A paper published in Nature finds that the Earth system is in dire condition.
We propose [Earth system boundaries] for maintaining the resilience and stability of the Earth system (safe ESBs) and minimizing exposure to significant harm to humans from Earth system change (a necessary but not sufficient condition for justice). ... Seven of eight globally quantified safe and just ESBs ... are already exceeded.
This means that unless a timely transformation occurs, it is most likely that irreversible tipping points and widespread impacts on human well-being will be unavoidable. Avoiding that scenario is crucial if we want to secure a safe and just future for current and future generations.
Stan Cox notes that technology simply can't ensure that "safe and just" future.
In the quest for sufficient mineral resources to make green dreams come true, affluent societies will become more dependent on an even more technologically complex, even more physically vulnerable energy supply as they exploit the resources of the global South. Those promoting this quest are all too aware that we are bursting through our planet’s ecological and resource limits.
The alternative to a voracious, high-energy, self-sabotaging economy would be one that provides for just enough material production to equitably ensure a decent, satisfying life for all.
In coming decades, it will be essential that communities across the nation and world find a way to sustain a decent life amid ecological breakdown, in a future they themselves didn’t create.
Update (September 14): An article published in Science Advances finds that six of nine planetary boundaries have been exceeded and two others are heading the wrong way.
Johan Rockström:
We are in very bad shape. We show in this analysis that the planet is losing resilience and the patient is sick.
A paper published in Nature Communications notes that up to 43 percent of environmental impact is due to the top ten percent of income earners.
For over half a century, worldwide growth in affluence has continuously increased resource use and pollutant emissions far more rapidly than these have been reduced through better technology. The affluent citizens of the world are responsible for most environmental impacts and are central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions. We summarise the evidence and present possible solution approaches. Any transition towards sustainability can only be effective if far-reaching lifestyle changes complement technological advancements. However, existing societies, economies and cultures incite consumption expansion and the structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies inhibits necessary societal change.
Update (June 26): Stephen Corry reacts to the WWF message for "saving our planet", in particular the plans to "roll out the new green tech" and "stabilise the human population as low as we fairly can".
Who bears the real responsibility for doing "the damaging stuff"? After all, there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who live and die, often hungry, who are responsible for practically no pollution at all.
In other words, if you’re worried about overpopulation threatening the environment, then you’re blind to the real menace: It’s not the growing number of "have nots" in the South, but growing overconsumption by the "haves" in the North.
Corry notes that the fascist notion of "replacement theory" has been around for a long time and is more widespread than we realize.
If we really want to save the world, we have to fight against such a truly destructive message. My guess is that it’s a struggle which will never end, but like combatting bigotry, cruelty and disease, that’s no reason not to engage. Here’s the real choice: On the one side are billions of dollars, on the other, billions of lives.
The annual State of the Climate report shows 2017 to be the warmest non-El Nino year on record and either the second or third warmest overall. And still, Peter Gleick implores us not to give in to fatalism.
It’s too late to stop severe climate change – indeed we see it around us. But it is absolutely not too late to slow the rate of climate change. ... We can, and must, still act.
Update (August 4): Jem Bendell also continues to see a need for action in what he calls the Deep Adaptation Agenda.
Disruptive impacts from climate change are now inevitable. Geoengineering is likely to be ineffective or counter-productive. Therefore, the mainstream climate policy community now recognises the need to work much more on adaptation to the effects of climate change. That must now rapidly permeate the broader field of people engaged in sustainable development as practitioners, researchers and educators. In assessing how our approaches could evolve, we need to appreciate what kind of adaptation is possible. Recent research suggests that human societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress. Such disruptions include increased levels of malnutrition, starvation, disease, civil conflict and war – and will not avoid affluent nations.
Update (August 7): A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that even meeting the emissions reductions in the Paris Agreement still risks failing to hold warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Even that increase could trigger positive feedbacks.
A “Hothouse Earth” climate will in the long term stabilize at a global average of 4-5°C higher than pre-industrial temperatures with sea level 10-60 m higher than today.
Update (August 14): Manuel Garcia notices more headlines about forest fires.
Why this new overt and blaring mainstream news attention to climate change, a subject that was officially hush-hush, trivial and fake news so recently in the past? Obviously because climate change has begun costing big money to major sectors of American capitalism.
Update (August 20): In an interview with Chris Hedges, Adam Frank also warns of a coming hothouse.
Once you get the ball rolling down the hill. … This is the greatest fear. This is why we don’t want to go past 2 degrees [Celsius] of climate change. We’re scared that once you get past 2 degrees, the planet’s own internal mechanisms kick in. The population comes down like a stone. A complete collapse. You lose the civilization entirely.
