[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvTFKpIaQhM]
Category: Global Issues Affecting all of Us
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More on the New World Order
I’ve been following George Soro‘s thoughts for a while and in the book I’m reading now, “The Ascent of Money”, Niall gives him a lot of air time. So when George presented a week long lecture series at the Central European University I just couldn’t resist. And in my usual explanative way: “brilliant“!
His theory of reflexivity is closely aligned with the great thinking that underpins a lot of the wonderful stuff that is going on now (Avatar is perhaps the best example I have experienced). What the Bleep? Heard of it. Same stuff.
Here’s the blurb on the FT web site link below:
George Soros unveils his latest thinking on economics and politics during a lecture series hosted by the Central European University (CEU) from Oct 26-30, 2009. These lectures are the culmination of a lifetime of practical and philosophical reflection. Mr Soros discusses his general theory of reflexivity and its application to financial markets, providing insights into the recent financial crisis. The third and fourth lectures examine the concept of open society, which has guided Mr Soros’s global philanthropy, as well as the potential for conflict between capitalism and open society. The closing lecture focuses on the way ahead, closely examining the increasingly important economic and political role that China will play in the future.
George Soros Lectures 26 October 2009 to 30 October 2009
Excellent stuff. Dry, but very good. Imagine, almost 80 years of experience from one heck of a performer (he was born in 1930). He’s worked out the rules of the game and plays it very well.
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The New World Order
Catchy title? It’s sure to attract attention.
I’m just about finished a great book called the “Assent of Money” by Niall Ferguson. An excellent read if you want to understand how the financial system works – including your credit card, your home mortgage and your pension – if you have one.
It’s a history of money, how it works, what it means and really what it is! He paints a very straight forward explanation for why the current shifting in economic power is from the west (in particular the USA) to the East (in particular China).
He also identifies key fractures in the current financial system (particularly credit default swaps – a notional USD 62 trillion worth presently in the market – that’s 78 times the size of the TARP bail out package released last year by the Obama government, and about the same as the entire World’s production, our GDP)
The origins of the financial system, in one place. No such book exists previously to this book.
4,000 years of the What and Why and When and How and Where and Who on money.
Don’t miss it!
Watch the video (where did they get that music?!! I remember that music from the games on the Commodore 64 from the early 80’s!!)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cIeQp2zzhY]
Here’s more of Niall speaking on the net: Niall Videos
Update: The Bitcoin Standard is the next one to read to bring you up to date with Money in today’s world.
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An Inconvenient Truth – 3 and a bit Years On (s)
I was recently watching “An Inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore again.
Again I was reminded of a large amount of doubt and misinformation wandering about the world on the topic of global warming. Like a frightened rabbit, the lights of the oncoming truck have frozen the collective we to the armchairs and to inactivity.
Al Gore put it very well: out of a study of 928 scientific journals over a 10 year period all 100% documents concurred that man was causing climate change, principally from CO2 emissions.
In the face of this evidence, the objective of a small, well-funded group was to “Reposition Global Warming As Theory rather than Fact” (from a leaked internal document).
Are they succeeding? Simply, Yes.
A public survey of popularist non-scientific articles (636 over 14 years) showed that a massive 53% throw doubt on whether global warming is an issue or not.
Has anything changed in the 3 or so years since this film?
It appears not.
I wondered what was happening with the melt rates on Greenland in recent years, since the film. A quick search of the web revealed that the highest rate ever recorded was in 2007.
Then I came across this article dated 27th May 2009. Here’s an excerpt: http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/sealevel.jsp
…To assess the impact of Greenland ice melt on ocean circulation, Hu and his coauthors used the Community Climate System Model, an NCAR-based computer model that simulates global climate.
They considered three scenarios: the melt rate continuing to increase by 7 percent per year, as has been the case in recent years, or the melt rate slowing down to an increase of either 1 or 3 percent per year.
If Greenland’s melt rate slows down to a 3 percent annual increase, the study team’s computer simulations indicate that the runoff from its ice sheet could alter ocean circulation in a way that would direct about a foot of water toward the northeast coast of North America by 2100.
This would be on top of the average global sea level rise expected as a result of global warming. Although the study team did not try to estimate that mean global sea level rise, their simulations indicated that melt from Greenland alone under the 3 percent scenario could raise worldwide sea levels by an average of 21 inches (54 cm).
