Will Civilization Collapse Because It’s Running Out of Oil?

Will Civilization Collapse Because It’s Running Out of Oil?

by | Aug 1, 2022 | ANALYSIS, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change

Editor’s note: Oil has been called the “master resource” of industrial civilization, because it facilitates almost every other economic activity and subsidizes almost every other form of extraction. Chainsaws, for example, run on gasoline; tractors run on diesel fuel; and 10 calories of fossil fuel energy (mostly oil) is used to produce 1 calorie of industrial food. From transportation to shipping, industrial production, plastics, construction, medicine, and beyond, industrial civilization is a culture of oil.

Richard Heinberg presents an interesting conundrum for us. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on peak oil, and understands the energy dynamics (such as EROI, energy density, transmission issues, and intermittency) that make a wholesale replacement of fossil fuels by “renewables” impossible. And while he understands the depths of ecological crisis, he is not biocentric.

This leads to our differences from Heinberg. While he calls for mass adoption of “renewables” as part of the Post Carbon Institute, we advocate for dismantling the industrial economy — including the so-called “renewables” industry — by whatever means are necessary to halt the ecological crisis.

Nonetheless, Heinberg is an expert on peak oil, and we share this article to update our readers on the latest information on that topic.

by Richard Heinberg / CommonDreams

 

Will civilization collapse because it’s running out of oil? That question was debated hotly almost 20 years ago; today, not so much. Judging by Google searches, interest in “peak oil” surged around 2003 (the year my book The Party’s Over was published), peaked around 2005, and drifted until around 2010 before dropping off dramatically.

Keeping most of the remaining oil in the ground will be a task of urgency and complexity, one that cannot be accomplished under a business-as-usual growth economy.

Well, civilization hasn’t imploded for lack of fuel—not yet, at least. Instead, oil has gotten more expensive and economic growth has slowed. “Tight oil” produced in the US with fracking technology came to the rescue, sort of. For a little while. This oil was costlier to extract than conventional oil, and production from individual wells declined rapidly, thus entailing one hell of a lot of drilling. During the past decade, frackers went deeply into debt as they poked tens of thousands of holes into Texas, North Dakota, and a few other states, sending US oil production soaring. Central banks helped out by keeping interest rates ultra-low and by injecting trillions of dollars into the economy. National petroleum output went up farther and faster than had ever happened anywhere before in the history of the oil industry.

Most environmentalists therefore tossed peak oil into their mental bin of “things we don’t need to worry about” as they focused laser-like on climate change. Mainstream energy analysts then and now assume that technology will continue to overcome resource limits in the immediate future, which is all that really seems to matter. Much of what is left of the peak oil discussion focuses on “peak demand”—i.e., the question of when electric cars will become so plentiful that we’ll no longer need so much gasoline.

Nevertheless, those who’ve engaged with the oil depletion literature have tended to come away with a few useful insights:

  • Energy is the basis of all aspects of human society.
  • Fossil fuels enabled a dramatic expansion of energy usable by humanity, in turn enabling unprecedented growth in human population, economic activity, and material consumption.
  • It takes energy to get energy, and the ratio of energy returned versus energy spent (energy return on investment, or EROI) has historically been extremely high for fossil fuels, as compared to previous energy sources.
  • Similar EROI values will be necessary for energy alternatives if we wish to maintain our complex, industrial way of life.
  • Depletion is as important a factor as pollution in assessing the sustainability of society.

Now a new research paper has arrived on the scene, authored by Jean Laherrère, Charles Hall, and Roger Bentley—all veterans of the peak oil debate, and all experts with many papers and books to their credit. As its title suggests (“How Much Oil Remains for the World to Produce? Comparing Assessment Methods, and Separating Fact from Fiction“), the paper mainly addresses the question of future oil production. But to get there, it explains why this is a difficult question to answer, and what are the best ways of approaching it. There are plenty of technical issues to geek out on, if that’s your thing. For example, energy analytics firm Rystad recently downgraded world oil reserves by about 9 percent (from 1,903 to 1,725 billion barrels), but the authors of the new research paper suggest that reserves estimates should be cut by a further 300 billion barrels due to long-standing over-reporting by OPEC countries. That’s a matter for debate, and readers will have to make up their own minds whether the authors make a convincing case.

For readers who just want the bottom line, here goes. The most sensible figure for the aggregate amount of producible “conventional oil” originally in place (what we’ve already burned, plus what could be burned in the future) is about 2,500 billion barrels. We’ve already extracted about half that amount. When this total quantity is plotted as a logistical curve over time, the peak of production occurs essentially now, give or take a very few years. Indeed, conventional oil started a production plateau in 2005 and is now declining. Conventional oil is essentially oil that can be extracted using traditional drilling methods and that can flow at surface temperature and pressure conditions naturally. If oil is defined more broadly to include unconventional sources like tight oil, tar sands, and extra-heavy oil, then possible future production volumes increase, but the likely peak doesn’t move very far forward in time. Production of tight oil can still grow in the Permian play in Texas and New Mexico, but will likely be falling by the end of the decade. Extra-heavy oil from Venezuela and tar sands from Canada won’t make much difference because they require a lot of energy for processing (i.e., their EROI is low); indeed, it’s unclear whether much of Venezuela’s enormous claimed Orinoco reserves will ever be extracted.

