Government (you can especially see this, nowadays, in the US) does not act as a unit. It’s too big to generally agree on all of the disparate agendas it contains at any given time. It’s not that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, it’s more like that the left foot and the right foot keep stepping on each other, deliberately.
Recently, there has been some press attention focused on the NHTSA (National Highway Transportation Safety Administration) sneaking a few true bits of information about global warming into one of their publications. It was note-worthy because the Trump administration’s general approach to global warming is to embrace it. First, act like it’s not a problem, then deny the science, and de-fund anyone who talks about it. From a distance it may seem as though the US Government has decided to have a great big nihilism-fest in which everyone declares “nothing matters, so let’s party until the lights go out!” – that’s a reasonable enough strategy if you’re a 79 year-old oligarch who is angry that young people will get to survive longer then they will; all their money can’t buy that one thing, and they’d just as soon see young people inherit a mess than to have a good life like they did.
Someone lost their job over this, I bet.
The NHTSA paper has been taken down (naturally) so I squirrelled away a copy where I control the take-down [ranum.com] – it’s not tremendously ground-breaking stuff, except insofar as it comes from a government agency. What’s interesting is its conclusions: we have already fucked ourselves so thoroughly, it’s hardly worth trying to do anything more. NHTSA models several cases in which the number of gas-burning automobiles are reduced by various amounts between “not at all” and “about 1/25 of what we have now” and NHTSA’s models show: we are thoroughly fucked.
“aside from that, Mrs Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?”
NHTSA is right, to the extent that it’s pointless to do much about cars, as long as the US and China are burning coal and natural gas for power generation. They’re right, in terms of what their models show. Everyone could switch to bicycles and it won’t make a whit of difference as long as the oligarchs are flying all over the place in CO2-spewing jet aircraft. May as well stick a fork in it, it’s done. I call this the “Private Hudson Response.”
Private Hudson is right: once the situation devolves to a point where there’s basically no option that looks good, all you can do is wander around and whine for a while until you die. It’s now too late. The time to have done a smart thing was a while back, in the past, and you can’t go back and fix it. Time to die.
This is the “conservative” strategy, writ large – keep kicking the can down the road on the big problems and, when you finally run out of road, you can say “well, now it doesn’t matter.” But, it did. Back then, it did. Personally I think it’s a tragedy that so many of the “greatest generation” and the WWI generation have escaped into a peaceful death – they will never have to confront the consequences of their choices. That strategy would make sense, to me, if they had decided not to have children and their plan was to die and be beyond reach.
Projection: the can will keep getting kicked down the road. Prediction: there will be consequences, and they will be bad.
So, what NHTSA is saying is that it’s going to be time to face the music, soon, and – buh-bye! It’s a switch from outright denial (“global warming isn’t real”) to acceptance and passivity (“global warming is real and it’s not my problem”). The NHTSA paper appears to even accept global warming scientists’ projections as to what happens if we stay on this course – which, we will, because it’s inevitable. 3.8C temperature rise – a rise that will turn the entire planet into a shithole.
And, we must remember that governments and political movements do not operate with exact agreement. There were factions within the prevailing faction, that understood and believed what was going on. It just wasn’t convenient for them to go against the overall strategy of the faction. Within the overall strategy, though, there were people thinking about Plan B, Plan C, and even Plan D. What do do when the temperature rise is on the order of 3.8C.
As Gwynne Dyer says:
They are working out how best to pull the drawbridge up. (@2:46)
It is enough to make one look at Brexit in new light, isn’t it? “Lifeboat England” as a real scenario. With some ethnic cleansing and considerable economic realignment, the UK could feed itself and let the rest of Europe literally “fuck off and die.” Are any of us naive enough to think that hasn’t occurred to the owners of England?
If you want to really depress yourself, listen to the bit at 13:00: (remember, this was recorded in 2012)
The United States Army looks at this and says “our major problem is Mexico. Mexico and Central America, where we are going to be ordered by Congress, they reckon, in the next 10/15 years – to close the border for real.”
The search for compact, portable, high-energy power sources was driven by warfare – in World War I, humans began to deploy massive coal-fired battleships, and built gigantic industrial farms in order to build the great guns, and the ammunition, and the steel plates and the shells. In World War II, gasoline and heavy oil drove the diesel-powered tanks, the great battleships, and the 4-engined heavy bombers; the blitzkrieg ran on gasoline. After World War II, the rising US superpower/empire depended on massive production (based on oil and coal and gas) to fuel pointless wars characterized by millions and millions of gallons of jet fuel being fed into armored vehicles, helicopters, and strike aircraft. As I write this, the US refuels Saudi (and US) airstrikes in Yemen, fueling them with millions of gallons of jet fuel. Human dependency on fossil fuels is the history of warfare – you will notice that the renewable sources of energy: wind, water, and sun – are not dense enough or portable enough to lend themselves well to warfare. Why do we fight these pointless wars? So that our depraved ‘leaders’ can aggrandize themselves personally; war benefits nobody else.