If the annual increase in the melt rate dropped to 1 percent, the runoff would not raise northeastern sea levels by more than the 8 inches (20 cm) found in the earlier study in Nature Geoscience.
But if the melt rate continued at its present 7 percent increase per year through 2050 and then leveled off, the study suggests that the northeast coast could see as much as 20 inches (50 cm) of sea level rise above a global average that could be several feet. However, Hu cautioned that other modeling studies have indicated that the 7 percent scenario is unlikely.
In addition to sea level rise, Hu and his co-authors found that if the Greenland melt rate were to defy expectations and continue its 7 percent increase, this would drain enough fresh water into the North Atlantic to weaken the oceanic circulation that pumps warm water to the Arctic. Ironically, this weakening of the meridional overturning circulation would help the Arctic avoid some of the impacts of global warming and lead to at least the temporary recovery of Arctic sea ice by the end of the century.
This is a confusing article. It starts with an ice melt rate of 7% per year – a measured rate, but shifts to discuss melt rates of 3 and 1% which are assumed and in the future (2050 and 2100). Why is this? Confused? Wondering what the point is? 7%, 3% 1%, levelling off? Meridional shifts??
Reference to the recent melt increase rate of 7% per year is obfuscated in the article. The key observation is: melt rates in Greenland have been increasing at 7% per year. Why focus on less alarmist scenarios of 3% and 1%?? Less alarming I assume!
The assumption is that by 2050 the melt rate “levels out”.
This doesn’t make sense. The earth is warming? Why would melting ice slow down? Wouldn’t it actually get faster?? Aren’t CO2 levels at all-time high?? They aren’t decreasing and there is no expectation of them to reduce to below pre-1900 levels for many 100’s of years. So why would the melt rate reduce from 7%? One would expect it to increase!!
Let’s look at some facts a little more clearly.
In 2006 the estimated ice melt rate was 239 cubic kilometres per year.
In 2007 the ice melt rate was 592 cubic kilometres per year.
There are 2.85 million cubic kilometres of ice in total in Greenland
The 7% increase per year was determined by looking at the change in earths gravity.
With an opening comment like this one: “In the past, the Greenland ice sheet has grown when its surroundings cooled, shrunk when its surroundings warmed and even disappeared completely when the temperatures became warm enough.” ; it kind of says, “ho-hum, what’s the problem. This stuff happens all the time”.
Well, there’s no problem really. Just a few extra meters of sea level, no freshwater in central Asia and extreme arid conditions in what are presently bread bowls of the world. Not much when you look at after all.
This does happen, but the natural cycles are every 10,000 years or so. Plants and animals (including us) can adapt over that time frame. But over a decade? They – and we – cannot.
Al Gore portrayed the equivalence of humans very well with the image of the frog in the warming water…
Unfortunately, I don’t expect any helping hand to come from the sky to pull us from the rising, warming waters. We’ll just have our equivalent “boiling alive”, well most of the human race will anyway.
Major climate change is here to stay. CO2 levels, like that of CFCs, are at highest levels ever recorded or measured in the last 650,000 years.
Melt rates are measured to be increasing at 7% per year.
And with the Antarctic showing evidence of beginning the melting process as well.
Buy a boat!
On a less alarmist note, I created my own “climate change model” to predict sea levels dependent solely on melt rates from Greenland. I assumed all ice cap meltwater goes into the sea, and I assumed no makeup from snow.
Being an exponential relationship, nothing really happens until towards the end, which is kind of the scary thought – lots of nothing for many years, and then relatively quickly meters of water in only a handful of years. In the early years, it’s all nice and small incremental change, but as rates increase faster and faster the power of compounding kicks in. In less than 39 years, sea levels rise by 7.2 meters.
I’ve ignored the very high increase in melt rates from 2006 (195 cubic km per year) to 2007 (592 cubic km per year). (That’s a 200% increase, not 7%).
If one uses that exponential relationship, then Greenland ice cap and the sea levels will rise by 7.2 meters by 2048 – only handful of years away really. I’ll be keeping an eye on what the melt rates are doing in Greenland!
