Oceanoxia
Exploring an increasingly strange new world
In his video on Witchcraft, Gender, and Marxism, Ollie Thorn of Philosophy tube presents the perspective that the medieval witch hunts and the terrorist lynching campaigns waged against black people both ended not because society “got better” and realized they were wrong, but more because the campaigns achieved their goals in one way or another, and so the bloodshed ended for that reason.
I think the same can be said of the history of colonialism, and colonialist aggression against indigenous people. In the United States, for example, there is no treaty made between the government and any Native American tribe or group of tribes that was not later broken when doing so seemed useful to the U.S. government, or to Euro-American business interests. This continues to the present day, with things like gas pipelines, water rights, and more, and it is by no means limited to the United States. It’s true throughout the Americas. It’s true in European countries where corporations and governments come into conflict with indigenous groups.
While Canada may have an international reputation for being “nice”, from what I can tell that has never been the experience of the First Nations people still living there. I’ve talked briefly before about the ongoing struggle over corporate use of Wet’suwet’en land, but unfortunately it’s safe to assume that it’s never just happening in one place.
The Mi’kmaq First Nation of Sipekne’katik recently decided to assert its legal right to establish a livelihood lobster fishery, currently totaling 7 licenses, allowing up to 350 traps total. For an idea of the scale of this, the overall “settler” lobster fishery consists of over 367,000 traps. Despite the fractionally small impact this would have on the lobster fishery, and the livelihoods of commercial fishermen, the Sipekne’katik fleet has been met with an intense and violent reaction.
The situation in Mi'gma'gi is escalating.
— Agent NDN (@TheAgentNDN) September 18, 2020
(Below is from the threadreader app unroll of @TheAgentNDN‘s thread)
Now you tell me who is the bigger threat to lobster stocks and marine conservation in general? I’m no bigshot mathematician, but it seems to me like ONE average Nova Scotia lobster fishing vessel is working with many more lobster traps than all Mi’gmaq vessels combined.Keep this discrepancy in mind when you read about settlers cutting lines on Mi’gmaw traps, when you see videos of them shooting flare guns at us, when you hear stories about gas stations refusing to serve us because we’re Native.
Whenever someone directs violence, intimidation, and threats at us in the name of “conservation” remember that settlers take more lobster using a SINGLE BOAT than our entire fleet does.If settlers are so worried, they should ask their neighbors to stop fishing so much.
The fact of the matter is that we’ve been fishing these waters for thousands of years and we’ve never had any problems. The fishery has never been on the verge of collapsing under our watch.Can settlers say the same?
Follow that twitter thread, and Ku’ku’kwes News for more updates on the story, and check out this google drive for ways in which you can help the Mi’kmaq fishery. They’re just trying to make a living on their ancestral land at a very small scale, and they’ve come under assault for even that minor assertion of their rights.
The colonization of the Americas never stopped. The marginalization and brutalization of Indigenous Americans never stopped. It only appeared to stop, at least to white folks like me, because we were taught that all that was in the past, and because, as with the destruction of many European indigenous cultures, much of the job had already been done. The greed and bigotry driving the atrocities of the past have gone nowhere, and the system in which we live retains all the physical and cultural infrastructure needed to resume any campaign of violent oppression required to maintain the supremacy of capitalism and the suicidal pursuit of endless growth.
Help out if you can, contribute to Agent NDN’s patreon if you can, and be on the lookout for others around the world whose struggles you might be able to aid, even a little. The only way out of the mess we’re in is to commit to global solidarity in word and in deed, and to act collectively for the collective good. This means doing our utmost to repair the damage done by previous generations, prevent that damage from being perpetuated, and to lift everyone up so we can all fight the same fights together as one species. There is no path to a sustainable future that does not address the need for social, economic, and environmental justice.
Fascism is gaining power in the United States right now, accompanied by both lies about who and what they are, and by liberal/centrist hand wringing over how bad it is to be mean to fascists. In this environment, education is a powerful tool in responding to those who are, knowingly or otherwise, spreading misinformation. I’ve previously linked Ollie Thorn’s video The Philosophy of Antifa, and if you haven’t watched it, you really, really should.
Another in this library that’s worth your time, and worth sharing around, is Thoughtslime’s new video on the Proud Boys, who are one of the fascist groups currently instigating violence in the United States:
Climate change is scary not just because of the direct problems it’s causing, but also because of its ability to exacerbate other problems. In particular, many of the ways we have to deal with higher temperatures require increased use of water. More water for agriculture, more water for drinking, and more water for evaporative cooling of various sorts.
