It’s the Climate, Stupid

That, of course, is the election slogan that never was. As Hurricane Sandy meanders over towards New York, the streets are so deserted, you half expect to see tumbleweed. After an endless campaign, we face the farce of a huge climate-change generated weather “event” that no one can name as such, because the issue has become unsayable. The canard is that to discuss climate disaster will scare the low-information voter. Let’s look at why that’s wrong and why the political establishment has closed ranks anyway.

Nothing to see here

The Serious People in Washington tell us that there is no consensus on climate change or action to deal with it. Wrong and wrong. It’s true that around the time of the 2008 economic crisis, popular sentiment placed far less value on the issue. But that has notably rebounded since as you can see from this chart.

So while agreement on the settled scientific consensus around global warming did drop, it never fell below 50% and is now at 62%, perhaps the greatest majority around an issue tagged as “Democratic” or “progressive” that there is, other than on reproductive rights. Nonetheless, even the new-fangled moderate Mitt Romney did everything short of actually eat coal and drink crude oil in the first debate, prompting the always timid Democrats to back off.

But the Brookings Institute report on climate change action options published in June 2012 shows how it would be possible to claim that majority for climate-related policy. It’s true that taxation and cap-and-trade schemes are not popular. But other options remain.

Here 77% of respondents, including 58% of Republicans, support requiring electricity to come from renewable sources. That’s a Senate-proof super-majority!

And a 52% majority (75% D /28% R) support the existing policy of using the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions. So there’s no need for Democrats to obfuscate the issue, one on which a clear divide exists between the two parties, so much so that 90% of oil company campaign contributions, which are usually carefully divided between candidates, has gone to Romney.

So why has the issue been so comprehensively back-burnered? There’s a dark corner of think-tank and government activity called climate security. This purports to measure the impact of climate change on national security. So climate security types have a different assessment of the situation than most people.

The Lancet, 2009

This diagram is taken from the British medical journal The Lancet. It shows, on top, countries mapped by quantity of carbon emissions. The United States is huge, while Africa is tiny. The bottom half maps countries by likely mortality due to climate change generated events. Here Africa becomes huge, whereas the US all but disappears.

There are those in climate security who see this kind of disparity as a form of strategic advantage to the US, despite the many issues of migration and disruption that are expected. In short, then, some in the US military-industrial complex are willing to let this kind of scenario play out for the strategic gains it entails. To be fair, others are not. But there’s a funny way that the most cynical view tends to win out in such circles.

The Lancet based its diagram on the 2007 IPCC consensus that a 3-4 degree rise in temperature was what could be expected. Since then, global efforts at CO2 mitigation have largely failed, emissions have risen to new heights and the feedback loops appear to be more virulent than had been expected. Translation: it’s much worse, much faster than was thought in 2007-9. US mortality rates are still going to be a lot lower than Africa’s, but drought, flood, fire and hurricane is not exactly what the term “security” suggests.

We know how to deal with this. It would mean a decentralized, demilitarized and de-industrialized way of life. Sounds good to me. And it may be something that people will be more willing to talk about if the New York city subway floods. Already the expectation is billions of dollars of damages. If we had spent that money on renewables and research back in 2007, perhaps this wouldn’t be happening. It’s not too late. But don’t look to our defunct electoral system for the solution.

For A Climate Debt Strike

Yesterday I had a bit of a rant about the destruction of the biosphere, ending in a call for action. It was that piece that got tweeted and FBed more than anything. So what does climate-related direct action look like? At the end of a day of Strike Debt meetings, it became clear: a climate debt strike.

How did we get here? There was a full day of Strike Debt discussion. A two-hour meeting looked at next steps for the movement after S17 in long breakouts. The consensus was to pursue greater networking at local NYC level and at national level. Task forces were created to investigate both processes. The immediate target is October 13, or O13, the European day of debt action, when Strike Debt will be doing solidarity actions.

Next, a debrief from S17. A strong sense here that the day went well for OWS in general and Strike Debt in particular, who were in the thick of things throughout. There was some concern that our messaging didn’t get out in the MSM, but no real surprise about that. On the positive front, The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual was a huge hit everywhere from Occupy Tampa to the Brooklyn Book Fair and the Free University.

