Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

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Full circle for the weekend

Postby Hugo Farnsworth » Sun Jul 19, 2015 10:25 pm

I started with reading the Dark Mountain Manifesto and, like some sort of weird synchronicity, JM Greer's latest post on a novel he just wrote on the same theme, "Moon Path to Innsmouth". Then Robinson Jeffers' poems led me to The Beach Boys "Holland" (California Saga - The Beaks of Eagles), and from the song "Trader", we have this:

Trader found the jeweled land
Was occupied before he came
By humans of a second look
Who couldn't even write their names, shame

Trader said they're not as good
As folks who wear velvet robes
Wrote home again and asked, "Please help
Their breasts I see, they're not like me"


And somehow, mysteriously ended with Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot"


From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi


These are things I already had experienced, but revisiting them was completely novel. It's been a good weekend.
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Oct 28, 2015 5:06 pm

On the subject of the possibility of human extinction being popularized in the media, has anyone been watching Heroes Reborn? Not only is that a driving motivation in the storyline, there's also a 9/11 Truth allegory regarding a terror attack that nukes a city being an inside job; in one episode a conspiracy researching character is referred to as a "Truther."
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Jan 26, 2016 8:33 pm

The Near-Term Extinction Movement Is Embracing the End Times
Written by Aaron Miguel Cantú
October 1, 2015 // 07:00 AM EST



We know the planet is in the midst of a new Great Die-Off, caused by human behavior. Less clear is whether this mass extinction will someday include us, but a growing number of people believe that it will. Who can blame them?

We’ve already dipped into a doomsday seed vault stash in the Arctic thanks to a war catalyzed in part by climate change, and images of refugees from that war rushing past militarized border police who shoot them with rubber bullets and flash bang grenades certainly don’t look like a world on the upswing. And yet the chaos has only just begun: Some degree of catastrophe this century is all but assured no matter what we do now. Our oceans will continue to rise for centuries. And scientists suspect that "feedback loops,” like the fast-melting permafrost in the Arctic and Siberia could send enough methane into the air to lead to catastrophic, runaway climate change.

So it’s no wonder that a burgeoning number of people are subscribing to the idea that human extinction in our lifetime is all but certain. Depending on who you ask, they earnestly estimate the climate change-caused apocalypse will unfold between a few weeks to three generations from now. There's not a lot of data on how widely these beliefs are shared, but the believers are beginning to organize; loosely, at least. An “extinction candidate” is running for Senate in California. Meetings and workshops are being held around the country to discuss the End. And an active, private Facebook group, “Near Term Extinction Love,” to which I belong, has hundreds of members. Call them near-term extinctionists, or the stoics of climate change, though they don’t go by any official moniker.

The tone of ‘Extinction Love’ is similar to what one might find in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. One woman recently posted about feeling deep despair for life lost and fear of the future, and supporters piled on likes and comments assuring her it was OK to feel that way. Occasionally, there are posts of lighter things, like a viral photo of a swan neck-hugging a man. More frequently members post “told you so” news articles bearing bad climate news.

Pauline Schneider, the administrator of the group, says it functions as a “daily memorial or a constant wake” for the life lost to mass extinction; the people who participate are in a constant state of mourning. Schneider herself says she was a committed activist who held on to hope up until a few years ago, when she was arrested on the White House lawn as part of a protest against the Keystone XL pipeline led in part by famed environmentalist Bill McKibben. Now she scorns McKibben and others like him, whom she accuses of “lying” about our ability to mitigate climate change.

“We are not going be able to save the world,” Schneider said of the group. “The events are already in motion. It’s too big. We’re focused on moving right now through the world and what we do with our lives, which we still have control over.”

Many like Schneider say they mourn not only for the impending loss of life, but the mass death happening among the planet’s beings right now, and profess a strong connection to the natural world. Some attended a workshop in New York for people who’ve “come to grips with near-term human extinction” and want to live out the last days of their lives as fully as possible, like doomed cancer patients who’ve accepted inevitable death.

Chris Johnston, who helped advise the development of the workshop, is a medical specialist with 20 years working in addiction recovery and a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance at Bristol University. When he began thinking about the psychological challenges presented by climate change, he was struck by how similar our coping mechanisms were to recovering drug addicts or terminally ill patients. Our addiction to a fossil fueled lifestyle and general refusal to recognize its harmful effects is similar to a junkie in denial, Johnston says. So is the process through which we come to terms with its mortal consequences, which proceeds from denial to anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—the stages of grief according to the Kübler-Ross model.

“People could believe their lives were just falling to pieces,” he said, “and they start thinking what’s the point, what else is there to do but junk out?” The workshop for near-term human extinction was informed by some of the ideas that Johnston developed with Joanna Macy, an environmental activist and spiritual leader who has used Buddhist concepts to help people in Ukraine process grief from the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. Despair “becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Johnston, but when people recognize they’ve hit rock bottom, they tend to change their behavior, and can eventually find some peace in their remaining days.

“It doesn't matter whether the industrial economy collapses or not, we're screwed in the short term either way.”

This workshop eventually evolved into a support group that meets a few times a month. Jevon Nicholson, a Brooklynite model and bar doorman in his 40s, has attended about five of the group meetings. Like Schneider, Nicholson’s politics have long been progressive, and for years he worked to improve the world. He voted for Obama in 2008 and supported Occupy Wall Street, but the seeds of despair had been laid years earlier, after he lost his job at an education nonprofit and found more time to read about how the nexus of government and corporate interests were driving climate change. These days, Nicholson said, he’s chosen to live a simpler life and “disconnect from the hyper-consumption” of the fossil fuel economy.

“I spend most of my time in the acceptance stage, trying to live lovingly and compassionately,” Nicholson told me, referring to the Kübler-Ross scale. He regards people who propose market-based solutions to climate change as hope-profiteers, and said that through the extinction support group, he’s found “other people out there comfortable letting go of hope.” He estimates humanity will be gone within 100 years.

Nicholson, like many of the climate stoics, was introduced to the idea of near-term extinction through the blog postings of Guy McPherson, a professor emeritus of natural resources and ecology at the University of Arizona and, more recently, a certified grief counselor. “I was filled with hope until 4 years ago, when the evidence overwhelmed me,” McPherson told me over the phone in July. “It doesn't matter whether the industrial economy collapses or not, we're screwed in the short term either way.”

McPherson's stark hopelessness has earned him ire from some fellow scientists, who accuse him of cherry picking data to fit his terminal prognosis. And it's hard not to wonder whether McPherson's ego compels him to find pupils for his message. Back in 2009, when he threw in the towel and decamped to a homestead in rural New Mexico, he had expected others to follow him. When nobody did, he became confused and angry, but says he eventually reached a point where he accepted “how difficult it is to change one person's mind, much less other people’s.”

