tokenism that is breathtaking in the extreme.

And it is no longer the case that mainly ‘invisible’ species are vanishing: those insects, amphibians and small animals about which you had never even heard, assuming they have been identified and given a name by humans.

You and I are on the brink of driving to extinction some of the most iconic species alive today. For a photo gallery of threatened species, some of which are ‘critically endangered’, see ‘World’s wildlife being pushed to the edge by humans – in pictures’.

If you want to read more about some aspects of the extinction threat, you can do so in these recent reports: ‘World Wildlife Crime Report: Trafficking in protected species’ and ‘2016 Living Planet Report’  which includes these words: ‘The main statistic from the report … shows a 58% decline between 1970 and 2012. This means that, on average, animal populations are roughly half the size they were 42 years ago.’

And if you want to read just one aspect of what is happening in the world’s oceans, this recent UN report will give you something to ponder: ‘New UN report finds marine debris harming more than 800 species, costing countries millions’. 

Of course, some of what is happening is related to the ongoing climate catastrophe and there isn’t any good news on that front. See ‘What’s Happening in the Arctic is Astonishing’.

But not everything that is going badly wrong is well known either. Did you know that we are destroying the Earth’s soil? See ‘Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues’.

Killing the Biosphere to Fast-track Human Extinction

And did you realise that even nitrogen is now a huge problem too? See ‘Scientists shine a spotlight on the overlooked menace of nitrogen’.

Of course, military violence has devastating consequences on the Earth’s ecosystems too, destroying land, water and atmosphere (not to mention killing human beings) in the fight over resources. You will get no joy from the article ‘Iraq’s oil inferno – government inaction in the face of eco-terrorism’ or the website of the Toxic Remnants of War Project. 

But every single aspect of military spending is ultimately used to destroy. It has no other function.

While 2.5 billion human beings do not have enough to eat. See ‘One in three people suffers malnutrition at global cost of $3.5 trillion a year’

As you read all this, you might say ‘Not me’! But you are wrong. You don’t have to be an impoverished African driven to killing elephants for their tusks so that you can survive yourself. You don’t have to be a farmer who is destroying the soil with synthetic poisons. You don’t have to be a soldier who kills and destroys or a person who works for a corporation that, one way to another, forces peasants off their land.

You just have to be an ‘ordinary’ person who pays your military taxes and consumes more than your share of world resources while participating without challenge in the global system of violence and exploitation managed by the global elite.

‘Why is this?’ you might ask.

This is because the primary driver of the human-induced mass extinction is not such things as some people hunting a particular lifeform to extinction, horrendous though this is. In fact, just two things drive most species over the edge: our systematic destruction of land habitat – forests, grasslands, wetlands, peatlands, mangroves… – in our endless effort to capture more of the Earth’s wild places for human use (whether it be residential, commercial, mining, farming or military) and our destruction of waterways and the ocean habitat by dumping into them radioactive contaminants, carbon dioxide, a multitude of poisons and chemical pollutants, and even plastic.

And do you know what drives this destruction of land and water habitats? Your demand for consumer products, all of which are produced by using land and water habitats, and the resources derived from them, often far from where you live. The most basic products, such as food and clothing, are produced on agricultural land, sometimes created by destroying rainforests, or taken from the ocean (where overfishing has savagely depleted global fish stocks). But in using these resources, we have ignored the needs of the land, oceans and the waterways for adequate regenerative inputs and recovery time.

We also participate, almost invariably without question or challenge, in the inequitable distribution of resources that compels some impoverished people to take desperate measures to survive through such means as farming marginal land or killing endangered wildlife.

So don’t sit back waiting for some miracle by the United Nations, international agencies or governments to solve this problem. It cannot happen for the simple reason that these organizations are all taking action within the existing paradigm that prioritizes corporate profit and military violence over human equity and ecological sustainability.

Despite any rhetoric to the contrary, they are encouraging overconsumption by industrialized populations and facilitating the inequitable distribution of income and wealth precisely because this benefits those who control these organizations, agencies and governments: the insane corporate elites who are devoid of the capacity to see any value beyond the ‘bottom line’. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane’. 

If you want action on the greatest challenge human beings have ever faced – to avert our own extinction by learning to live in harmony with our biosphere and equity with our fellow humans – then I encourage you to take personal responsibility.

If you do, you need to act. At the simplest level, you can make some difficult but valuable personal choices. Like becoming a vegan or vegetarian, buying/growing organic/biodynamic food, and resolutely refusing to use any form of poison or to drive a car or take an airline flight.

But if you want to take an integrated approach, the most powerful way you can do this is to systematically reduce your own personal consumption while increasing your self-reliance. Anita McKone and I have mapped out a fifteen-year strategy for doing this in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ which obviously includes nonviolence towards our fellow species.

