2/12/2016

Anthropocene or Capitalocene

Spanish

John Kerry (after the failure of the climate summit in Paris): "We are sending a key message to the global market", "market already have a clear signal," El País, 12/13/2015.

James Hansen James Hansen (director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space the world most famous climate scientist): "The climate agreements is worth less than the paper they are written" "The Paris agreement is a fraud"

Abengoa, a world leader in renewable, presented the November 25, 2015, the largest suspension of payments of the ecomomic history of Spain, slumping the stock market.

Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows (2012): "The mistaken belief that to avoid heating we can still put a carbon tax here, a little there, some emissions trading here or a voluntary agreement there will not be enough. The long-term objectives (for example, 80% of CO2 in 2050) have no scientific basis. What governs future global temperatures and other adverse climate impacts are emissions of yesterday, today and in inmadiate the coming years "

Noam Chomsky : "The world we are creating for our grandchildren is bleak ... The level of destruction of species in the world today is about the level of sixty-five million years ago, when a large asteroid hit the Earth and had horrifying. ecological effects "" the same is happening now, except that now we are the asteroid "

Richard Smith: "The problem with capitalism is tha the economy can not be taken a ballot on and today, the huge decisions that affect us all, to other species, and even the fate of life on earth, are all still private decisions made by the boards of transnational monopoly corporations. "

Climate change go marching in



The May 10, 2013 scientists Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii announced that global emissions of CO2 had crossed the threshold of 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in millions of years, which means that we are fast approaching the dreaded tipping points (points of no return from which the process automatically feeds back) - subarctic tundra thawing or thaw and release of vast amounts of methane still frozen in the Arctic ocean floor -. CO2 Concentration has increased more than 40% over the past 200 years, with a increase trend between 2 and 2.5 ppm each year. So, despite all the climate summits (Kyoto, Copenhagen, Cancun, Cape Town, Doha and the last of Paris) and subsequent promises of restraint and the infamous CO2 market, the growth of emissions and concentrations weather has accelerated ( Keeling Curve).

The progress of CO2 concentration can be monitored on the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego website. There any one can observe how  we are marching with firm and decisive step toward disaster.

During the Pliocene, the geological age 3 to 5 million years before the present, there was a concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere above the 400 ppm. Recent studies estimate that the maximum concentration reached 415 ppm, with global temperatures reaching between 3-4 degrees above current temperatures. Sea level was between 5 to 40 meters higher than in present day. Actually sea level has not had time to so much due to the high inertia in the reaction of the oceans absorbing extra heat.

The report published in 2013 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC is an institution of conservative design, drawing attention only on aspects where there is more scientific consensus) estimates that global temperatures will rise between 1.8 and 4 degrees Celsius by mid-century; The report notes that more than 2 degrees, humans could lose the ability to take action to remedy or substantially mitigate climate change, after which we would have entered a "danger zone" where the climate could become unpredictable and consequences unforeseen  in large measure.

Global warming so far has been more or less linear. More CO2 = more warm. But according to the models with more consense among scientists, beyond the 2 ° C encrease, the level of uncertainty and the threat of global warming becomes uncontrollable due to crossing of successive thresholds (tipping points) as if we suddenly will put into operation hundreds of thousands of new coal-fired power plants. We do not know when we will come to this global turning point, but climate science today tells us that we are much closer to an increase of 2 ° C than it was thought when the limit was originally proposed.

Capitalism, a border civilization


The ecological and environmental disaster has been caused by a tiny and increasingly small minority of humans, the capitalist class, which has managed to impose on the entire planet a carcinogenic form of social organization based on a system of voracious appropriation designed to ensure all the power and concentrate the whole wealth in the hands of a small predatory elite.

Capitalist cancer has its origins in the mid-sixteenth century when it began to spread, from Holland and England across the globe. Originally no one wanted capitalism (abominatin of destruction, misery and inequality unparalleled since its earliest babbling) and in their own original countries found enormous resistance. Capitalism has prevailed and expanded by brute force, gunboat diplomacy, shock therapies, etc. But it has also improved its ideological arsenal (A. Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, M. Friedman, Jayek, etc.) to be justified as "natural" as something rational and in line with human nature. Her mutant ability has allowed it to dress up itself as "communist" in the USSR, China, etc.

