Around
the mid-nineteenth century Marx said that philosophers had hitherto endeavoured
to understand the world; and that it was time to transform it. Seventeen
decades later, this idea screams in our ears.
Put
in another way: there is no solution to environmental problems within the
capitalist model.
Summary
1 – Introduction
2 – Environmental management by capitalists and their employees
3 – Climate change - causes and effects
a)
Ineluctable absence of human
interference cases
b)
Historical and current impacts of
capitalist development
c)
Environmental management as done by
multinationals and their employees
1 – Introduction
Humanity has, since its remotest times,
left marks on the planet. But they never, however, had the scale and depth of
present times. And the effects of this intervention are, today, shown to be
disastrous and extremely dangerous.
Studies on the subject abound and for
decades, in various societies, groups and institutions have emerged that point
to the damage caused by capitalism, although most of them treat capitalism as a
given, as something external and compatible with environmental changes. In
fact, even if there was no awareness of environmental changes, as has happened
up to fifty years ago, there are many reasons to promote the extinction of
capitalism and the fight against its pseudo-alternatives.
As the image below demonstrates, the
well-known neo-liberal capitalism, the "socially responsible"
capitalism – credible only for reasons of propaganda or faith – sustainable
capitalism or capitalism with a human face, has the same face, the same smell
and a lot of capacity and patience to persuade anyone who has the mind of a
child of less than five years age. Recently, in Davos, the moguls of capital assembled,
always open to using any
ideological mishmash so that everything remains the same.
ideological mishmash so that everything remains the same.
Capitalism corresponds to the
accumulation of capital, growing and unstoppable, marching from crisis to
crisis, from war to war, from destructing to constructing, or to construction
to be destroyed; with the necessary degree of destruction of human lives.
To accelerate this accumulation –
insufficient if based only upon the production of goods and services – the
capitalist system has developed the financial artifices that, through multiple
and linked speculative operations on commodities essential to Humanity, as well
as numerical fantasies, allow the generation of large capital gains. These
operations, which benefit from the necessary support of the globalized political
classes or the nation-states, generate a fragile dynamic, the halting of which
leads to ruinous reversals to financial capital itself, to enterprises
producing goods and services, where human beings are located and, in
particular, to the base, overwhelmingly composed of workers, ex-workers or
unemployed. The latter constitute the said majority of 99% of the Humanity[1]
which, on the other side, has the nefarious
1%, of bankers and speculators, holders of great wealth and the highest
strata of the political classes.
In this delusion, people are worth
little and are disposable, from work or life, whether they are anti-capitalist,
neutral or ignorant of what capitalism is; they are and will be victims
whenever this situation is favourable to the march of accumulation; and the permanently
inhabited areas (oecumene) as well as the atmosphere or the oceans, will be
treated the same.
No area of human life is
exempt from conditioning or being driven by capitalism; nothing and no one
today can escape its insane drift. Hence there is a huge danger for Humanity
(the current 7,200 million human beings) since the difficulties, the poverty,
the social deconstructions and the conflicts are immense; disasters that will
not diminish if human
population reaches 9,600 million within thirty years. This despite it being
known, given today's technologies, that the planet can guarantee decent living
conditions for 12,000 million, according to UNESCO calculations from 1999.
Symbolically, the question is: the stock market or your life.
In this context, all the piecemeal,
segmented, approaches to reality fall short, as has been said recently,
and their integration, the generation of synergies, is necessary, setting
outside, as declared enemies, capitalists and the political classes, which are managers
– factually or potentially – of the State’s apparatuses, and whose functions
are to flatten the ground for the attainment of accumulation of capital, and the vigilance or pitiless repression in order to
subdue the crowd.
