Tuesday 23rd of April 2024
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ecoshit...

ecoshit

Yesterday we launched in London what we hope will be a new direction for the environmental movement, one which takes green thinking in a more progressive and pragmatic direction. We call it ‘ecomodernism’.

The idea is to build a new cross-political movement of people who believe that humans are capable of using technological innovation to solve critical environmental problems, such as climate change, at the same time as allowing economic growth to eradicate poverty in developing countries. Traditional environmentalism has tended to insist that human prosperity and our environment are on a collision course: as we make clear in our manifesto, we don’t think this has to be the case.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/25/george-monbiot-is-wrong-to-suggest-small-farms-are-best-for-humans-and-nature

George Monbiot is correct:

 

Beware of simple solutions to complex problems. That is a crucial lesson from history; a lesson that intelligent people in every age keep failing to learn.

On Thursday, a group of people who call themselves Ecomodernists launch their manifesto in the UK. The media loves them, not least because some of what they say chimes with dominant political and economic narratives. So you will doubtless be hearing a lot about them.

Their treatises are worth reading. In some important respects they are either right or at least wrong in an interesting way. In other respects … well, I will come to that in a moment.

With the help of science, technology and development, they maintain, human impacts on the natural world can be decoupled from economic activity. People can “increase their standard of living while doing less damage to the environment.” By intensifying our impacts in some places, other places can be spared. Through reduced population growth, the saturation of demand among prosperous consumers and improved technological efficiency, we can become both rich and green.

There seems to be some evidence that such transitions could be taking place. In the UK, for example, Chris Goodall, drawing on government figures for raw material consumption, has proposed that we might have reached “peak stuff”. Despite the resumption of economic growth, we appear to be using fewer material goods.

I don’t dismiss the possibility that this represents a real transition. But in the same period (2000 – 2012), incomes have stagnated while the cost of rents and mortgages has rocketed. Perhaps we simply have less spare money than we had before. If so, we can expect the shift to last for only as long as extreme inequality and an economy dominated by rentiers persist. To judge by the way things are going, this might be quite a long time.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2015/sep/24/meet-the-ecomodernists-ignorant-of-history-and-paradoxically-old-fashioned

 

 

 

Me thinks that Ecomodernism is a subtle subterranean venture set up by big companies, either directly, indirectly or even by secret means that the honchos at Ecomodernism don't realise they are manipulated... But I think not the latter.

big business with a fake green nose...

It seems that Ecomodernism is about big business disguised as the little guy with an intent on saving the planet. It seems that solutions that offer local improvements are never good enough for these guys. It's all about big things: big farms, big electricity supplies, big GM developments. Here is a sample of the crap in which the headlines are deceptively coloured green on the original info. It's ecoshit:

 

Calls For Agricultural Innovation In Africa
African Leaders Optimistic For Agricultural Transformation

You have to read this terrific op-ed by Rwandan President Paul Kagame and K Y Amoako, founder of the African Center for Economic Transformation. In their piece, the two call for agricultural innovation and modernization in African countries, writing "From Europe and North America to East Asia and Latin America, agricultural advances have proved to be key precursors of industrial development and gains in living standards." Kagame and Amoako also discuss the "pitfalls" of agricultural modernization, such as excess labor and environmental damage, that gets to the dispute between ecomodernists and George Monbiot in the Guardian a few weeks ago. Fortunately, it seems African leaders are more optimistic about their ability navigate that "long and complex process" than Mr. Monbiot. 

 


Greater Expectations
The New Geopolitics of Climate Change

Gayathri Vaidyanathan has a spectacular piece of reporting out of India. Vaidyanathan documents the tension between grid and off-grid energy in India, highlighting a story in Dharnai that I blogged about last year. Even as off-grid technologies have gotten cheaper, the grid remains the most coveted form of electricity access in India: Vaidyanathan reports Dharnai citizens chanting "We want real electricity, not fake electricity!" 


