Dear true environmentalists: I am with you.
Corporate pollution and releasing of toxic substances should be
treated as a criminal act, with full power to seize assets for
reparations, actual reparations, not just punitive fines.
I would apply the same standard of prosecution to the “medical”/pharma
and agri-food industries,
also.
However, the planet and biosphere are not at risk of imminent collapse, and certainly not from CO2.
The “imminent collapse” fabrication serves powerful manipulators, and
necessarily diverts us away from attaining actual democracy and
fairness. In the words of Chomsky:
For example, suppose it was discovered tomorrow that the
greenhouse effect has been way underestimated, and that the catastrophic
effects are actually going to set in 10 years from now, and not 100
years from now or something. Well, given the state of the popular
movements we have today, we’d probably have a fascist takeover—with
everybody agreeing to it, because that would be the only method for
survival that anyone could think of. I’d even agree to it, because there
just are no other alternatives around right now.
Rather than accept fascism or totalitarianism, corporate and finance
criminality can best be fought from a position of realistic perspective
regarding the end of the world, sober analysis of means regarding
leverage for change, and focused political targeting against corporate
rule without accountability.
History of imbedded doomsday narratives
All societies are dominance hierarchies, and all large, human
dominance hierarchies have hired high-priests that construct and
maintain the State doomsday narrative. These high-priests constantly
instruct us on required beliefs and behaviours that minimize the
deleterious effects of the alleged impending catastrophe. The
behavioural instructions fan everything from diet, to hygiene, to dress
code, to physical activity, to work ethics, to attitudes and morals, to
child rearing, to political positions, to deference to experts, and so
on.
It would be delusional to believe that this structural feature of
society is any different than it ever was. In present Western society,
the high-priests are the “scientists”, which include the medical doctors
and all the “experts”.
This does not mean that science itself is not a valid and rigorous
method to test and eliminate hypotheses and theories. It only means that
establishment scientists are hired high-priests, notwithstanding the
rare exceptions that prove the rule. It also does not mean that
scientists never tell the truth. It only means that establishment
scientists never harm or rebel against the dominance hierarchy, except
by accident or solely in appearance.
These days, there is an industry of scientists that indulge in
generating, testing and ameliorating ever more creative doomsday
predictions, which are hoped to be of utility to the bosses. The said
utility is often termed “societal relevance”. As an eminent example, we
have the theory of a “tipping point” towards irreversible total collapse
of the ecosphere, often referred to as a “species mass extinction”. The
notion of a tipping point has also been advanced for planetary climate,
wherein, in the absence of any non-human cause, one crosses into a
global climate regime of constant extreme weather and flooded
continents.
Whereas past planetary transformations have been related to
game-changers, such as the advent of photosynthesis, the calming of
tectonic (volcanic) activity, and so forth, and whereas the known
recurring climate catastrophe of ice ages is believed to be driven by
variations in solar insolation, the new “tipping points” spontaneously
occur from the gradual changes of increased modern human or industrial
activity, including: habitat destruction, burning of fossil fuel,
population growth, and dispersal of toxic substances.
The new “tipping point” theory is not unlike the deluge of the Old
Testament, which followed an accumulation of human depravity, except
that no god is postulated, and building the Ark requires a centralized
and globally restructured economy, handled by overarching elite private
institutions, of course. War, disease, hunger … are all defeated under
the same umbrella, death itself eventually.
The accompanying calls from establishment icons are often shrill. In the words of Prince Charles, in 2009:
,
If we do nothing, the consequences for every person on
this earth will be severe and unprecedented – with vast numbers of
environmental refugees, social instability and decimated economies: far
worse than anything which we are seeing today … We have 100 months left
to act.
While the leader of the most warring nation on earth, President Barack Obama, concluded in his 2015 State of the Union speech:
No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.