2 – Environmental management by
capitalists and their employees
Capital accumulation causes collateral
damages such as the production of more or less toxic waste from homes,
factories or hospitals; but always in increasing amounts and with more
complicated and expensive management. Lethal waste from nuclear power plants is
prone to take 10,000 years to disappear; meanwhile they drift around, pushed,
and relocated to unstructured and poor countries. Toxic gases circulate freely,
generated in power stations that burn oil or coal, or by the engines of
automobiles, trucks, boats or airplanes, instruments of the segmented
production inherent to the relocations, vital to generate higher rates of
profit, besides tourism. The integration of chemicals into human, animal, and
plant nutrition has poorly studied or under-estimated implications, but
increases business profitability. Abandoned waste from mines contaminates water
and soil. The essential logistics chains for the movement of goods from
anywhere to everywhere feed businesses, lower wages, living and working
conditions, in order to respond to a consumerism induced to generate profits,
and a fleeting well-being purchased on credit. The impacts resulting thereof in
aquifers, rivers and seas are evident. All this and more, because of a supreme
fixation on the abstract growth
(of GDP) which, in a more technical and political way, is translated into
accumulation of capital, to be later redistributed.
More media-appealing than pollution –
although this one is more palpable, visible, better known, and clearly
originated in the neglected human performance – are climate changes, with a
global scope, more immune to spatially restricted interventions or to the
isolated action of groups of people, state, national, regional or local
institutions; and, above all, there is no consensual acquis in the area of cause and effect relationships.
This global reality tends to be
monitored by governments or in international fora, where technicians,
scientists, NGOs, politicians, members or consultants hired by large
multinationals cross. The interference of States and multinationals guarantees
situations of bastardization and bias of experiences and conclusions drawn from
scientific works; having behind them reasons related to stupid nationalisms,
the fixation in subordination to the logic of profitability, value creation,
and profit-making, for the benefit of shareholders.
From this promiscuity a culture broth ensues
that is not aggressive and even cooperates with the action of those states and
multinationals. Within the logic of capitalism and armed with the absurd belief
that States and political classes exist to help peoples, there are groups that
focus on a mania inherent to capitalism – growth – as if admitting that once
the disease is cured the world will live in peace and eternal bliss... in
capitalism.
3 – Climate change - causes and effects
There is a great
diversity of views on climate change, its causes and the rhythm at which it is
happening. The IPCC - Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change points out the human causes as the most important, but there
are researchers who consider mostly natural causes. Everything points to the
need to consider a cross between human causes, on the one hand, with others, inherent
to the planet and its relation with the surrounding space.
Among
scientists, there is a need to address deficiencies in the measurement methods
used and/or weaknesses in the data collected. This justifies the commitment to
compilation of climate data for longer periods, in order to make the global
circulation model (GCM) more robust, with a search for greater consistency with
the results obtained through simulations.
Current
knowledge about the climate[2] is quite insufficient and uncertain. The main factors used
for this end are based on cycles of 3.36 years and 22.6 years, taken
independently and which, being very short, allow for proportionally large
variations.
The
first of these cycles is related to the ENSO - El Niño-Southern Oscillation
, which is based on the irregular variation of winds and the surface
temperature of the eastern Pacific, that affects the climate, mainly in the
tropical and subtropical areas, causing there high atmospheric pressures in
parallel with low pressures in Indonesia. These high pressures and heating
through the El Niño take turns with the cooling that accompanies La Niña, their
whole being called the Walker
circulation.
The
second cycle is related to the Hale sunspot cycle, that is to say, with
variations in sunspots, which are associated with strong magnetic fields and
whose cycles
are irregular, the possibility of predicting them and relating them with
the temperature of the Earth being very difficult. And this is in spite of it being
known that the Earth's magnetic field deflects a substantial part of the
radiation coming from the Sun.
Additionally, the effects that a millenarian cycle
resulting from the conjunction of the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn, and the specific
influence that, in addition to the Sun, enormous planetary masses – such as
those of the two planets – exert on the Earth can also be considered.
It is also known that the Earth has a slight
oscillatory movement relatively to the Sun, partially compensated by the
attraction of the Moon, and that this oscillation causes changes in
temperature, in a cycle estimated to last 41,000 years.