At the end of all this a group retired to a local Happy Hour just to kick back. Everyone’s kidding around and suddenly a passionate debate about climate justice has started. Perhaps it was no coincidence that people from Panama, India and Palestine got this moving, calling attention again to the privilege that even a protestor on Wall Street has in relation to residents of underdeveloped nations. The daily threats of toxicity, disease, food insecurity (aka hunger), pollution and sea level rise make daily life in many locations a permanent emergency.

Climate justice activists have long highlighted the “climate debt” that the developed world owes to those places it has underdeveloped. That is to say, developed nations should cut cut their carbon emissions sufficiently far as to leave “room” for currently underdeveloped nations to expand their industrial economies in such a way as to mitigate their everyday emergency.

So far, this concept has won lip-service, some green-washing ads from corporations and not much else. Eco-activism has long concentrated on trying to influence national governments or global governance structures like the United Nations. The collapse of the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Rio earlier this year made it clear that such options are no longer viable.

Just as we have seen with financial justice, the only way that the global one per cent will concede climate justice is if a radical movement forces the issue onto the agenda. We have begun to organize a debt resistance movement in the finance economy. We need to start to organize debt resistance in the climate economy. Which is to say that all debt refusal is also climate debt resistance.

The reason is simple. In order to “pay back” purported “debt” it is necessary to increase the size of the economy. At the present moment that cannot be done without increasing carbon and other toxic emissions, increasing land grabs from indigenous peoples and increasing primary extraction, like tar sands. Debt refusal is not an immoral welching on an obligation. It is at once the political claim that such debts were coerced; and deceptive and the moral claim that the economic growth required to “repay” them must be refused in name of all life.

A debt strike is a climate debt strike. Join the resistance. Strikedebt.org

Recolonizing Everyday Life

I’m writing this post, like all the others, on a Mac computer that proudly advertises it is made from solid aluminum (or aluminium). That aluminum was probably mined from land belonging to indigenous people. Today workers for Spectra Energy began constructing a pipeline that will bring fracked natural gas and its accompanying radioactive Radon right into the West Village, close to where I live. Needless to say the swathes of land being destroyed by this extraction once belonged to the indigenous people here too. The once-heralded immaterial knowledge economy feels a lot less real than this recolonization of everyday life. Wherever you live, it’s right there in increasingly similar ways.

In the swirling moments around 1968, the Situationists declared that there was an ongoing “colonization of everyday life.” Perhaps it’s an indication of what McKenzie Wark has called the “disintegrating spectacle” that this drama can now be visualized. It’s a surprisingly material process, the physical extraction of energy and minerals displacing first the indigenous, and then whomever else happens to be in the way. We are reminded once again that, as Walter Mignolo has put it,

coloniality is modernity.

The endless process of accumulation is revisiting both places and materials that it has already used in a different way to produce this recolonization.

So what’s in my Mac? Making aluminum an incredibly destructive process. Three tonnes of bauxite is required to produce 1 tonne of alumina. It’s nearly all strip-mined because bauxite tends to close to the surface. Only half a tonne of aluminium can be extracted from 1 tonne of alumina. So it’s a six to one waste to product ratio. Mining regions are devastated.

The supply chain for a globalized material like aluminum is not transparent. The nations offering the largest supply include Australia, China, India and Brazil. You’ll be aware of the explosions in Apple’s China plants caused by aluminum dust.

Apple supplier in China after explosion

In Australia, 60% of all mines are either situated on land still recognized as Indigenous or adjacent to it. On the Burrup Peninsula, home to the extraordinary petrogylphs of the Yaburara people, some 90 of the 118 square kilometres has been zoned for industrial development.

 

The pattern in India is similar. India’s Center for Science and the Environment reports:

If India’s forests, mineral-bearing areas, regions of tribal habitation and watersheds are all mapped together, a startling fact emerges – the country’s major mineral reserves lie under its richest forests and in the watersheds of its key rivers. These lands are also the homes of India’s poorest people, its tribals.