Here are the results:
Assumptions 2,850,000 Current Total Greenland Ice Mass (cubic kilometres) 195 2006 melt rate (cubic kilometres per year) 7.2 meters of sea-level rise if entire Greenland ice mass melted 0.50 2006 Sea level rise per year from current Greenland Melt (mm) 7.0% Increase in annual melt rate 5.0% Acceleration of Increase of melt rate Year Melt Rate Increase Melt Rate Year Start Melt Rate Year-End Total Ice Mass Each Year Annual Sea Level Rise (mm) Total Sea Level Rise (cm) 2006 7.00% 195 209 2,850,000 0.51 0.05 2007 7.35% 209 224 2,849,784 0.55 0.11 2008 7.72% 224 241 2,849,551 0.59 0.16 2009 8.10% 241 261 2,849,300 0.63 0.23 2010 8.51% 261 283 2,849,028 0.69 0.30 2011 8.93% 283 308 2,848,732 0.75 0.37 2012 9.38% 308 337 2,848,410 0.82 0.45 2013 9.85% 337 370 2,848,056 0.89 0.54 2014 10.34% 370 409 2,847,666 0.98 0.64 2015 10.86% 409 453 2,847,235 1.09 0.75 2030 22.58% 3,585 4,394 2,824,056 10.08 6.61 2035 28.81% 10,912 14,056 2,783,133 31.54 16.94 2040 36.77% 43,438 59,412 2,628,357 129.92 56.05 2041 38.61% 59,412 82,352 2,557,475 179.07 73.95 2042 40.54% 82,352 115,740 2,458,429 250.22 98.97 2043 42.57% 115,740 165,010 2,318,054 354.63 134.44 2044 44.70% 165,010 238,767 2,116,166 510.03 185.44 2045 46.93% 238,767 350,828 1,821,368 744.75 259.92 2046 49.28% 350,828 523,715 1,384,097 1104.69 370.38 2047 51.74% 523,715 794,706 724,886 1665.37 536.92 2048 ALL ICE GONE FROM GREENLAND = SEA LEVEL RISE 7.2 METERS It all happens in the last few years – as the last of the ice slips off the land, and sea levels rise exponentially.
This does not consider the West Antarctic ice sheet (another 7 meters of water if it melts).
I’ve seen a few less informed – or rather paid well by others – parade the Global Cooling myth, but I think for little more than ego aggrandisement and their hip pocket. I like this succinct summary:
“This hypothesis never had significant scientific support, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of press reports that did not accurately reflect the scientific understanding of ice age cycles, and a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling.
Then have a look at the most vocal proponent Don Easterbrook
Just follow the money.
Hey, I’m going to grab a nice book or three, find a nice place and watch what happens over the next 10 years.
The last 10 have been a ripper for change across the planet. The next 10 will be a rip-snorter!!
Depending on the source, Albert Einstein referred to compound interest as the eighth wonder of the world, the human race’s greatest invention, or the most powerful force of the universe.
The sad fact is that for the next 30 years or so, the “measured” rate of increase will be small. It is only the last 5 years where the water level rises dramatically. Boiling the frog? Absolutely.
That’s what this is all about.
There are solutions but that’s not what this blog was about, now was it?
From National Geographic
Another update from NASA – warm sea storms, 20 November 2016: NASA Report
Article from BBC on what’s happening in Greenland in 2019:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49483580
Thanks for reading!
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The End of Royal Dutch Shell?
Today I read of the demise of Royal Dutch Shell – that huge unconscious behemoth employing 104,000 people around the world with 22B profits and revenues greater than USD300B per year.
Well it wasn’t the specifically the demise, but the decision – that defining moment that will lead to Shell’s demise – that I read about.
The article was in Professional Engineering, 25th March 2009, Page 4: Royal Dutch Shell has announced that it will no longer invest in renewable energy sources (wind, solar and hydropower). Whilst it will still remain a “committed member” of the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI)*, Royal Dutch Shell will invest in biofuels and carbon capture.
Why do I say that this is the beginning of the end for Royal Dutch Shell? Isn’t the world looking at carbon capture? Isn’t “clean coal” the new buzz word? Isn’t corn ethanol our salvation?
No they are not.
Carbon capture simply raises the costs of using existing fossil fuels, and defers the problem of carbon dioxide disposal to future generations.
Biofuels are not only expensive and marginally carbon neutral, they raise the cost of food for people, and increase the rate of degradation of the worlds remaining, dwindling farming lands.