Volcanic
eruptions (see below) release CO2 into the atmosphere but that tends
to be absorbed by the rocks and included in the Earth's crust; and, within a span of millions of years, is melted into the magma of the Earth's
interior from which it returns to the atmosphere through volcanic eruptions. And, in this case, the negative human interference, with accelerated
deforestation and CO2 emissions through, namely, industrial activities
and transportation, in addition to the irrational use of the automobile, is
evident.
Those
pointing to the preponderance of non-human causes can establish three types of
reasons for this effect:
Ø Undoubted scientific calculations, some of which are truly applicable,
as mentioned before;
Ø As instruments of countries in an accelerated process of capitalist
development, anxious to recover from their historical backwardness in this
process, especially China and India (see below the energy consumption), covering
up their responsibilities behind nonhuman causes;
Ø And a third case, made of the articulation between the energy’s great multinationals
that, allied with the political classes
of their countries, try to hide their responsibilities behind the ineluctable
changes emanating from the planet itself and its positioning within the solar
system. This situation is, therefore, in all things similar to that stated in
the previous point.
a) Ineluctable absence of human interference cases
·
In 939/40 the Icelandic volcano Eldgja
had the largest known eruption in the last two millennia and caused a
particularly cold summer in the northern hemisphere; and this was used in
Iceland for the burial of the "ineffectual" pagan gods, favouring the
adoption of Christianity[3]. Its poisonous sulphur dioxide emissions were equivalent
to 33/78 million tons and are estimated to have caused a cooling of 0.7º/1.5o
on the northern hemisphere, making it the second coldest summer in 1500 years.
Reports of the
time, German, Irish, Arab, and Chinese, refer to very cold winters with frozen
rivers and lakes during the epoch following the eruption of the Eldgja; the Nile presented an abnormal low flow in reaction to the aerosol effect; there have been breaks in agricultural production, caused by the cold, with
run-away starving soldiers and peasants in Sicily, Italy, as well as in
present-day Benelux, Germany and parts of France and Switzerland, and also in
Baghdad and the Maghreb. In China, very bad agricultural years were followed by
floods caused by the upstream thawing that followed the extraordinary snowfalls. The spring/summer drought in the following years was particularly severe in
the Atlas, northern Alps and eastern China, where it is known that there were
many thousands of deaths (this topic is technically developed here).
·
More serious than that of the Eldgja was
the eruption of the Toba in Sumatra some 70,000 years ago – the most violent in
a two million years interval – that caused successive and cold winters (drops
of 10oC in the temperature) and the near extinction of the human
species.
·
The so-called Little Ice Age lasted from
the 13th to the 17th centuries, though there were still cold peaks in 1650,
1770 and 1850, apparently as a result of a breakdown of solar storms. At that
time, the Thames froze in 1607 (the first time) and 1814 (the last); in 1780
the ice allowed passage on foot between the islands of Manhattan and Staten, in
New York; and Iceland was surrounded by ice in 1695. In the fifteenth century,
there were no longer Scandinavians in Greenland, one of the causes being the
migration of the Inuit to the south, beset by cooling. Throughout this period
human causes with any expressiveness, can hardly be found. In 1783/4 another
Icelandic volcano – the Laki – caused a cooling of 1-2oC.
·
In 1883, Krakatoa’s brutal eruption
caused the lowering of the temperature (approximately 1ºC) for years, following
the dust and ash surrounding the Earth; and, in the immediate moment, generated
36,000 dead, with the noise of the explosion being heard 5,000 km away. After
some time (very small in geological terms), its effects dissipated and today,
after more than a century, only the memory remains.
·
In 2014 the Bandarbunga volcano in
Iceland began a six-month period of activity and emitted more pollutant gases –
sulphur dioxide – than the whole of Europe in three years. Already in 2010 the
Eyjafjallajökull had caused the closure for a week of the airspace of twenty
European countries, due to the emission of ashes; and therefore had more media
attention, since it affected the march of business... in the midst of the financial
market crisis.
· In the examples mentioned so far, there is always a demonstrable cause
for the known effects; when there are no such conspicuous elements, things are
much more complicated. Currently, calculations point to 140-year
cycles of great volcanic activity in Iceland, with the emission of toxic
gases that certainly impact the planet's temperature.