The map below indicates mines with symbols and areas of poverty/Adavasi habitation with dark shading:

North-East India: minerals and poverty
The mines are mostly owned by multinational magnates like Vedanta, which generated $14 billion in revenues in 2011 and made a cool $4 billion in pre-tax profits on that. It produced 675 kilotons of aluminum, largely at Jharsuguda. Nonetheless, Vedanta is closing some of its processing plants because it says everything is gone from the ground. This may be taken with a pinch of salt because Vedanta were prevented from mining in the hills at Niyamgiri, a region sacred to the Dongria Kondh, the indigenous people of the area.

The reasons are clear. According to an Amnesty International report of August 2012:

Vedanta’s human rights record falls far short of international standards for businesses. It refuses to consult properly with communities affected by its operations and ignores the rights of Indigenous peoples.

We could generalize that statement to say that the recolonization of everyday life flatly ignores what it considers to be unnecessary restraints on profit generation like rights or existing law.

In Canada, according to a devastating piece by Andrew Nikiforuk, the neoliberal Harper administration has literally rewritten the law to enable the creation of a tar sands pipeline into and across the Great Bear Rainforest. The forest has hitherto been a model of sustainable development, combining:

ecotourism, renewable energy, sustainable forest products, shellfish aquaculture, and the restoration of First Nations’ access to fisheries.

In March 2012 the administration bundled together an extraordinary assemblage of deregulation into one package and passed it as an omnibus bill, undoing not only the rainforest protections but almost all aspects of environmental monitoring that might hinder the operations of Big Oil.

The distinguished marine ecologist Ragnar Elmgren of Stockholm University called it “an act of wanton destruction…the kind of act one expects from the Taliban in Afghanistan, not from the government of a civilized and educated nation.”

Leaving aside the cultural hierarchy implied in this statement, which is a tad unfortunate to say the least, what’s notable is that this recolonization–or perhaps more exactly, reversion to colonizing conditions–has no exception for the EuroAmerican “white” person.

The Fourth World can be permitted a wry smile. The West Village, home to Sarah Jessica-Parker and other glitterati, is now not only subject to the mad NYU expansion, which will put construction in the area for twenty years and leave it looking like downtown Omaha, but now it’s getting a fracking pipeline. So as much as the global city likes to present itself as an oasis from the actual conditions created by financial globalization, they have now returned to sender.

As I mentioned, it’s happened before. Nikiforuk calls the tar sands product by its traditional name: bitumen, also known as asphalt. It’s that filthy dark black stuff they use to coat roads. And in the beginnings of the industrial period, they used it as part of the immaterial labor of the day. For artists always searching for a true black, bitumen appeared to be a great discovery. So in museums all over the world you can see early nineteenth century paintings that are gloomily dark and cracked. Bitumen never fully dries, so it expands when warm and contracts when it cools, creating the cracks and allowing it to spread across a canvas. The great canvases of Romanticism in particular are literally smeared in oil.

The most famous example is The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault.

Géricault “Medusa”

The coal-smoke yellow and impenetrable gloom of the canvas are the gifts of fossil fuel painting. Ironically, the subject concerns a shipwreck of a colonial voyage to Africa that led the survivors to cannibalism. Once again, the recolonization of everyday life has us cannibalizing ourselves, dying for fuel in a tragic farce.

Sense of Planet/Planet Sensing

What are the possibilities of imagining and knowing the planet? A symposium in Sydney addressed this question today at what it called “earth magnitude.” Can the planet be “sensed’? How do the new dynamics of human and non-human within globalized networks of communication change our understandings of life itself?

Ursula Heise drew on legends like Gilgamesh to show that we have always have been haunted by fears of mass extinction. She has developed the concept of “sense of planet” to supplement the better known assumption of “sense of place.” She has less interest in concepts of place, not least because as a German she is suspicious of the Nazi rhetoric of soil and locality. Her project promotes by contrast a concept of “eco-cosmopolitanism” in which our responsibility is to learn more about the way that others envisage place rather than cultivate our own gardens.

