Julien wrote:
> Mark, I don't know for sure about the USA but western Europe sure sucks A
> LOT less than, say, 60 years ago.
Things have not got better, they have got much worse. In 1945 European
society was in ruins, but the European environment was not. Huge potential
resources still existed. They do not exist now. It is not just oil and gas
which is depleted. The fisheries have collapsed. Topsoils are depleted and,
absent massive infusions of petrochemical based fertilisers and treatments,
agricultural production will collapse.
Water bodies are grossly polluted. Every living human contains DDT, dioxins,
hormone-analogues and a whole cocktail of pesticides and other poisons.
People talk about declining population as if demographic change was purely a
matter of choice and had nothing to do with the collapse in fertility, or
with the average fall of male sperm counts by almost 50% since 1945. These
are profound indicators that something is seriously wrong. It is more than
just a public health crisis: the potential for dieoff exists in Europe, and
not only in Russia and Africa (where it's already a fact). Human immune
systems have been insidiously attacked by enviornmental decay, but meanwhile
microbial resistance to antibiotics has created a profoundly dangerous
situation in our crowded cities, with the potential for pandemics. Collapse
of transport, food supply chains, and lack of energy for heating will
trigger outbreaks of uncontrollable disease. It is just no good enough to
repeat other mantras: 'it can never happen; science will find the answers'.
This is not economics, it is cargo-cultism, it is blind faith in witchcraft.
But witchcraft will not save us.
The future of Europe is bleak. Energy will have to come from the Caspian and
especially, the Russian Arctic north. The economic cost will be colossal (if
it can be done at all), but the environmental cost will be simply
incalculable, especially in the Arctic. In reality, there will be deepening
energy shortages and economic and social crises which will be worse than
anything in historical experience. Those who repeat mantras about growth are
part of the problem: their false promises are designed to reassure people
and stop them from being active. But only an activist, aware population
which can impose its demands on the power elites, can change things.
As for my remark about Venus, I presume you meant the suggestion that
runaway warming may lead to an atmosphere like that of Venus, where life
cannot exist. But I am not alone in fearing this: according to the New York
Times today, physicist Stephen Hawking has just predicted that runaway
warming may *already* by the unavoidable outcome of greenhouse gas emissions
and climate change. He, too, predicts the extinction of the human species.
There is no recent to be complacent.
Mark
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