Free, abundant energy from the Sun is the answer – captured by photovoltaics, wind power and hydro.
Remember, that wind is also created because of the Sun: hot air rises, and cool air rushes in to fill the gap: wind power is solar energy one step removed. Hydro: capturing the energy of falling water from rain caused by heating of the earth by the Sun, solar energy two steps removed.
Shell is missing an important factor: the rapidly reducing cost of producing electricity from solar panels.
By 2015 using the Sun to directly produce electricity from photovoltaics will be an economic reality for every one. The cost to produce electricity is presently around $0.20 per kWhr and with reducing manufacturing costs this will reach $0.10 per kWhr by 2015 – directly competitive with power from coal, with no government subsidies or incentives in sight!
This is supported by research from the RMI (Rocky Mountain Institute). [Here’s Amory Lovins, director of the RMI, speaking about it: Amory Lovins on winning the oil endgame]
First Solar: the worlds largest billion dollar manufacturer of solar cells is rapidly approaching 1 GigaWatt in annual production capacity. They are already manufacturing at $0.93 per Watt – this is as of the 30th of April 2009.
So why has Shell taken this monumental decision – not to invest in wind and solar – only a handful of years from the tipping point?
A few reasons:
Shell is a fossil fuel company making business by selling the stored energy of the sun for over 100 years. The leadership, the management, and hence the culture of Shell is fossil fuels. This inertia is difficult to refocus.
Fossil fuels are also still highly profitable: production costs are still less than $10 per barrel in most parts of the world (and here in the middle east, it’s less than 2), so there’s a heck of a lot of profit still to be made. And profit, well that will drive us for a long time to come.
The worlds present infrastructure, the system, is built on a fossil fuel economy. As a people we fear change, and strive to maintain a constant regular environment around us. This drives short term thinking and puts off long term decision making.
Perhaps Shell believe they can delay the tipping point?
Can they can buy up – and lock up – the new technologies. Yes, I suppose they could, in the short term. What lengths would you go to to protect a $300B business? You certainly have a lot of money to support what ever strategy you wanted!
For example, technology developed by Stanford R. Ovshinsky, leader in thin film photovoltaic and Li-Ion battery technology – was bought and locked up by Exxon Mobile in the early 2000’s. (Watch “Who Killed the Electric Car” for this reference). What has happened since? Newer, better technologies, made the purchase by Exxon redundant. It slowed the shift but didn’t stop it.
So what? So solar panels can make cheap electicity? Who cares? Well everyone will. When the cost of placing solar panels on the home roof is less than the annual fuel bill for the home car, then most people will want to switch to an electric car and charge it with the power collected from those solar panels (Electric car technology is more than suitable right now – see Tesla Motors, backed by one of the founders of Google, or the stylish two seater vehicle from Aptera Motors).
A shift will occur.
Four key things will happen:
1) Demand for electric cars will surge
2) Demand for oil will drop
3) Power generation will become decentralised, as consumers control the generation of their own electricity
4) Demand for coal will dropThe age of fossil fuels will be over.
And Shell, by the looks of their current policy will be over with it.
How long will the shift take? Perhaps 10 to 20 years after the tipping point is reached. Perhaps less. The first world war (1914 – 1918) was a war waged on crude oil. The diesel engine was developed a mere 25 years earlier in the 1890’s. Trucks, tanks, battlecruisers and even cars and planes using similar technology where all driven by refined crude oil was used for the first time on a huge scale during this war. It established the fossil fuel economy.
So the time frame for the next shift will be about the same, perhaps less because sharing the information can now happen at the speed of the internet.
What a time to be alive!
* By the way, Royal Dutch Shell has committed a paltry 50M GBP to the ETI over 10 years. The company profit presently exceeds 60M GBP per day.
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The surge of US troops in Afghanistan is fundamentally flawed
Why? Because the strategy is short term focused, and forgets about what is really going on: a nation of disgruntled people with not much else to do, except wait for an exceptionally bleak future to roll over them. This disgruntled state is giving birth to the violent factions we now endeavor to “remove”.