 Worse Than Fossil Fuels
Why Bioenergy is Not Green
There appears to be a bit of an environmentalist tide turning against bioenergy, which has a far higher land footprint than any other form of energy. In January, the World Resources Institute came out strong against bioenergy, finding that renewable biomass and biofuels rarely contribute to carbon reduction goals once land use change is taken into account. There's also this great ongoing series at Climate Central called Pulp Fiction.Breakthrough's own Marian Swain recently interviewed Tim Searchinger, Princeton professor and WRI Senior Fellow. One fascinating bit from that interview: We did a calculation that showed that even if you’re foolish enough to use the world’s most productive agricultural land in Brazil for solar PV, you’d still produce on the order of thirty times as much energy as you would get from sugarcane for biofuel. The lesson is, if you want to produce energy from solar radiation, cut out the middleman – a very bad middleman. Photosynthesis is the only way to make energy to feed ourselves, and the only way we can produce trees, but it’s a really lousy way to produce energy.I would only note that bioenergy is the unappealling-but-necessary wedge you have to include if you commit to a 100% renewables future, since intermittent wind and solar can't do it all.

 

 

 

 With G.M.O. Policies, Europe Turns Against Science
Mark Lynas for The New York Times

a deeper critique of ecoshitmodernism...

 

In this piece the ecomodernism views are in italics. Gus comment is in bold

 

You have to read this terrific op-ed by Rwandan President Paul Kagame and K Y Amoako, founder of the African Center for Economic Transformation. In their piece, the two call for agricultural innovation and modernization in African countries, writing "From Europe and North America to East Asia and Latin America, agricultural advances have proved to be key precursors of industrial development and gains in living standards." Kagame and Amoako also discuss the "pitfalls" of agricultural modernization, such as excess labor and environmental damage, that gets to the dispute between ecomodernists and George Monbiot in the Guardian a few weeks ago. 

The one thing that this tends to forget is the style of diet. I have claimed that take conflicts away from Africa and Africans can feed themselves easily at the local and greater society level without the need for over-industrialisation of food making.  Raw food making employs a lot of people too. Mechanise the whole lot and you are likely to create unemployment, social disparities and a new western diet convenient to the producers of western diet but definitely not to the locals. AND DESTROY A LOT OF ENVIRONMENTALLY SENSITIVE AREAS.

 


Greater Expectations
The New Geopolitics of Climate Change

Gayathri Vaidyanathan has a spectacular piece of reporting out of India. Vaidyanathan documents the tension between grid and off-grid energy in India, highlighting a story in Dharnai that I blogged about last year. Even as off-grid technologies have gotten cheaper, the grid remains the most coveted form of electricity access in India: Vaidyanathan reports Dharnai citizens chanting "We want real electricity, not fake electricity!" 

This is a big furphy. At the moment the capacity to produce electricity by clean means (no CO2 and no radioactive waste) can soon outgrow the demand. The major problem has been storage of electricity in times when the demand is low and production is high. To present us with "We want real electricity, not fake electricity" as if being on the grid is a status symbol is crap. There is no such thing as "fake electricity". As well because not much of it has been exposed in the past, but all fossil fuel and atomic energy supplies have been subsidised by government far more than the wind farms and solar energy. The fellow who supply the ecomodernism info has also written the glory of shale oil exploited as Coal Seam Gas...  Rubbish. As we know, CSG destroys water tables, creates subsidence and DOES NOT PROVIDE CO2 free combustion. 


Worse Than Fossil Fuels
Why Bioenergy is Not Green
There appears to be a bit of an environmentalist tide turning against bioenergy, which has a far higher land footprint than any other form of energy. In January, the World Resources Institute came out strong against bioenergy, finding that renewable biomass and biofuels rarely contribute to carbon reduction goals once land use change is taken into account. There's also this great ongoing series at Climate Central called Pulp Fiction.Breakthrough's own Marian Swain recently interviewed Tim Searchinger, Princeton professor and WRI Senior Fellow. One fascinating bit from that interview: We did a calculation that showed that even if you’re foolish enough to use the world’s most productive agricultural land in Brazil for solar PV, you’d still produce on the order of thirty times as much energy as you would get from sugarcane for biofuel. The lesson is, if you want to produce energy from solar radiation, cut out the middleman – a very bad middleman. Photosynthesis is the only way to make energy to feed ourselves, and the only way we can produce trees, but it’s a really lousy way to produce energy.I would only note that bioenergy is the unappealling-but-necessary wedge you have to include if you commit to a 100% renewables future, since intermittent wind and solar can't do it all.