These days, McPherson says he works to help people learn how to “spend our precious few breaths on this planet doing work we love, pursuing love, and excellence in our lives,” which he thinks are lessons we should take to heart whether or not he’s wrong about the coming apocalypse—which he predicts could come as early as October.

Two months after we first spoke, McPherson invited me to a gathering at Pauline Schneider’s home in Westchester, New York, about 35 miles north of the city.

When I arrived, McPherson and three others were sitting solemnly in the lush backyard under the last licks of summer heat. As more people arrived—about a dozen showed up in total, nearly all in their middle years—the mood became chattier, but remained grim. I can’t recall hearing laughter more than once the whole evening. After warming up with a chat about car accidents, we got right down to discussing the end times.

I mentioned to the group that I’d spoken to ocean fauna experts who were hopeful that humanity could at least mitigate some devastation in the oceans. Thom Juzwik, a massage therapist in his 50's, shot down the possibility by pointing out the proliferation of oxygen-sucking algae blooms in the oceans, which one study suggests played a role in the Earth's previous five great extinctions. Others agreed. As the conversation moved along, they all scoffed at Hilary Clinton's support from the oil and gas industry, but I was in the minority in feeling unsure the world would end before 2030.

Image

This pessimism is beginning to percolate into the mainstream with the release of Roy Scranton's anticipated new book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. In it, Scranton advocates for a new philosophical framework that could become a metaphysical wrench-in-the-machine for the global economy, interrupting flows of capital and and replacing knee-jerk reactionism with slow, mediated reflection on our own mortality.

“Philosophical humanism in its most radical practice is the disciplined interruption of somatic and social flows, [and] the detachment of consciousness from impulse,” he writes. At a recent talk Scranton gave at the book’s launch in Brooklyn, he suggested the science was just too bleak for social movements to change our future, and all there was left to do is cultivate compassion and patience as we wait to die together.

Scranton’s stoicism is just the kind of detachment from our fiery collective fate that near-term extinction adherents value. Yet while they may uniformly believe the End is nigh, it’s clear that some still hold onto the possibility that things could change for the better.

***

Before I left the gathering in Westchester, I met a woman named Laurie Evans who said she had also attended the extinction workshop. Evans volunteers her time to a campaign to stop the construction of a pipeline to transport fracked gas, which takes up so much of her time that her husband gives her grief. She also tries to live a sustainable lifestyle, however futile she acknowledges the effort may be.

“I use candles, I use bars of soap because I don't want to use plastic bottles. I cut my sponges in half. Guy says it doesn't matter whether or not you cut your sponges," she said, "I want to keep trying to make change because I want to have some hope for my kids.”


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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 26, 2016 9:17 pm

:)

Welcome to the Anthropocene, fellow human.


seemslikeadream » Fri Jan 08, 2016 3:14 pm wrote:
All of the Reasons Scientists Are Certain We Are Now Living in the Anthropocene
WRITTEN BY JASON KOEBLER
January 7, 2016 // 02:01 PM EST

“Human activity is leaving a pervasive and persistent signature on Earth.” So begins one of the more depressing scientific papers I’ve ever read.

What follows in “The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene,” a new study published in Science, is a laundry list of human sins that, in total, add up to what its authors say is irrefutable evidence that Earth has entered a human-driven geological epoch that began midway through the 20th century and continues today.

Whether we’re actually living in the Anthropocene (the era of humans, basically) rather than a subdivision of the Holocene, an era that started roughly 11,700 years ago, has been a subject of great debate in scientific circles for the last two decades. Some argue that the Anthropocene started when humans first began making fires and polluting; others have traced it back to around 1610, when European settlers began earnestly making their mark on the Earth as a whole. Still others suggest that humans aren’t capable of making a geologically significant impact on Earth. Or at least they’re not yet.

The paper, published Thursday by 24 well-respected scientists from the Anthropocene Working Group (whose members include scientists from the British Geological Survey, Cambridge University, Berkeley, the University of Nairobi, Harvard, Georgetown, Duke, the Australian National University, etc. etc. etc. and so on) argues that the Anthropocene started in the mid 20th century.

If the study is officially recognized by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the authors say that “not only would this represent the first instance of a new epoch having been witnessed firsthand by advanced societies, it would be one stemming from the consequences of their own doing.”

As you might suspect, the driving force behind these changes are “accelerated technological development, rapid growth of the human population, and increased consumption of resources.”

Let’s take a look at the evidence.

Influence on rock layers (strata)





Image: Science
The authors note that “recent anthropogenic deposits, which are the products of mining, waste disposal (landfill), construction, and urbanization contain the greatest expansion of new minerals since the Great Oxygenation Event [2 billion years ago].”

The findings are “entirely novel with respect to those found in the Holocene and pre-existing epochs"

More than 98 percent of all elemental aluminum (the metal is not naturally occurring) has been produced since 1950, and the past 20 years account for more than 50 percent of all concrete ever created. The biomass of plastics we’ve manufactured now weighs at least as much as the combined weight of all the human beings on Earth, and “the decay resistance and chemistry of most plastics suggest that they will leave identifiable fossil and geochemical records.”

Modification of land surfaces



The remnants of Mir Mine in Russia. Image: Wikimedia
Dams, mining activities, and landfills have “modified sedimentary processes sufficiently to leave clear expressions in river, lake, windblown, and glacial deposits that are often far removed from direct point sources.” Meanwhile, agriculture and livestock farming has transformed countless biomes around the world and deforestation in the tropics has necessarily influenced the construction of mountain roads that “is resulting in substantial surface erosion and landslides.”

New geochemical signatures

Pollution, farming, and energy use (coal, gasoline, etc) have resulted in nitrogen and phosphorus levels doubling in soils over the last 100 years. “Human processes are argued to have had the largest impact on the nitrogen cycle for some 2.5 billion years.” Use of rare earth elements since World War II has resulted in “a global pattern of dispersion in the environment and novel stoichiometric ratios,” while “industrial metals such as cadmium, chromium, copper, mercury, nickel, lead, and zinc have been widely and rapidly dispersed since the mid-20th century.”

Radiological signatures



Image: Science
We of course haven’t even gotten into the fallout from nuclear bomb testing, which, according to the authors, is “potentially the most widespread and globally synchronous anthropogenic signal.” The scientists note that the fallout “will be identifiable in sediments and ice for the next 100,000 years.”

Carbon cycle and sea level rise

The researchers write that atmospheric carbon, which is now over 400 parts per million, “was emitted into the atmosphere from 1999 to 2010 ~100 times as fast as the most rapid emission during the last glacial termination.”