This combines uncomfortably with the incredibly high rate at which we use fresh water, the trend of privatizing water sources, and the widely reported depletion of aquifers. The danger of lethal water shortages is very real, and has a lot of people worried about mass famine, thirst, and war as a result. It’s a valid cause for worry, particularly with the current political climate of the world.
Given all of that, it’s nice to have a little good news now and then, and this bit comes to us from a recent publication in the journal Earth Systems Dynamics that suggests that the world’s large aquifers are in less danger than previously feared, and more resilient to climate change than previously hoped. From the research team’s press release:
Previous global studies of changes in groundwater storage, estimated using data from the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite mission and global models, have concluded that intensifying human water withdrawals in the majority of the world’s large aquifer systems are causing a sustained reduction in groundwater storage, depleting groundwater resources.
Yet this new study, published in Earth System Dynamics, reveals that depletion is not as widespread as reported, and that replenishment of groundwater storage depends upon extreme rainfall that is increasing under global climate change.
Lead author, Dr Mohammad Shamsudduha, Lecturer in Physical Geography and a member of the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme at the University of Sussex, said: “The cloud of climate change has a silver lining for groundwater resources as it favours greater replenishment from episodic, extreme rainfalls in some aquifers located around the world mainly in dry environments. This new analysis provides a benchmark alongside conventional, ground-based monitoring of groundwater levels to assess changes in water storage in aquifers over time. This information is essential to inform sustainable management of groundwater resources.”
This new study updates and extends previous analyses, accounting for strong seasonality in groundwater storage in the analysis of trends. It shows that a minority (only 5) of the world’s 37 large aquifers is undergoing depletion that requires further attention for better management.
Co-author, Professor of Hydrogeology, Richard Taylor from UCL Geography, said: “The findings do not deny that groundwater depletion is occurring in many parts of the world but that the scale of this depletion, frequently associated with irrigation in drylands, is more localised than past studies have suggested and often occurs below a large (~100 000 km2) ‘footprint’ of mass changes tracked by a pair of GRACE satellites.”
For the majority, trends are non-linear and irregular, exhibiting considerable variability in volume over time. The study shows further that variability in groundwater storage in drylands is influenced positively and episodically by years of extreme (>90th percentile) precipitation.
For example, in the Great Artesian Basin of Australia, extreme seasonal rainfall over two successive summers in 2010 and 2011 increased groundwater storage there by ~90 km3, more than ten times total annual freshwater withdrawals in the UK. Elsewhere in the Canning Basin of Australia, however, groundwater depletion is occurring at a rate of 4.4 km3 each year that is associated with its use in the extraction of iron ore.
This doesn’t mean that there are no problems, and the study’s authors still advocate that measures be taken to reduce groundwater depletion. Even so, it’s nice to know that the bigger storms aren’t just creating temporary deluges that run off into the oceans – they also replenish aquifers, more than we previously knew.
There remains the danger of contaminating aquifers through industrial activity like fracking and the storage of fracking wastewater, but that is, in theory, a problem we can avoid in pursuit of mitigating our climate impacts, that will also help conserve our sources of potable water.
As ever, the goal is to avoid the creation of a Mad Max hellscape, and increased resilience in our planet’s aquifers gives us an additional buffer against that.
This blog, and its associated podcast, are brought to you by my wonderful patrons, each of whom gives to me according to their ability, that my household might eat according to our needs. If you would like to stand in solidarity with these people, and help support the work I’m doing, you can head over to Patreon.com/oceanoxia to join the Oceanoxia Collective. You have nothing to lose but your chains, and as little as $1.00USD/month!
This podcast episode is a reading of my earlier blog post by the same name.
This blog, and its associated podcast, are brought to you by my wonderful patrons, each of whom gives to me according to their ability, that my household might eat according to our needs. If you would like to stand in solidarity with these people, and help support the work I’m doing, you can head over to Patreon.com/oceanoxia to join the Oceanoxia Collective. You have nothing to lose but your chains, and as little as $1.00USD/month!
The newest podcast episode will be up tomorrow. In the meantime, please enjoy some Czech bluegrass.
Sand mining is an environmental problem that has often been overlooked. Sand is everywhere, and it’s easy to feel like there’s as much chance of “over-using” it as there is of over-using sea water.