The role of scientists
The scientists follow and are often not more contained than Prince Charles or President Obama:
Earth is rapidly approaching a tipping point. Human
impacts are causing alarming levels of harm to our planet. As scientists
who study the interaction of people with the rest of the biosphere
using a wide range of approaches, we agree that the evidence that humans
are damaging their ecological life support systems is overwhelming. We
further agree that, based on the best scientific information available,
human quality of life will suffer substantial degradation by the year
2050 if we continue on our current path. Science unequivocally
demonstrates the human impacts of key concern: Climate disruption –
more, faster climate change than since humans first became a species. …
We maintain that humanity’s grand challenge is solving the
intertwined problems of human population growth and overconsumption,
climate change, pollution, ecosystem destruction, disease spillovers,
and extinction, in order to avoid environmental tipping points that
would make human life more difficult and would irrevocably damage
planetary life support systems.
But today, for the first time, humanity’s global civilization—the
worldwide, increasingly interconnected, highly technological society in
which we all are to one degree or another, embedded—is threatened with
collapse by an array of environmental problems. Humankind finds itself
engaged in what Prince Charles described as ‘an act of suicide on a
grand scale’, facing what the UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor John
Beddington called a ‘perfect storm’ of environmental problems. The most
serious of these problems show signs of rapidly escalating severity,
especially climate disruption. But other elements could potentially also
contribute to a collapse: an accelerating extinction of animal and
plant populations and species, which could lead to a loss of ecosystem
services essential for human survival; land degradation and land-use
change; a pole-to-pole spread of toxic compounds; …
The loss of biodiversity is one of the most critical current
environmental problems, threatening valuable ecosystem services and
human wellbeing. A growing body of evidence indicates that current
species extinction rates are higher than the pre-human background rate,
with hundreds of anthropogenic vertebrate extinctions documented in
prehistoric and historic times.
In fact, there is no science of a “tipping point” for earth
biodiversity or for earth climate. No such testable theory has been
elaborated. The entire notion of “tipping point” is hypothetical and
tenuous. It is a product of bias to presume that a large and complex
system (planet) would be susceptible to “tipping” rather than
extraordinarily stable against internal superficial changes. A recent
paper describes how one might begin to define concepts or measures that
would allow even discussing the topic of “tipping point” intelligently,
for realistic ecological systems.
Furthermore, even among scientists, still getting their bearings,
there is persistent disagreement as to whether species extinction rates
are higher in recent decades. A critical review concludes:
Net species gains or losses should be assessed with
respect to common baselines or reference communities. Ultimately, we
need a globally coordinated effort to monitor biodiversity so that we
can estimate and attribute human impacts as causes of biodiversity
change. A combination of technologies will be needed to produce
regularly updated global datasets of local biodiversity change to guide
future policy. At this time the conclusion that there is no net change
in local species richness is not the consensus state of knowledge.
Reality check
There is a large structurally imbedded industry of doomsday
narrative. In addition, individuals are reared in a dominance hierarchy
and therefore constantly seek messaging about fitting in. The result is
that we adopt the State religion. Even if the State is occupied by an
exploitative elite, we continue to uphold and follow any State religion
that has been sufficiently implanted.
In this case, the State religion is that we are cared-for by mother
earth but that our bad behaviour is poisoning mother earth and that we
are therefore all at risk, unless we adopt the new stringent conditions
that should be imposed globally. Non-believers should be rooted out and
isolated. We should demand that all our peers and our representatives do
what is proscribed by the State religion.
Meanwhile corporate criminality, while dressed in the colours of the
State religion, will continue at an accelerated rate, and our minds and
bodies will continue to be occupied.
I say no. To escape this trap, we must realize that the planet is,
well, a planet, with huge response capabilities; that the planet is far
more resilient and robust than we imagine.
Habitat destruction and industrial practices are grotesque, and these
cause real and significant harm to human communities and ecosystems —
more so even than actual wars in the present era … although not more so
than so-called economic sanctions and exploitative nation financing. In
contrast, “warming” itself cannot hurt the biosphere or humans, nor is
the planet at risk of “collapse” from all the criminal practices. That
is fabricated nonsense.
Our joint efforts should be on justice, attaining actual democracy,
the elimination of criminal behaviour, extortion and exploitation,
enforcement of reparations, enforcement of corporate transparency and
accountability…
The problem is human behaviour against humans and nature, organized
by an occupied dominance hierarchy, and the solutions are political;
nothing to do with CO2, methane or anything else in the atmosphere.