Sending in brute force to quell the institute tribes of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan is akin to the invasion of Vietnam by the US in the 60’s and 70’s. That particular war failed because the local embedded defence forces knew what they wanted: to defend their home lands from invaders, to win at all costs. To fail was to loose not only their lives, but the identity of their people, their nation, everything they stood for. Their lives were secondary in this battle. The Taliban – and Al Qaeda – will do the same. Suicide bombers, bombings of public places like bars and accommodation units occurred in Vietnam as well – a dear friend of mine still has pieces of a grenade coming out of his body from one such attack by a child. These acts weren’t called “terrorist activities”.
The second much more fundamental reason for the failure that will become Afghanistan is the ancient knowledge that like-begets-like: bring in severe force against a group will only instil more retaliatory brute force in kind.
Additonally, local support from non-violent groups will tend to favour the local tribes, rather than the “invading” occupying forces and as the war drags on, this support will increase.
The World’s Fight Against Terror (it should be termed the “fright against terror”) means nothing to the people of Afghanistan. Food, basic shelter, education and a future to look forward to are their concerns.
So what is the answer? Again an ancient saying: “turn the other cheek”. Some 2,000 years old in some texts. Now I don’t mean walk away. Far from it.
Here is what will work: the US forces become a security force, an advanced form of police that enters the country with a specific task, not of attacking Taliban tribal groups (like Al Qaeda), but tasked with the defence of social and welfare infrastructure. This social welfare infrastructure is built in parallel – a Grand Master Plan – and defended by the defence initiative. This defence force will also protect the personal and private assets of individuals, thus allowing entrepreneurialism to flourish – a vital component of the establishment of a long term viable solution for the people of the region.
US money, UN money, world money, is spent to raise the standard of living for the Afghan people: to build and run schools, hospitals, sanitation, water supplies. Establish enterprises to grow and supply food, training, materials, trade, training. In short a future. Doing this will improve the living standard and the outlook for a people who presently have very little to look forward to, and will endear these people to those protecting them and this future.
I’m talking about rebuilding an entire social environment, building a nation, something that will be sustainable for the next 1,000 years! (Why not? We know what works and what doesn’t). (Sustaining the culture and lifestyle is an important element of this process).
What will happen if this is done? Well the Taliban’s key strategy now: suicide bombings will dwindle and become defunct. Why? Because prospect recruits will have an alternative: a future, something to drive them to live, not to die. Right now they have a bleak future, and with the oncoming escalation of war, of violence, even less to look forward to. Thus, with my proposed alternative strategy, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda will shrink: 1) because they will use up their resources (by blowing themselves up), 2) because recruiting will become harder and harder, there is a better alternative, and 3) because their like will defect, because of the better lives they can see growing up around them. Ultimately the need for them existing as an extremist group will cease to have any purpose.
Going in now with the intent to “crush the Taliban” will simply not work.
US President, Barak Obama, yesterday or even today stated “we have a clear goal to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and prevent their return to either country in the future”. This is a futile and near sighted goal for the reasons I have outlined above.
OK, so let’s answer another question: what about the financial benefits of waging war outside your homeland. I go into this in detail at this post: The Business of War. The argument is that, in the short term, war makes is good financially for a nation. Not in the long term.
What is the main resistance to the build and defend strategy I have outlined? It is the status quo, inertia and simply human practice.
Nation building is the newest and boldest of human strategies that we may – or may not – be ready for.
Think of the increase in national GDP if public services were provided in foreign lands rather than the destruction, death and disarray brought by the mightiest defence force on the planet? (The US Navy is larger than the next 13 largest navies combined, and 11 of these are allies or partners).
Will it be hard to stay focused? Yes. Will it be hard not to ignore the innocent deaths that occur whilst the building commences? (There will civilian companies engaged in the infrastructure building. Yes it will be. But in the long term the solution will be far superior.
In Iraq right now (2 hours from where I sit), 1 in 3 people live without access to municipal water and only 1 in 5 have access to a sanitation service (sewage). Universities and schools are closed most days, doctors and teachers receive death threats telling them to leave the country, which most have. What is left? Now that the US are pulling out (yes they are – I see it most days on the roads here), what is being left behind? A victory? Bitter sweet indeed.
Yet, a new goal: Afghanistan?
Like the issues with Global Warming facing us, helping a disgruntled and deprived people, and building a nation for them – in their likeness, not ours – is a job for all of us and a challenge for our global society to shake from the shackle of brute force and isolated non-unifying solutions.