Capitalism does not advance and has never advanced only from  the accumulation of capital gains extracted in the fully commodified  area under its control, but has advanced and has always expanded in leaps through successive phases of accumulation by appropriation. In fact the process of accumulation by appropriation of territory, natural resources, societies, etc., not yet commodified, is a fundamental and inherent spect of the system. Capitalism is a real free rider so that in each of their successive expansionist waves, frontier provided vast reserves of labor, food, energy and raw materials susceptible of appropriation without compensation. Accumulation by appropriation also involves outsourcing, without compensation, of waste and pollution beyond the border. But, free rider apropiation is so intrinsecally embedded in capitalism that if it fails,
the system collapses.

Capitalism System days as we have known it are numbered. Subsequent possibility of accumulation by appropriation of new border zones are being reduced to a minimum. The planet is not flat and infinite but spherical and finite. The remaining resources available are nearly exhausted or have been completely depleted. There remains almost any workforce whose  reproduction occurs outside the system (the latter were the 100 million Chinese peasants without papers -nongmingong - exploited by monopolistic multinationals ) and, moreover, the atmosphere, which has not turned out to be a  infinit dump, no longer supports more emissions and reacts with escalating violence.

But today, with most of humanity in poverty and about to trigger a climate holocaust, capitalism presents itself, through its embracing media control, such as the lesser evil who will avoid, for the moment, at least in the short term,an immediate disaster, and in any case, to guide and accompany us into the abyss.

Capitalist dichotomy between man and nature


Engels (Dialectics of Nature).. "We must not presume too much of our human victories over nature. For each of such victories nature takes revenge on us. It is true that in every victory we obtain, in the first instance, the expected results, but in second and third instance, the effects are different, often unforeseen that cancel the first ... Nature is the foundation upon which we human beings, ourselves products of nature, have grown ... at every step it reminds us that in any way we rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, or as someone who stands "outside nature" but that with the flesh, blood and brain, we belong to nature and exist in his bosom. "

Kingsnorth (2011): "My feeling is that the environmental movement has been torpedoed himself with numbers. His obsession with climate change, and its insistence on considering it as an engineering challenge that must be overcome with technological solutions guided by the neutral look of science, has forced him to be integrated into a ghetto that can never escape. Most environmentalists now spend their time discussing whether they prefer wind farms or batteries tidal turbines or nuclear power to carbon sequestration. They even offer very refined predictions of what will happen if you do or not do this or that, all based on figures collected from one or another "study" as if the world were a giant calculation sheet wich requires only to be balanced correctly."

Jason Hříbal: Animals of the working class

Capitalism considers the man nature relationship from a pure Cartesian approach. Man is in a box and nature is i nanother. Thus the capitalist homo economicus uses nature and exploits it unceremoniously. It is about toconsider nature as an external object capable of being mapped, measured and regulated, to put it all at the service of capital accumulation. Thus the issue of climate change is considered, even by many militant environmentalists, as an engineering challenge that has to be solved by quantifiable technological solutions.

No pre-capitalist social formation has approached things this way. Human beings have always felt part of the natural environment in which they lived except in capitalism, where the Cartesian dichotomy has reached gargantuan levels. Timothy W. Luke has published a book with a very explicit title: "The development of global accounting: making nature like a storable product, a service, and a system for ecological governance." And the tragic true is that botany, geology, geography and other geosciences are, in capitalism, not just "science" but above all, big business.

Anthropocene or Capitalocene



Geologists divide 4,500 million years of Earth history into a hierarchy of intervals (eons, eras, periods, epochs and ages) called the Geological Time Scale. We live in the Quaternary Period, the latest subdivision of the Cenozoic Era, which began 65 million years ago. The Quaternary in turn is divided into two epochs: the Pleistocene, which began 2.58 million years ago, and the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago and extends to the present.