Bio-fuels are only a stop gap solution to the usage of fossil fuel. Our transport mechanism rely on COMBUSTION. This is why it's called the combustion engine. Electric cars are coming onto the market, but yet again the technology of electricity storage is slowly developing. Engines should able to run on bio-fuels only. The show MYTHBUSTERS did a comparison and showed that there was no difference between performance. Burning only bio-fuel is cleaner still. The only problem is the longevity of engines. Alcohol is a dry non-lubricant fuel and can wear an engine quickly. Add a small quantity of high burning point bio-oil to it and the problem is solved. We used to in model aeroplane engines and it's the case in what they call the "top-alcohol" dragsters... though they might use synthetic oil. We used castor oil...

And bio-fuels are very close to being CARBON-NEUTRAL. see also: octane, alcohol, petrol, toluene plus the smell of oil rags and of doing donuts...  
 
With G.M.O. Policies, Europe Turns Against Science
Mark Lynas for The New York Times

Read my other blogs on this subject. GMOs are bad for the environment. bad, BAD, BAD...

 

more shit from the ecomodernists...

 

Despite the anti-capitalist rhetoric of green-left writers like Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben, and the anti-corporate street protests of environmental NGOs, could it be that their small-is-beautiful, degrowth, localist, organic, anti-GMO and anti-nuclear approach to solving climate change and biodiversity loss is in fact working in service of neoliberalism (while not even doing much to help the planet either)?

Ever since The Population Bomb, the 1968 bestseller by serial-Chicken-Little and anti-natalist Paul Ehrlich, warning that four billion would die of starvation by the end of the 1980s, and the Club of Rome’s 1972 report Limits to Growth that predicted civilizational “overshoot and collapse” within decades, neo-Malthusians have been telling us we need to degrow the economy and retreat from a Western, consumerist, high-technology, unsustainable way of life, or else Hobbesian doom is all but a fortnight away.

Updated for the era of the genuinely exacting challenge of global warming and biodiversity loss, a retreat from economic growth is argued to be necessary today because “We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet”.

Yet all this talk of “we” in the developed world (or, as some hair-shirt wags put it, we in the over-developed world), of “our” overconsumption, of an undifferentiated mass of big spenders, ignores the billowingly large class differences that exist in the global north and the decades-long bludgeoning of workers’ standard of living.

Throughout the post-war period of powerful trade unions, full employment and a strong welfare state that the French nostalgically call Les Trente Glorieuses, workers’ pay across the West rose in tandem with growth. But since that time, wages and benefits have stagnated or declined in most sectors. If the median US household income had kept pace with the broader economy since 1970, it would now be $92,000 instead of $50,000. 

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2015/nov/04/why-eco-austerity-wont-save-us-from-climate-change?CMP=share_btn_tw

 

I know that the Guardian is a broad church of opinions but the eco-modernist crowd is basically a subtle bastion of the indefensible consumption. Here, with the ecomodernist movement, consumption is wrapped up in a comdomic improvement while the planet is being raped, for profit by a few.

When the author mentions the pace of broader economy since 1970, the average wage would now be $92,000 instead of $50,000, one should be alerted that the difference, a cool $42,000 is mostly being pocketed by the one percent at the top of the pyramid, while this translates as millions for the top one percent of the one per cent. No wonder they try to con you with some ecomodernist economic shittic improvements to LURE YOU AWAY FROM proper GREEN ECOLOGICAL VENTURES.

Ecomodernism is a first class con. Monbiot saw this early in the piece and the agenda has not changed. 

See toon at top...

 

the dark side of industries at work...

This so-called Ecomodernism has not a skerrick of eco in it... After a careful study of its enterprises by Gus, Gus can report that Ecomodernism is seriously financed by the nuclear industry, the GMO industry, the coal comfort industry, some cash from petroleum companies and other crap designed to make you feel comfortable while you're going to boil and eat shit. 

They (the masters and string-pullers of Ecomodernism) also finance some "university" research outfits, not too dissimilar to the one we rejected with Lomborg in Australia. One of such universities is the Cornell University in California which goes full bore on the GMO "with impartiality". Of note is the Bill gates foundation $5.6 million towards the Cornell Alliance (alliance with Big Bux Indutry) that the Cornell Alliance calls a mere drop in the ocean of the group’s pro-GMO “philanthropy”. 

Their aim is to show that organic farming is useless, uses more water than GMO and that their GMO goat's milk will cure ingrown toenails. They have videos to show progress towards this amazing feat.

At first I thought my cartoon was a bit strong considering the graphics of Ecomodernism looked like they were about to do green things... No way. It's all darkish. 

Ecomodernism is about repackaging all the crap we're trying to slow down and get rid off, because it's DESTROYING THE NATURE of this planet. 