Most frightening, perhaps, is that Earth should be cooling due to its current orbit cycle around the sun, however, “increased anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases have instead caused the planet to warm abnormally fast, overriding the orbitally induced climate cycle.”

Species-level change



Image: Science
The scientists note that we are likely in the beginning stages of a sixth mass-extinction event, but that “evolution and extinction rates are mostly too slow and diachronous to provide an obvious biological marker for the start of the Anthropocene.” The planet does, indeed, still host most of the species that we began the Holocene with. However, we can still use species distribution to mark human impact on the Earth: “Species assemblages and relative abundance have been altered worldwide,” they wrote. “This is especially true in recent decades because of geologically unprecedented transglobal species invasions and biological assemblage changes associated with agriculture on land and fishing in the sea.”

Taken together, the findings noted above are “either entirely novel with respect to those found in the Holocene and pre-existing epochs or quantitatively outside the range of variation of the proposed Holocene subdivisions.”

In other words, welcome to the Anthropocene, fellow human.
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Luther Blissett » Thu Feb 11, 2016 10:32 am

Forbes now on the anti-capitalist tip?

Unless It Changes, Capitalism Will Starve Humanity By 2050

Capitalism has generated massive wealth for some, but it’s devastated the planet and has failed to improve human well-being at scale.
  • Species are going extinct at a rate 1,000 times faster than that of the natural rate over the previous 65 million years (see Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School).
  • Since 2000, 6 million hectares of primary forest have been lost each year. That’s 14,826,322 acres, or just less than the entire state of West Virginia (see the 2010 assessment by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN).
  • Even in the U.S., 15% of the population lives below the poverty line. For children under the age of 18, that number increases to 20% (see U.S. Census).
  • The world’s population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050 (see United Nations’ projections)

How do we expect to feed that many people while we exhaust the resources that remain?

Human activities are behind the extinction crisis. Commercial agriculture, timber extraction, and infrastructure development are causing habitat loss and our reliance on fossil fuels is a major contributor to climate change.

Public corporations are responding to consumer demand and pressure from Wall Street. Professors Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg published Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations last fall, arguing that businesses are locked in a cycle of exploiting the world’s resources in ever more creative ways.

“Our book shows how large corporations are able to continue engaging in increasingly environmentally exploitative behaviour by obscuring the link between endless economic growth and worsening environmental destruction,” they wrote.

Yale sociologist Justin Farrell studied 20 years of corporate funding and found that “corporations have used their wealth to amplify contrarian views [of climate change] and create an impression of greater scientific uncertainty than actually exists.”

Corporate capitalism is committed to the relentless pursuit of growth, even if it ravages the planet and threatens human health.

We need to build a new system: one that will balance economic growth with sustainability and human flourishing.

A new generation of companies are showing the way forward. They’re infusing capitalism with fresh ideas, specifically in regards to employee ownership and agile management.

The Increasing Importance Of Distributed Ownership And Governance

Fund managers at global financial institutions own the majority (70%) of the public stock exchange. These absent owners have no stake in the communities in which the companies operate. Furthermore, management-controlled equity is concentrated in the hands of a select few: the CEO and other senior executives.

On the other hand, startups have been willing to distribute equity to employees. Sometimes such equity distribution is done to make up for less than competitive salaries, but more often it’s offered as a financial incentive to motivate employees toward building a successful company.

According to The Economist, today’s startups are keen to incentivize via shared ownership:

The central difference lies in ownership: whereas nobody is sure who owns public companies, startups go to great lengths to define who owns what. Early in a company’s life, the founders and first recruits own a majority stake—and they incentivise people with ownership stakes or performance-related rewards. That has always been true for startups, but today the rights and responsibilities are meticulously defined in contracts drawn up by lawyers. This aligns interests and creates a culture of hard work and camaraderie. Because they are private rather than public, they measure how they are doing using performance indicators (such as how many products they have produced) rather than elaborate accounting standards.


This trend hearkens back to cooperatives where employees collectively owned the enterprise and participated in management decisions through their voting rights. Mondragon is the oft-cited example of a successful, modern worker cooperative. Mondragon’s broad-based employee ownership is not the same as an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. With ownership comes a say – control – over the business. Their workers elect management, and management is responsible to the employees.

REI is a consumer cooperative that drew attention this past year when it opted out of Black Friday sales, encouraging its employees and customers to spend the day outside instead of shopping.

I suspect that the most successful companies under this emerging form of capitalism will have less concentrated, more egalitarian ownership structures. They will benefit not only financially but also communally.

Joint Ownership Will Lead To Collaborative Management

The hierarchical organization of modern corporations will give way to networks or communities that make collaboration paramount. Many options for more fluid, agile management structures could take hold.

For instance, newer companies are experimenting with alternative management models that seek to empower employees more than a traditional hierarchy typically does. Of these newer approaches, holacracy is the most widely known. It promises to bring structure and discipline to a peer-to-peer workplace.

Holacracy “is a new way of running an organization that removes power from a management hierarchy and distributes it across clear roles, which can then be executed autonomously, without a micromanaging boss.”

Companies like Zappos and Medium are in varying stages of implementing the management system.

Valve Software in Seattle goes even further, allowing employees to select which projects they want to work on. Employees then move their desks to the most conducive office area for collaborating with the project team.

These are small steps toward a system that values the employee more than what the employee can produce. By giving employees a greater say in decision-making, corporations will make choices that ensure the future of the planet and its inhabitants.
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Feb 09, 2017 7:04 pm

Well, this thread just wouldn't be complete without an acknowledgement of "Herr Trumpenstein":

February 9, 2017
Unspeakable Ecocide and the Perils of Trump

by Paul Street

My last long CounterPunch essay, titled “Unspeakable,” needs a short and on-point follow-up. Written in relation to Donald Trump’s ill-fated on ban travelers from seven Muslim-majority nations, it reflected on three related taboo topics in United States’ corporate media news and commentary: (i) capitalism’s reliance on a “reserve army” of unemployed workers; (ii) the role of America’s massive military budget in hollowing out American society; (iii) America’s epic imperial war crimes against humanity in the Muslim world and across the planet.

It was a decent essay but it was of course incomplete. It left out numerous other and related topics that have been designated as taboo in the reigning commercial U.S. news media. And here I want to mention the most unspeakable topic of all in that media: the rising specter of ecosystem collapse driven above all by anthropogenic (really capitalogenic) climate change. It’s no small matter. Global warming, the left philosopher John Sanbonmatsu once told me, is “the biggest issue of our or any time.” As our leading left intellectual Noam Chomsky argued nearly five years ago, if environmental catastrophe “isn’t going to be averted” then “in a generation or two, everything else we’re talking about won’t matter.”