We are climbing rapidly out of mankind's safe zone into new territory, and we have no idea if we can live in it.
Update (August 22): Robert Hunziker offers a quote from the PNAS study hinting that capitalism is incapable of solving the problem.
The present dominant socioeconomic system, however, is based on high-carbon economic growth and exploitative resource use. ... Incremental linear changes to the present socioeconomic system are not enough to stabilize the Earth System. Widespread, rapid, and fundamental transformations will likely be required to reduce the risk of crossing the threshold and locking in the Hothouse Earth pathway… We suggest that a deep transformation based on a fundamental reorientation of human values, equity, behavior, institutions, economies, and technologies is required.
Update (September 3): In his book, Light of the Stars, Adam Frank explains his reasoning for assuming technological civilizations have previously existed in the universe. He also presents the results of preliminary modeling for those civilizations encountering their own versions of climate change. The most frequent result was a massive dieoff before stabilization. Adaptation seems more manageable with a greatly reduced population, but what kind of civilization would be left isn't clear. A second result was stabilization after early adoption of low-impact energy technology. The last result was extinction even after later adoption of low-impact technology. Extinction may depend on things like climate sensitivity to new forcings. Of course, all the associated probabilities are unknown.
And a paper published in Science expects changes as large as those during the last glacial-to-interglacial transition.
[W]ithout major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, terrestrial ecosystems worldwide are at risk of major transformation, with accompanying disruption of ecosystem services and impacts on biodiversity.
Update (January 26, 2019): Robert Hunziker discusses a video from Jem Bendell.
Update (December 22, 2021): Marianne Apostolides argues Bendell undervalues new technology that could avoid the collapse of civilization.
[His] logical leap from catastrophic climate change to societal collapse betrays his stance against capitalism, which he has blamed for the climate crisis. Bendell denigrates mainstream adaptation efforts as "encouraging people to try harder to be nicer and better rather than coming together in solidarity to either undermine or overthrow a system that demands we participate in environmental degradation." By implication, those efforts — the unglamorous work of revamping infrastructure, engaging in urban and ecosystem planning, coordinating supply chains for food, water, and raw materials — are superficial, unlike the profound ethical and spiritual transformation that Deep Adaptation envisions. Societal collapse, in this worldview, becomes the event that triggers a creative reimaging of human civilization.
Blinded by utopian visions, Bendell seems to overlook the advancements, in science and technology and other realms, that are capable of upholding society. In sectors such as energy, water, materials science, and agriculture, basic science and innovative technology are spawning new realities that could stabilize societies, even amid horrific shifts in the natural world. Some of this technology, including large-scale nuclear fusion reactors and smaller nuclear batteries, will reduce carbon emissions. Other technologies, especially those developed with synthetic biology, may help us adapt to a warming planet by, for example, improving crop yields and revolutionizing manufacturing. By seizing a power once reserved for nature — the power to direct evolution — scientists can tackle some of the very problems humans have created through their consumption of fossil fuels.
None of these developments is a panacea. None will stop catastrophic climate change. None prefigure a world I want to live in. Yet they all refute the idea of societal collapse.
In the year since the death of Michael Brown and the protests that followed in Ferguson, Missouri, a poll from the Washington Post shows that 60 percent of Americans say the nation needs to continue making changes to give blacks and whites equal rights. That compares to 46 percent from a Pew Research Center poll prior to the Ferguson events.
Activism works. Inequality is a campaign issue (at least on the Democratic side). And as David Cay Johnston reminds us, it's about more than money:
It's also about education, environmental hazards, health and health care, incarceration, law enforcement, wage theft and policies that interfere with family life over multiple generations.
St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar told The Huffington Post it was “a shame that we haven’t had the political will before 2014” to look at the municipal courts. ..."[I]n areas that are not as affluent, and where folks really are struggling with issues of poverty and education and crime and everything else that goes along with it -- unemployment -- they don’t have the ability really to voice that opinion. They can’t leverage change. That’s a good thing that’s come out of all this.”
A shift in media behavior after a tragedy is not unusual, Sarah Oates, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, told The Huffington Post. Before Ferguson’s uprising, many media outlets tended to accept police accounts as fact. Now, reporters are asking why black communities are outraged with policing.
“What’s sad is it often takes a tragedy,” Oates said. “What happened in Ferguson wasn’t unusual -- which is awful, but true. The response was unusual, and the depth and breadth of the protests was unusual. And you could kind of see it coming from Trayvon Martin ... This rising awareness [about] race and unfairness, and this real question about what was really going on.”