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The Little Earth Book – Introduction to Second Edition
I’ve decided to retype this introduction here because it makes a lot of sense. The balance between yin and yang – ancient Chinese descriptions for two distinct energetic states – is shifting. It is through books like this, disseminated via the Internet, that will change the path of our civilisation, bringin balace and harmony where before there was none.
Since The Little Earth Book was first published in October 2000 the damage being inflicted on the planet by humanity has become more apparent.
Britain has been subjected to widespread flooding and government policies have led to an orgy of animal slaughter. President Bush has relaxed restraints on the emission of greenhouse gas. The World Trade Organisation has to hold its meetings outside democratic countries. In the South there has been a widespread collapse of commodity process leading to an epidemic of suicides among farmers. The obscene level of inequality within and between countries has continued to rise. And now the stated policy of the US military is ‘full spectrum dominance’- which includes space.
Yet and interesting decade-long social study in America gives some hope. It finds that their society falls into three main categories. The US, like Britain and most countries, is still dominated by the ‘moderns’ – those that believe in growth, competition, control, confrontation and all the male yang qualities. A second small category is the ‘traditionals’, those who would like to turn the clock back. But a third category is emerging: it represents the concerned, caring, co-operative, holistic, female yin qualities. The study refers to these as çultural creatives’. They are not a recognisable demographic group, but they now represent 26% of the US adult population. Let us hope that the planet gives us time to redress the yin-yang balance, allowing world affairs to move towards sanity.
In this edition we add chapters at the end to show some positive developments. We have also updated Free Trade and some of the marginal comments.
James Bruges 2001
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The Little Earth Book – Introduction to First Edition
This is the introduction to “The Little Earth Book“, first Edition, written by James Bruges in 2000.
The content in these 167 tiny – only 145 x 135 mm – pages is clear concise. Recommended reading to understand WHAT CAN BE DONE beyond the disturbing and circular discussion on what has happening.
Juts before this book went to the printers, at the end of August 2000, the editorial of the New Scientist commenced: “Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are well on the way to those found in the Eocene period when the world was ice-free and England a steaming mangrove forest”
Such news makes some of us deeply anxious. Others will ask what they can do. This Little Earth Book will, by shedding light on complex issues, help us to respond both constructively and creatively – rather than throw up our hands and leave responsibilities to ‘the experts’.
The book is about new attitudes and a change of direction, not doom and gloom. And if we say some apparently dramatic things, remember that scientists – in many cases the majority of them – are saying dramatic things too. They are beseeching us to look at the evidence and DO something.
This year, 2000, the Royal commission on Environmental Pollution advised the [UK] Government that: “The world is now faced with a radical challenge of a totally new kind, which requires an urgent response. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already higher than at any time for millions of years. There is no precedent to help us understand precisely what consequences will follow. The environmental consequences are potentially catastrophic.”
This follows consistent warnings from the scientific community. Even back in 1992 1,670 scientists, including 110 of the 138 living winners of Nobel prizes in the sciences, issued the famous “World Scientists” Warning to Humanity”. It included these comments:
“We are fast approaching many of the Earth’s limits. Current economic practices which damage the environment cannot continue. Our massive tampering could trigger unpredictable collapse of critical biological systems which are only partly understood. A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”
In 1999 the chief meteorologists of Britain and the US issued a joint letter to national newspapers in both countries, including: “Ignoring climate change will surely be the most costly of all possible choices, for us and our children.”
But politicians, vulnerable as they are to lobby groups, are – crucially – still dragging their heels. Lawrence Summers, Secretary to the US Treasury and hugely influential in the World Bank, has said: “There are no limits to the carrying capacity of the Earth that could bind any time in the foreseeable future. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.”
[Another organisation of scientists, the U.S.-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), prepared a lengthy report in 2006 showing that ExxonMobil has funnelled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organisations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science”.
“ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their products caused lung cancer,” said Alden Meyer, UCS director of strategy and policy. “A modest but effective investment has allowed the oil giant to fuel doubt about global warming to delay government action just as big tobacco did for over forty years.”
Two United States senators, Republican Olympis Snowe from Maine and Democrat Jay Rockefeller from West Virginia, also joined in the growing effort to persuade ExxonMobil to behave ethically. The two senators said that ExxonMobil’s brazen and outrageous effort to spread ignorance and confusion about the climate crisis “has damaged the United States’ reputation.” saying that ExxonMobil’s ongoing misrepresentation of the science is not honest, they protected “ExxonMobil’s extensive funding of an ‘echo chamber’ of non-peer-reviewed pseudoscience.”