Desc: Belshazzar’s Feast Artist: REMBRANDT, Harmensz van Rijn : 1606-69 : Dutch Credit: [ The Art Archive / National Gallery London / Eileen Tweedy ]
Gwynne Dyer is not a very good speaker, but he’s an in interesting thinker about grand strategy, and was the producer of BBC’s Climate Wars series.
as
As you note, this was known to the fossil-fuel industry back decades ago.
A horribly plausible explanation for a number of recent(ish) global issues is a strategy of deliberate genocide and quarantine, which has been a subject of discussion over in Charlie’s Diary over recent years.
E.g.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/02/some-notes-on-the-worst-case-s.html
sonofrojblake@#2:
I’ve never seen that before. It’s perfect.
I don’t know if this is true or not, but a friend who served on the Theodore Roosevelt once said that when you have a navigational mistake in a nuclear aircraft carrier, you can cause a collision and it takes 15-20 minutes for it to happen – but in the meantime, there’s nothing you can do but sit and watch. Physics has taken over and what’s going to happen is going to happen. That’s where we are, now.
There are litanies of things we can look at, like that the Gulf of Mexico fisheries are on their last legs. The Bay of Bengal is already dead. Tuna are going extinct. I feel bad for the polar bears but they’re the “canary in the coal mine” – all the signs point to bad.
John Morales@#1:
a subject of discussion over in Charlie’s Diary over recent years.
Charlie’s blog is fascinating. I don’t read it regularly because the comments are so interesting (and so are the commenters personas) it takes a long time to get through. Very thought-provoking.
I think the post you linked to is pretty much spot on. Politicians have revealed themselves to be a bunch of nihilists, and suddenly people are going “wait, how can this be?” Well, it’s been pretty obvious all along, we just ignored the writing on the wall.
What a beautiful world we live in if somebody can lose their job because of worrying about a problem that is likely to kill billions of people. Of course nobody should ever worry about the entire planet becoming uninhabitable. That’s such a trivial issue. /sarcasm tag
It’s not like people allowed them to form and drive the human civilization. They just seized the power without asking for permission.
The ones who made decisions were the richest 0.01% of people. Nobody asked the rest of the humanity what they wanted to do about this problem. A subsistence farmer who never earned enough money to even buy a car didn’t have a voice. Yet poorest people who never contributed to the climate change will be the first ones to starve to death once the climate worsens and they lose their only source of food. Even the American middle-class never had any say about the whole issue. Do you want food on your table? Then get a job. Do you need transportation for commuting? Then get a car, because we already destroyed the public transportation network. Electric cars or passive houses are too expensive for the average person to afford them. Shifting government funding and investments away from fossil fuels and towards nuclear/wind/solar? Nope, also here people had no say. The rich never asked what majority of the citizens wanted. And the problem is that kicking the can down the road was a perfectly rational decision for the rich. They never cared about billions of people losing their homes and starving to death. All they cared for was personal profits. And the fossil fuel business sure was profitable. My guess is that the rich who made this whole mess believe that their children and grandchildren won’t suffer the consequences. Rising sea lever will flood some areas. Increased heat will make some other places uninhabitable. But it’s reasonable to assume that some regions will remain habitable for humans. The rich are probably counting on buying land in the remaining habitable regions. As for billions of people starving to death, why should a billionaire even care about some poor people dying? Thus fucking up the planet is a perfectly rational decision for those few people who have the power to make decisions.
Ieva Skrebele@#5:
It’s not like people allowed them to form and drive the human civilization. They just seized the power without asking for permission.
Sometimes, when I am feeling depressed and have had too much wine, I realize that civilization is just a hack that the people who wanted to be rich and powerful cooked up, to make them rich and powerful. It’s what rich and powerful means, after all. “Let’s create this system wherein everyone works for us, because those that don’t get stabbed with a sharp stabbing-stick.”
It’s a bizzare notion, like “celebrity” – people are famous. What are they famous for? For being famous, of course!
What is power? I’ve written about this before – why be powerful? The only benefits one gains from wealth and power is through exploiting them.
Capitalism: somehow .05% of the world’s population have convinced the other 99.5% to work 40+ hours a week for them.
I don’t even need to get drunk in order to think so. It’s obvious that the rich and powerful are the ones who benefit from the existence of a civilization a lot more than the poor and oppressed.