Of course, logistical curves are just ways of using math to describe trends, and trends can change. Will the decline of global oil production be gradual and smooth, like the mathematically generated curves in these experts’ charts? That depends partly on whether countries dramatically reduce fossil fuel usage in order to stave off catastrophic climate change. If the world gets serious about limiting global warming, then the downside of the curve can be made steeper through policies like carbon taxes. Keeping most of the remaining oil in the ground will be a task of urgency and complexity, one that cannot be accomplished under a business-as-usual growth economy. We’ll need energy for the energy transition (to build solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, heat pumps, electric cars, mass transit, etc.), and most of that energy, at least in the early stages of the transition, will have to come from fossil fuels. If oil, the most important of those fuels, will be supply-constrained, that adds to the complexity of managing investment and policy so as to minimize economic pain while pursuing long-range climate goals.

As a side issue, the authors note (as have others) that IPCC estimates of future carbon emissions under its business-as-usual scenario are unrealistic. We just don’t have enough economically extractable fossil fuels to make that worst-case scenario come true. However, even assuming a significant downgrade of reserves (and thus of projected emissions), burning all of the oil we have would greatly exceed emissions targets for averting climate catastrophe.

One factor potentially limiting future oil production not discussed in the new paper has to do with debt. Many observers of the past 15 years of fracking frenzy have pointed out that the industry’s ability to increase levels of oil production has depended on low interest rates, which enabled companies to produce oil now and pay the bills later. Now central banks are raising interest rates in an effort to fight inflation, which is largely the result of higher oil and gas prices. But hiking interest rates will only discourage oil companies from drilling. This could potentially trigger a self-reinforcing feedback loop of crashing production, soaring energy prices, higher interest rates, and debt defaults, which would likely cease only with a major economic crash. So, instead of a gentle energy descent, we might get what Ugo Bardi calls a “Seneca Cliff.”

So far, we are merely seeing crude and natural gas shortages, high energy prices, broken supply chains, and political upheaval. Energy challenges are now top of mind for policymakers and the public in a way that we haven’t seen since oil prices hit a record $147 barrel in 2008, when peak oil received some semblance of attention. But now we run the risk of underlying, irreversible supply constraints being lost in the noise of other, more immediate contributors to the supply and price shocks the world is experiencing—namely lingering effects from the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russian oil and gas, and far stricter demands for returns from domestic investors. Keeping the situation from devolving further will take more than just another fracking revolution, which bought us an extra decade of business-as-usual. This time, we’re going to have to start coming to terms with nature’s limits. That means shared sacrifice, cooperation, and belt tightening. It also means reckoning with our definitions of prosperity and progress, and getting down to the work of reconfiguring an economy that has become accustomed to (and all too comfortable with) fossil-fueled growth.

Richard Heinberg is a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and the author of fourteen books, including his most recent: “Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival”(2021). Previous books include: “Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy” (2016), “Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels” (2015), and “Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines“ (2010).

 

Photo by Chris LeBoutillier on Unsplash.

Even Common Species Are Experiencing Population Crashes

Even Common Species Are Experiencing Population Crashes

by | Jul 25, 2022 | ANALYSIS, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction

By Max Wilbert

Yesterday I met this juvenile red-shafted Northern Flicker in the high desert of Oregon.

Flickers are common, but like all life on Earth, they are in danger. Bird populations around the world are collapsing. Even “common” species like the American Robin have seen massive population declines because of habitat destruction, insect population collapse, housecats, and other human impacts.

Flickers are not safe. They face all these impacts. This tree is a Western Juniper, one of several Juniper species who are being clearcut en masse across Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, California, Wyoming, and Montana. Ironically, this is not for lumber or even firewood, but because of a misguided attempt at “restoration” of water cycles which have been harmed by overgrazing, overpumping, and more and more human impacts. People are arguing that cutting down the forest will mean more water available for humans. It’s insane.

These trees are also being cut down to supposedly help the Greater Sage-Grouse, another bird species which has lost 98% of it’s population. The Sage-Grouse is mostly being harmed by habitat destruction for ranching, mining, oil and gas exploration, urban sprawl, as well as increasing wildfires (about 90% of wildfires are caused by humans). Vast forests of native Juniper and Pinyon Pine trees, some of them hundreds of years old, are being cut down in the name of this “restoration.” The trees are being scapegoated, and the birds who rely on them will go as they do. Already, the Pinyon Jay (who are symbiotic with Pinyon Pine trees) is experiencing massive population crashes — more than 90% — as their forests are destroyed.