That said, we use a vast amount of sand in this civilization of ours. Sand extraction for concrete alone is causing serious problems near where it’s mined:
Dr Chris Hackney at the University of Hull who led the research, said: “With the world currently undergoing rapid population growth and urbanisation, concrete production has grown massively, fuelling unprecedented demand for sand, so much so that sand is now the most consumed resource on the planet, after water”
The research was undertaken as part of a NERC funded project led by Professor Stephen Darby at the University of Southampton, which is studying the impact of climate change on the fluctuation of sediment through the Mekong.
Professor Darby added, “Much of the sand used in the production of concrete comes from the world’s big sand-bedded rivers, like the Mekong. There has long been a concern that sand mining from the Mekong is causing serious problems, but our work is the first to provide a comprehensive, rigorous, estimate not only of the rate at which sand is being removed from the system but how this compares to the natural replenishment of sand by river processes, as well as the adverse impacts unsustainable sand mining has on river bank erosion.”
[…]
Dr Julian Leyland of the University of Southampton, who performed the TLS surveys, said that “Our research showed that it only takes two metres of lowering of the river bed to cause many of the river banks along the Mekong to collapse, but we’ve seen that dredging pits can often exceed eight metres in depth. It’s clear that excessive sand mining is responsible for increased rates of bank erosion that local communities have been reporting in recent years.”
Dr Hackney warns that without proper regulation, excessive sand mining on the Mekong and other major rivers worldwide could have increasing environmental and social consequences.
As if the warming climate isn’t enough to be worried about. It probably shouldn’t be surprising that with the rise in demand for sand, there has also been an increase in illegal sand mining operations around the world. As Wired reports in their article on illegal sand mining and the violence surrounding it, desert sand isn’t good for construction because the grains are too smooth and round to bind well in concrete, so rivers and coastal regions become the biggest targets.
Apart from water and air, humble sand is the natural resource most consumed by human beings. People use more than 40 billion tons of sand and gravel every year. There’s so much demand that riverbeds and beaches around the world are being stripped bare. (Desert sand generally doesn’t work for construction; shaped by wind rather than water, desert grains are too round to bind together well.) And the amount of sand being mined is increasing exponentially.
Though the supply might seem endless, sand is a finite resource like any other. The worldwide construction boom of recent years—all those mushrooming megacities, from Lagos to Beijing—is devouring unprecedented quantities; extracting it is a $70 billion industry. In Dubai enormous land-reclamation projects and breakneck skyscraper-building have exhausted all the nearby sources. Exporters in Australia are literally selling sand to Arabs.
In some places multinational companies dredge it up with massive machines; in others local people haul it away with shovels and pickup trucks. As land quarries and riverbeds become tapped out, sand miners are turning to the seas, where thousands of ships now vacuum up huge amounts of the stuff from the ocean floor. As you might expect, all this often wreaks havoc on rivers, deltas, and marine ecosystems. Sand mines in the US are blamed for beach erosion, water and air pollution, and other ills, from the California coast to Wisconsin’s lakes. India’s Supreme Court recently warned that riparian sand mining is undermining bridges and disrupting ecosystems all over the country, slaughtering fish and birds. But regulations are scant and the will to enforce them even more so, especially in the developing world.
Sand mining has erased at least two dozen Indonesian islands since 2005. The stuff of those islands mostly ended up in Singapore, which needs titanic amounts to continue its program of artificially adding territory by reclaiming land from the sea. The city-state has created an extra 130 square kilometers in the past 40 years and is still adding more, making it by far the world’s largest sand importer. The collateral environmental damage has been so extreme that Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam have all restricted or banned exports of sand to Singapore.
And as with all big sources of profit, people are being killed over sand. Photovoltaic panels are almost entirely made from crystalline silicon, which doesn’t require any particular shape of sand grain, to my knowledge, but it’s not uncommon for groups that specialize in something like extracting and selling sand to seek to monopolize emerging markets. Whether that will end up throttling the sand supply for solar panels remains to be seen. Furthermore, as with most technologies these days, there are materials involved in photovoltaics beyond silicon, including various hazardous materials. Solar power is going to be an ever-increasing portion of our society’s power generation, and being able to reuse the materials involved is crucial to extending the usefulness of that technology into the future, and to any effort to minimize the impact we have on the rest of Earth’s biosphere. Fortunately, that’s an area in which we are making progress, and researchers are starting to analyze efforts in that field.
Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have conducted the first global assessment into the most promising approaches to end-of-life management for solar photovoltaic (PV) modules.
[…]
The authors focused on the recycling of crystalline silicon, a material used in more than 90% of installed PV systems in a very pure form. It accounts for about half of the energy, carbon footprint, and cost to produce PV modules, but only a small portion of their mass. Silicon’s value is determined by its purity.
