Juggernaut
Two articles today:
Data suggests oil giants are not looking very hard to find ways to reduce their carbon footprint
How the 1% tricks you into thinking climate change is your fault
This latter article kind of pissed me off until I read through the whole thing. I figured they were going to whitewash the meaning of wealth and money, which is NOT only a capitalist expression. They didn’t, but they still failed to actually address the sheer folly of our capitalist society and what it has meant for planetary destruction.
Everyone is still massively lying about temperature targets, pre-industrial temperatures and how hot it actually is today (October 2021). 2021 has already seen the 1.5C “target” disappear in the mirror, NEVER to be seen again while the world’s media, politicians and even scientists continue to lie about meeting this target. This situational deception serves the interests of the monied elite and the power brokers that are spreading endless propaganda about what they’re supposedly doing about deadly climate change, furthering the dangerous deceptions about what the future actually holds for all of us.
They’re lying because it serves their present interests to lie. They’re also lying because they can’t actually stop what’s happening, there is far too much forward momentum to risk burning out the economy by slowing things down even further. The heat engine of civilization and the massive amounts of consumption and waste produced is the source of their (our) sustenance – the very bedrock of the global economic system, what we call the “economy”. They’re really not interested in changing this paradigm – so it doesn’t get changed. The same power-brokers remain steadfastly and assuredly in place despite a little commotion from the common people.
The world continues to plunge headlong into a massive, irreversible climate crisis and it’s going to big, really truly big. Gargantuan even. Stupendous beyond comprehension. Contributions of deadly greenhouse gasses are still being added by the billions of tons per day worldwide. Consumption of the Earth’s natural resources is higher then ever. Depletion of the world’s non-renewable resources continues. The so-called “renewables” are proving to be severely over matched by human appetites and are in increasingly critical conditions. Fresh water, glaciers, fisheries, top soil, forests, rivers, lakes and streams, it’s all being heavily depleted as humanity spawns itself across the Earth in ever larger numbers.
The pandemic didn’t make enough of an impact upon our numbers, our appetites and our habits didn’t change or slow things down much. There are “supply chain disruptions” as hundreds of massive container ships lie idle off-shore, unable to disgorge their latest cargo, and over 80,000 truck drivers are presently needed to transport these converted resources into factories, distribution centers and homes around the nation. This is what is getting the focus, but not what it actually means to our future survival.
Numerous previous civilizations have experience resource collapse which immediately proceeded their own collapse. We know enough about these people and their depletion of their environment to know that their foolhardily destroyed themselves just like we are foolhardily destroying ourselves. Our economics, professors, scientists, advisors and politicians tasked with guiding our way through this complex world have almost entirely failed us, beholden themselves to perpetuating the destructive paradigm of consumption and “economy” through the wholesale conversion of Earth’s resources into human greed and consumption.
I’ve always said it didn’t have to be this way, but it is. The super-rich are getting even richer and some in the media would have us to believe that “they” are the real problem, which is a load of horseshit. They may indeed have larger carbon footprints and higher rates of consumption, but the rich are not the real problem. Civilization is, the conversion of Earth’s resources into human consumption and control, backed by a monetary system that is specifically designed to produce wealth, greed and extreme levels of over-consumption. Complicit media outlets, colleges and universities and entire institutions on a global scale perpetuate this destructive “plan” to dominate the whole of the natural world which now contains less then 4% of the remaining wild biomass versus humanity and the domestic animals we consume for food.
This is a recipe for disaster. We barely understand how the natural world even works, but have taken it upon ourselves to dominate it all. Our science is still largely in its infancy on environmental matters and the symbiotic relationships of soil, microbes, plants, hydrology and Earth systems all working together to sustain life. Factory farms and huge waste pools have replaced wild herds, barbed wire and oil rigs now dominates even remote regions as humans seek to exercise control over everything.
This is insanity on a global scale, planned, processed and delivered ecocide that has humans scraping the bottom of the ocean floors for the remaining sustenance that powers the global markets. Oil rigs drill deeper, farther and are being erected in the remotest regions to wring out the last drops of black death to power a civilization that refuses to restrain itself or choose a better, different way to exist. When Wall Street clangs the bell, the vultures and greed follow right behind.
The world is dying and some of us know it, but it’s a message that goes unheeded and largely unheard. We seem to be a species that cannot restrain ourselves despite having full knowledge that we are engaging in endless self-harm. We are very good at deflecting and laying the blame elsewhere but poor at introspection and examination. We’re even poorer at self-correction, demonstrating ourselves to be an unhealthy species of beings that has managed to severely wreck the planet. Our imaginations and flights of fancy are being directed to the stars and the planets of the solar system while we trample down and extinguish most of the life on the Earth beneath our feet. Somehow, someway we convince ourselves that we will be magically “better” and more “just” and “moral” if we can escape this place and setup a new colony somewhere else.
We are deluding ourselves.