ExxonMobil’s motive for engaging in this extraordinary and ongoing effort at mass deception is certainly not mysterious. In early 2007, the company announced the largest annual profit for the preceding year, 206, of any corporation in U.S. history.
Excerpt from The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore, pages 201 and 202
The report can be read here: ExxonMobil Report 2007 by UCS]
Throughout this book you will find reference to the World Bank, for it is a giant player on the world stage. In November 1999 its Chief Economist stunned the world by resigning. He had been consistently overrules. “It is not just the creation of a market economy that matters“, he said, “but the establishment of the foundations of sustainable, equitable and democratic institutions.”
So, the scientific community is saying that we are exceeding the earth’s carrying capacity, and is being heeded by the United Nations. Th World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organisation, on the other hand, are still acting as if the world’s health will improve if we all consume more.
WHO IS RIGHT? Surely we should take scientists seriously when they are almost one voice. We also have, all of us, the evidence of our own senses. We smell the increase in pollution, see the countryside being overwhelmed by concrete, listen in vain for the song of once-familiar birds, are aware through our travels of growing inequalities, and know the futility of wealth creation for it’s own sake.
If the scientists are right, we face human misery on an unprecedented scale, much of it caused by the policies of the World Bank and the I.M.F. and the frenzied, headlong rush towards a globalised economy which seeks to make us all into consumers, customers and competitors. Future generations will see us as guilty of the ultimate crime against humanity: allowing our Earth’s support systems to die while we enjoyed the temporary benefits of an unsustainable lifestyle.
We are NOT just consumers, customers, competitors. We are, first and last, human beings. And each one of us has enormous potential to change things. This book has stirring examples of individuals thinking, acting and dreaming up new ideas. Some may sound unrealistic but, if the scale of remedial action fails to match the scale of the crises, the crises will overwhelm us. This book is a clarion call to each of us. It shows us that there is hope.
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The Modern Curse that Divides Us from Nature
My views on architecture, the environment and society are underpinned by one unifying idea – the vital need for harmony
The Prince of Wales
We live in an age when technological ease has become so much a part of the accustomed way of life that it seems “natural” to some, even their right. But what does our dependence upon such technology do to our connection with Nature? Does our increasing dependence upon technology make us believe that we, too, and the world about us, are merely part of some enormous mechanical process?
These questions have concerned me for many years, because there is now a worrying imbalance in how we are persuaded to see the world. Our perception of Nature, in particular, has become dangerously limited.
When I have spoken of these things I have been shot at from all sides – the natural consequence, I suppose, of having the temerity to challenge the status quo of scientific Modernist rationalism. But undeterred by the barrage of invective, I would like to explain what lies at the heart of my concern.
A question from a newspaper correspondent in the 1930s drew from Mahatma Gandhi one of his pithiest responses. Asked, during his visit to Britain, what he thought of Western civilisation, he replied: “It would be a very good idea.”
Gandhi realised that humanity has a natural tendency to consume and that, if there are no limits on that tendency, we can become obsessed simply with satisfying our desires. The desire grows ever more potent as we consume ever more, even though we achieve very little of the satisfaction we desire. Is this not so in the Western world today? We hear so many people admitting to feeling deeply dissatisfied. It reminds me of that wise observation about gross national product by Robert Kennedy 40 years ago, that it “measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile”.
I’m sure that many people know it is wrong to plunder the Earth’s treasures as recklessly as we do, but the comprehensive world view persuades us that such destruction is justified because of the freedom it brings us, not to say the profits. Our tendency to consume is legitimised by a world view that puts humanity at the centre of things, with an absolute right over Nature. And that makes it a very dangerous view.
This approach has been adopted in such a wholesale fashion that I feel many do not even realise we have lost something precious – what I might describe as an intuitive sense of our interconnectedness with Nature.
The movement responsible for the imbalance – it is often called “Modernism” – rose to dominance at the start of the 20th century. Now, this movement must not be confused with the great social, economic and political advances of the earlier “modern” age, the many benefits of which endure to this day.