Black Lives Matter activists frequently extend the conversation beyond police brutality to economic, academic and other forms of inequality.
“When we say Black Lives Matter, we are talking about the ways in which Black people are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity,” writes co-founder Alicia Garza on the movement’s website. “It is an acknowledgement [that] Black poverty and genocide is state violence.”
The death of yet another young, Black man at the hands of the police in Baltimore sparked protests which morphed into riots. As usual, a heap of unwarranted blame is placed on the victims.
This post originally appeared on Julia Blount's Facebook page.
Dear White America,
It is somewhat strange to address this to you, given that I strongly identify with many aspects of your culture and am half-white myself. Yet, today is another day you have forced me to decide what race I am — and, as always when you force me — I fall decidedly into “Person of Color.”
Every comment or post I have read today voicing some version of disdain for the people of Baltimore — “I can’t understand” or “They’re destroying their own community” or “Destruction of Property!” or “Thugs” — tells me that many of you are not listening. I am not asking you to condone or agree with violence. I just need you to listen. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to, but instead of forming an opinion or drawing a conclusion, please let me tell you what I hear:
I hear hopelessness
I hear oppression
I hear pain
I hear internalized oppression
I hear despair
I hear anger
I hear poverty
If you are not listening, not exposing yourself to unfamiliar perspectives, not watching videos, not engaging in conversation, then you are perpetuating white privilege and white supremacy. It is exactly your ability to not hear, to ignore the situation, that is a mark of your privilege. People of color cannot turn away. Race affects our lives every day. We must consider it all the time, not just when it is convenient.
As a person of color, even if you are privileged your whole life, as I have been, you cannot escape from the shade of your skin. Being a woman defines me; coming from a relatively affluent background defines me; my sexual orientation, my education, my family and my job define me. Other than being a woman, every single one of those distinctions gives me privilege in our society. Yet, even with all that privilege, people still treat me differently
For most of my childhood, I refused to allow race to be my most defining feature. I actually chose for most of my childhood to refuse race as my most defining feature. But I found that a very hard position to maintain, given the way the world interacts with me and the people I love. Because I have to worry about my brother and my cousins getting stopped by the police. Because people react to my wonderful, kind, intelligent father differently, depending on whether he’s wearing a suit or sweat pants. Race has defined the way I see the world like no other characteristic has.
This can be hard to understand, if you never experienced it firsthand. So again, for just one more moment, reserve your judgments and listen. This is what you might come to realize, if you spent your days in my skin.
In childhood: People regularly ask “What are you” instead of “Who are you?” This will not end, either. In high school, one kid even asks if you are “Mulatto,” which, according to some scholars, originally meant “little mule.”
A few years later: Go on a road trip with your mom. Refuse to get out of the car at a gas station in the boondocks, because you are sure the person with the Confederate flag bumper sticker is going to realize your white mother married a black man and hurt her (and you too, being the byproduct of said union). He’s carrying a rifle on a gun rack. Now even more terrifying.
As a teenager: Be the only person of color in the majority of your Advanced Placement classes, even though there are a decent number of brown and black people at your school. For years following 9/11, get “randomly” selected for the additional screening at the airport.
In college: People assume you got into Princeton because of affirmative action. They refuse to believe it could be because you are smart.
In adulthood: Your younger brother has been stopped in his own neighborhood — the neighborhood he has lived in all his life – and asked what he could possibly be doing there.
At your workplace: For two years in a row the NYPD shows up randomly at the school you work at, which has a 100 percent minority student body. The first time the police don’t even tell the school beforehand. The cops just show up early in the morning, set up a metal detector and X-ray scanner, and fill the cafeteria with dozens of policemen. As your young students file in in the morning, the NYPD scans them like they’re going through airport security right after 9/11. They confiscate cellphones, and pat some of students down, particularly the older-looking boys. As you watch this, you feel anger welling up in your chest and almost start to cry. You think, “Why are you treating my kids like criminals?!” Children are in tears. The screenings are not due to any specific threat, but rather as part of a “random screening program” — but one that never seems to make its way to the Upper East Side. White America’s children are told they can go to college, be anything. These students are treated like suspects. And that is exactly what society will tell your children one day, unless something changes.
Today, tomorrow, every day: White people around you refuse to talk about what is happening in this country. The silence is painful to experience.
These are my experiences. They have deeply affected who I am. And I am SO PRIVILEGED. Mine has been a decidedly easy life for a person of color in America. I try to conceptualize what it is like for my students who got wanded by the NYPD, my students who have been stopped and frisked, my students whose parents work multiple jobs, my students on free and reduced-price lunch, my students whom white adults move away from because they look “scary.”