This is all part of our selfish nature and endless greed, the imagination that we can make science fiction “real” and that our civilization will finally advance itself to the point of a human-created Utopia. It is a massive lie already revealed if anyone but looks at what we’ve already done, who is being enriched and privileged and who isn’t. Most of our technology and innovations have yet to reach the s0-called “developing world” which is being withheld from internal advancement by world banks, mega-nationals and corrupt public officials being paid off to oppress their own people.
What they want – and what they are getting – is their raw resources which is being converted into cell phones, laptops, computer chips, diamonds, gold and oil. Their forests are being laid bare for exotic wood and making room for palm oil plantations while their wildlife is increasingly diminished to the point of disappearance and extinction. No amount of charitable foundations and hand-wringing is going to change this. As long as we deploy an economic system that preys upon the wealth of the natural world, the corruption of people and politicians which rewards the most insane among us will rule the world.
Many people think they want to be rich and to be like the wealthy elite of the world, but I don’t. You would have to sell your soul to be like them, to be one of them. I don’t need it and neither do you, but that’s a message they like to hear, less competition at the top leaves them more room to operate in their offices of global greed. To them, we are nothing but dust under their feet, part of the faceless herds they lord over, and their right about this. We have no real power, no real defense, and no real voice.
Many years ago I spent a fair bit of time writing about this. Our protests and pleas go largely ignored. Nothing has changed since then and nothing will change now. The entire planet is increasingly worse off under the systems of destruction they have deployed. These are facts, irrefutable and indisputable. There is no solution to this despite what you may have heard. Incremental changes will not stop the destruction or the depredation. Nobody is going to flip the switch and turn it all off. The entire juggernaut of civilization is pressing forward, unstoppable and irrefutable until there is nothing left to convert into human greed. We are going to have to ride this things right down into the ground and only then, and if we can – find a way to survive.
This isn’t something anyone can actually plan for. Not really. I only know that it is going to happen as the towering house of cards humanity has erected eventually comes crashing down.
There are several trigger points for the collapse that will come over the coming months.
1. China, which has emulated the idiotic concepts of rampant industrialism and urbanisation [that were the developed world’s Achilles Heel in the 1970s and 1980s], in order to political and economic power.
With little indigenous oil and insufficient coal, China has been increasingly dependent on imports of energy and resources in order to drive economic growth. Pollution levels reached the intolerable point, whereupon China attempted to reduce coal dependency, only to find that other energy sources were inadequate to fuel the kind of economy that they had established.
The zealous construction of hydro dams has already come back to bite them in the bum, which cracks emerging in major systems and some having already collapsed.
The wild swings in conditions experienced on the ground -due to climate instability- mean there has been either not enough water or far too much.
The developed nations -especially European nations, the US, Canada, Australia carried out a massive fraud by claiming that they had cleaned up the environment and reduced emissions; all they had done was move heavy industry to China and other developing nations (India, Vietnam, Malaysia, Korea etc.) and increased overall emissions.
Then commenced the ‘blame China’ narrative, whereby developed nations that had beenall-too-keen to close down high labour-cost factories and relocate to low-cost, low-environmental-regulation Asia but needed someone other than themselves to blame for rising levels of pollution throughout the world.
NZ went down a similar track, with the relatively small amount of heavy industry beiong closed down in favour of importations of cheap Asian goods, and the conversion of much of the land into a resource base to feed China with timber and wool, and to literally feed China via exports of meat and dairy products generated on the back of yet more destruction of the local environment.
Well, China has now hit the wall, with the property developer Evergrande only temporarily grand, and now unable to make payments on massive bonds issued when the tide was rising: with a falling tide, everything begins to unravel. With inadequate energy supplies, China has done a U-turn on coal in order to generate enough electricity to heat homes and keep industry working. So-called renewables have proven the failure anyone with a brain knew they would be.
2. The US peaked in conventional oil extraction around 1970, and has been living on borrowed time ever since, firstly by looting and polluting Alaska and shallow off-shore regions, secondly by doing deals with Middle East nations and by invading them, and thirdly by drilling and fracking small pockets of hydrocarbons with a low energy return on energy invested on the basis of ‘junk bonds’.
The egregious money-printing that has taken place since Nixon closed the gold window has allowed ostentatious consumption to continue at the expense of the future -in particular water supplies and the fertility of the soil and the atmosphere, which is now so out of balance the Jet Streams no longer function as they did before massive overheating due to the great excess CO2 that came from burning fossil fuels. Unable to generate electricity as it once did, unable to grow food as it once did, and now dependent on extraordinary levels of money-printing to prop up property values and equity markets, the US is ripe for collapse.
3. The UK was in bad shape in the 1970s, with coal extraction having peaked in 1913 and the oil economy that was established in the 1920s being increasingly dependent on oil imports. The oil shocks of the early 1970s resulted in a 3-day [working] week.
The UK got itself out of the energy-triggered economic and financial mess though the exploitation of oil and gas extracted from the North Sea fields.