Chomsky was writing for leftists and progressives, a group for whom “everything else” includes standard left targets like poverty, imperialism, racism, inequality, plutocracy, sexism, police-statism, nationalism, mass incarceration, thought control, militarism, and, well, capitalism.

He had a point. All bets are off on prospects for a decent future unless homo sapiens wakes up quickly and acts quickly to move off fossil fuels and on to renewable energy – a technically viable project. Struggles over how the pie is distributed, managed, and controlled and for whom lose their luster when the pie is poisoned. Who wants to turn the world upside down only to find it riddled with disease and decay? Who hopes to inherit a dying Earth from the wealthy Few?

Which brings us back to Trump. The United States’ reigning media and politics culture is full of horror and disgust at multiple offenses committed by the new White House. The list of maddening Trump transgressions that you can learn about in great detail in the dominant media is already impressive. There’s the foolish provocations of Mexico (Trump acting on the promise to “build a wall and make Mexico pay for it”) and the Muslim world (the clumsy seven-nation travel ban order); the Nixonian firing of an acting Attorney General who refused to implement Trump’s unconstitutional travel order; the president’s insipid reference to a federal magistrate who blocked that order as a “so-called judge;” the openly preposterous and repeated (straight out of Goebbels) claim that he won the popular vote (by 3 to 5 million votes!) last November; the chilling elevation of Trump’s crypto-fascist top political adviser Steve Bannon to a top position on the National Security Council; Trump’s childish public statement about his “terrible” phone call with the Prime Minister of Australia; the farcical threat to send U.S. troops to deal with “bad hombres” in Mexico; his opening day trip to the CIA’s headquarters, where Trump complained about the media’s supposed under-estimation of the size of the crowd at his Inauguration and said that the U.S. might get “another chance” to go take Iraq’s oil.

Notice, however, what has escaped serious attention. The threat Trump poses to livable ecology is a non-topic. It barely registers on the media radar screen.

Don’t get me wrong. The environmental crisis is nothing new. Earth scientists have been warning us for many years about the ever more imminent risk ecosystem collapse, identifying the excessive extraction and burning of fossil fuels and the climate change that results from burning carbon-based fuels as the leading driver behind the approaching calamity.

The beast with orange hair hardly invented our ominous “ecological rift,” which is rooted, in the words of John Bellamy Foster, “capitalism’s [longstanding] war on earth.” With the U.S. in the planet-cooking, oil- and gas-addicted lead, humanity has been slouching to self-exterminating ecocide for decades.

But with his determination to “deregulate energy” – to go full bore with the Greenhouse Gassing to Death of Life on Earth (a crime destined to the make the Nazis look like smalltime criminals) – Trump represents what Chomsky has rightly called “almost a death knell for the species.” In a time when increasingly desperate Earth Science warnings point unambiguously to the existential necessity of a rapid planetary conversion to renewable energy, Trump is committed to ramping up the extraction and burning of the very fossil fuels that are driving homo sapiens and other living things off the cliff. And that’s no small part of why scientists have now moved the infamous Doomsday Clock ahead by 30 seconds closer to midnight.

The topic is shockingly absent from “mainstream” (corporate) media coverage and commentary in the dawning Age of Trump. One pertinent example: media and Democratic criticism of Trump’s appointment of Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State has focused almost exclusively on Tillerson’s perceived excessive closeness to Russia and Vladimir Putin. Almost completely ignored is Tillerson’s longstanding status as a high priest of climate change denial as CEO of the world’s leading corporate climate criminal, Exxon-Mobil. That is insane.

Yes, you can read on the front page of last Sunday’s New York Times about how Trump’s “surprise” election has been a Koch Brothers dream come true, leading to the epic high-speed slashing of federal rules and regulations restricting the behavior of the oil, gas, and coal industries. The Times’ chilling report on that reflects first-class reporting (see Eric Lipton, “G.O.P. and Trump Hurry to Slash Oil and Gas Rules,” NYT, February 3, 2017). It is chock full of important information. But is unthinkable that responsible journalists would tell the full story – that Trump’s energy policies will push life on Earth past irretrievable tipping points, forcing an advance final commons-ruining enclosure on a desirable future. That’s just too much to report. It’s the same across the corporate media board. The complete story on the existential peril is unspeakable.

Once again, it’s nothing new. Media climate failure is a big part of why global warming consistently ranks below other concerns – “the economy,” “terrorism,” “education,” “jobs,” and “crime” to name a top handful – in public opinion surveys on U.S. citizens’ leading policy priorities.

Historians will look back on it all in dumb amazement – if history survives contemporary carbon-addicted capitalism and the Trump administration.

Survival requires rapid revolutionary organization, planning, and action. As Chris Hedges recently wrote, this nation must become “ungovernable” as soon as possible. “Now is the time not to cooperate. Now is the time to shut down the systems of power. Now is the time to resist. It is our last chance. The [right wing] fanatics [in the Trump White House] are moving with lightning speed. So should we.” Basic Earth science suggests that Hedges is right on here, environmentally speaking (he’s right in other ways as well). Bringing down Herr Trumpenstein’s eco-fascist administration is only the beginning.


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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Aug 08, 2017 5:11 pm

August 8, 2017
The Extinction Event Gains Momentum

by Robert Hunziker

“In the next few decades we’ll be driving species to extinction a thousand times faster than we should be,” Dr. Stuart Pimm, conservation ecologist, Duke University.

“It is quite possible that the baby boomer generation is the most impactful generation that this planet has ever seen,”(Source: Racing Extinction directed by Louie Psihoyos, Discovery Channel, 2015).

The Great Suffocation

Imagine for a moment that phytoplankton, the foundation of the aquatic food web startlingly dies off. All of a sudden gone! Phytoplankton feeds everything from microscopic zooplankton to multi-tonne Blue Whales (the largest animal on Earth). But first and foremost, every 2nd human breath is oxygen produced by phytoplankton. Without phytoplankton, life dies.

According to Dr. Boris Worm, marine research ecologist at Dalhousie University and head of the Worm Lab study of marine biodiversity: The planet has lost 40% of plankton production over the past 50 years, primarily as a consequence of climate change/global warming. “We are changing the geology of the planet. We are changing the ocean chemistry… The anthropocene means that what happens to this planet is now in our hands.” (Boris Worm, et al, Global Phytoplankton Decline Over the Past Century, Nature Vol. 466, Issue 7306, July 29, 2010 and interview in Racing Extinction)

“Falling oxygen levels caused by global warming could be a greater threat to the survival of life on Earth than flooding, according to researchers from the University of Leicester.” The study claims an increase of water temps of six degrees Celsius, which could occur as soon as 2100, could stop oxygen production by phytoplankton. (Source: Global Warming Disaster Could Suffocate Life on Planet Earth, Research Shows, University of Leicester Press Office, Dec. 1, 2015).