There are many other threats to Flickers. As I mentioned, insect populations are crashing, and they are the main food source for Flickers. Like Orca whales starving as salmon populations go extinct, the Flickers will go as the insects go.

Industrial civilization is driving a mass extermination of life, turning forests into fields into deserts, creating hundreds of oceanic dead zones in seas vacuumed of fish by vast trawlers, and destabilizing the climate. It’s a moral imperative for us to take action to stop this.

 

Photo by Sonika Agarwal on Unsplash

An Ecological Basis for the Right to Abortion

An Ecological Basis for the Right to Abortion

by | Jul 18, 2022 | ANALYSIS

By Will Falk

(I recognize that I am a man. I will never confront a decision about abortion. I am not trying to tell women what to do with the following. I am, however, humbly trying to offer an argument for enforcing women’s rights to full reproductive freedom that is rooted in neither political or religious ideology, but in ecological reality.)

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” – Aldo Leopod, A Sand County Almanac

The global economy – the system that brings most humans the basic necessities of life (food, water, clothing, shelter) – is based on, and would collapse very quickly without, the ever-growing consumption of non-renewable resources and the over-exploitation of renewable resources. Fossil fuel consumption is one example (though it is not by any means the only example). Most of the time when we think of fossil fuel consumption we think of tail-pipe emissions from personal automobiles because that is the most overt example of most individuals’ direct use of fossil fuels. But, fueling personal automobiles, of course, is only one way fossil fuels prop up the global economy.

Fossil fuels are essential to the global food supply, for example. The world’s topsoil is also essential to the global food supply and is another one of those non-renewable resources that the planet is rapidly running out of. Humans have postponed the worst effects of local and regional topsoil deficits through the use of fossil-fuel based fertilizers like nitrogen fixers. Fossil fuels are also essential for processes like transporting food from where it’s grown to places humans need that food, for the manufacture and operation of the machines needed to harvest crops supporting humans, etc.

We are depleting many nonrenewable resources like topsoil and fossil fuels at an intensifying pace. This consumption of resources is driven, if not primarily, at least significantly by a human population that is growing exponentially. Basic algebra teaches us that the infinite use of a finite resource, the ever-growing use of a non-renewable resource, leads to the total loss of that resource. In other words, topsoil, fossil fuels, and other non-renewables we are currently losing will not be replaced. (Topsoil takes thousands of years to regenerate. Perhaps it will regenerate in several millennia but that doesn’t help creatures alive and suffering on earth today or for the next several millennia. It certainly doesn’t help any unborn children for the next few thousand years.)

Human population has doubled since 1968 and has grown by 40% since 1987. It appears that human population growth might have slowed from 2% per year for the last 50 years to around 1% per year in recent years. However, all that means is the rate of growth is slowing. It does not mean human population is decreasing.

There’s another aspect to the problem. The rate of resource consumption similarly appears to be increasing. Many mainstream studies estimate that while human population doubled in the last half-century, resource consumption quadrupled. So, each human today, on average, is using 4 times the amount of resources that each human was using in 1970. Right now there are more and more humans using more and more of the natural world that can never be replaced.

This reality means that humans who follow us (the population of which will only be made larger by making it more difficult for women to access abortions) will not only be part of a much larger population, those humans will use more resources than they are today – all while there will be less and less of those resources available.

A primary argument offered by anti-abortionists revolves around the right of a fetus to life. I should note that I am uncomfortable with the distinctions and hierarchies of life that many humans use to justify their position on abortion one way or the other. To me, this argument gets too close to arguments about why animals and other creatures should or should not have rights based on how closely they resemble adult humans. It gets too close to the arguments made by human supremacists seeking to justify the destruction of the natural world because, for them, only humans are truly alive.

So, I’ll take it as a given that a fetus is alive, a person even. Anti-abortionists then argue that a mother’s right to an abortion should not trump a fetus’ right to live. This of course ignores the danger pregnancy threatens a mother’s life with, too.

However, I’ll set that argument aside too because ecological reality undermines the anti-abortionist argument about a fetus’ right to life on its own terms. How?

Quite simply, the vast majority of humans alive today (and the vast majority of unborn fetuses that are not aborted tomorrow) survive by stealing from the future. The laws of ecology which are as immutable as the laws of physics illustrate how this is true.

Generally, whenever a population of any species overshoots the carrying capacity of that species’ habitat, a crash always follows. It is not a question of if a crash will follow, it is only a question of when. And, to make matters worse, when the carrying capacity of a certain habitat is overshot, carrying capacity is permanently eroded. The longer a population exists in overshoot, the more carrying capacity is destroyed. The inevitable crash happens. And, the population, whenever it stabilizes, will be far less than the carrying capacity that existed prior to overshoot.