The divisions are not arbitrary: they reflect significant changes in the prevailing conditions and forms of life on Earth. The Cenozoic Era is marked by the rise of mammals, after the mass extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic. The Pleistocene was marked by successive "ice ages". The last glacial retreat marks the beginning of the Holocene, which has been characterized as a stable, relatively warm weather.

The official boundaries of the eons, eras, periods and geological eras is defined by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. Every so often a new Chronostratigraphic International Table is published, an agreed list of the various geological periods . The geological age in which we find is the Holocene (which began only 11,700 years ago). The impacts of human actions on the planet in the last 300 years have been so profound that it can justify the definition of a new geological era of the earth, the Anthropocene (a term coined by Paul Crutzen, Nobel Prize for the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer). In fact it has been set a working group on the matter (which includes the Spanish Alejandro Cearreta) and has set the year 2016 to take a decision.

The definition of Anthropocene trys to link capitalism with homo sapiens. In this sense continues with pro-system theorists mania to equate humans with their homo economicus . The human species was able to manipulate and control the fire which started out its career as manipulative and agent of climate. When humanity lit his first dead tree, that could only lead, a million years later, to start burning millions of barrels of oil ..

The Anthropocene idea ​​trys to trivialize  that "humans" have created things that did not exist as synthetic mineral fibers, carbon fibers, plastics, concrete (that has spread on the surface of our planet at a speed of two million kilometers per year) , we have been able to burn about 200 million years of fossils, including coal, oil and gas, the that the digging for minerals and fossil fuels have drilled more than 50 million kilometers below the surface, etc.

Systematically, it is presented as responsible for climate change to antropozoico abuse "fossil fuels" as if closing a few coal plants we will solve the problem. The truth is that capitalism is not a phenomenon that begins with the steam engine and the industrial revolution 200 years ago, but a degenerative malformation  that began in mid-XVcentury  in Europe and increasingly expanded rapidly with bold strategies of world conquest and endless commodification. If you turn off some coal plants can perhaps slow down global warming for a few days; if we turn off, however, the social relations that gave rise to irrational growth and waste, it will stop forever.

The anthropocenic notion, in addition of avoiding responsibility, includes the fallacy of attributing the system the ability to manipulate the climate and the environment at will by sequestration emissions systems or geo-engineering experiments (design of planetary techno-structures  for the reduction and removal of greenhouse gases).


Climate science, politics and discourse in general are constantly formulated according to the Anthropocene narrative: collective self-flagellation, recommending "consumers" to amend its consumer rules and other ideological tricks that only serve to mask the real driver, capital. The object is to naturalize and perpetuate a mode of production that is specific to a particular place and time. The classic strategy of ideological legitimation.

In addition, Anthropocene, excluding capitalist causality, fosters confusion and fallacy proposing responsibility no in terms of system, of class, but in geospatial terms, with countries or geographical areas more responsible than others, dividing the world between humans still have "the right to pollute and emit toxic gases" and others who no longer have so many "rights". In this line it is stated that it is logical that the Chinese pollute more since they have come later development (when in fact the Chinese environmental disaster has been managed and led by industrial outsourcing of the major Western monopolistic corporations). I doubt that Chinese workers are thinking in these terms, and taking into account that China is especially vulnerable to  Climate change. A sea level rise of about 25 m rwould educe the habitable area of ​​the river basins so that 250 million people would become inland refugees.

The new geological era in which we are living is not the Anthropocene but the Capitalocene, the age of capital (which has the advantage of naming the real culprit), the architect of enclosure of land, appropiation of communal lands, the commodification of life, colonialism, slavery, of irrational industrialization, the world wars, the atomic bomb, the cold war, the marketing and the planned obsolescence of production waste, irrational depletion resources, biogenetic manipulation, ozone depletion, exploitation and misery of their fellows to an inconceivable scale never experienced by any other species in the planet's history. Today, the largest and most representative portion of Capitalocene homo poor live a bad live in great misery in huge and unhealthy shanty slums without sewers and services of any kind. Almost half the world, more than 3 billion people subsist on less than $ 2.50 a day, 80% of humanity lives badly with less than $ 10 per day. These are numbers that qualify Capitalocene, not the Anthropocene.