“It takes a lot of investment to make silicon pure,” said Silverman, PV hardware expert. “For a PV module, you take these silicon cells, seal them up in a weatherproof package where they’re touching other materials, and wait 20 to 30 years — all the while, PV technology is improving. How can we get back that energy and material investment in the best way for the environment?”
The authors found some countries have PV recycling regulations in place, while others are just beginning to consider solutions. Currently, only one crystalline silicon PV-dedicated recycling facility exists in the world due to the limited amount of waste being produced today.
Based on their findings, the authors recommend research and development to reduce recycling costs and environmental impacts, while maximizing material recovery. They suggest focusing on high-value silicon versus intact silicon wafers. The latter has been touted as achievable, but silicon wafers often crack and would not likely meet today’s exacting standards to enable direct reuse. To recover high-value silicon, the authors highlight the need for research and development of silicon purification processes.
The authors also emphasize that the environmental and economic impacts of recycling practices should be explored using techno-economic analyses and life-cycle assessments.
Finally, the authors note that finding ways to avoid waste to begin with is an important part of the equation, including how to make solar panels last longer, use materials more effectively, and produce electricity more efficiently.
“We need research and development because the accumulation of waste will sneak up on us,” Silverman said. “Much like the exponential growth of PV installations, it will seem to move slowly and then rapidly accelerate. By the time there’s enough waste to open a PV-dedicated facility, we need to have already studied the proper process.”
If successful, these findings could contribute one piece of a PV circular economy.
Hopefully this will lead to faster improvements in our capacity to recycle and reuse solar panels, and to reduce the demand for the extraction of new materials. We’ve got a lot of work to do, and any steps we can take to slow the rate at which we add to that needed work will be hugely beneficial in the long run. It’s “clean as you go” at a societal level.
We’ve known for decades that the oceans play a major role in Earth’s climate, not just because of the way they absorb heat and move it around, but also because they absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, and so play a role in mitigating our own carbon emissions.
The new study, led by the University of Exeter, includes this — and finds significantly higher net flux of carbon into the oceans.
It calculates CO2 fluxes from 1992 to 2018, finding up to twice as much net flux in certain times and locations, compared to uncorrected models.
“Half of the carbon dioxide we emit doesn’t stay in the atmosphere but is taken up by the oceans and land vegetation ‘sinks’,” said Professor Andrew Watson, of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute.
“Researchers have assembled a large database of near-surface carbon dioxide measurements — the “Surface Ocean Carbon Atlas” (http://www.socat.info) — that can be used to calculate the flux of CO2 from the atmosphere into the ocean.
“Previous studies that have done this have, however, ignored small temperature differences between the surface of the ocean and the depth of a few metres where the measurements are made.
“Those differences are important because carbon dioxide solubility depends very strongly on temperature.
“We used satellite data to correct for these temperature differences, and when we do that it makes a big difference — we get a substantially larger flux going into the ocean.
“The difference in ocean uptake we calculate amounts to about 10 per cent of global fossil fuel emissions.”
Dr Jamie Shutler, of the Centre for Geography and Environmental Science on Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall, added: “Our revised estimate agrees much better than previously with an independent method of calculating how much carbon dioxide is being taken up by the ocean.
“That method makes use of a global ocean survey by research ships over decades, to calculate how the inventory of carbon in the ocean has increased.
I suppose on the surface this seems like good news, but it honestly worries me. It means that as the oceans continue to absorb heat and consequently lose their ability to absorb more CO2, the rate of warming may increase faster than our previous understanding of oceanic carbon uptake would indicate. On the plus side, this may mean that if we reduce carbon emissions dramatically, the levels in the atmosphere will fall faster than previously expected, or at least rise more slowly than feared, as the result of the various feedback loops we’ve triggered. All in all, it’s good to know more about what’s happening, if we want to have a hope of changing course.
This blog, and its associated podcast, are brought to you by my wonderful patrons, each of whom gives to me according to their ability, that my household might eat according to our needs. If you would like to stand in solidarity with these people, and help support the work I’m doing, you can head over to Patreon.com/oceanoxia to join the Oceanoxia Collective. You have nothing to lose but your chains, and as little as $1.00USD/month!
The Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 was, in many ways the process of resuming the movement against global capitalism that had been heating up in the late 1990s. Before 9/11, protests against the WTO had been pulling in both increasing attention and increasing brutality from law enforcement. That was around the time I was starting to get involved in political activism through my high school and through the New England branch of Quakerism. For me, that mostly meant learning, along with a few protests and demonstrations. I focused on the devastating humanitarian impact of the sanctions against Iraq, and on the School of the Americas/WHINSEC, and the role of the US military in South and Central America. Capitalism wasn’t really on my radar – I still saw these issues, along with environmental issues, as largely separate things, with individual, largely separate solutions. I didn’t really get what the WTO protests were about, nor did I understand their connection to the issues that had captured my attention. Others definitely did, though, and so I came into contact with activists who were involved in things like the protests in Seattle, and later in Quebec. I heard stories that have become very familiar in recent years, of wanton use of tear gas and pepper spray, of police aiming for people’s heads, and targeting medics. As the 2003 protests in Quebec showed, that movement wasn’t ended by 9/11 and the reactions to it, but I think it was drowned out a bit. Similar to how so many events seem to slip by with minimal reporting in the Trump era, a lot of stuff happened during the Bush years that went unnoticed by a lot of people – myself included.
When Obama got into office, there was a misguided feeling among some of us that we had begun the process of “fixing things”, and with that and the 2008 crash, people making systemic critiques were being heard again. Occupy Wall Street brought a renewal of mainstream focus on the shortcomings of capitalism, including articles like this one from New Scientist discussing a study of the underlying skeleton of the global capitalist economy:
The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.
Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core’s tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. “If one [company] suffers distress,” says Glattfelder, “this propagates.”
“It’s disconcerting to see how connected things really are,” agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.
This aligns well with Naomi Klein’s earlier reporting, in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and underscores the degree to which increasingly unrestrained capitalism has concentrated ever more power into the hands of ever fewer people. The rise of corporate power has, on occasion, been described as a movement toward a form of neo-Feudalism. In discussing things like taxes for universal healthcare, I’ve often pointed out that for essential services like health insurance, corporations have more or less become small, privately owned branches of government, operated for the personal gain of those in charge. The premiums paid by residents of the United States are taxes in every practical sense. The same can be said of the fees we pay to utility companies, internet service providers, and so on. Vast portions of the global economy are controlled not by governments – even through international treaties – but by corporate boards, mostly made up of a small, overlapping group of people. Any changes to something like global power production or the structure and motivations of the global economy, can only come with either the permission, or the dis-empowerment of this tiny ruling class.
I want to be clear – this is not a statement of some “conspiracy”. It is rather a straightforward description of how the world currently works, as a result of the basic structures of a capitalist system. Capitalism, by design, has always concentrated wealth – and therefore power – in an increasingly small number of hands. This has led to national economies that serve the interests of the “captains of industry”, rather than the general public, under the assumption that this “natural” hierarchy will result in the best possible results. The more measures like progressive taxation, anti-monopoly legislation, and so on have been whittled away, the more concentrated wealth and power have become.
This is why the notion of individual action on climate change – or on any environmental problem – has always been a red herring. It’s part of the constant propaganda saying that, in capitalism, the “consumer” is in control, and corporations merely give us whatever we keep buying. This simplistic equation is, of course, undermined by the ways in which the people at the top work to crush competition, manipulate legislation, and by the long-confirmed effectiveness of advertising in manipulating demand. The reality is that as consumers we have very little control, particularly as wealth disparity has increased, and the network of corporate ownership has shrunk, meaning that our “choices” are largely pre-determined by the people who control the options from which we choose.
Environmental problems – climate change included – are the result of the way our global economic system operates, and how it doles out power. Increasingly, that also means that they are the result of corporate policy, more than governmental policy. Multinational corporations have wealth rivaling that of many nations, and that results in power and influence on a similar scale. A lot of focus over the years has been on which countries are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, but it’s becoming clear that while there’s some use to that analysis, it largely misses the point. It’s more useful to focus on which corporations, with their associated supply chains, are responsible for emissions.
Professor Dabo Guan (UCL Bartlett School of Construction & Project Management) said: “Multinational companies have enormous influence stretching far beyond national borders. If the world’s leading companies exercised leadership on climate change — for instance, by requiring energy efficiency in their supply chains — they could have a transformative effect on global efforts to reduce emissions.
“However, companies’ climate change policies often have little effect when it comes to big investment decisions such as where to build supply chains.
“Assigning emissions to the investor country means multinationals are more accountable for the emissions they generate as a result of these decisions.”
The study found that carbon emissions from multinationals’ foreign investment fell from a peak of 22% of all emissions in 2011 to 18.7% in 2016. Researchers said this was a result of a trend of “de-globalisation,” with the volume of foreign direct investment shrinking, as well as new technologies and processes making industries more carbon efficient.