One of the hidden tragedies of modern human existence is that we have been terrorized into believing that we are not personally responsible. See ‘The Delusion “I Am Not Responsible”‘.

For a fuller explanation, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’. 

It isn’t true but few people feel powerful enough to make a difference.

And every time you decide to do nothing and to leave it to someone else, you demonstrate why no-one else should do anything either.

Extinction beckons. What will you do?

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Robert J. Burrowes, Global Research, 2018

Cape Town water crisis prompts rationing to prevent Day Zero tap shutoff

I try to remain objective on global warming , but we must admit the evidence is starting to build. China is planning a polar silk road. Cape Town is one of millions of cities being stressed by overpopulation and limited natural resources. Perhaps South Africa could exchange its unlimited, but controlled and manipulated, supply of diamonds for ship loads of water?

Average reservoir level in Cape Town, population 4 million, is at 27%, but not all of that is usable

Source link

http://www.cbc.ca

The Associated Press

Posted: Jan 26, 2018

People queue to collect water from a natural spring outlet in the Cape Town suburb of St. James on Jan. 20. Residents are being advised to reduce daily water usage by over 40 per cent to avoid a Day Zero scenario that could happen in the coming weeks. (The Associated Press)

 

Long lines of South Africans collect water daily from a natural spring pipeline in an upscale suburb of Cape Town, illustrating the harsh impact of a drought that authorities say could force the closure of most taps in the country’s second largest city in just over two months, an occasion ominously known as Day Zero.

The prospect that large sections of South Africa’s showcase city, famously perched near two oceans, might go without running water has induced anxiety as well as resolve among its nearly four million residents. It has attracted scrutiny from scientists and city managers worldwide who also face the dual challenge of ballooning populations and shrinking resources. If it goes dry, Cape Town would become the world’s first major city to do so.

“There are a lot of people who have been in denial and now they suddenly realize this is for real,” said Shirley Curry, who waited to fill a plastic container with spring water from one of several taps outside a South African Breweries facility in the Newlands suburb.

 Security guards made sure people took only an allotted amount – 25 litres maximum in one line and 15 litres in another express line. However, things were more freewheeling at a nearby spring water source with no oversight. Mayor Patricia de Lille this month threatened to fine those who use too much water and said the city can no longer ask people to comply: “We must force them.”

• Cape Town’s plans to shut off water will mostly hurt poorest residents, local activist warns

The spectacle of people scrounging for water could become more common as Day Zero approaches in Cape Town, whose natural beauty has made it a coveted spot for international visitors. While the city urges people to restrict water usage, many living in poor areas already have limited access to water. They use communal taps in gritty neighbourhoods such as Blue Downs on the Cape Flats, where people washed clothes outside and carried buckets of water to shack dwellings on a recent afternoon.

People collect water from a communal tap at an informal settlement near Cape Town on Tuesday. While the city urges people to restrict water usage, many living in poor areas already have limited access to it. (The Associated Press)

Cape Town’s leaders have instructed residents to use only 50 litres of water daily from Feb. 1, down from the current 87-litre limit. Day Zero is projected to arrive on April 12, but some fear it could come sooner, while others hope it won’t happen if rationing works and rains eventually come.

Continue:

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MASS EXTINCTION event now under way that will decimate the global human population, scientists claim

Source: MASS EXTINCTION event now under way that will decimate the global human population, scientists claim – NaturalNews.com

With permission from

NaturalNews.com

by: Mike Adams

August 20, 2017

(Natural News) A hotly-debated study led by Professor Gerardo Ceballos at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico warns that the human population explosion is leading to the widespread contamination and destruction of the planet, ultimately collapsing life support systems upon which human civilization depends. As reported by The Times of Israel:

Human overpopulation and over-consumption are leading Earth to its sixth mass extinction faster than was previously thought, with the human race likely to be eradicated along the way, a new study warns…

These findings indicate nothing short of “biological annihilation,” the scientists conclude, “a massive anthropogenic [human-driven] erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilization.”

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was co-authored by Paul R. Ehrlich, a population control advocate.

Adding to the controversy of the study, Paul Ehrlich’s views have also been cited by population control advocates like Bill Gates, who calls for an engineered depopulation of the planet in order to achieve long-term sustainability. Bill Gates has donated millions of dollars to infertility technologies and vaccine “innovations” that include vaccines in Africa being covertly laced with infertility chemicals to achieve a race-based “medical cleansing” / genocide by making sure black people don’t reproduce.