MY CARTOON at top IS 100 per cent SATIRICAL. Satire being a deceptive format that tells the truth. Nothing but the truth.

 

Ecomodernism should be disbanded forthwith and ALL media organisation should recognise the sly shifty deceitful construct of this outfit. You have been warned.

reclaiming the divine?...

Ecomodernism as the politics of theological optimism

Ecomodernism, the pro-human environmental movement which led Clive Hamilton to begin this exchange, has a distinctive way of gauging our alienation from nature. Contra Hamilton, who associates alienation with excessive detachment, ecomodernists associate alienation with excessive dependency - specifically, humanity's reliance on biomass as an energy source. As long as we need to fell trees to make and heat our homes or enslave and kill animals for transport, food and clothing, we have been unable to accord nature the respect it deserves - and in the process, we display our own fallen nature.

Such an "us versus them" attitude towards nature speaks to humanity's inability to rise above nature's own default mode of being. Thus, we engage in zero-sum struggles for resources. The sort of scarcity-based economics first advanced by Reverend Thomas Malthus and later generalized by Charles Darwin into a theory of natural selection has been based on a Hamilton-like pessimism vis-a-vis our prospects for overcoming this predicament. At most, we will be the supreme predatory animal for a brief moment in cosmic history.

Ecomodernism speaks unequivocally against this entire line of thought, and in so doing aims to reclaim our divine entitlement. 

read more if you want to pollute your brains: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/09/29/4321467.htm

-------------------

What a lot of codswallop... Steve Fuller has not understood that ecomordernism is the same shit as capitalism with a few greenery to hide the greedery. It's a bit like leaving the illusion of forest along a road with a few stands of trees, while the rest is plundered to the roots. Ecomodernism is a giant con. Read from top. 

the moneying of disasters...

This film explores the truly insane & disturbing world of ‘nature commodification’ in all its warped dystopian horror.

Witness men in suits tell us how much a fly is worth or how much unpaid bee-labour adds to the economy. Listen to them talk about the amazing investment opportunities in species-scarcity and show their portfolios of rare owls, turtles, butterflies etc. 

Did you know an entire banking system is evolving that deals with something even less real than fiat-money? That buys up land on which – allegedly – endangered creatures live and then sells the ‘credits’ it gives itself for ‘saving’ this land as offsets to other businesses – so they have what amounts to a licence to pollute and destroy?

You didn’t? Well it’s something of a well-kept open secret. Maybe because it’s not a business model that can survive close ethical or practical scrutiny. 

However it is also a cornerstone of the ‘Green industrial Revolution’, and the drive to allow corporations free rein to ‘save’ bankable wild spaces. This indeed was one of the barely-alluded to agendas behind the recent media panic over the allegedly ‘unprecedented’ burning of the Amazon (remember that?)

The idea is that big business can somehow ‘invest’ in species and habitats on the verge of extinction and thereby save them. 

There is so much wrong with this on so many levels that we can’t develop it here, but probably the major flaw is the obvious one that this business, like any other capitalist business, requires monopoly and scarcity. 

If the fly featured in this documentary managed to recover and populate other regions not owned by the corporation that currently ‘protects’ it, then that corporation loses its monopoly, and its commodity (the fly) loses value. 

The corporation has an incentive to keep this little creature frozen forever on the verge of extinction. A bankable little living fossil, already set apart from the truly living and integrated wild.

This ‘saving the planet’ model not only incentivises species and habitat scarcity, but equally incentivises the creation of new scarcities and even the promotion of fake ones. 

If crisis is your raison d’etre, how hard are you going to try to end that crisis? 

The subject of this movie feeds into the parallel issue of Green-washed climate-panic. Many of the same dangers and arguments apply. It’s a major crisis of our time, threatening both increased environmental degradation and massive loss of human freedom. 

The fact so few in the alt-media are waking up to this is considerable cause for concern.

 

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/11/04/watch-banking-nature/

 

 

Unfortunately we cannot stop the moneying of disasters... But GLOBAL WARMING IS READ AND ANTHROPOGENIC... THE DESTRCUTION OF SPECIES IS REAL AND ANTHROPOGENIC... We're approaching the top of a cliff at the end of a slope... MONEYED  or not... and we do not have an "insurance" which would be a virgin planet... Knowing human nature we would fuck this one up as well...

 

 

Read frrrrrrrrrrrom top.