Mapping the global flow of investment, researchers found steady increases in investment from developed to developing countries. For instance, between 2011 and 2016 emissions generated through investment from the US to India increased by nearly half (from 48.3 million tons to 70.7 million tons), while in the same years emissions generated through investment from China to south-east Asia increased tenfold (from 0.7 million tons to 8.2 million tons).
Lead author Dr Zengkai Zhang, of Tianjin University, said: “Multinationals are increasingly transferring investment from developed to developing countries. This has the effect of reducing developed countries’ emissions while placing a greater emissions burden on poorer countries. At the same time it is likely to create higher emissions overall, as investment is moved to more ‘carbon intense’ regions.”
The study also examined the emissions that the world’s largest companies generated through foreign investment. For instance, Total S.A.’s foreign affiliates generated more than a tenth of the total emissions of France.
BP, meanwhile, generated more emissions through its foreign affiliates than the foreign-owned oil industry in any country except for the United States; Walmart, meanwhile, generated more emissions abroad than the whole of Germany’s foreign-owned retail sector, while Coca-Cola’s emissions around the world were equivalent to the whole of the foreign-owned food and drink industry hosted by China.
As with individual action, the emissions of individual nations are something of a red herring in this era of multinational corporations. While individual nations can influence their carbon emissions, decisions they make are made far less relevant or effective by the ways in which corporations move their activities around. The degree to which a nation is contributing to the rise in greenhouse gasses has far more to do with corporate activity within that nation.
This is even more then case when one accounts for the ways in which corporations use their wealth and power to influence national policy. In my post about the privatization of water, I wrote a bit about how companies like Nestle can use their wealth to gain control over a country’s natural resources. Similar tactics of investment, bribery, and loans are used by corporations in all nation to influence policies in ways that benefit those corporations, and the people who run them.
All of this is to say that while there’s merit in working to pursue sustainable lifestyles, and to pursue national policies that reflect and encourage those values, without a global perspective, and a global change in how power and resources are managed, we will never be able to achieve the changes we need. The entities most responsible for the continuing rise on greenhouse gas levels are, in many ways, landless rogue governments, that relocate as they see fit, and govern their affairs in a manner that benefits that tiny group of people who run them – people who already use their wealth to isolate themselves from any of the problems of humanity, including those relating to climate change.
The Shock Doctrine is a story of capitalism using crisis to exert control and crush democracy, and set up temporary, extractive feudal governments. It’s corporations as piratical governments, roving around in fleets and latching on to weakened nations to plunder them. Simply looking to our own affairs, and dealing with our own emissions is doomed to failure, not just because other nations might choose to do otherwise, but because history has shown that they will be unable to do so, if we do not stand in solidarity with them to disarm and destroy the pirates.
Over the course of the 20th century, the United States has, as empires are wont to do, improved the lives of its core population by extracting wealth from other populations within its sphere of influence. This is what has created the now-independent multinational corporations that are free to roam across the planet influencing policies and practices wherever they go. The reason I supported Bernie Sanders in the primary was that he was the sole candidate whose policies and record indicated that he understood the severity of this problem, and that he might begin slow down – or even stop – the practice of destabilizing other countries to ensure their servitude to corporate interests.
That opportunity is gone, now, but the work remains. We must stand in solidarity with the people of every other nation if we are to deal with climate change. We must end the imperialist policies of the United States in particular, and of powerful nations in general. The path we are on leads to extinction for us, and for most other species currently living on this planet, and as long as global affairs are dictated by the needs of a tiny handful of people who are so isolated from the rest of humanity, we are doomed.
This blog, and its associated podcast, are brought to you by my wonderful patrons, each of whom gives to me according to their ability, that my household might eat according to our needs. If you would like to stand in solidarity with these people, and help support the work I’m doing, you can head over to Patreon.com/oceanoxia to join the Oceanoxia Collective. You have nothing to lose but your chains, and as little as $1.00USD/month!
Climate disasters present us with an opportunity to rebuild in a manner that will prepare us for the coming changes to our climate, but without a deliberate policy of doing so, it won’t happen by itself.
If you want a transcript from this episode, you can check out the blog posts on which it’s based:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/oceanoxia/2020/09/02/hurricanes-and-disaster-response-rebuilding-society-from-the-ground-up/
If you want to support my work, any help at all is more than welcome at https://www.patreon.com/Oceanoxia
Thank you for listening, and take care of yourselves.