http://monthlyreview.org/2015/09/01/when-did-the-anthropocene-beginand-why-does-it-matter/
It can be seen in the chart as acceleration from mid-1950 coincides with the beginning and the unstoppable deployment of monopoly globalization. During the short Capitalocene nuclear exterminism has always been a predictable outcome but it depends on a single button. The ozone hole has been reverse by changing the mix of  emissions that produced it. But with climate change occursthat there are too many switches to switch off and is inherent to the system not to turn them off, but conversely , to continue installing more and more to accumulate more and more capital.

¿Es posible la lucha contra el cambio climático en condiciones de capitalismo?


Nicholas Stern: "The problem of climate change involves a fundamental failure of markets: those who damage others by emitting greenhouse gases generally do not pay" ... and "climate change is the result of the major market fault  the world has ever seen. "

This is not a simple litle bug, but a tremendous failure of the market mechanism. But approach it mechanically as "fault" still implies the possibility of repair or tune the mechanism. Stern continues on this path. Thomas Friedman poses a future market for "green jobs" related to renewable energies, nuclear power plants and electric cars as "the next great engine of industrial growth" - the common perfect capitalist "win win" solution .

Globally, power plants fueled by fossil fuels generate only 17% of emissions of greenhouse gases, heating is responsible for 5%, other forms of fuel combustion represent 8.6%, industry 19%, transport 14.3%, 13.6% agriculture, changes in land use (mainly deforestation) 12.2%. Production of millions of electric cars instead of millions of cars with petrol engine, would not be less environmentally destructive and polluting, even if they were to run on solar energy.

James Jansen has proposed the creation of a system of "dividend-tax" per tonne of CO2 emitted to charge to corporations that peddle with fossil fuels. The tax should not to revert to government but directly to the entire population as dividends electronically transferred to the bank accounts of the beneficiaries. A tax of  $ 115 / mt would generate $ 670,000 million in dividends so that each resident in the United States would receive $ 3,000 a year.

The problem is that capitalism is a system governed by "market signals", a perverse system subject to the undemocratic planning of large private corporations.

The only way to stop climate change will impose a dramatic decline, and in some cases the total closure of industries, including whole sectors across the economy and across the globe - not only producers of fossil fuels, but all sectors that consume and produce emissions of greenhouse gases - cars, trucks, airplanes, airlines, shipping and cruise, construction, chemicals, plastics, synthetic fabrics, cosmetics, fibers and synthetic fabrics, synthetic fertilizers and animal fattening concentrated agribusiness. The vast majority - at least three-quarters - of all goods and services produced today simply do not need to be produced at all.

All these changes are not simple and require to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a production-oriented to what we need economy,  while preserving resources for future human generations and other species with which we share this planet.

We are entering the post-antibiotic era, where an infection after a scratch or through a catheter hospital could mean a death sentence. Increasing antimicrobial resistance is in many ways a more immediate threat to humanity even climate change. The reason: the refusal of the pharmaceutical monopolies to invest in antibiotics because they are not sufficiently profitable compared to medications for chronic diseases.

In all economic sectors, the set of things that are profitable is much smaller than the set of those useful. Capitalism limits what we produce only to those things that allow the accumulation of capital. Capitalism can offer only a shadow of the potential innovation  that socialism could undertake.

The alternative is to nationalize and socialize the big monopolistic corporations that are destroying the planet. Many would be simply closed, others thinned, and other converted. The alternative to capital has to be a combination of democratic planning and rationing. A collective democratic control over the economy to give priority to the needs of society, the environment, the other species and future generations. This requires concatenating national economic planning with world planing to organize the economy and redistribute the work and resources on a global scale.

The market will lose the role of first performer and go back to the humble and residual role it had played in the history of societies before the big capitalist aberration.


Links:

Jason Moore:
The Capitalocene Part I:
The_Capitalocene Part_II

Capitalism and the destruction of life on Earth

The Anthropocene Myth

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