Her new project interestingly suggests that planetary awareness stems from databases. She argues that the database is the “primary planetary sense organ,” building on Lev Manovich’s ideas that the database is “a cultural form of its own.” In this context, the database is a paradigm that generates narratives.

Such databases as the Census of Marine Life, the Catalogue of Life, the Encyclopedia of Life, and the Consortium for the Barcode of Life allow us a new means to create a planetary paradigm of life. Heise showed how artists like Maya Lin have created database-generated projects, like her What Is Missing? (Click the link to play). Indeed, the Taronga Zoo at Sydney that I visited yesterday is a form of living taxonomy of scarcity, in which the wall text next to animal enclosures highlights the extent to which the species is threatened.

Such archives oscillate between minimalist and sublime aesthetics. As an example of the former, Joel Satore photographs and displays endangered and extinct species in distinctly anti-romantic form. By contrast, the TV generated ARKive featuring David Attenborough uses a familiar info-tainment sublime by generating high-resolution full color images of rare animals with an aesthetic of imminent disappearance. For Heise, such projects are modern epics that acknowledge an inevitable shortfall in their efforts to capture the world-system. Such work sees itself as part of an epic struggle to preserve life itself, a recuperation of the heroic out of the horizontal. Here then we find the “great man” theory of history re-entering the database as an organizing principle.

The eye of Avatar

Tim Morton talked about Avatar in the frame of his dark ecology. He stressed the way in which it addressed the need for an environmental politics without satisfying it. The Anthropocene provides a precision of dating that is uncanny in relation to geological time. Avatar is a fantasy of an organic Internet, an embodiment into the planet, which Morton calls “planet sense.” Ironically, present-day environmentalism shows precisely how we are necessarily always interactive with the planet. It’s worth remembering that the film centers on the desire for colonial mining, a representation of the existing global South. Avatar centers around such binaries, epitomized by Jake who is human and Navi at once.

For Morton, Avatar is an object in the sense of Object-Oriented Ontology, an animist vision making the film into a person. OOO places things at the center of its attention, a set whose members are not identical to themselves. Reality is, in this view, “profoundly disjointed.” It moves past the logic of non-contradiction. There is no vantage point outside the set, reality cannot be peeled away. Morton has a dense philosophical analysis that is hard to summarize, it must be said.

This sense that “we are not the world” troubles the relation between foreground and background: how can we bring together beings that cannot be reduced? There is no “world” in this view. So: doom. Doom is fate and a judgement, but it is also justice, the figure of deconstruction. Humans’s doom is to recognize the presence of the non-human.

Jennifer Gabrys talked about planet sensing in fieldwork she carried out in Lapland. Environmental monitoring takes place in the far North using computational sensors, where it is a key scientific activity. This sensing creates a database, rather than recording “how things really are.” She argues that there are many forms of sensing, quoting Alfred Whitehead

We are in the world and the world is in us.

The subject emerges from the world and vice-versa. Objects like rocks have experience insofar as they are affected by the world, and says Steven Shaviro

this being affected is its experience.

From this background, Gabrys argued for “citizen sensing” as a form of environmental monitoring and participation, using open-source software like Arduino. For example, Beatriz da Costa has used pigeons to monitor air quality in Los Angeles. Such projects questions who or what counts as a citizen, a question that resonates within the Occupy movement. Perhaps such environmental action might constitute citizenship, or becoming a sensing citizen?

Finally, Marco Peljhan presented his Arctic Perspective Initiative (together with many others) as a Constructivist Engagement. He noted that satellite sensing and its massive data sets are largely open source. He has used such data in the Makrolab projects that detailed migrations of capital and climate. Working with Inuit partners in the Arctic, however, it became clear that a longer-term approach was necessary. Under Stalin, the Arctic was part of the Gulag and subject to an “accidental” genocide. In Canada, major dislocation was common and culturally destructive. The theme became one of resilience, a key theme for life in the Arctic.

The Initiative created renewable and sustainable digital labs for the Arctic, including hydroponic gardens. The group offered local Inuit film makers courses in video editing using open source software, aerial maps, The current project is called Sinuni, a climate/weather and land recording device, using satellite imagery. This interface between indigenous oral knowledge and globalized digital military-industrial technology provides a means to repurpose military visualization for autonomous purposes.