Deadly Ocean Acidification

When cars, trucks, planes, and factories emit carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, it doesn’t all stay there. The ocean absorbs one-third up to one-half. In turn, CO2 reacts with water and forms carbonic acid resulting in a more acidic ocean, prompting the question: What is the problem with acidic ocean water? Answer: Drop seashells in a glass of vinegar. Over time, the shells dissolve.

For a real time example of changing ocean chemistry, professional hatcheries of shellfish in America have already experienced too much ocean acidification. Ocean water intakes for inland shellfish hatcheries killed off shellfish larvae because of excessive acidity.

Taylor Shellfish Farms (100 years of farming the World’s Best Oysters) Bill Dewey claims: “The rate of change that we’re seeing in the ocean and the changes it’s going to create in our food chain, it’s going to be dramatic and it’s going to be in our lifetime. The things that we’re used to eating may not be available any more, and we’ll need to transition to eating jellyfish or something like that.” (Source: Racing Extinction)

Bon appétit, tonight’s menu: Boiled Jellyfish.

“No one knows exactly how marine life around the world will fare as the seas continue to sour, but fear is spreading. ‘People who are aware are panicked,’ said Dewey, who recently traveled to New York to speak at the United Nation’s first Ocean Conference. ‘The level of awareness is increasing rapidly and the story is getting out there.” (Source: Lisa Stiffler, Investigate West, Climate Change Turns Puget Sound Acidic and Region’s Signature Oysters Struggle to Survive, July 10, 2017).

It is very discomforting (and then some) to read Dewey’s prophetic words: “People who are aware are panicked.”

Skyrocketing CO2

“The rate of carbon dioxide growth over the last decade is 100 to 200 times faster than what the Earth experienced during the transition from the last Ice Age,” Peter Tans, atmospheric scientist at ESRL, said in a press release. “This is a real shock to the atmosphere.” (Source: Brian Kahn, Carbon Dioxide Is Rising at Record Rates, Climate Central, March 2017).

According to Dr. Jen Veron, former chief scientist, Australian Institute of Marine Science: “There’s been five mass extinctions… there’s been one common factor in all, a massive increase in carbon dioxide, and we’ve never had a carbon dioxide spike like we’re having now” (Source: Racing Extinction)

Unfortunately, growth of CO2 in the atmosphere is accelerating, not decelerating or holding steady, even though CO2 from fossil fuels has barely grown over the past three years. Ouch! In 2016 CO2 grew by more than 3.00 ppm, a new record and considerably higher than the rate in 2015. This is deeply troubling. The reasons are multi-fold but significantly, it is believed the oceans have turned from carbon sinks to new sources of CO2 emission. “Oceans appear to have turned from sinks into sources of CO2, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.” (Source: Accelerating Growth in CO2 Levels in the Atmosphere, Arctic News, Feb. 25, 2017).

It is mind boggling how much science-based evidence exists about the destructiveness of human-generated carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The world community knows this. Otherwise, why did 195 countries adopt the Paris Agreement in 2015?

Interestingly, Trump’s exit strengthens the Paris Agreement. Several governing details have not yet finalized. Negotiators will be working between now and 2020, committing those details to paper. If the U.S. had stayed in the agreement, Rex Tillerson’s State Department would have veto power in the talks, likely weaken the agreement even more than it already stands.

Still, with/without Trump, too little too late remains the major question mark overhanging the Paris Agreement, and furthermore, it’s not properly structured to stop the extinction event.

Postscript: “One saw a bird dying, shot by a man. It was flying with rhythmic beat and beautifully, with such freedom and lack of fear. And the gun shattered it; it fell to the earth and all the life had gone out of it. A dog fetched it, and the man collected other dead birds. He was chattering with his friend and seemed so utterly indifferent. All that he was concerned with was bringing down so many birds, and it was over as far as he was concerned. They are killing all over the world… Man is the only animal that is to be dreaded.” Jiddu Krishnamurti, Indian Philosopher
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 28, 2019 10:17 am

As Earth Chokes on Plastic Waste, Industry Expands Production
Recycling, Lagos, Nigeria
Plastic recycling in Lagos, Nigeria. Photo credit: King Baudouin African Development Prize / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Reading Time: 19 minutesWhoWhatWhy Climate Change Coverage

It’s no secret that plastic waste products — especially single-use items — are polluting the land, sea, and air. The Story of Plastic is a new documentary that focuses on a global movement — called Break Free From Plastic — and shows activists using many methods to clean up plastic waste while working to reduce our use of a wide range of plastic products.

In this new WhoWhatWhy podcast, Brett Chamberlin, the impact producer for the documentary, says that cleanup efforts can’t keep up with the expanding production of plastics, which are a major profit center for the oil and gas industries.

And while “Big Plastic” corporations have pledged $1 billion toward cleanup efforts, they are spending over $200 billion to build even more plastic plants.

With the virtual collapse of the global recycling marketplace, landfills are choking with plastic waste, and plastic debris clogs creeks, rivers and beaches, culminating in a number of floating “gyres,” the massive collections of plastic waste drifting in our oceans.

Chamberlin notes that microplastics and “nurdles” (little pellets of plastic) have even entered the food chain.

Environmental activists are fighting back. One of them is Diane Wilson, a veteran shrimp boat captain from the Houston area. On October 15, 2019 Wilson’s group won a court victory that orders Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics to pay $50 million for polluting waterways, to comply with “zero discharge,” and to clean up existing pollution.

The Story of Plastic premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival and will be screened at other festivals before full release. It is directed by Deia Schlosberg and produced by the nonprofit that delivered the viral film, The Story of Stuff. Get screening information and view short videos at StoryofPlastic.org.

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Full Text Transcript:

As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to time constraints, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like. Should you spot any errors, we’d be grateful if you would notify us.

Peter B. Collins: Welcome to another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. In San Francisco, I’m Peter B. Collins. It’s no secret that our planet is awash in plastic waste. Everywhere you look, you see shreds of single use plastic bags, crushed single use plastic water bottles, and our oceans are now filled with huge trash dumps that are called gyres, and there is apparently no end in sight. Brett Chamberlin joins me today. He’s an impact producer from a brand new documentary film which is based on, or an extension of, the organization that brought you The Story of Stuff, and their new film that just premiered worldwide at the Mill Valley Film Festival a week or two ago, is called The Story of Plastic. Brett, thanks for being with us today.

Brett Chamberlin: My pleasure, Peter. Thank you so much for inviting me to join you.