And the most brilliant part of this whole nasty system is that it’s inherently impossible for me to avoid working for the rich assholes. As a self-employed artist I don’t directly work for some company owned by an asshole billionaire. So I’m not working for the .05%, right? Wrong. I’m obliged to pay taxes, and oligarchs have figured out ways how to lay their hands on part of the tax revenue. I’m also forced to buy things. I can buy my food in the farmers’ market and avoid giving my money to the big companies, right? Wrong, the farmer who produced my food probably got their seeds, fertilizer and farm equipment from the big companies. I’m also forced to buy electronics (and who sells those?), I need transportation (who earns money by selling oil, making cars, providing public transportation, even selling bicycles?). Only the homeless and penniless can avoid working for the .05%, and even then it gets hard—the state will just grab them and lock them up inside a private prison, which generates profits for some rich asshole.
Hunting and gathering or subsistence farming could not conceivably lead to widely available antibiotics, anaesthesia, clean water or effective safe contraception. Civilisation did. These are massive improvements in quality of life for basically everybody who has access to them, which despite any anticapitalist cynicism you may have is still many if not most people.
Well, in a world utterly incapable of long-term planning I’d hang on to some scepticism. At the very least those proud life-boat captains ought to be kicking themselves over letting the outsourcing / globalisation thing get out of hand like that. A Britannia-class dinghy that still has to import half the stuff a modern country needs to keep going is a bit sad, and it would be tricky when everyone else has gone. That’s more than a “considerable” economic realignment. In the case of Britain even local manufacturing would only get you so far because you need raw materials you likely won’t get in the Isles. The state of the Royal Navy might also be a cause for reget if it was ever needed to defend the moat (or to build another Empire to feed the industry).
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Re: Marcus Ranum (#6):
It’s sunday evening, so this stings a bit, thank you so much. I don’t suppose your sermons are deliberately timed to get everybody down just as they head back into the weekly drudge?
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Re: Ieva Skrebele (#7):
At least we got some nice temples and palaces for sight-seeing out of it. Hooray?
Ah, the four-stage strategy.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yes,_Minister#Episode_Six:_A_Victory_for_Democracy
sonofrojblake @#9
True. Civilization certainly has advantages. Nor am I idealizing the living conditions of hunter-gatherers—after all, there are plenty of reasons why their life expectancy was a lot shorter than what we now enjoy. Besides, exploitation happened also in primitive societies. Tribal chiefs, shamans, etc. people could easily abuse their leadership positions in order to take more than their fair share of that animal the whole group just hunted. My attitude isn’t anti-capitalist either. As they say, under capitalism man exploits man, while under communism it is vice versa. While impoverished peasants and workers lived in misery, high ranking members of the communist party enjoyed a life of luxury.
What bothers me is exploitation—people abusing their leadership positions in order to take more than their fair share of what the society has produced. In the USA a poor person will work 50+ hours per week while being unable to afford health insurance or college education. Simultaneously, a billionaire will live a life of luxury, treat their employees like slaves, and profit from destroying natural resources. The moment a group of people attempt to work together (because working together benefits everybody and increases people’s chances of survival) and try to create something that resembles a civilization, a bunch of greedy and power-hungry individuals will show up and try to take more than their fair share of what the society has produced.
komarov @#10
In French language there’s an expression “métro, boulot, dodo,” which translates as “metro, work, sleep.” It comes from a French poem and was meant to represent the everyday rhythm of people living in Paris—commute, work, go home to sleep, get up the next morning, commute, work, go home to sleep and so on; life is monotonous, repetitive, and there’s no way out how one could escape this kind of misery.
The author is poet Pierre Béarn. The French poem goes as following:
Au déboulé garçon pointe ton numéro
Pour gagner ainsi le salaire
D’un morne jour utilitaire
Métro, boulot, bistro, mégots, dodo, zero
Translation (not mine):
Off you go, boy, and punch the clock
To earn your pay
On a dreary working day.
Métro, job, bistro, smokes, blankie, zero.
Yep, this is what I was learning back when I had French lessons at school. I have a suspicion that my French teacher wasn’t particularly happy with her life if she chose to teach us this one instead of something happier and more optimistic.
sonofrojblake@#9:
Hunting and gathering or subsistence farming could not conceivably lead to widely available antibiotics, anaesthesia, clean water or effective safe contraception. Civilisation did. These are massive improvements in quality of life for basically everybody who has access to them, which despite any anticapitalist cynicism you may have is still many if not most people.
That’s true.
I’m not trying to stand alongside Rousseau and cast aspersions at civilization; it’s certainly had some good side-effects for everyone. I might argue that many of those side-effects are accidents of attempting to improve war-making capabilities, or to make it easier for the workers to gather more surplus for the rich and powerful. Increasing productivity has benefited workers a bit, but has created an even more dramatically elevated superclass. It’s a trade-off that the workers were never invited to think about, either. As usual “this is how it’s going to be.”