Reflections to follow tomorrow with my own contribution.

[ps written on the fly so apologies for typos etc]

 

On Growth, Sugar and the Forest

Another day, another World Heritage Area. Today we headed through the Queensland sugar plantations to the rainforests of the Kuku Yalanji people. The experience was a direct clash between destructive but highly productive Western agriculture and indigenous no-growth stewardship of the land. For two centuries, this has been a history of the former defeating the latter. The Yalanji have been here for 40,000 years, though, so this little story is just a blip. What we saw was the contradiction between “globalization” and the planetary.

It was during the American Civil War that Queensland jumped into the business of sugar cane production to meet the fall in supply. Sugar cane was an immensely labor-intensive process and so indigenous labor from across the Pacific was brought in under compulsion.

Sugar planting in Queensland around 1870

Missionaries had no hesitation in calling it slavery (above). As a self-governing colony (until 1901), Queensland nonetheless had a free hand. The compeled labor was brought in from relatively close locations like ni-Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands and as far away as Polynesia. They were called “blackbirds,” and are still trying to get their story recognized.

In more recent times, the industry declined until the rise in demand for ethanol led to a massive revival. Although the cane growing is now highly mechanized, the square plantations of seven foot high plants, each as thick as a large finger, would be recognizable to any plantation owner or worker.

As ever, the grass (sugar cane is a grass) is visibly destructive. The crop rapidly denudes the soil because the indigenous tropical flora, although spectacular, are evolved to grow in the poor, sandy soil. Later we were shown a tree in the forest from whose seeds the Yalanji make bread. It’s eight hundred years old and only about twelve feet high. Sugar cane seedlings that I saw were therefore surrounded by black compost and white chemical powders. In between the fields, which are in all stages of production from planting to recently harvested, stand a few remnants of the forest.

Higher up, where the cane can’t grow, the rainforest and its people survive, protected now as a National Park and a UNESCO heritage site. Today the steep green slopes were shrouded in mist and cloud, looking more like Aotearoa New Zealand than the Sunshine State. The Kuku Yalanji people have recently begun to offer guided tours of their land and its culture.

Guides from the Kuku Yalanji people

Our walk, guided by Jenny, also known as Butterfly, was beautiful and informative. Apparently uninteresting plants were revealed to be means of cleaning, healing, or sources of food. Shelters were left for others to use, rather than being demolished. Few now live in this traditional way, but there’s a commitment to remembering and passing on the old ways. It’s easy to be naive and romanticize this way of life. But as Raymond (Kija/Moon) emphasized at the end of our tour, these people have survived in this place for millennia without rendering it unusable, as Europeans have managed in a couple of centuries.

Raymond performed the digeridoo for us, and showed the required technique of circular breathing, also used by some jazz players like Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Wynton Marsalis. Accompanying himself with clapsticks, he gave a virtuoso performance, imitating the sounds of numerous animals above the drone-like beat. He also insisted that the instrument was forbidden to women, although there are many known instances to the contrary. It seems to be another instance where a reaction against European culture is producing a more conservative form of indigenous culture. For example, art works that were formerly permitted by Elders to be seen in galleries have recently been reclassified as secret.

It’s hard to be censorious. The cassowary bird is a key link in the rainforest ecosystem.

Cassowary bird

It eats fruits that are poisonous to humans and disseminates the seeds in its scat. Humans have now taken to feeding the flightless bird. The cassowary becomes accustomed to being fed and sometimes attacks people for food. Human food has altered its digestive system, so we were told, with the result that it is less able to digest the fruits it normally eats. It’s at these small intersections that things go out of joint and violence results.

If it’s a direct choice between sugar culture and indigenous conservation, it’s seems clear where we should go. But it isn’t. The Kuku Yalanji are not proposing that kind of return to a lost beginning, in part because the land could no longer support the numbers of people that there are here, and in part because electricity, health care and other such modern conveniences are not worth revoking. There are some people living traditionally off the coast of the island of Kauai, part of the Hawai’ian archipelago, it should be said, and traditional navigation is making a return across the Pacific. By the same token, we can’t choose modern-style growth as a solution because there aren’t enough resources for everyone to live in the Anglo-US-Australian way. This is the sharpest edge between the myth of “globalization” and the actual experience of the planetary. All the choices are bad.