Peter B. Collins: Well, I think that you and your team, and Stiv Wilson is one of the drivers of this project, have done a fabulous job of really explaining the mountains of trash that we’re seeing, mostly plastic stuff, on land and the real dangerous development of these massive piles of trash that are floating in the sea. And your film, as I said, debuted at the Mill Valley Film Festival, and I have to say you and your team did a great job of describing the problem and helping us understand that the industry is not slowing down. In fact they are expanding their capabilities for producing plastic products worldwide. So congratulations on an excellent documentary. Let’s pause for a second and just talk about the origins here of The Story of Stuff, because that became a viral video sensation and helped a lot of people understand that our materialism has gone a little too far.

Brett Chamberlin: That’s right, Peter. The Story of Stuff project began, as you know, as an animated explainer short documentary released in 2007 under the title, The Story of Stuff, and it became one of the first cause-oriented viral videos in the then baby YouTube way back when in 2007. And the documentary attempts to take a look at the way that we consume and dispose of stuff, all of the things in our material economy, from our clothing to our electronics, and of course the consequences and impacts on people and planet at every step of that system, from the extraction of the raw materials used to produce them, to their consumption and distribution, and ultimately their end of life in the environment, landfills or incinerators.

Brett Chamberlin: Now, we of course have a consumer economy here in the US. That’s one of the key sources of economic activity, but so much of it goes unexamined. So it was an attempt to really step back and link a number of issues from social and environmental and economic justice under one holistic framework. Since then we’ve produced a series of other animated Story Of videos from The Story of Electronics to Cosmetics to Water and Bottled Water, in an attempt to zoom in on different steps and material types within that system, and those videos have helped to mobilize the global community of individuals working to take action to change the system for the better.

Peter B. Collins: And so when we look at plastics, there really was a revolution back in the 1950s, 1960s, as the oil and petrochemical industries emerged with a whole new line of handy devices from Tupperware to, we have so much plastic in our cars now, and so plastics have made an important contribution to our consumer lifestyle. At the same time, we have been grossly negligent about the side effects and particularly about the long life that plastic waste has.

Brett Chamberlin: That’s precisely correct. Certainly plastics are a miracle material, and they provided incredible opportunities in their creation. It really was viewed as a miracle material when they first came onto the market in the 1960s. Unfortunately though, one of the qualities as you note is their longevity. One of those qualities that makes them so valuable, their longevity is of course what causes such severe problems at their end of life when they end up in landfills, incinerators, or the environment.

Brett Chamberlin: Now another problem is unfortunately that increasingly plastics are not being used for those purposes in which it does make sense to have long lasting materials. But increasingly plastics are being used to create single use “disposable” items, principally packaging or other throw away goods that are used once and then spend the rest of their life in landfills of the environment if they’re not incinerated causing additional pollution issues.

Brett Chamberlin: Now the production of plastics is also increasing at an enormous rate. In fact, half of the plastics ever created have been produced in the last 13 years. So this problem has exploded. And part of the reason that we’re seeing so much attention to plastic and plastic pollution recently is that the scale of the problem has increased so dramatically. And unfortunately industry is continuing to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in increasing their production capacity here in the US and other oil producing countries.

Peter B. Collins: And, Brett, let me, let me jump in because the most striking segment of the film and the data point that I came away with, I tried to take a few notes in a dark movie theater, but this really stuck with me that the oil and plastics industries have benevolently announced that they are grouping together to raise a measly $1 billion to address the worldwide plastic waste problem. And in the very same time frame, they are investing over $200 billion in new facilities to produce plastic products, not only in the United States but across the Earth.

Brett Chamberlin: That’s precisely correct. You know, certainly big plastic as we refer to them, that is the petrochemical industry which produces much of the plastic that we see in the world. And of course the fast moving consumer goods companies, which integrate those plastics into their supply chains and use them to package their products, would really like for us to keep the focus on the end of life. So they’d like for all the attention and of course the investment as well to remain on trying to clean the plastic out of the oceans or pick up beaches or do advertising against individual litter bugs. But that really is an effort to shift the focus and shift the blame on the individual consumers rather than admitting that we are seeing so much dramatic plastic pollution entering the environment because there’s so much low and no value plastic entering the economy.

Brett Chamberlin: So the film is in part an effort to look upstream, to draw the attention back from the focus that has dominated media and previous documentaries on plastic, on beaches and in the ocean, and look at who’s creating all this plastic in the first place and how can we hold them responsible.

Peter B. Collins: So Brett, as we look at the scope of this problem and the minimal efforts that the industry is doing to police the waste that it has created, your film depicts activists in many countries around the world who are picking up the slack and running their own local programs to clear out streams, to clear up beaches. But also to address the monumental problem of the plastic waste that’s floating in our oceans.

Brett Chamberlin: Absolutely. And those activists are united under the banner of a movement called Break Free From Plastic, which began about three years ago as an effort to unify the efforts of a variety of individual activists, organizations and NGOs, and to bring them together with a unified global strategy to tackle plastic pollution with a realistic view of who’s really responsible and what the most impactful points of intervention are. Some of the activists profiled in the documentary are really on the front lines of this issue and they’re really working to bring responsibility to bear on the corporations who need to be held accountable for this problem in the first place.

Peter B. Collins: And one of the heroes of mine who is depicted in the film is a woman named Diane Wilson, who is a shrimper on the Gulf Coast of Texas. And the waters where she has been fishing for years have been increasingly polluted by effluent from a, I believe it’s owned by Formosa, a plastics plant in the area there. And just last week she won, or she and her group won, a big victory in court. Can you tell us a little about that?

Brett Chamberlin: Absolutely. So there are a number of plastic production facilities located along the Gulf of Mexico coastline in the greater Houston area. Now Diane was a shrimp captain in that area who began to observe effluent from those facilities, both chemical outputs and of course a flood of little plastic pellets that are called nurdles. These are the preproduction virgin resin pellets produced from these facilities. And unfortunately these materials were smothering this fragile ecosystem, this marine estuary that so many people relied on for their economic activity. Again, she was a shrimp boat captain that depended on this thriving ecosystem to be able to feed her family. So she began sampling the water and tracking those nurdles back to a specific Formosa plant, working with individuals inside the plant who were willing to come forward and talk and has been engaged in a long legal battle against Formosa.

Brett Chamberlin: But just last week Formosa Plastic agreed to pay $50 million in a settlement for polluting those waterways. So Diane, together with working under the Clean Water Act and a group of other local activists, was able to bring a degree of accountability to that company. However, this really does illustrate one of the broader problems that applies to a variety of pollutive industries, that as long as the fines are less than their proceeds, they of course have no incentive not to clean up. Rather they have no incentive to clean up their act. And so while $50 million is certainly a really good outcome in this case, it’s unlikely that that really even comes close to what this particular plant’s revenue would have been over the course of the time that they were polluting.