Ecologists and other scientists have known for decades that human population has overshot Earth’s carrying capacity for humans. The Earth’s carrying capacity for humans is the maximum population of humans which the Earth can support indefinitely. Overshoot is the condition of having exceeded for the time being the permanent carrying capacity of Earth. Human overshoot has created a carrying capacity deficit, a condition where the Earth’s permanent ability to support human life is less than the quantity of humans already in existence. The Earth’s carrying capacity for humans has been temporarily extended by drawdown. Drawdown has been achieved by extracting resources necessary for human life that cannot be replaced. This drawdown will lead to a crash and a permanent carrying capacity deficit.

The harsh truth, for humans alive today, is that a population crash is coming. Meanwhile, more and more humans are being born who will depend on, and contribute to, the permanent destruction of resources that future humans require. These humans are more likely than we are to experience the horrors of that population crash. How horrific will that crash be? Mainstream estimates of the Earth’s carrying capacity for humans often range in the hundreds of millions. There are nearly 8 billion humans alive today. The die-off will likely be massive. 

The vast majority of humans alive and/or born today are quite literally stealing from the future. The vast majority of human fetuses that survive today are quite literally ensuring that many human fetuses in the future will not even have the opportunity to survive.

Ecological reality, therefore, undermines the argument that abortion infringes on the rights of unborn children because most children born today (especially in developed countries like the US) will consume and permanently destroy resources that future unborn children desperately need. Indeed, in industrialized countries most children born today reduce the number of children that can be supported in the future. Therefore, enforcing an unborn fetus’ right to life today comes at the costs of unborn fetuses right to life tomorrow.

Epilogue: My argument here focuses on effects to humans because I know most humans only care about humans. But, a biophilic reader, while reading my arguments, could (and should) point out that humans are destroying the Earth’s carrying capacity for everyone else we share this beautiful planet with. Right now, industrial humans aren’t just destroying countless other-than-human lives and species, industrial humans are rapidly destroying the very possibility that those creatures can exist in the future.

Author of How Dams Fall Will Falk is a biophilic essayist, poet, and lawyer. The natural world speaks, but rarely in English. Wind and water, soil and stone, fin, fur, and feather are only a few dialects. Will’s work is how he listens.

 

Mary Lou Singleton on Roe v. Wade, the abortion debate, and how we got here

Banner image: “Child Labor: Breaker Boys, Pittston, PA, USA, 1911.” by Kelly Short6 is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Derrick Jensen: “Civilization is Not—and Can Never Be—Sustainable”

Derrick Jensen: “Civilization is Not—and Can Never Be—Sustainable”

by | Jul 15, 2022 | ANALYSIS

Editor’s note: This excerpt comes from the book Endgame by Derrick Jensen, a two-volume book consisting of Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization and Volume 2: Resistance. These premises serve as a starting point for Endgame and are explored in detail in the book, which may be Jensen’s magnum opus. If you are confused by these premises, we highly recommend reading the book. See here for a definition of civilization.

PREMISE ONE: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.

PREMISE TWO: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities.

PREMISE THREE: Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.

PREMISE FOUR: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

PREMISE FIVE: The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.

PREMISE SIX : Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the  planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.

PREMISE SEVEN: The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier the crash will be, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.

PREMISE EIGHT: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.

Another way to put Premise Eight: Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and stupid. Sustainability, morality, and intelligence (as well as justice) require the dismantling of any such economic or social system, or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.

PREMISE NINE: Although there will clearly someday be far fewer humans than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in population may occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some will be characterized by extreme violence and privation: nuclear Armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a continuation of overshoot, followed by a crash. Other ways could be characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default of our culture. Yet some ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would con- sist of decreasing the current levels of violence—required and caused by the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich—and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps long- term shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament and what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.

PREMISE TEN: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.

PREMISE ELEVEN: From the beginning, this culture—civilization—has been a culture of occupation.

PREMISE TWELVE: There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.

PREMISE THIRTEEN: Those in power rule by force, and the sooner we break ourselves of illusions to the contrary, the sooner we can at least begin to make reasonable decisions about whether, when, and how we are going to resist.

PREMISE FOURTEEN: From birth on—and probably from conception, but I’m not sure how I’d make the case—we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate our- selves. If we did not hate the world, we could not allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. If we did not hate ourselves, we could not allow our homes—and our bodies—to be poisoned.

PREMISE FIFTEEN: Love does not imply pacifism.

PREMISE SIXTEEN: The material world is primary.This does not mean that the spirit does not exist, nor that the material world is all there is. It means that spirit mixes with flesh. It means also that real world actions have real world consequences. It means we cannot rely on Jesus, Santa Claus, the Great Mother, or even the Easter Bunny to get us out of this mess. It means this mess really is a mess, and not just the movement of God’s eyebrows. It means we have to face this mess ourselves. It means that for the time we are here on Earth—whether or not we end up somewhere else after we die, and whether we are condemned or privileged to live here—the Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything. It is silly to think or act or be as though this world is not real and primary. It is silly and pathetic to not live our lives as though our lives are real.