I try, when I can, to listen to them, because only by validating their feelings can we begin to find a way to overcome the challenges they face. That doesn’t mean I let them off easy when they do something wrong. But I try to understand the why.
I don’t need you to validate anyone’s actions, but I need you to validate what black America is feeling. If you cannot understand how experiences like mine or my students’ would lead to hopelessness, pain, anger, and internalized oppression, you are still not listening. So listen. Listen with your heart.
If you got this far, thank you. By reading this, you have shown you are trying. Continue the conversation, ask questions, learn as much as you can, and choose to engage. Only by listening and engaging can we move forward.
A study by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University examines the evidence for four theories of American politics. Who has the most influence--average citizens, economic elites, mass-based interest groups, or business-oriented interest groups? It is probably not a surprise that elites and business groups have the most influence while the rest of us have essentially none.
Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
Update (April 26): Michael Lind discusses the Gilens/Page study.
Update (June 22): In a discussion on the relevance of Marx for today's politics, Sean McElwee argues that the political left needs to focus on the working class. He notes Gilens and Page observed that "[t]he preferences of average citizens are positively and fairly highly correlated, across issues, with the preferences of economic elites". And quotes Steinbeck: "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
Education and persuasion remain major components of the socialist project.
The implications of ideology are important and numerous. The left must not fall into the trap of believing that all Americans actually do share our views, but that a conspiracy of the wealthy, or the power of GOP framing, or the influence of money are preventing us from succeeding. To some extent, these things may indeed harm the left, but widespread ideology — the automatic assumption of capitalism’s unmitigated merit, for example — is just as big a problem. We must win the war of ideas before we can win the war of democracy.
Update (September 2): Sean McElwee reports on a paper by Larry Bartels that describes the governments of other "democratic" countries as being unresponsive to public opinion on social issues.
Update (December 4, 2015): A paper by Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright reports on a survey of wealthy individuals showing how their values and policy priorities differ from the general public.
We find that they are extremely active politically and that they are much more conservative than the American public as a whole with respect to important policies concerning taxation, economic regulation, and especially social welfare programs. Variation within this wealthy group suggests that the top one-tenth of 1 percent of wealthholders (people with $40 million or more in net worth) may tend to hold still more conservative views that are even more distinct from those of the general public. We suggest that these distinctive policy preferences may help account for why certain public policies in the United States appear to deviate from what the majority of US citizens wants the government to do. If this is so, it raises serious issues for democratic theory.
Update (December 17, 2018): A study from the University of California and Columbia University finds that staff for Republicans in Congress tend to overestimate how conservative constituents are.
This stunning misperception can largely be explained by the disproportionate attention lawmakers and their aides lavish on donors and special interest groups.
Update (April 5, 2014): There's an interesting juxtaposition between a recent Supreme Court ruling removing the donation cap to candidates in an election cycle and Republican efforts to restrict voting in the name of non-existent voter fraud. Jon Stewart made the point in "Donors Unchained". It is astonishing--rich people are "free" to spend millions of dollars on as many candidates as they choose, but a poor person better have their damn voter ID or they're not even going to be allowed to vote.
Update (May 12, 2014): Brad Friedman is hopeful that we've reach peak Republican "voter fraud" fraud.
Update (August 29, 2014): Justin Levitt of the Loyola University Law School uncovers a voter fraud rate of approximately 0.0000031 percent over a fourteen year period.
Update (July 27, 2015): Sean McElwee reports on research showing that the donor class is richer, whiter, and mostly male. Their disproportionate influence often works against the public interest. The solution is greater voter participation and public financing.
Update (July 17, 2020): Matthew Rozsa describes a study by L. Taylor Phillips and Brian S. Lowery.
[I]n the United States, people are conditioned to believe that we live in a meritocracy and to attribute success or failure primarily to one's talent and hard work. When members of the upper-middle or upper class are confronted with evidence that class privilege plays a major role in determining socioeconomic status, their self-regard is challenged. To maintain their sense of self-worth, they will exaggerate their own hardships or focus on the amount of work they do — even though class privilege does not preclude the reality of non-class related hardships and many people work very hard without achieving socioeconomic mobility.
Fortunately not all wealthy people are seek to justify their privilege.
A group of more than 80 self-described "millionaires for humanity" came together to urge governments across the globe to tax them and other ultra wealthy people to cover the immediate costs of the coronavirus pandemic and to build more equitable, just societies in the long term.
A letter is being circulated ahead of the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Governors meeting.
Today, we, the undersigned millionaires, ask our governments to raise taxes on people like us. Immediately. Substantially. Permanently.