· Whether or not the regularity of 140-year cycles in volcanic activity is
true, volcanoes have been major active agents in the climate configuration,
causing warming with the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases;
or causing cooling by sending into the atmosphere ash and aerosol droplets that
reflect the sun's rays, preventing them from reaching the surface of the planet.
These
facts show a plan of causes-effects that until now have been leading to an
approximate return to the situation previously known; in fact, there has never
been a homogeneous variation of temperature for the planet. Any synthetic
measure of climate change is based on dispersed data in geographic space and
time, with the introduction of averages and deviations in statistical
forecasting models. However, any synthesis of these localized, crossed and
weighted data, each with high ranges of randomness, leads to another variable
which, being global, will reproduce a larger interval, where the parameter
chosen as an indicator of this synthesis will lie. This fallibility has led,
for example, that the catastrophic predictions, years ago, of experts such as
Lovelock have failure materialize.
b)
Historical and current impacts of
capitalist development (see the second part of this text, to be published)
·
Capitalist development, in particular after the
Industrial Revolution, took place in completely oblivious way to the impact of
the production of goods and services to the market (such as wars) and,
secondarily, to meeting peoples’ needs; a process which includes deforestation, a process that accounts for 30% of greenhouse gas emissions, as much as the
global transportation activity. And yet, the reduction of forest space continues, in
the name of progress; in Amazonia, for the production of soy or establishment
of pastures, a new impetus being expected with the Bolsonaro[4] government; and in Gabon or Borneo for the planting of palm trees
that will supply the "markets" with palm oil.
·
In the last century the planet has
warmed more vigorously due to industrialization, even in processes of
"democratic" distribution through relocation; as a result of the
growth of the circulation of vehicles of all the kinds of transport and to the
human activity in general. The forecasting models – with some inconsistency
margin, given the narrowness of the period of time concerning the collected
data – say that we should already have entered a new cooling era; however,
effects that are more related to warming continue to preponderate, resulting in
a higher incidence of hurricanes and droughts, with effects on animal and plant
life.
·
The shrinking of low-lying islands in
the Maldives or the Andaman, the effects on corals of the acidification of
marine waters, major environmental disasters such as the oil spills in the Gulf
of Mexico, the creation of uninhabitable areas in Chernobyl or Fukushima... will
have little relation with climatic oscillations inherent to the planet. Its
responsible lies not with the Earth but with the homo economicus, focused on the maximization of yields and profits
by time interval.
·
In Siberia, permafrost shows the effects
of the slight warming that is being felt and reminds us that a few millennia
ago – time, in geology and climatology has a different dimension from that
which so afflicts Papalagui[5] – there were mammoths in
Siberia, a river ran through Petra, Pasargadae or Persepolis were large cities
inserted in green areas, etc. In addition, there are clear cases of human
intervention such as the extinction of the lions in the Middle East, the
aurochs grazing in the Iberian Peninsula, the European monkeys, now reduced to
those resisting on the rocky cliffs of Gibraltar, in addition to the shameful
extinction of the Caribbean natives and of the Brazilian coast, the Eastern
USA...
c)
Environmental management as done by
multinationals and their employees
A third case is the covering of big multinationals
responsibilities in climate drift – in collusion with the political classes
linked to them – endorsing the causes of climate drift to the natural dynamics
of the planet itself and its positioning in the solar system. And to this
smokescreen, there is a strong contribution of the neoliberal theology, as we
shall further specify:
·
In the actions and positioning of the
political classes there is the presence of the induction of belief in their
virtues, in their commitment and sacrifice for the well-being of the people,
necessarily coming from free private initiative, the source of all Goodness. In
the political classes it
is appreciated that people are passive collaborators, taxpayers, voters,
compulsive consumers, debtors, spectators, and patriots but never
define their own destinies or take any initiative that dispenses with the
existence of the political class. Never ever!
·
Within these attitudes of states and
political classes is the logic that each person ought to individually seek
solutions to problems that are collective, within the scope of the ideological
and political directive decreed by Thatcher, in the early days of neoliberal
subversion – "there is no such thing as society". This tirade leads
to directly leaving to the sacrosanct private initiative those collective
problems of which the state exempts itself; or placed before individuals and
families that will directly support the costs of problem solving[6].