Capital and the Drought

From the Guardian

There is devastating drought across about half of the US, caused by fossil fuel capitalism. The drought and resulting food shortages, price rises in basic foodstuffs and resulting inflation is likely to intensify the crisis of capitalism. There will be food riots in places where incomes are low and mostly spent on food. That may include parts of the fossil fuel intensive world, as well as the domain of the wretched of the earth. All the anxiety about the technicalities from CDOs to LIBOR may pale beside the fundamental crisis in producing food for humans and animals, should the drought continue.

The photograph above makes it clear that this set of circumstances is the product of a certain form of financial capital. The ostensible subject of the picture is the wizened corn, so dry that farmers would be delighted to salvage a third of the crop. Any neutral person is also going to want to know about that sign.

It indicates that the corn being grown is not “natural” but a proprietary product of Croplan by Winfield, number 6125VT3. This varietal is intended especially for use in the West. One of its alleged benefits is being drought-resistant:

Hybrids are selected for strong drought tolerance, even when planted at a high plant population. This is important in the western Corn Belt where low plant population is used as a hedge against drought.

Oops. Now you might think that this would lead to farmers not using these crops next year. But it’s not that simple. The seed always belongs to the supplier and contracts lock you in. The particular varietal shown drooping above is a test variant being tried out in various locations. According to a farmers’ chat site, Croplan

source their germ plasm from Monsanto, Syngenta, Pioneer, Mycogen

meaning the major GMO food monopolists. Croplan is part of WinField Solutions, the third largest seed company and number 1 pesticide outlet in the country. Both are owned by Land O’ Lakes, the dairy conglomerate, itself part of Dean Foods. As a result of these interfaces, Croplan is very keen on corn that is pesticide tolerant.

Again, the supposed benefit to the farmer is plants absorbing more moisture and nutrient.

So farmers have paid for expensive drought-resistant seed that didn’t deliver when really tested. The ramifications of this failure go in many directions. There are vast numbers of genetically modified varietals interacting with the existing seed population to unknown effect. It’s an article of faith among dog owners that GMO corn makes dogs allergic. What does it do to us? Food is becoming more expensive with food prices officially rising 4.8% in 2011 and likely to be much higher again in 2012. An economist with the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas explains:

The impact of higher food prices is felt disproportionately by poorer Americans, Mr. Henderson said. For Americans in the bottom 20% of income, food typically takes up more than a quarter of household income, compared with about 10% for wealthier Americans.

So if food rises 10% in price over two years, you can be sure that the wages and salaries in the lower half of the economy have not risen to match. While the poorer will do worse, the corporate fear is that food will ignite inflation and reduce profits. Dean Foods, owner of the whole chain of corn and milk we’ve been discussing is down 22% in the stock market. I wonder if capital can survive another shock of this size, despite what Naomi Klein has called the “shock doctrine.” If the largest monopolies are struggling, who can take them over?

La Via Campesina in action

So climate change is not “just” a disaster caused by capitalism, which it is; but it’s also a disaster for capitalism. Last week, Via Campesina, the international land-use and peasants’ movement, concluded a successful conference in Indonesia. The Governor of West Sumatra returned expired land use contracts from corporations to ulayat (indigenous peoples/community rights). The final declaration called for the movement:

to incorporate other peoples who are threatened by the same current phenomena, including urban dwellers threatened with impoverishment and with eviction to make way for real estate speculation; peoples who live under military occupation; consumers who face ever higher prices for food of ever worsening quality; communities facing eviction by extractive industries; and rural and urban workers.

I would say that sounds like an agenda I can agree with, wouldn’t you? More than that, it sounds like the agenda we need.