Peter B. Collins: Now on The Story of Stuff website, it’s storyofstuff.org, you have a brief video called Let’s Ban the Bead. Give us a quick thumbnail of why these nurdles and these microplastics are of such concern.

Brett Chamberlin: Absolutely. So microbeads were an additive in many personal care products like face washes and for much of their history they were being made from small plastic pellets. The problem is that when used as designed right in the shower over the sink, these pellets would just wash down the drain and many of them were so small that they couldn’t be captured by water treatment facilities and they were ending up in our waterways. And this illustrates a real particular problem with this category of products is that they were effectively designed to create pollution. Now The Story of Stuff project, and our former campaigns director who was the executive producer of The Story of Plastics, Stiv Wilson, were able to bring legislation to bear first here in California and then soon at the federal level, and were able to pass a ban on these types of beads. So since then they are now being made with natural products like silica or clay or even better former waste products like nut shells from nuts.

Peter B. Collins: Now, Brett, one of the things that has been impressed on me is that these microplastics are getting into the food chain, and I’m one of those people who has been reflexively for years cutting up the plastic, what is it called? A holster, a saddle for a six pack of sodas and I’ve seen the grizzly photos of birds and other wildlife that have ingested our plastic waste. But we’re seeing substantial flow-through of plastic waste into fish and to other elements of our food chain. So we are now ingesting this on a regular basis. Do we have any scientific studies that indicate if this leads to cancers or other serious illness?

Brett Chamberlin: Well, there’s really been an effort to look for a smoking gun with regard to human consumption of microplastics. And again, microplastics are tiny, often nanometers in length, smaller than the width of a human hair, which are really saturated in the environment. They’ve been found pretty much everywhere we’ve gone to look for them, whether it be in tap water, in bottled water. 19 out of 21 brands that we tested at The Story of Stuff project had microplastics in bottled water. It’s been found in honey and beer and table salt. It’s been found <in> the most remote parts of the Alps and in pretty much every sample of ocean water collected. They really are saturating and blanketing our environment. And of course humans are consuming them too. Now because compared to a nanometers small piece of microplastic, we’re relatively large, it seems most likely that they probably do pass through our digestive system without too much trouble.

Brett Chamberlin: However, the real concern is that these tiny particles could be thought of as a plastic smog when they do end up in more fragile ecosystems. And so it’s actually down at the very base of the food chain that we need to be looking with concern. So while they may not cause problems in the human digestive system, they could wreak havoc on phytoplankton or the small organisms that make our soil thrive. And so the concern is that we are just smothering our ecosystem in this material and we’re going to start to see the consequences build up the food chain as we destabilize those ecosystems. Now what-

Peter B. Collins: Now Brett, Oh, go ahead. I’m sorry.

Brett Chamberlin: Well, just to add one more point to that there, as I mentioned, we’ve been looking for a smoking gun with regard to microplastics and human consumption with regard to endocrine disruption, cancer and other diseases. However, again that also is looking in the wrong place. To find the consequences of plastic pollution on human health we only need to look up the production cycle. Plastic begins its life as fossil fuels, like oil and natural gas, and then it goes through a highly pollutive industrial process to produce a raw plastic resin. And that is without a doubt causing enormous consequences for the communities that live nearby those plastic production facilities, which are often marginalized communities, communities of color and economically disadvantaged folks. So if you are a child born within a few miles of the Houston ship channel, you are 50% more likely to have leukemia. So there absolutely is a real disastrous human health impact from plastic production well before plastic enters the environment.

Peter B. Collins: So here in California a few years ago, we banned single use plastic bags. There are other parts of the country where they’re still in wide circulation. And just recently the governor signed a bill passed by the legislature to outlaw or at least eliminate the use of these little shampoo bottles and little lotion bottles, the avocado body lotion that you get at Motel 6. I’ve heard those commercials, I know Tom Bodett really means it. And so there’s a convenience factor. I keep those in my travel kit. I’ve stolen them from some of the best hotels around the world. But one of the notions that we have to look for is unintended consequences. Because in the film you show that while these miniature bottles are a problem, the likely replacement are these kind of plastic envelopes called sachets and they are made of materials that I guess degrade even slower than some of the single use plastic containers.

Brett Chamberlin: That’s right. So a sachet is typically a single serving plastic envelope, so a ketchup packet is a really familiar example of sachets to people here in the US and the global north. However, sachets are really becoming one of the primary delivery mechanisms for packaged products in developing markets, so Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa. The industry would like us to believe that sachets are poor friendly because it allows them to sell a single serving of say soy sauce or shampoo or even more concerningly face whitening cream for you know, effectively cents, which is much cheaper than buying a whole bottle. However, the problem is that when you buy an entire bottle of something like dishwasher detergent or shampoo, it tends to come in a relatively highly recyclable PET or PP plastic bottle. Unfortunately, these single serving sachets tend to be made of multi-layer or low-value plastic film that really can’t be recycled. And so they’re far, far, far more likely to end up polluting the environment.

Brett Chamberlin: So this is actually an example of the double standard that these fast moving consumer goods companies are applying. Here in the global north they tend to talk about their concern for plastic pollution and all of the steps that they’re taking to make sure that they’re doing things differently and producing recyclable packaging and buying into help support recycling infrastructure. But in the developing world where their support and accountability is most needed, they continue to flood the market with these low and no value materials that so often end up in the environment.

Peter B. Collins: One of the other big ironies that is focused on in the film is that the oil and gas industries are aware that people are responding to climate change, behaviors are changing, the automobile fleet is shifting. And their projections show that the sale of gasoline products for example, will be declining over the next 10-year period. So their reaction as capitalists is to take the oil that they’re pulling out of the ground and look for alternative products that they can market to maintain revenue and profitability. And so plastics is seen as the growth area for these old line oil and gas companies.

Brett Chamberlin: That’s exactly right. It is really the same companies at the end of the day we’re talking about, you know, Phillips, Conoco, Sunoco, Exxon, Formosa. The same companies that we have pushed against so long with regard to oil and natural gas as fuel sources for transportation and heating now see plastic as a lifeline. So as fuel use for energy decreases, fuel use for plastic and other petrochemical products is slated to increase with, again, just shy of $200 billion being invested in the next few years alone in increasing production capacity here in the United States. So it really is the same players that are receiving those same subsidies that we need to continue to bring accountability towards. So we view this fight as being really one and the same as the climate justice struggle because it is the same companies that we are addressing.

Peter B. Collins: So, Brett, I would add to that development, okay, the intent of the oil industry to shift into profitable plastics together with the collapse of the recycling market in recent years, and the dramatic rollback in regulation at the federal level under the Trump administration and at the state level, among many Republican administrations in big red States like Texas. And so this is a perfect storm, but it’s kind of moving in the wrong direction.