PREMISE SEVENTEEN: It is a mistake (or more likely, denial) to base our decisions on whether actions arising from them will or won’t frighten fence-sitters, or the mass of Americans.

PREMISE EIGHTEEN: Our current sense of self is no more sustainable than our current use of energy or technology.

PREMISE NINETEEN: The culture’s problem lies above all in the belief that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable.

PREMISE TWENTY: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.

Modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the monetary fortunes of the decision-makers and those they serve.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the power of the decision-makers and those they serve.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are founded primarily (and often exclusively) on the almost entirely unexamined belief that the decision-makers and those they serve are entitled to magnify their power and/or financial fortunes at the expense of those below

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: If you dig to the heart of it—if there is any heart left—you will find that social decisions are determined primarily on the basis of how well these decisions serve the ends of controlling or destroying wild nature.

 

Combating Extinction Will Help Stop Global Warming

Combating Extinction Will Help Stop Global Warming

by | Jul 11, 2022 | ANALYSIS, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction

Editor’s note: The dominant global culture (“industrial civilization”) is built on resource extraction and forced conversion of habitat to exclusive human use, and this has serious consequences.

Both global warming and the ongoing mass extermination of life on the planet (which has been deemed “the sixth mass extinction”), as well as other ecological crises (aquifer depletion, toxification of the total environment, ecosystem collapse, oceanic dead zones, etc.) are symptoms of humanity’s broken relationship to the planet. In plain terms: this way of life is killing the planet.

Today’s article reminds us that these crises are deeply interlinked, and so are solutions. While we are a revolutionary organization, every small step in the right direction also matters. And as a biocentric organization, we are in favor of actions to protect the natural world rather than putting our faith in technological Bright Green Lies.

By Tara Lohan / The Revelator

Mass extinction lurks beneath the surface of the sea. That was the dire message from a study published in April in the journal Science, which found that continuing to emit greenhouse gases unchecked could trigger a mass die-off of ocean animals that rivals the worst extinction events in Earth’s history.

The findings serve as just the latest reminder that climate change and biodiversity loss are interconnected crises — even if they’re rarely addressed in tandem by policymakers.

Toward that point, the Science study came with a dose of hopeful news: Action to curb greenhouse gas emissions and keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius could cut that extinction risk by 70%.

Additional research published in Global Change Biology offers another encouraging finding. The study, by an international team of scientists, found that not only can we do better at addressing biodiversity issues — we can do it while also targeting climate change.

“Many instances of conservation actions intended to slow, halt or reverse biodiversity loss can simultaneously slow anthropogenic climate change,” the researchers wrote in the study.

Their work looked at 21 proposed action targets for biodiversity that will be the focus of this fall’s international convening of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Kunming, China — a meeting delayed two years by the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers found that two-thirds of those biodiversity targets also support climate change mitigation, even though they weren’t explicitly designed for that goal. The best opportunities to work on these crises together were actions to avoid deforestation and restore degraded ecosystems. Of particular focus, the study found, should be coastal ecosystems such as mangroves, seagrass and salt marshes, which can store large amounts of carbon and support a diversity of animals.

Mangrove GalapagosA pelican enjoys a perch in a mangrove stand in the Galapagos. Photo: Hans Johnson (CC BY 2.0)

Also important is restoring forests and woodlands, but doing so with native species is critical. Planting monocultures of nonnative trees won’t boost biodiversity, the researchers point out, despite such endeavors being incentivized as a climate change solution.

Another target is reducing runoff into rivers, lakes and coastal waters from excess nutrients — including nitrogen and phosphorus — that cause algal blooms and oxygen-depleted waters. This eutrophication, combined with warming, may increase greenhouse gas emissions in freshwater bodies, in addition to harming fish and other animals.

Expanding and connecting the network of protected areas is another mutualistic target. Globally, we’ve protected about 15% of land and 7% of marine habitats. But we need to bump those numbers up considerably. As the researchers behind the Global Change Biology study put it, “There is a substantial overlap of 92% between areas that require reversing biodiversity loss and the areas needing protection for enhancing carbon storage and drawdown.”

Working on these issues in tandem can help boost the benefits.

We’re also spending large sums of money in all the wrong places. The study lists the reduction or elimination of subsidies that are harmful to biodiversity and the climate as “one of the most important and urgent reforms.”

We spend 10 times more on subsidies for environmentally harmful practices than on biodiversity conservation, the researchers note. Brazil, for example, spends 88 times more on subsidizing activities linked to deforestation than on those that may help stop it.

Other target areas to boost biodiversity and climate work include recovering and conserving wild species; greening urban areas; eliminating overfishing; reducing food and agricultural waste; and shifting diets to include more plant-based foods and less meat and dairy.

And, the researchers say, we need to “mainstream” the issues together — embedding both climate and biodiversity targets and metrics into policy, business and consumer practices.