 

The Fall of the Oil Empire

We have spent much time trying create a narrative to tie together the themes of biosphere extinction, debt catastrophe and the failure of counterinsurgency. It may be as simple as this: the oil empire built by the US was undone by the unanticipated consequences of debt and climate change. There never was a grand strategy, just the application of overwhelming force that no longer holds sway. No one knows what comes next.

What do we know is that the empire doesn’t work, the debt machine has been exposed as a fake, and the biosphere is really starting to show signs of non-viability.

In no particular order: the LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) debt scandal is huge and should be the top political issue of all time. LIBOR is the means of setting global interest rates by a few men in London after polling 16 leading banks. This sets the rate for your mortgage, credit cards and student loans. And it has been systematically fixed for years. These manipulations were of the order of five or ten basis points (1%=100 basis points), which sounds negligible. But $550 trillion of credit is affected by this rate: some estimate as much as $800 trillion. Apparently tiny changes save or cost the banks billions. So far from this being a “free” market, it’s been fixed.

Not only that, it’s not just Barclays, who have paid a minimal fine of $450 million as part of their acceptance of wrong-doing. LIBOR rates automatically exclude the highest two rates and the lowest two. So to actually change LIBOR at least six, probably eight, maybe all 16 banks had to be involved. If the mafia had done this, we’d have 800 year prison sentences being handed down under RICO statutes. Don’t hold your breath to see a bankster do time. Because government must have known: or, equally scandalously, they didn’t. Either way, in a functioning political system of any kind, heads would roll. If they don’t, we’ll know that the empire has no functioning bureaucracy and that it has all been outsourced to the financial sector.

It’s been obvious for some time that global counterinsurgency has morphed into a drone-enabled assassination program, a kind of automatic merger of COINTELPRO and Murder Inc. It doesn’t work very well. Why does this matter? Because if non-US nations buy US Treasury bonds as tribute to the global empire, as David Graeber has argued, it rather makes a difference whether that empire can keep order.

Here the US has benefited from the disaster that has become the eurozone so that rumors that circulated in 2007 about oil being priced in euros have disappeared. Global liquidity has nowhere else to go except the dollar. One group of mainstream economists have described the US dollar as being on the “oil standard.” In this view, the empire kept peace in oil-producing regions and in exchange, oil was priced in dollars and not too highly. Since the invasion of Iraq, the connection that kept the dollar strong when oil prices were high has been broken.

It still makes sense to think of the dollar as a petro-currency and of its empire as being boosted by oil. In 2007, it was predicted that the US would produce about 30% of its oil needs in 2010. In fact, it currently produces about 45% of its needs, due to massive exploitation of all available resources and greater fuel efficiency. From not being in the top ten oil producers in 2005, it is now number three.

Big oil is very much alive and well as a result.  The five largest oil companies made $136 billion in net profits in 2011, with no sign of decreases this year. US Representatives that receive significant campaign contributions from Big Oil get over $150,000 each: all 250 of them. Ironically, the supposed oil man, Bush, has been replaced by a far more oil friendly regime.

There are just two tiny problems. The oil is running out, one, and the biosphere is dramatically transforming, two. Which is why, three, things aren’t going so well.

The International Energy Authority, a totally pro-fossil fuel organization, has been sounding the alarm for some time. On the one hand, according to their chief economist Fatih Birol

We think that the crude oil production has already peaked in 2006, but we expect oil to come from the natural gas liquids, the type of liquid we have through the production of gas, and also a bit from the oil sands. But in any case it will be very challenging to see an increase in the production to meet the growth in the demand, and as a result of that, …the age of cheap oil is over.

Notably, even though their percentages have improved, the big five oil companies are indeed making less oil than they used to do.
And then there’s the heat.

Temperature records for June 2012 in the Midwest

Across the country, 3300 temperature records were set or tied in June. 172 new all-time temperature records were set. The climate scientists are now able to tie these weather events directly to carbon emissions, while also being able to say that events like the cold winter in the UK in 2011-12 were not so caused.

If you were, say, running for office and needed to win in the Midwest, where 600 heat records were set in June, you might make something of all this: if that is, you had any idea what to do about it. Time’s up for pretending that everything will be OK, that some invention will come along or whatever else.

So what’s left for the empire? Good question.