To some, the warnings of Paul Ehrlich echo the hysteria of globalists like Al Gore, who claims that climate change, not chemical poisoning of the planet, will destroy human civilization unless everybody agrees to pay him $15 trillion dollars. In truth, “climate change” only predicts oceans rising less than a meter in a hundred years, yet the mass chemical poisoning of our world will collapse human civilization long before rising oceans becomes a relevant issue (and that’s assuming the temperature data are accurate, but we know much of those data are routinely faked by the pro-climate change science hustlers).

The entire “environmental” movement ignores all the real, immediate threats to our planet

What’s my take on all this? The real threat to sustainable life on our planet isn’t so-called “climate change,” it’s the mass contamination of our world with pesticides, herbicides, pharmaceutical runoff, hormone-disruptor chemicals, genetically engineered crops, heavy metals in medicine (such as mercury in vaccines), industrial chemicals and biosludge. Yet, astonishingly, no mainstream environmentalists seem to care about any of these threats. The entire environmental movement has become nothing more than a mindless climate change echo chamber, totally clueless about the real threats to our world that are destroying sustainability right now.

For example, left-leaning environmentalists are now openly denying the chemical gender-bender effects of atrazine because they all want to believe that gender is a “choice” rather than something that can be altered by chemical exposure. So they deny all the science surrounding atrazine because it conflicts with their LGBT narratives. In a similar way, the same Leftists who warned about cigarette smoke causing cancer now believe that marijuana smoke is somehow harmless, even though it contains many of the exact same carcinogens as tobacco smoke. Meanwhile, California’s hemp farms are producing massive tonnage of toxic runoff, poisoning thousands of acres of land across the state. And nobody seems to care, since it’s all being done in the name of “pot legalization.”

In my view, if we don’t stop the mass chemical poisoning of our world — and of ourselves — we will of course destroy ourselves in the process. That’s why I’ve dubbed humanity a “suicide cult.” In the name of corporate profits, humans are poisoning their food (pesticides), poisoning their minds (psychiatric drugs), poisoning their agricultural soils (glyphosate) and even poisoning their children (toxic vaccines).

Watch this Natural News video to learn more, and see all Natural News videos at this Vimeo link.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/230345426

 

Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse

Source: Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse | The Tyee

TheTyee.ca

By William E. Rees 

William E. Rees is professor emeritus of human ecology and ecological economics at the University of British Columbia.

July 17, 2017

‘Overshoot’ is when a species uses resources faster than can be replenished. We’re already there. And show no signs of changing.

Too many people consuming too many resources and deepening inequality a prescription for disaster. Tokyo photo by Marco Verch, Creative Commons licensed.

Humans have a virtually unlimited capacity for self-delusion, even when self-preservation is at stake.

The scariest example is the simplistic, growth-oriented, market-based economic thinking that is all but running the world today. Prevailing neoliberal economic models make no useful reference to the dynamics of the ecosystems or social systems with which the economy interacts in the real world.

What truly intelligent species would attempt to fly spaceship Earth, with all its mind-boggling complexity, using the conceptual equivalent of a 1955 Volkswagen Beetle driver’s manual?

Consider economists’ (and therefore society’s) near-universal obsession with continuous economic growth on a finite planet. A recent ringing example is Kaushik Basu’s glowing prediction that “in 50 years, the world economy is likely (though not guaranteed) to be thriving, with global GDP growing by as much as 20 per cent per year, and income and consumption doubling every four years or so.”

Basu is the former chief economist of the World Bank, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and professor of economics at Cornell University, so he is no flake in the economics department. But this does not prevent a display of alarming ignorance of both the power of exponential growth and the state of the ecosphere. Income and consumption doubling every four years? After just 20 years and five doublings, the economy would be larger by a factor of 32; in 50 years it will have multiplied more than 5000-fold! Basu must inhabit some infinite parallel universe.

In fairness, he does recognize that if the number of cars, airplane journeys and the like double every four years with overall consumption, “we will quickly exceed the planet’s limits.” But here’s the thing — it’s 50 years before Basu’s prediction even takes hold and we’ve already shot past several important planetary boundaries.

Little wonder. Propelled by neoliberal economic thinking and fossil fuels, techno-industrial society consumed more energy and resources during the most recent doubling (the past 35 years or so) than in all previous history. Humanity is now in dangerous ecological overshoot, using even renewable and replenishable resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate and filling waste sinks beyond capacity. (Even climate change is a waste management problem — carbon dioxide is the single greatest waste by weight in all industrial economies.)

Meanwhile, wild nature is in desperate retreat. One example: from less than one per cent at the dawn of agriculture, humans and their domestic animals had ballooned to comprise 97 per cent of the total weight of terrestrial mammals by the year 2000. That number is closer to 98.5 per cent today, with wild mammals barely clinging to the margins.