Understanding these issues should start early, too. A study of school curricula in 46 countries found that fewer than half addressed climate change, and a paltry one-fifth referenced biodiversity. Both these subjects should be covered more and integrated together, the researchers say.

It’s not possible, after all, to tackle one crisis without addressing the other.

To fight climate change, we need fully functioning ecosystems with healthy populations of native plants and animals.

“And climate change is damaging this capacity,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a study coauthor and climate researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. “Only when we succeed in drastically reducing emissions from fossil fuels can nature help us to stabilize the climate.”

Photo by Jon Butterworth on Unsplash

Globalization is Destroying the Planet

Globalization is Destroying the Planet

by | Jul 8, 2022 | ANALYSIS, The Problem: Civilization

Editor’s note: Globalization is the process of increasing global integration between countries and regions. This increased connectivity is largely driven by trade. Enabled by the explosion of fossil fuel use over the past 150 years, global trade networks have opened up previously inaccessible natural communities (“ecosystems”) to market pressure, which has vastly accelerated the ecological crisis.

Globalization is an atrocity for the living planet. Today, forests in the southeastern United States are ground into pellets and sent to Europe to be burned in “green” power plants. Mineral ores are ripped from the ground in South America and shipped to processing plants and factories in Southeast Asia. Nigerian oil fills Delhi streets with smog. And factories around the world produce endless streams of consumer goods to fill homes that have tripled in size over the last 50 years.

As the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) has stated, ““The neoliberal globalization of capitalism is based on exploitation, plunder, contempt and repression for those who resist it — in other words, the same as before, only now globalized.” And meanwhile, every indicator of ecological health—greenhouse gas emissions, oceanic dead zones, species extinctions, plastics in the ocean, overpopulation, urban sprawl, etc.—is heading in the wrong direction.

The following article focuses mainly on the human impacts of globalization, which are brutal and feed inequality. As the then-Prime Minister of Jamaica said in 1977, “We are condemned to poverty by the nature of the exchange. There is nowhere else to go except down.”

By Joseph Grosso / CounterPunch

It is perhaps a wonder that it was not until experiencing the fallout from a global pandemic, that most Americans were forced to read or hear the words ‘supply chain’ or ‘logistics.’ Surprising both because it is on these things that the basic essentials of modern life are dependent and because of the revolutionary changes in these arenas over the past generation. Yet with COVID still haunting the global economy, as of this writing China is only just emerging from the largest COVID lockdown since Wuhan, and with inflation at the highest it’s been in decades, uncertainty about supply chains lingers.

Over the past twelve months this uncertainty has assumed many forms. There have been reports of shutdowns of factories in Asia, with workers reluctant to return to their jobs, ships backed up by the dozen at American ports, a shortage of truck drivers, and exploding wealth for the likes of Jeff Bezos. Obviously, the immediate trigger to the crisis would appear to be a mix of COVID and as a result Americans greatly increasing their online shopping. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, e-commerce sales jumped nearly 32 percent in 2020, and 50.5 percent since 2019. Overall, online sales now account for 19 percent of retail. Given the $400 billion in government stimulus and much of the outdoor service economy locked down (i.e. restaurants, movies, sports events, etc.), Americans spent nearly $1 trillion more in goods in 2021 compared to pre-pandemic times. Hard to see any supply chain not getting strained. Still, in May 2022 only 11 percent of shipments from Asia arrived in North America on time, down from 59 percent in May 2020.

By the end of 2021 the cost of shipping from Asia to the west coast of the U.S. had risen 330 percent in one year. According to the Freightos Baltic Index, as of June 22ndthe average global price to ship a 40-foot container was $7261, down from a peak of over $11,000 in September 2021, but still five times higher than before the pandemic. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimated that higher shipping rates during the lockdown raised the inflation rate by 1.5 percent.

Step back further though and a fuller picture emerges, one featuring globalization, exploitation, and deindustrialization. It is no secret that the U.S. has lost millions of manufacturing jobs over the past generation- about 7.5 million since 1980. While automation has been a big factor in the decline, so has outsourcing and subcontracting. From 1970 to 2010 the number of manufacturing jobs in East Asia more than tripled from 31 million to 97 million. In the decade from 1997 to 2007 value of East Asian exports increased from $269 billion to nearly $1.5 trillion. Of course, the emergence of China as the world’s factory played a vital role. Foreign direct investment into China increased from $57 million in 1980 to $114.7 billion in 2010. Imports from China reached $506 billion in 2021 (with $151 billion in exports headed the other way, a trade deficit of $355 billion).  Imports from Vietnam have also exploded over the past two decades. In 2020, Vietnam was the 6th largest supplier of U.S. imports, up 21.2 percent from just 2019, and 436 percent from 2010. In a way, Vietnam has been the winner of the U.S. trade war with China. The U.S. trade deficit with Vietnam exploded nearly threefold to $90 billion since 2018 (as for the effectiveness of the U.S. tariffs: a good amount of the exports from Vietnam originate in Chinese-owned factories). Indonesia imports are up 23 percent since 2010.

