How Science Is Telling Us All To Revolt by Naomi Klein

[Coyotl]

October 29, 2013 by New Statesman
How Science Is Telling Us All To Revolt
by Naomi Klein -- http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/29-4

In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.

But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).

What scientists and experts are saying, says Klein, is "that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules."

Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less."

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.

Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. .........

[haikugal]

1. He's right...

it's all we can do now...resist and hope we don't take every other living thing down with us.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

2. K&R

If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable. - Murray Bookchin

[Fantastic Anarchist]

6. Nice!

Be realistic, demand the impossible! ~ every anarchist alive

[gopiscrap]

3. Interesting article thanks!

[Egalitarian Thug]

4. As our world becomes more and more fragmented, this kind of dichotomy will

be more and more common.

The truly gifted and highly educated do their thing and present their results, but as the results make their way into the public sphere they become divorced from the comprehension required to understand them, so we end up in this scenario of hopeless morons running around declaring that facts will yield to their fantasy world of magical entities that will save us from ourselves.

[Scuba]

5. "... still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism ..."

[bemildred]

7. They would do well to listen to this guy. nt

[Quantess]

8. K & R

[marmar]

9. k/r

[HomerRamone]

10. kick

[dreamnightwind]

11. Kicking this, very important!

edited to add that this is a paragraph from the article in the OP, not my words, should have made that more clear.

But the truth is getting out anyway. The fact that the business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilising life on earth is no longer something we need to read about in scientific journals. The early signs are unfolding before our eyes. And increasing numbers of us are responding accordingly: blockading fracking activity in Balcombe; interfering with Arctic drilling preparations in Russian waters (at tremendous personal cost); taking tar sands operators to court for violating indigenous sovereignty; and countless other acts of resistance large and small. In Brad Werner’s computer model, this is the “friction” needed to slow down the forces of destabilisation; the great climate campaigner Bill McKibben calls it the “antibodies” rising up to fight the planet’s “spiking fever”.

[GliderGuider]

12. I'd love to believe that it's all capitalism's fault, and that changing the rules would fix it

But I don't.

Capitalism, like every other socio-economic-political system that humanity has deployed over the last 10,000 years and more has had a single, common goal. That goal is to be the most effective facilitator of human growth possible. Capitalism, socialism, fascism, monarchism, feudalism - they are all organizing systems whose common aim is growth. Whether it's growth in shared or concentrated wealth, growth in knowledge, growth in numbers or growth in power, successful organizing structures from universities to corporations and political bureaucracies have growth as their goal.

(As an aside, why are there so very few anarchies in the world today? Because they are not organized they can marshal less power than their erstwhile competitors, which are all structured, hierarchic systems. As any cyberneticist can tell you, organized structure is what gives a system the control it needs to manage the flow of power.)

The engine of all growth, at every scale from bacteria to nations, is energy. Systems that make more effective use of more energy tend to prevail over systems that are less effective. The fact that capitalism in all its various forms is the dominant organizing system in the world today is testimony to the fact that it prevails over all others through its effective deployment of massive amounts of energy.

This grim implication of this fact is that we can't "get rid of" capitalism or its excesses by simply changing the rules or opting out. Changing capitalism enough to make it a humane system would require everyone to use less energy - potentially much less energy. Changing the global system enough to slow down (not even to halt, just to slow) the destruction of the planet's atmosphere, geosphere, biosphere and oceans would require everyone to stop using almost 90% of the energy we use today: all the energy that comes from fossil fuels.

What would that shift require? No more motorized transportation, average salaries a mere tenth of what they are today, and the loss of virtually all the modern amenities we take for granted, from food availability to urban sanitation and medical care. No half measures, mere political resistance or even direct action will accomplish this change on the necessary scale.

How many of us, no matter how altruistic, would willingly choose such a future? I certainly would not. Would you? Out of the 7.2 billion people on the planet today, how many would would abandon all their dreams of a better future and in its stead choose for themselves and their descendants, lives of impoverishment, ill health and perpetually curtailed opportunity?

If we will not (or perhaps more to the point, cannot) make such a draconian choice, there is only one outcome I can see. We will make some changes that amount to nibbling around the edges of our predicament while not addressing its core - all the while hoping that the next tiny fix will turn the tide. This pursuit of business as usual with a few adjustments will simply delay the denouement of the human experience on planet Earth by a few years, or a few decades at best. Unfortunately, change always happens, and these changes that we cannot make voluntarily will eventually be forced upon us by changing climatic and social circumstances.

Given the eternal, obstinate optimism of human nature, we will not escape the cunning trap that we unwittingly laid for ourselves when we began cutting the trees to plant our food in straight rows.

I wish I could be more optimistic, but ten years of looking at every aspect of the unfolding crisis has left me face to face with this reality, and no place to hide. The only other option is the one that most of us will choose in one way or another: denial.

[malaise]

13. K & R

for truth

[mopinko]

14. grow your own food, if you can.

if you can find clean soil, or make it.
at least, i think this is kind of a radical and positive thing to do.

tune in, turn on, drop out.

[Coyotl]

15. Tune in, turn on to knowledge, and be proactive.

That "drop out" line has been twisted wrong too often. It should have been, tune in, turn on, and take over. Take over in the sense of controlling one's own life, voting with your actions in every sense, and being involved in your community and the world. Leary was a misdirected piped piper on the drop out front.

Harvested 20 pounds of tomatoes yesterday. Also, collected a lot of seeds from the garden.

[mopinko]

20. always sort of took it as 'drop out of the bullshit'

so i don't think we disagree.
we did a lot of seeds this year. really our primary concern.

[nashville_brook]

16. wow -- reading the whole thing now.

[Fantastic Anarchist]

17. Why isn't this kicked more?

I shall have to remedy that.

[polichick]

18. Excellent - k&r

[AverageJoe90]

19. It's a good article, but the radicalism shoulda been toned down just a bit, TBH.

One of my biggest quibbles however, is Kevin Anderson being portrayed as a leading climate scientist; he's not. He's actually on the fringes, known only in certain circles(ThinkProgress, for example). Here, let's pick apart the quote from the essay:

in developing emission scenarios scientists repeatedly and severely underplay the implications of their analyses. When it comes to avoiding a 2°C rise, “impossible” is translated into “difficult but doable”, whereas “urgent and radical” emerge as “challenging”

Y'know, the funny thing is, I haven't really seen all that much bonafide downplaying in recent years.....in fact, what I *have* seen is a few people *overblowing* the implications: i.e. a difficult but achievable scenario becomes "virtually impossible", and challenging and urgent becomes "we will be doomed if we don't stop NOW".....b

– all to appease the god of economics (or, more precisely, finance).

For example, to avoid exceeding the maximum rate of emission reduction dictated by economists, “impossibly” early peaks in emissions are assumed, together with naive notions about “big” engineering and the deployment rates of low-carbon infrastructure.

Which, btw, has been quite a bit more successful than anticipated in recent years, at least not when impeded by Big Fossil and their endless lines of lobbyists.

More disturbingly, as emissions budgets dwindle, so geoengineering is increasingly proposed to ensure that the diktat of economists remains unquestioned.

Not so much economists as crazies without a care in the world and corrupt oil industry officials.

But other than that, this Naomi Klein article does offer some interesting insights, so still giving it a K & R for that.

[caraher]

21. kicking

And what's this about Anderson being a "fringe" figure? Is the Tyndall Centre some little-known organzation of marginal respectability? I encourage DUers to do a little Googling to check Average Joe's assertions...

[me b zola]

22. K&R