The “competitive displacement” of other species is an inevitable byproduct of continuous growth on a finite planet. The expansion of humans and their artefacts necessarily means the contraction of everything else. (Politicians’ protests notwithstanding, there is a fundamental contradiction between population/economic growth and protecting the “environment.”)

Ignoring overshoot is dangerously stupid — we are financing growth, in part, by irreversibly liquidating natural resources essential to our own long-term survival.

And things can only get worse. Even at today’s “lacklustre” three-per-cent global growth rate, incomes/consumption would double in just 20 years and produce — in this century — dramatic climate change, widespread extinctions, the collapse of major biophysical systems, global strife and diminished prospects for continued civilized existence.

But even this threat isn’t enough to move the world community to act sensibly to save itself. Like a mind-altering drug, the compound myth of perpetual growth and continuous technological progress obscures reality. Economists thicken the fog by insisting that the economy is “decoupling” from nature — another illusion resulting from faulty accounting, modelling abstractions and the fudging effects of globalization (for example, wealthy countries “offshoring” their ecological impacts onto poorer countries and the global commons).

The biophysical evidence — that is, reality — shows that material consumption and waste production are still increasing with population and GDP growth. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide is accumulating at accelerating record rates in the atmosphere and the years 2014, 2015 and 2016 sequentially shared the distinction of being the warmest years in the instrumental record.

Continue:

Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse | The Tyee

The conversation between plants and soil

Source: The conversation between plants and soil

phys.org/news

By Daryl Holland

June 6, 2017

Plants have a finely balanced relationship with soil, depending on it for vital resources. Credit: Pexels

To a child, soil is just dirt – a home for worms. To a gardener, soil is a collection of organic matter and nutrients. But to plants, soil is a hotbed of chemical activity. And plants don’t just observe, they actively participate in this activity.

Plants release chemicals into the soil, called exudates, that tell microbes to turn on or turn off certain chemical processes. Scientists are beginning to understand these signals and are hoping to exploit them to improve the efficiency, sustainability and environmental impact of the trillion dollar agricultural industry.

The three main nutrients plants need to grow are carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. A plant’s carbon needs come from air in the form of carbon dioxide, but the nitrogen and phosphorus needs come from the soil, and often nitrogen is the element in shortest supply naturally – and so to increase their yields, farmers add nitrogen to the soil.

Artificial nitrogen fertiliser is an essential component of an agricultural system that feeds more than 7 billion people, but it comes with a huge environmental cost. As the population grows, and as feeding habits change to more meat-based diets, nitrogen pollution looks set to become even more of a problem.

Combatting nitrogen pollution

“The extent to which we’ve meddled with the nitrogen cycle globally is astonishing,” says Professor Herbert Kronzucker, head of the University of Melbourne’s School of BioSciences.

“210 million tonnes of nitrogen per year are taken from the atmosphere and turned into a solid form of nitrogen through human activities. And most of this ends up as fertiliser in agricultural soil.

“But less than half of this can actually be captured by plants. The rest is lost to the atmosphere as nitrogen gas or the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, or leaches into waterways where it is a major pollutant.

“In the US, more than half of all lakes are badly impacted by too much nitrogen or phosphorus.”

But what if instead of adding more and more nitrogen to the soil, we help plants to better use the nitrogen that’s already there?

Professor Kronzucker and his colleagues at the University of Toronto, Laval University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences are looking for crops that communicate with the soil in a way that reduces their nitrogen requirements. 

“We became interested in the relationship between chemicals from plants and the impact these have on soil microbes,” says Professor Kronzucker.

Human meddling

Nitrogen takes many chemical forms. The most useful forms for plant growth are nitrate (NO3-) and ammonia (NH3). Chemical processes in the soil transform nitrogen between these and other forms.

One example is a process called nitrification, which turns ammonia into nitrate. Nitrate is problematic in the soil because, while plants love it, it doesn’t stick around like ammonia does. It tends to dissolve in water and is washed out of the soil through rain and groundwater. Also, soil microbes turn nitrate into nitrogen gas, which is useless to plants.

All of these processes are reversible, and eventually nitrogen gas is returned to the soil through another microbial process called nitrogen fixation, but this process is too slow for industrial agricultural systems. Farmers have to keep adding more and more nitrogen, and usually this is in the form of artificial nitrogen fertilisers.

These fertilisers are produced using an energy intensive industrial process that ‘fixes’ nitrogen gas by turning it into ammonia. This process, called the Haber-Bosch process, was a major factor in the Green Revolution that began in the 1960s and now provides food for more than 7 billion people.

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The conversation between plants and soil