Nothing exemplifies the supply chain crisis quite like the sight of cargo ships backed up by the dozens outside the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Containerships transport 90 percent of global trade and these two ports handle about 40 percent of U.S. imports. A ship from China takes 15-20 day journey to an American port. The process of turning a ship around from China to the U.S. typically takes around 60 days. The process is supposed to be timed for maximum efficiency, one ship in, one out. COVID fouled up the system. At peak chaos there were over 100 ships waiting to dock. If all the waiting containers had been laid out the line would actually have stretched from Los Angeles to Chicago. The turnover time increased to 100 days. Biden eventually ordered the ports to work 24/7 and some ships were diverted to other ports. Ships waiting outside the LA ports fell by half by the beginning of 2022, though this spring a dozen plus ships were often backed up at ports around the U.S. As of May nearly 20 percent of container vessels globally were still waiting outside congested ports, including hundreds in China.

In a perfectly surreal example of built-in absurdity, the price hike made a trip from Asia to the U.S. 20 times more expensive than a trip going the other way. Therefore through the pandemic there were reports of ships returning to Asia with many of their containers empty. The shippers have been rejecting U.S. agricultural exports. It is more profitable to simply return to Asia and refill there rather than wait for food to be loaded and carried back. This past holiday season, some of the largest U.S. retailers were chartering their own, smaller ships to get around the backlog, docking at smaller ports around the country. Of course, this option was beyond the great majority of U.S. businesses.

If such a picture brings to mind any notions of incompetence or inefficiency, from the perspective of the shipping industry these can be quickly cast aside. In 2021 global shipping earnings equaled the entire industry’s earnings from the previous decade. Last November, the Wall Street Journal ran an article titled ‘For Investors in Shipping, Payoff at last.’ The opening lines read: ‘Global supply-chain bottlenecks are creating headaches for retailers, delays for consumers- and big gains for financial firms that invested in container ships before the pandemic upended the logistics business.’

The emergence of COVID has not been the only recent cause of disruption for the shipping supply chain. On March 23, 2021, the 20,124 TEU containership Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Cancel (TEU stands for Twenty-Foot Equivalent Unit, meaning the number of standardized 20-feet containers a ship can carry). The shortest shipping route between Europe and Asia, up to 15 percent of global trade passes through the Suez Canal, including a million barrels of oil a day and roughly 8 percent of the supply of liquefied natural gas. On a given day that means about 50 ships. With Ever Given wedged in the canal for a week, hundreds of ships were backed up in a 60-mile queue waiting to get through. All in all, an estimated $9.6 billion a day worth of trade was held up.

On March 15 2022, another ship owned by Evergreen Marine Corp, this one named Ever Forward, went aground in Chesapeake Bay. While this blockage did not stop traffic it took a month to free the ship. The ship CSCL Jupiter did hinder ship traffic when it ran aground for a day outside the port of Antwerp in 2017.

Given that navigational technology has improved in recent years ship groundings should be becoming less common. Yet there is the sheer size of the current ships. A few months after the Ever Given jam, the largest containership ever built, Ever Ace (another by the Evergreen Marine Corp), made its way through the Suez Canal in August 2021. Measuring just over 1300 feet (about the size of the Empire State Building) with a capacity of nearly 24,000 TEU (23,992 to be exact), Ever Ace took the title from the HMM Algeciras (23,964 TEU) which took its maiden voyage hardly a year earlier. Both ships are just part of expanding fleets of mega-ships of that size soon to be sailing.

For perspective, the largest ships today are 15 times what they were in the late 1960s around the time when containerization was standardized. The world’s first commercially successful container trip, Malcolm McLean’s coverted tanker, the Ideal-X, took 58 containers from New Jersey to Texas in 1956. When the ship Encounter Bay, one of the early fully cellular containerships, went into service in 1969 its capacity was 1578 TEUs. Even by the year 2000 ship capacity topped out at around 8000 TEUs. Then when the shipping company Maersk introduced its E-Series of ships in 2006, capacity reached around 15,000 TEUs, basically doubling the capacity of the previous largest ships. Since then over 130 ships have launched with a carrying capacity between 18,000 and 24,000 TEUs. In the past decade alone or so capacity has gone up 80 percent.

Here is where the deregulation comes in. As Matt Stroller described in a Substack piece, for most of the 20thcentury U.S. shipping law was based on the Shipping Act of 1916. The act granted shipping companies an exemption from anti-trust laws. They were allowed to form alliances with each other (something that continues today) where they would jointly set routes and prices. However there was a condition that all prices had to be public, service had to be offered on equal terms, and companies were not permitted to undermine competitors by offering volume discounts or under-the-table rebates. In addition to the Act, there were subsidies for shipbuilding and the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (known as the Jones Act) which requires all ships carrying goods between two U.S. ports to be American-built, -owned, -crewed, and-flagged. The idea was to protect smaller companies and businesses against predatory moves of larger companies by giving bargaining power (hence the public prices). National security concerns wanted to keep American shipping strong. Stable prices take the edge off a boom-and-bust industry.