Brett Chamberlin: Well, you know, there’s a little of this and a little of that. So let me take a couple of those pieces apart here just to make sure to bring the listeners along. You referred to the collapse of the recycling systems. A couple of years ago, rather prior to the implementation of a new policy in China called National Sword, about 50% of mixed plastic recycling from the US was going to China. We really don’t have a particularly large or developed domestic recycling infrastructure, particularly for the lower value plastics. So you know number one PET which is what soda bottles are made from that tends to be pretty recyclable pretty easily and often will stay here in the US, but those other low and no value plastics we were sending abroad to China where environmental controls and cost of labor is so much cheaper that it was economically feasible to recycle them.

Brett Chamberlin: Well, beginning in 2017 China implemented this policy, effectively shut the doors, said “We are no longer going to be the dumping ground for the world.” And this has sparked an enormous crisis in the recycling market. Municipalities that were accepting and sorting mixed plastic recycling and used to be earning hundreds of dollars per ton to sell that plastic abroad are now paying money to try and find places to dispose of it. Or it’s simply stacking up in warehouses or lots here in the US. Unfortunately, much of that plastic that is continuing to be sent abroad is now being sent into other developing countries in the global south, like the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam where there is an extremely informal and rapidly developed ad hoc recycling sector. So we’re seeing people handling these materials and open warehouses or fields where it can wash into estuaries and rivers and where the low value plastics that can’t be recycled are burnt onsite, openly in fields adjacent to neighborhoods. Something I witnessed myself in Indonesia.

Brett Chamberlin: So we’re seeing an enormous crisis in the recycling space. So this illustrates why we cannot recycle our way out of this problem. As you know, we really just need to shut off the taps. We cannot solve this problem without dramatically decreasing the amount of plastic being produced at all. And as you know, legislative interventions are a really effective way to do this. It forces corporations to redesign the way that they are designing and delivering their products and packaging. And it forces them to come to the table with new and novel solutions, be they alternative materials or different ways of delivering products altogether.

Brett Chamberlin: Unfortunately though, industry is of course not taking this lying down. We’re even seeing preemption laws in some states where even before a plastic bag ban can get passed, corporations under the guise of groups like ALEC, the American Legislative Executive Council, which is a coalition of corporations that put together model legislation and then work to push that in legislatures across the country, they will pass bans on bans before that ban can even be passed. So this really is a fight that’s being fought out in the trenches and there’s so much space and really need for individual activists to be coming to the table, banding together, working with local organizations to pass bans at the municipal and state level, which will force corporations to find different ways of doing things.

Peter B. Collins: And, Brett, beyond trying to just practice behavior that is admirable and conscious, our activities do have an impact. We have seen that the shift away from plastic straws has at least caused restaurants to step back and say, well, if you want a plastic straw, ask for one, but we’re not just going to pass one around automatically with every beverage we serve. And so our individual actions and consciousness I believe can drive consumer trends that industry will respond to.

Brett Chamberlin: Well, you know, I certainly think that you’re right there. It is incumbent in all of us to make sure that we are being responsible and it’s just the appropriate thing for conscious and mature adult to certainly bring their own reasonable shopping bag or bring their reusable mug or bottle to the coffee shop. However, I think it’s really important that we do note that that alone will not solve this problem because so much of it, those solutions and conversations are not reaching all of the people that we need to participate. We will never get 100% of people doing the right thing. And frankly what we need is to make doing the right thing the easy thing. So yes, certainly let’s make appropriate individual decisions, but let’s also make sure that we’re working together, flexing our citizens’ muscles, and pushing for systemic interventions that change corporate behavior from the top rather than expecting the individuals change behavior from the bottom.

Peter B. Collins: We’re talking with Brett Chamberlin and we’re
discussing this new documentary film called The Story of

Plastic. As I mentioned at the beginning of the

conversation, I saw it at the Mill Valley Film Festival.

Give us an idea of when it will be available for broad

audiences across the nation and I have listeners well

outside the United States who I’m sure would be very

interested, Brett.

Brett Chamberlin: Absolutely. So we have a series of other film festivals lined up over the course of the next month or two. Folks can visit storyofplastic.org and click on the watch tab to see our calendar of upcoming festivals at which they might be able to catch the documentary. In the meantime we are working to secure a distribution deal that’ll allow us to get this film out into the world. We have a lot of movement partners within the Break Free From Plastic network and folks all around the world that are really excited to see that and we are really excited to share it with them. We really think that this is an important tool or mobilizing movement, changing the way that we’re framing this conversation and ultimately driving people to take action. So we’re certainly working our hardest to get it out as soon as we can.

Peter B. Collins: And, Brett, in addition to being an impact producer on this film, you also are the director of community engagement. So give us an idea of the kinds of programs or informational efforts that you use to allow people to organize locally to address these issues.

Brett Chamberlin: Absolutely. So our work focuses on building clear pathways for people to interact with our content online, be it our social media content through Facebook or Instagram or our other animated or live action videos to take action where they live. Some of our other campaigns include work on water privatization. For a long time we’ve been working to prevent Nestle, the global, well, it’s a food and beverage company, one of the largest in the world. They have a massive bottled water division, which has local water extraction sites, including one in the San Bernardino National Forest where they’ve been extracting millions of gallons of water, paying a few hundred dollars in a well permitting fee, and then of course bottling that water in plastic and shipping it around the world. And they operate similar extraction sites, including one in Everett, Michigan, just over a hundred miles away from Flint, where again, they paid just a few hundred dollar well fee. So in a community where folks don’t have clean drinking water, it’s being given away for free to a multinational corporation. So we’re engaged in a number of site fights to try and shut off the taps on Nestle.

Brett Chamberlin: And we’ve also been pushing for a number of state and local legislative solutions to the plastic crisis, including a recent effort in California to dramatically reduce the amount of single use disposable plastic in our economy, which unfortunately didn’t pass this cycle, but it did get much further than we had expected. So we’re certainly eager to continue that fight and continuing to bring other solutions to bear.

Peter B. Collins: Brett Chamberlin, thanks for joining me today, and I highly recommend that people view The Story of Plastic at a film festival or online, and you can get more information at storyofplastic.org. Thank you, Brett.

Brett Chamberlin: My pleasure to speak with you, Peter. Thank you.

Peter B. Collins: Thanks for listening to this radio WhoWhatWhy podcast with Brett Chamberlin. Send your comments to Peter at peterbcollins.com and I’d love it if you could make a contribution to support the investigative journalism here at WhoWhatWhy.
Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from
https://whowhatwhy.org/2019/10/28/as-ea ... roduction/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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