Thus,
anyone wanting to refuse plastic food will have to pay more for healthy food
because the said neoliberal State only wants the market to work, with a
"healthy" competition between plastic food and healthy food; it being
known that the first, less judicious in the choice of ingredients, with more
massive production and advertising-induced, will be the first choice[7].
The
use of solar energy at the domestic level is relegated to the competence and
will of the family nuclei, whose investment will be greater, because equipment
suppliers will be able to exploit the atomization of their customers to apply
higher prices; in the Portuguese case, without the State waiving the VAT
charge... at the maximum rate. The alternative is the use of majestic energy
supply companies which, although incorporating a share of renewable origin,
will be able to include in the invoice regular increases in prices, with the
VAT bond coupled, among other charges; those do not exist when families directly
capture the solar energy. Probably because the "raw material"
extracted from the sun is increasingly expensive…
·
The global discourse is not restricted
to wait with benevolence for the family initiative to emerge. But points to
each individual as the culprit of all evils; be it through the increase of the
public debt or deficit, lack of competitiveness, pollution, climate change,
through their small current and everyday actions. Who does not remember, in
Portugal, during the time of the troika, the speech of "we have
spent beyond our means"? The plural “we” is downright offensive to the
overwhelming majority of the population!
In
order to brush off this guilt (well contained in Christian eschatology),
families must re-equip their homes, replace the lamps and the car, buy food labelled
bio... which, by the way, is a more expensive alternative... all of which is in
blatant contrast with stagnant or shrinking incomes, in the name of crisis,
recurrent in political speeches. This applies to those the market considers to
be competitive and qualified (rich), as well as to those who are considered ear
marked to heavy and disqualified tasks (poor).
This
higher cost is, simultaneously, a punishment to those careless, polluting
individuals who do not invest enough in green technologies. This discourse on
energy-saving and healthy practices feeds more sophisticated
"markets" and more expensive goods and pushes into consumption and
indebtedness; which is by no means a contradiction. These solutions make the
industry and the financial system smile and have positive effects on GDP; how
convenient…
·
Far worse is something that the media
and the political classes are silent about, so that multinationals and large
energy companies can continue to pollute with impunity, avoiding technological
changes and investments that would impact the profits and value of their
shares. That is why it is good to know who has greater responsibility for
climate change[8].
o In 1988/2015 the CO2 emission was 833 Giga tons. Slightly more than all
the emissions between the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and 1988.
o In the same period that began in 1988, the 100 largest companies engaged
in fossil fuel production promoted 71% of industrial emissions of greenhouse
gases; and among them, 25 private companies, state companies or countries
accounted for 51% of the emissions. The top ten and their contributions are:
1
|
China (Coal)
|
14.32%
|
2
|
Saudi Arabian
Oil Company (Aramco)
|
4.50%
|
3
|
Gazprom OAO
|
3.91%
|
4
|
National
Iranian Oil Co
|
2.28%
|
5
|
ExxonMobil
Corp
|
1.98%
|
6
|
Coal India
|
1.87%
|
7
|
Petroleos
Mexicanos (Pemex)
|
1.87%
|
8
|
Russia (Coal)
|
1.86%
|
9
|
Royal Dutch
Shell PLC
|
1.67%
|
10
|
China National
Petroleum Corp (CNPC)
|
1.56%
|
o These data are not disclosed by the corporate media. The large global
and national institutions that manage energy production cannot be penalized –
with regulations and taxes – because they would reach the stock market’s
diffuse interests and the price levels of the already volatile oil market. They
are not only too big to fail but also untouchable, because a financial
crisis, of trust in the functioning of the capitalist system, is something that
the financial system, the very rich, the speculators and the political classes
do not want at all.
·
In parallel with the G20 summit in 2017,
a report was issued[9] revealing the role of States in supporting big capital,
contrary to the scholastic thinking that the State fulfils the satisfaction of
the common good. Well, this support for fossil fuels is four times higher than
that given to renewable energy, as you can see from this extract of published
data (annual average in 2013/15, in millions of dollars).