The system was tossed aside by the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 1998. In a sense we were left the worst of all worlds: the anti-trust exemption was kept and the transparency was scrapped. Predictably, concentration in the industry exploded. Up to 60 of the 1000 largest ocean carriers have vanished since the early 2000s.  Banks were only too eager to provide funding for the megaship arms-race. Shipping companies are good lending targets as valuable ships can simply be repossessed in the event of a default. Plus shipping often receives government subsidies.

In the midst of all this came the economic crash of 2008. The downturn meant there wasn’t enough freight to fill the growing ship capacity. With shipping prices at rock bottom the remaining large carriers formed alliances. The Top 10 shipping companies had 40 percent of the market in 1998. Today it is over 80 percent. All ten companies are part of one of the three company alliances that dominate the industry- 2M, Oceans Alliance, and The Alliance. The megaships also keep up a nice barrier to entry. New companies have a hard time breaking in with such upfront costs as a megaship. Infrastruture (railroads, ships, social media networks) tend to require a huge amount of investment to build, but not much to operate. This makes it inefficient for many companies to build competing networks. As a result it is often owned by the state of too-big-to-fail monopolies.

The larger the ship the more the shipping company is supposed to be able to squeeze out savings on construction, fuel, and staff. The larger the ships size to go with consolidation and alliance also give companies leverage over other parts of the system. This led to an arms race among the ports. Ports in Baltimore, Miami, and Norfolk began dredging projects to deepen their harbors. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey spearheaded a project to raise the Bayonne Bridge 64 feet to accommodate larger ships. The project cost $1.7 billion. Such works are quite convenient for the carriers as they get almost all the savings while the ports, and the taxpayers that often contribute funding, foot the bill. As larger ships are unable to service as many ports as smaller ones, they lead increased concentration of terminal operators and therefore port traffic, one reason the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach handle so much traffic and are therefore prone to backups.

A few weeks ago, in the face of raising inflation, President Biden ranted about ‘foreigned owned’ shipping companies who raised their prices by ‘as much as 100 pecent.’ He chimed ‘Every now and then something you learned makes you viscerally angry.’ On June 16th, he signed the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022. Legislation that breezes through Congress nowadays promises not to be too earthshattering. The act empowers the Federal Maritime Commission to limit ocean carriers refusing American and limit port fees. It is questionable how thoroughly it can be enforced.

Another facet to the shipping world is flags of convenience. For a fee ship owners can simply register their ships with a willing country. Countries without a nationality or residency requirement for ship registration are described as having open registry. This form of paper globalization works the same as other forms. The obvious goal is to take advantage of places with low wages and less regulation. Thus in 1960 the U.S. flag merchant fleet had almost 3000 ships. By 2019 the number was 182. Almost three-quarters of the worl’d fleet is now flagged under a country different from the ship owners. For a long time the places with the largest registries have been Panama, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands. In her book Ninety Percent of Everything, Rose George explains:

‘There are few industries as definitely opaque as shipping. Even offshore bankers have not developed a system as intricately elusive as the flag of convenience, under which ships can fly the flag of a state that has nothing to do with its owner, crew, or route.’

While the International Maritime Organization, a UN agency, has passed plenty of regulations since its inception, and the International Labor Organization (ILO) has adopted stadards for seafarers- the Maritime Labor Convention was ratified in 2006 by 80 countries and came into effect in 2013, the ocean has a tendancy to dissolve such paper. As with many things, the COVID pandemic brought the underbelly to light.

In September 2020, as 300,000 workers were stranded on ships, a Bloomberg report found dozens of labor violations.  Of the 40 seafarers interviewed for the story, half didn’t have current contracts and others hadn’t been paid for months, meeting the ILO’s definition of forced labor. Shipping lines and staffing agencies (as in other industries such as meatpacking, shippers often outsource hiring to agencies), determine when and how workers return home, even holding their passports. In an industry rife with middlemen, including networks of owners, operators, and employmeny agencies, it is difficult to hold parties accountable.

By no means is shipping the only leg of the supply chain that is hellish for workers. In the U.S. when goods are unloaded from shipping containers they are moved onto truck beds. Trucks move around 70 percent of domestic goods, over ten billion tons of freight a year. Truck drivers’ wages have plummeted over the past four decades. If the adjusted average wage of a truck driver in 1980 was $110,000, by 2019 the trucker earned $45,000 a year- a decline of 60 percent.  From there goods are often driven to warehouses. The turnover rate at Amazon warehouses can reach 150 percent a year. Buy commodities certified ‘Fair Trade’ as you will, just don’t assume such a concept applies to the workers that bring them to you.

Joseph Grosso is a librarian and writer in New York City. He is the author of Emerald City: How Capital Transformed New York (Zer0 Books).