Sometimes I think about what a stable non-growth civilization would look like. The main intellectual benefits of the 19th and 20th century being bacteriology, virology, immunity, and public hygiene. As you say, contraception is a good one, too. But we cannot fall back to small-scale agrarian civilizations because they inevitably lose wars to mechanized and militarized civilizations. The built-in necessity for endless growth is directly tied to offense or self-defense in war. We can’t ever break this cycle without giving up on warfare and I don’t think that’s going to happen (the rulers of the world see warfare as necessary to preserve their power and position)
Ieva Skrebele@#13:
Métro, boulot, bistro, mégots, dodo, zero
Well, it beats being a medieval peasant because you’ve got the subway, but you’ll die even earlier because of the cigarettes.
komarov@#10:
It’s sunday evening, so this stings a bit, thank you so much. I don’t suppose your sermons are deliberately timed to get everybody down just as they head back into the weekly drudge?
It was supposed to be uplifting.
xohjoh2n@#11:
Ah, the four-stage strategy.
I’d never heard of that before. But, basically, it’s recognizable as the Republican plan for dismantling Obamacare.
Thank you for the poem, Ieva (including the translation).
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Re: Marcus (#16):
But how?! I’m not really qualified to give career advice but, please, don’t ever become a life coach.
komarov@#18:
But how?!
I was lying there. Sorry.
I got nothing. This is some real pretty shit we’re in now. Game over, man!
Oh, I suspected as much. At least I can still count on the BBC to
cheer me upkick me when I’m down.So that’s going to be a “no”, then. If only the scientists had warned us. Oh, wait. If only the scientist had … oh. Maybe if they resorted to hostage taking – influential conservatives? – they’d be taken seriously. But in the meantime, it’s definitely the scientists’ fault for not doing enough back when it still mattered.
The 2018 DOD budget is, according to google, around 0.7 trillion. Now I can’t decide whether climate change is economically insignificant or the DOD budget has become so bloated that it can rival a global catastrophe. But I’m leaning towards the latter.
Meanwhile, in Australia…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-09/environment-minister-says-calls-to-end-coal-drawing-long-bow/10354604
komarov@#20:
The 2018 DOD budget is, according to google, around 0.7 trillion. Now I can’t decide whether climate change is economically insignificant or the DOD budget has become so bloated that it can rival a global catastrophe.
We must have been sharing a brain-wave this afternoon. I was thinking “this must be humanity’s gom jabbar: if we were at all sensible, we’d collectively agree to forgo all wars for 15 years, during which the economic output we’d normally spend killing each other would be spent re-tooling for a carbon-neutral civilization.” There is no war as important or urgent as this crisis. Like a war, it would stimulate R&D and focus economic output and vast fortunes would be made. Superpowers could vie to sell their wares, just like they do now – except sell windmills, hydro, pebble-bed nuc, whatever. It seems pretty obvious that nationalism is one of the big impediments to humanity’s having an effective response to the crisis; if we could fix the worst characteristics of nationalism long enough to increase our chances of survival, we collectively might get through this thing.
Our civilization may collapse, but we’ll have F-35s!
Wouldn’t you know it. Just as my life started to have some kind of upside, this.
What’s the fucking point? I should slit my wrists, get out now and avoid the rush.
I think part of the conservative ideology is this central idea that only they really know how to respond to a crisis. They don’t mind making them, in fact self-made crises are usually even better because you have more information about them going in. The conservative leaders love a crisis because it lets them play hero and the masses love it because it they have no real responsibility, they’re just the crowd cheering on the heroes.
If they work at it, the leaders can frame the crisis and the resolution any way they want. The only problem with George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” was he tried to do it while still keeping troops in warzones. Even there, I’m not sure the conservatives saw it the same way the rest of the world did. They’re wearing rose-colored glasses to view all this stuff after all.
The problem with the environmental crisis is it’s too low key until it’s too late. The conservatives who deny climate change are doing so because they don’t know how to ride that crisis to hero worship. Also, some other people started defining the problem before they did.
One last slightly related bit. Have you ever noticed how much of the post-apocalyptic survival fiction out there does a lot of it’s world building by saying who made it through with guns? Weapons almost always seem to be central to how the story pans out. Even after a nuclear apocalypse which should leave the indelible lesson that war is bad, the story is still all about waging wars (or being able to), big or small.
Let’s not be too hasty: F-35 jets: US military grounds entire fleet [BBC]
At least it’s only fuel tubes. You don’t need those when you’ve run out of fuel, although we might get lucky and all die before oil reserves really run out. That’ll show those environmentalist “peak-oil” pessimists!
Look, I found another chunk of the yearly climate change budget we need! Now they just have to scrap the Zumwalt boondoggle and the first year is paid in full, courtesy of and apologetically by the US military.
Besides, a trillion dollars and just 3000 units sold? I think I just felt millions of capitalists cry out in anguish and be bankrupted.