The “Modernism” to which I refer offered us an unrelenting emphasis upon a material and mechanistic view of the world. To quote from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s foreword to its recent exhibition on Modernism: “Modernists had a Utopian desire to create a better world. They believed in technology as the key means to achieve social improvement and in the machine as a symbol of that aspiration.”
Thus the ground was laid for the arrival of those straight, efficient lines of Modernism with the aim of simplifying and standardising the world, making things as efficient and as convenient as possible. This is why the curved streets of towns became straight matrices and why we have so many buildings grouped into single- use zones, including those for living – most noxious of all, those high- rise blocks of flats that, throughout the 1960s and 70s, became the living quarters for thousands of people in every city across Europe and the US.
Removed from their communities, people were accommodated in brand- new, convenient, concrete cul-de-sacs in the sky, and when their newness faded, those areas all decayed into violent, soul-destroying ghettos with no capacity to nurture community. Guess what is happening now in the new cities springing up in China and India? As they doggedly follow the Western pattern of 40 years ago people are again compelled to leave their farms to live like factory-farmed chickens in mechanical boxes. Thus are millions more condemned to the same toxic future.
The imposition of that simplistic geometry drastically reduces the richness of complexity. Those who drove this 20th-century ideology did not understand (or simply ignored) what biology and microbiology declare loud and clear – that complexity is key to life. The diversity that made up this complexity was bulldozed in the pursuit of simplicity and convenience, creating an appeal that continues to fuel the conspicuous consumption and throwaway societies we see everywhere. Just what Gandhi most feared and predicted…
How has this come to be? I would suggest it is the net result of two seismic shifts in our perception.
Modernism fuelled a fundamental disconnection from Nature – from the organic order of things that Nature discloses; from the structure and cyclical process of Nature and from its laws that impose those natural limits which Gandhi was at such pains for us to recognise.
As a result, our perception of what we are and where we fit within the scheme of things is fractured. This is why I consider our problems today not just to be an environmental crisis, nor just a financial crisis. They all stem from this fundamental crisis in our perception. By positioning ourselves outside Nature, we have abstracted life altogether to the extent that our urbanised mentality is out of tune with the key principles underpinning the health of any economy and of all life on Earth. And those principles make up what is known as “Harmony”.
Biology shows that in all living things there is a natural tendency towards Harmony. Organisms organise themselves into an order that is remarkably similar at every level, from the molecules in your little finger to vast eco-systems such as the rainforests. Life seeks balance. Every organism works together to produce a harmonic whole. When it is in balance, when there is harmony, the organism is healthy.
This is why I have been so outspoken about how industrialised agriculture sees Nature simply as a mechanical process. When you consider that in one pinch of soil there are more microbes than there are people on the planet, you have to ask what irreversible damage do we do to that delicate ecosystem – the six inches of top soil that sustains all life on Earth? The soil’s health is our health. Yet we have eroded it and poisoned it and failed to replace lost nutrients to such a degree that a recent UN survey found that in just 50 years we have lost a third of the world’s farmable soil. That is hardly a sustainable rate of exploitation.
Also implicit in “Modernism” was the notion that we could somehow disconnect ourselves from our inner nature; from the accumulated wisdom of the ages. Thus spiritual practice is denigrated by many: seen to be nothing more than outdated superstition. But “super-stition” means something much more profound if you see it as two words that point to a heightened sense of something within. But what? Could it be that animating source of the harmony inherent in all life? Could it be that intuitive element in our human constitution; that “sixth sense”, perhaps?
Each of the great civilisations back to ancient times depicted what might be called the “grammar of harmony” in their mythology and the symbolism of their art and architecture, from the ancient Hindu temples of India to the great Gothic cathedrals of these islands. In cutting ourselves off from Nature we cut ourselves off from what we are; from our inner selves.
You may believe that I have some reactionary obsession with returning to a kind of mock medieval, forelock- tugging past. All I am saying is that we simply cannot contend with the global environmental crises we face by relying on clever technological “fixes” on their own.
The denial of our real relationship with Nature has engendered a dangerous alienation. In denying the invisible “grammar of harmony” we create cacophony and dissonance. If we hope to restore the balance, we must reintegrate the best parts of this ancient understanding of Harmony with the best modern technology and science, not least by developing innovative and more benign forms of technology that work with the grain of Nature rather than against it.
This is an edited version of a speech to the Foreign Press Association. The full version can be read here