Rather than carefully utilise this once-only bonus to establish sustainable (or even semi-sustainable) arrangements, the idiots in charge (notably led by Margaret Thatcher) embarked non an orgy of overconsumption that resulted in extraction peaking shortly after the year 2000. The solution to the UK’s energy predicament (nuclear having failed spectacularly) was to head down the path of importing coal and gas from Russia.
Other nations followed the same idiotic path.
And now the price of gas in the UK and much of Europe has reached crippling levels, as Russia is unable or unwilling to supply ever-greater quantities.
The banker’s Ponzi scheme looks set to unravel over the coming months.
In the short term, we are to be subjected to rapidly rising prices for basics (petrol up 40 cents per litre in a matter of months, and the similar rise in diesel will ripple through the entire diesel-powered economy), while at the same time many of the overblown markets -like housing- now appear to be on the way down.
Against this background, we now discover that the so-called vaccine does not work the way Pfizer said it would and that repeated ‘booster shots’ (for the foreseeable future?) will be necessary.
The ineffective and frequently counterproductive activities focused on Covid containment have not worked, and I am told it is now in the South Island.
Egregious money-printing by central banks (including RBNZ) is staving off collapse in the short term. But we must never forget that the entire system is an energy system. And the government has no plan for energy, other than to squander it as quickly as possible (thereby incre3asing the size of our predicament) to prop up the financial system and make fake economic numbers look good.
When an entire economic and financial system is governed and operated by criminals and clowns, only one outcome is possible.
That’s a great summary depicting how we ‘got here’. I don’t know if the economy has only a few months of standing or not. There doesn’t seem to be a mass exodus occurring, which means either nobody knows what is going to happen, or they are blissfully unaware of it, or that it’s not the right time. My guess is the latter, we’ll see.
The economy should have never been built upon consumption, energy or otherwise. Even before the advent of oil to power civilization, consumption was driving factor, or should I say “greed”. Civilization hasn’t changed since then, it’s only diversified itself. Prior to fiat money and the practice of computerized shady accounting tactics, the Egyptians were fabricating their own means of monetary exchange to satisfy their economy and enrich the wealthy at the expense of the many. Nothing has really changed since then, it’s only continued to get worse.
Now they want us to believe that a form of Utopia is once again, just around the corner, if we but continue to go along with it, accept their ‘leadership’ and keep paying our taxes. It’s a great way to keep the serfs in line. Things will get better – until they don’t, something that has been underway for many, many years, but the distractions are endless, the attention too little and the opportunities for deceit vast. Sociopaths run freely in the halls of power – just like they always did.
The ONLY thing that has made this Ponzi scheme last as long as it has was the abundance of easily obtained natural resources, now completely plucked from the denuded tree of Life itself. Madmen and profiteers thought it could last forever and billions of people went along with their schemes. Those that got in the way were exterminated and swept aside, eradicating the only sustainable way of life humanity has ever found.
It’s no joke to say that we’ve screwed the pooch here, it’s irrefutable, indisputable and a foregone conclusion, we’re going to witness and experience it all. Depending on where you live on the planet, you may have already entered into the maw of the devouring beast and found your life forfeit. The rest of us will soon find out – but exactly when is unknown. Collapse doesn’t usually happen all at once, it happen to us individually when your world collapses. Millions have already experienced this, billions will.
Here in Godzone the first rumblings of housing catastrophe are sounding:
‘It became slightly easier for aspiring first home buyers to be able to afford a home of their own in several parts of the country in September, as prices dipped at the ‘bottom of the market.
According to the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand, the national lower quartile selling price dropped $14,000 from $619,000 in August to $605,000 in September.
The lower quartile price is the price point at which 25% of sales are below and 75% are above, representing the most affordable part of the market.
The biggest lower quartile price decline was in Auckland where it dropped by $30,000, from $880,000 in August to $850,000 in September. This was followed by falls in Taranaki of $23,785, Manawatu/Whanganui of $15,870, a Northland drop of $15,000 and a fall in Wellington of $10,000.
The lower quartile price was unchanged in Otago, while all other regions posted an increase in the lower quartile price in September.
However not all of the benefit of lower prices flowed through to buyers because it was partially offset by an increase in mortgage interest rates. The average of the two year fixed rates offered by the major banks rose from 2.82% in August to 3.02% in September, which was the first time it has been above 3% since April last year.’
First home buyers in Northland, Auckland, Taranaki & Manawatu/Whanganui benefit from a fall in prices | interest.co.nz
The combination of falling house values and rising interest rates is, of course, deadly for the financial system. Especially for those foolish enough or unlucky enough to have bought recently at the market peak.
Paying more in monthly payments for an asset that is declining in value is not going to lead to much bliss, especially when the price of practically everything else is rising.
Thus, people cut back on consumption…the economists’ and bankers’ nightmare. And the government’s nightmare too, since it is dependent on housing construction, infrastructure construction and consumerism in general to keep the fiat money system functioning just a little longer.
I am far from ready but am ‘light-years’ ahead of most others, despite starting from scratch just over 18 months ago.
I see the level of Lake Mead has fallen again, after a short period of rising.