Clean Energies
(a)
|
Fossil energy
(b)
|
(b) / (a)
times
|
|
South Africa
|
229
|
352
|
1.5
|
Germany
|
2357
|
3461
|
1.5
|
Saudi Arabia.
|
13
|
1276
|
98.2
|
Australia
|
524
|
152
|
0.3
|
Brazil
|
1165
|
2985
|
2.6
|
Canada
|
171
|
2953
|
17.3
|
China
|
85
|
13532
|
159.2
|
South Korea
|
92
|
8907
|
96.8
|
USA
|
1271
|
6008
|
4.7
|
France
|
650
|
609
|
0.9
|
Great Britain
|
172
|
972
|
5.7
|
Italy
|
123
|
2149
|
17.5
|
Japan
|
2657
|
16466
|
6.2
|
Mexico
|
235
|
288
|
1.2
|
Russia
|
0
|
1092
|
-
|
Regarding multilateral financing through development
banks, the situation is less severe.
ADB (Africa)
|
132
|
166
|
1,3
|
ADB (Asia)
|
935
|
674
|
0,7
|
ERDB (Europe)
|
919
|
1012
|
1,1
|
EIB/BEI (Europe)
|
4011
|
3485
|
0,9
|
I-A DB
(Inter-Americ.)
|
532
|
151
|
0,3
|
The World Bank Group
|
2428
|
3228
|
1,3
|
And the global situation shows what we
have said above, that the financing of fossil energies is clearly preferred to
clean energies, with the high patronage of the political classes, managers of
the sanctified State.
Grand Total
|
18739
|
71781
|
3,8
|
“The problem of today’s world is that intelligent people are full of
doubts, and idiotic people are full of certainties” – Bertrand Russell
(to
be continued)
Soon, Capitalist delusion and climate drift - 2
This and other texts in:
http://grazia-tanta.blogspot.com/
http://www.slideshare.net/durgarrai/documents
https://pt.scribd.com/uploads
http://www.slideshare.net/durgarrai/documents
https://pt.scribd.com/uploads
[1] The marked and objective antagonism
between the 99% of humans and the 1% of large capitalists and the high levels
of the political class was popularized by the horizontal mass movement Occupy
Wall Street, in 2011.
[2] We closely follow the article
"Identification of the driving forces of climate change using the longest
instrumental temperature record" published in the renowned journal Nature,
assuming our limited knowledge in these scientific matters https://www.nature.com/articles/srep46091
[3] The new
gods, however, did not free the Icelanders from the catastrophic eruptions of
the Hekla in 1300; nor from the black plague in 1350; or from the imprisonment
of Reykjavik’s inhabitants, taken as slaves by Moorish pirates in the
seventeenth century...
[4] In the annual period beginning in August/2012 the
Amazon lost 5843 km2 of forest and the murdering of Indians already in
Bolsonaro consulate is not a good omen; neither for the environment nor for the
natives.
[5] Reference to the personage of the book Papalagui by Erich Scheurmann “… a collection of
speeches by a Samoan aborigine chief from Tiavéa on the island of Upolu, deals
with the speeches of a Tuiavii and describes his vision of the European in a
pre-World War I period ... Papalagui is a Samoan term that translated literally
means the one who pierced the sky, an allusion to the white man, or, the
European.” Adapted from the Wikipedia article (TN).
[6] Even if
the problems are real idiocy. Years ago, a well-known ecologist association
advised families to put out the small lights distributed throughout the
Christmas tree whenever they left home. The energy savings are... huge!
[7] In Portugal, the recent tax on sugary drinks has been aimed at obtaining
tax revenues tolerable by the plebs - and that the manufacturers will proceed
to include in the prices without any difficulty. However, anyone standing in
the supermarket queues still has at hand’s reach a bundle of treats, full of
sugar and dyes, to entice them, children in particular.
[8] According to “The Carbon Majors Database” –
Report 2017
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário