Archive for July, 2019

Some biased thoughts on politics

July 26, 2019

An intemperate spiel inspired by a set of comments on some one else’s facebook page:

It is necessary to be clear on the general differences between right and left wing thought.

Right wing thought is always about defending and supporting hierarchies first and boundaries second. It is usually about defending established hierarchies. In the US and Australia, that is about defending plutocracy, but it can be about strengthening older hierarchies, such as military, theocratic, racial, or gender hierarchy amongst others.

Left wing thought is about weakening hierarchies and establishing some kind of close to egalitarian organisation. The problem with Left wing thought is that if it gets established through revolution then its supporters can try and support the new hierarchies, such as the party or whatever. Success means the left is in danger of becoming right wing.

Centrist thought could be about balancing the hierarchies off against each other; recognising them but weakening them, but it usually isn’t.

In the US and Australia, right wing thought, as said above, is nearly always about strengthening the power of the wealthy and the corporate sector.

It may be disguised in other language, such as ‘liberty’, but this always comes down to the liberty of the wealthy to do what they like and the poor to accept what they are told. The right may talk about ‘free markets’, but this always means that any control the workers may exert on the corporate sector is an interference with the market and has to be abolished, while any control the corporate sector may exert over the workers is the market in action and eventually for the workers’ own good.

Logically for the Right, everyone with enough sense and talent is able to get wealthy, and people are only poor because they are talentless, stupid or feckless. And as talentless, stupid or feckless people they should be left to rot. The only thing holding them back from the good life is themselves. Any support for them, other than grovel-demanding charity, will corrupt them even further.

However, support for the wealthy is just support for talent, so that’s pretty cool. Every wealthy person has earned their wealth. They rightly own everything produced by the people they pay. Wealthy people are wonderful, unless they disagree with rightwing theory, in which case they are ‘elites’.

If we have to maintain a level of unemployment to keep costs to business low, or use tax-payer funded food stamps to keep workers alive, and costs to business low, then great. Wages are always a drag on profits and to be eliminated if possible, except for the wages of high level executives of course, because talent deserves to get paid. Hierarchy and worker’s dependence needs protecting.

As plutocracy is wonderful, it should be extended to all institutions. Churches should only count if they make money – voluntary poverty is just stupid. Good churches will say wealth is a mark of God’s favour. Schools should have to make money, and wealthy schools are simply good schools. Education is a privilege not a right. If you can’t afford a good school, you are obviously stupid. Medical treatment should be about service to those good people who can pay, everyone else is trash. Medical care is a privilege. If you can’t afford privilege you don’t deserve it – even if the rest of us catch your plague. Universities should be run by managers and seek profit; research should aim to boost the private sector or be aimed at issuing patents for university profit. Students should be passed if they pay, because that is what they have paid for. Any idea that education should be about cultivation of the soul or gaining knowledge or whatever, is completely dumb.

Note that the only purpose of life is to get rich and to please employers. All of your education should be about increasing your obedience to employers and the wealthy. That way you will do well.

As plutocracy is good, profit is good. In the US, who cares if a few people get murdered or die by accident with guns if it makes a profit for arms manufacturers? Who would stop arms manufacturers from selling weapons to terrorists or our countries’ enemies? Who would stop them selling to people with convictions for violence or mental disease? Anyone who would propose lessening the profit of arms manufacturers by even a little, must be communists trying to stop profit altogether and take guns away from everyone. They must want to leave us helpless.

Likewise who cares if we destroy the environment if it makes a profit? Poison the air, then sell people air filters and oxygen; everyone benefits and more profit is made. All is good. If coal is profitable, then sell it. Let’s not worry about government subsidy of something destructive, its all good profit. If you can’t live anywhere because of the pollution and eco-system breakdown, that just means you were inferior to begin with. Living in a functional ecology is a privilege not a right. If you were good you would have bought that privilege. You could have bought property high above the waterline or on a cruise ship, or hired your own private army.

Wealth, however, is not a privilege it is the right of wealthy people and cannot be challenged. If you are wealthy, you should have every privilege you can pay for, if you are poor you should also have what you can pay for, and nothing else.

Profit for the wealthy solves all problems. Indeed no other solution to any kind of problem should be proposed.

Without maximum profit everything dies, the capitalist system collapses, the hierarchy collapses, so we can’t lower profit, and must support profit at any other cost and that includes the death of talentless poorer people.

The further thing, is that right wingers know what is best for everyone. Everyone has to do what we say or suffer. If you don’t please the wealth elite, you don’t deserve anything. If I think you are a man I’ll address you as a man, no matter what you think or want. If I think you are an ape then I’ll address you as an ape. If you object, you clearly have mental issues and are in need of assistance so you can come to think like me…. That way everything will work all RIGHT.

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What is Energy?

July 26, 2019

This is an attempt to talk about energy more concretely. It is clearly exploratory, rather than finished. Comments and disagreements more than welcomed. I do not claim to be particularly well informed.

What is Energy?

Many people spend a lot of time talking about energy in social theory, but they don’t say what they are talking about. This probably produces confusion, so this is an attempt to be more specific.

Energy is present in motion, change or transformation, or keeping things in regular dynamic patterns. This usually involves forces (such as electro-magnetism, differences in heat, or gravity) being transmitted through: physical contact; ‘radiation’;  displacement in space;  chemical bonding and so on. This is particularly the case when we are talking about “cause”. Causing or producing events takes energy. Jean Mark Jancovici, a French energy and climate ‘expert’ writes “Energy is what enables you to change the environment, by definition”.

Energy is often defined in terms of “work”. In normal parlance work means controlled, or directed, energy expenditure. It may, or may not, be useful to keep the term “work” for that specific meaning of human labour. Labour might be thought of as the directed and controlled application of human energy. With this definition, we can perhaps more readily understand why human labour may not have to increase, for there to be increased production, value or potentiality – we just need the energy to come from elsewhere.

Energy is in some ways observed in a dynamic set of relationships between ‘things/nodes’ and the systemic context and changes that the things/nodes ‘cause’.

What any organism, or group of organisms, can do, is limited by the amount of energy available to it for conversion into activity. Some animals spend almost all their obtained energy in eating, growing, healing and reproducing. As shall be stated later, energy is always lost, or dissipated, when it is used.

Let’s look at the cycles of energy on earth.

  • Naturally occurring nuclear energy within the Sun (energy within the atomic structure) provides sunlight and heat.
  • This heat drives movement of ‘matter’ on Earth: tides, weather, water cycles etc.
  • We also have planetary geothermal heat gradients, volcanoes and so on, and geographical gradients from uneven weather, stratification, upheaval, water flow, and other chemical state changes (expansion of water as it freezes, natural acids etc), which also drive the movement, and break up, of matter on Earth.
  • Chemical/biological conversions of sunlight, to the movement, or growth, of a pattern of material (an organism).
  • After organisms die they can form fossil fuels over very long (geological) periods of time and chemical processing. This also requires energy and pressure which is a form of energy stemming from gravity.
  • Organisms can convert other organisms to energy, through eating.
  • Finally we have ‘tools’ and ‘machines’, some of which are powered by human or animal energy, some by weather, some by fossil fuels, nuclear energy, or electrical energy from some other source.
  • For humans, after they are fed, using more energy really means “using more machines” (Jancovici again), or killing themselves through over-eating, or whatever.

Fossil fuels are amongst the most efficient forms of energy currently available to humans. They are easy to use, have been easy to find, and the technology involved is pretty simple. So far replacement technology for fossil fuels is more complicated, and requires more energy expenditure to build.

The laws of thermodynamics apply to energy. The important ones for social analysis, seem to be:

1) Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms.

2) In a closed system the entropy, or dissipation of energy as random motion or heat, will increase over time. Things will run down. Hence energy needs to be arrive in the closed system from somewhere else.

Entropy is often equated to disorder and randomness, but this is not quite correct. With universal heat death, where entropy is maximal, order is almost total. Everything is uniform. One space is not distinguishable from another, over time. Nothing of “any interest” occurs. In that sense, disorder and difference seems essential for functioning systems. Energy occurs in patterned systems of difference.

These principles of thermodynamics roughly translate as follows (even experts sometimes disagree on what they mean):

1) Energy is not created. It is converted from one form to another, or transported from one place to another. Conversion and transport of energy usually require some other form of energy conversion. There is no energy available to humans without previous energy expenditure. Understanding this idea is vital.

Energy that is taken from a patterned system for a particular use, is not available for other uses – partly because of the next law.

2) We can never use energy with total efficiency. Some energy will be lost in processes of conversion or transport and dispelled into the general systemic context/relationships – perhaps disturbing or disrupting them. The more steps to a process, the more energy is likely to be lost/dissipated.

The ratio between energy expended and the energy available as a result of that expenditure is usually known as “Energy Return on Investment” (EROI) or, as I prefer, “Energy Return on Energy Input” (EREI)- because this makes it clear that energy input is central and money, while important, is secondary. The higher the EREI the higher the “energy availability” and the more freedom of action; although, for particular societies, this also depends on the social organisation. In economies of high inequality, large groups of people are likely to be powerless and poor with little energy available to them. EREI ratios of one or less are disastrous for complex civilisations, because it implies all the energy available is being used to produce less replacement energy.

The ‘external’ Sun is the basis for continuing life and any “interesting” planetary functioning. Without the Sun, the system would run down. Earth does not form a closed system because of the input from the Sun.

I have heard people say that “entropy will kill us anyway in the long run”, therefore we should do nothing about climate change. But they rarely say: “we don’t need to be employed because of entropy, or we don’t need wealth, we don’t need energy etc…” So this argument is rather selective.

Eventually we will all die, and the solar system will end; but this is probably not a basis for not caring about the near future. As long as the sun shines at roughly its current rate Life will continue. For current day humans, this ultimate end is not an immediate worry, or even a distant worry. It will not affect us, or our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren. It will occur in billions of years.

While it is not formally part of the entropy theory, we can extrapolate and say that any long-term directed use of energy to produce what the users consider to be order will produce disorder as well, because of the effects of dissipation of energy. Disorder or randomness is not unimportant to the system’s ability to function, or its ability to fall apart. Without generation of entropy nothing happens.

In macro terms, this means we cannot ignore the production of waste and pollution if we want to keep the system functioning. This means we cannot ignore the destruction of ecological sources of energy through energy usage (ie the destruction of ecologies, of food, the capacity for chemical conversion of waste into useful products for the ecology, and so on). These ecological systems provide energetic resilience, or systemic stability (within bounds). Without them, the system is more likely to become unstable. So we always have to look at the whole system in order to understand the effects of the parts of that system.

Most of these sources of energetic resilience are currently ‘free’ – or, more accurately, provided by the planetary system without human effort. Destruction of the natural ecology, destroys the processes of conversion of waste into resources, and the resilience of the system. This ongoing destruction, through social ordering, opens the possibility of a general transition to new and unfamiliar, disruptive stabilities or instabilities, which humans will find costly in all senses of the word. It will require a lot of energy usage for humans to compensate for the loss of these systems, and that will produce more pollution, and it will possibly take energy away from other necessary activities.

The problem with fossil fuels, despite their extraordinarily high Energy return on Energy investment, is that they increase disorder through pollution, and climate change, and they poison the systems they are used within. This is not strictly entropic, but it is comparable, as it disrupts the energetic resilience of systems.

If we counted destruction of energetic resilience as a problem, we would be expending more energy to solve the problem, whatever else we do. We might even abandon fossil fuels. There is also the possibility we are losing high EREI fossil fuel extraction anyway: people do not extract oil from tar sands if oil is easily, and cheaply, available elsewhere. Likewise, people do not frack, if gas is easily, and cheaply, available elsewhere – unless there are other incentives such as government subsidies, or economic distortions such as Ponzi type loan schemes.

Money is a sign of energy. Easily available money can enable the appearance of human organised energy, and activity. However, currency depends upon social power. If social power and monetary accounting is used to ignore real energy deficits, the destruction of energetic resilience, or increases in disorders, then we are headed for lower EREIs and probably for intensified disaster.

Monetary cost and profit can also distract from significant problems such as the noticeable entropic or disorderly effects of our ‘movement’, such as when we overgraze land, overfish waters, or stick poisons in rivers because it’s easy. In some cities the amount of heat produced as a side effect of air conditioning (cooling) is supposed to be noticeable, but in general that does not seem to be a problem.

One of the problems for decarbonisation projects is that those energy substitutes for fossil fuels, which are easily available, do not have as high EREI. They require more energy to build (in the short term) and are often built through heavily polluting processes. It may also be the case that the lower EREI means that less energy is freely available, lowering the ease of transition at the very moment we require freely available energy to build that transition. However, the consequences of delaying the change, get worse with every delay. This is not an easy process, but it is essential.

But if we did not have a civilisation that was based on ignoring the basic nature of energy, and the energetic production of entropy in the form of disruptions and dissipations of production through pollution and ecological destruction, then we could be better off to make the transition and to plan realistically for life afterwards….

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Energy, Management, Money

July 22, 2019

Economies and organisations always run on available energy, and energy is fundamental to any kind of economy/organisation. This is true whether you are hunting and gathering to obtain the food to enable people to have the energy to gather more food and socialise, or whether you are trying to run a world-spanning army through electric and oil power. The amount of energy that is available to the organisation after deducting the amount of energy expended to gain that energy, fundamentally influences the possibilities of what it, and its members, can do for ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Financial cost is one way of measuring this, but it should probably not be taken as the only or fundamental way of evaluating the relationship between energy expended and energy gained.

The ratio between energy expended and the energy available, as a result of that expenditure, is usually known as “Energy Return on Investment” (EROI) or as I prefer “Energy Return on Energy Input” (EREI)- because this makes it clear that energy input is central and money, while important, is secondary. The higher the EREI the higher the “energy availability” and the more freedom of action; although, for any particular group of people, this also depends on social organisation. In economies of high inequality, large groups of people are likely to be powerless and poor with little energy available to them.

Time is also a factor that is important. It might be necessary to expend more energy than is released in the hope of building a better energy system. It may also be the case that an energy system is so destructive in its side effects that it needs to be modified quickly. However, in the long term energy output must be greater than energy input for any kind of survival.

A fundamental reason why we have both our current prosperity and troubles, is because fossil fuels have been a massive gift. Their EREI has been very high. Some people suggest that it took the energy from one barrel of oil to produce 50 barrels of oil (figures vary but are large, I’ve seen figures of 1 to 100). We have had similar EREI’s for coal. Fossil Fuels are also easy to transport with relatively little energy loss – or in the case of gas, where there has been massive loss of escaped gas, the quantities of non-leaked gas have been so great and the loss so invisible, that it has not been counted until recently. Fossil fuels are also easy to use; the technology involved in their application is pretty straightforward and simple.

However, these huge ratios are no longer the case; EREI is declining for fossil fuels. Easy to access sources seem to have been used up, are close to having been used up or are taking more energy to extract energy. Companies are having to drill deep in the ocean, which takes lots of energy, with high potential for accident and loss. Other companies are moving into small, difficult or energy intensive processes such as tar sands, shale oil and fracking. These sources of fossil fuels would not be being used, if higher EREI sources were easily available. Coal appears to be still relatively low in energy consumption because miners now largely do open cut mining, which uses explosives, or straightforward drilling in to a cliff face. In other words coal seems to be good provided you ignore the ecological costs.

However, more people are starting to realise that fossil fuel pollution is not good for human and environmental health, coal in particular. Mines are often destructive of fertile lands needed for food production. Even more destructive mines which not only threaten food supplies, but threaten water or endangered wildlife are being opened or proposed. Finally, burning fossil fuels produces disruptive climate change, which is likely to consume even more energy in repairing, or abandoning, infrastructure damaged by that change. The more destructive, or potentially destructive, the mode of extraction allowed, the cheaper the financial cost, and probably the less energy deployed to obtain energy in the short term. There is an incentive for fossil fuel companies to be immediately destructive – which is not good on top of the destruction from climate change.

The energy needed to deal with, or remediate, such destruction and enforced change is quite high, and severely diminishes the available EREI, but the costs are usually put on the taxpayers (or ignored) rather than being charged to polluters, so the polluters notice it less.

With fossil fuels we have been spoilt. Energy became invisible, and rarely even features in most economics other than as price, despite its centrality. Likewise, we have not needed an economy of air, even if we all know that without air you are dead, and air might slowly accumulate poisons.

Declining availability of energy, may not mean that customer costs increase immediately; many energy companies have vast supplies of financial capital which they can use to maintain customer lock-in and prevent change, in the hope of recouping the loss over time, or in the hope of getting the last fossil fuels out of the ground before they become unsellable – either because people are sensible and abandon them, or because the system collapses in its own muck.

Given these factors of decline and destruction, it becomes vital for any organisation to think carefully about how they obtain the excess energy which enables them to act, and about the likelihood of the costs of cleaning up after destructive ways of obtaining energy.

Energy has to be the fundamental concern of any organisation whatsoever. Members of an organisation may always have to be thinking, ‘How can we get or generate more energy more efficiently, use it more efficiently, co-ordinate that use, and then expand what we can do with that amount of energy?’

Energy is even more fundamental than money, because without excess energy you cannot do anything. If the electricity to power the office buildings and computers is simply not available, nearly everything would shut down – no matter how much money you had.

Energy becomes a manageable problem if you use the right sorts of technology for the future, have the right kinds of organisation that can allocate energy where and when it is needed, and if the people in the organisation give the energy system the right kind of attention – the kind of attention that they would nowadays give to the monetary system.

Consequently, organisations probably need an Energy co-ordinator to make sure that different parts of the organisation co-ordinate energy uses, and that energy savings and efficiency are not diminished by another department making financial savings. Over time EREI, energy use and the effects of that usage are likely to become more pronounced in accounting and management measures.

An added aim for, say, local government involves questions about how they can increase the ability of their inhabitants to live well, which involves saving the conditions of life on the planet and local area (as they are not disconnected), providing adequate energy, guaranteeing low destructive energy supplies and using that energy well within the organisation and in local area.

To some extent renewable energy could provide an opportunity for organisations to become more self-sufficient, and less dependent on suppliers while saving money. ‘Distributed power systems’ also tend to be more resilient to shock events as they are not vulnerable to a central source collapsing or the transport wires collapsing. Taking such action may be inhibited by regulations which assume that the existing system is the only system possible.

If the EREI of fossil fuels is declining or increasingly produces dangerous effects, these energy sources need to be abandoned before they are used up, yet currently renewable, or low polluting, energies do not have as high EREI. Consequently organisations may need to restructure their energy expenditure, as part of their preparation for the future. It may be that for the short-term attempt to produce future energy savings, energy expenditure will be quite high, and this may also require financial expenditure.

At the moment, immediate financial savings are likely to disrupt energy savings, and possibly even make EREI invisible or low priority. What matters is what is counted, and the ease of counting money should not always make money the priority.

To reiterate yet again, the more energy availability, the more can be done for ‘good’ and ‘bad’. However, there are often organisational limits, what is often called ‘lock-in’; ways of doing things that become harmful after a certain threshold and are difficult to change.

For example, the more complicated an organisation can become, then in general the more it can do. All large multi-faceted organisations tend to become complicated. However, after a point the energy expended for the organisational energy released, can become unsustainable and declines. It takes more and more effort to maintain the physical and organisational structures. In many countries, we can see roads and bridges in bad repair. Maintaining complexity requires energy. Not using energy for the necessary repair and maintenance to keep the organisation going is a political decision deferring costs to the future. To save organisations from this fate, organisational limits may need to be investigated and recognised.

Money can resemble the excess of the energy system because an organisation can give itself temporary energy boosts by going massively into debt. This was the secret of apparent prosperity in the 80s; anyone can look prosperous if they burn up the future, but eventually the debt runs out or is called in. There has been an argument amongst financial analysts that fracking, for example, is only successful because of growing debt in the industry, based largely on future promises (imaginings) of high prices for the product and improved technologies of extraction.

However, if you constrain money too much then you cannot do anything because advancement requires financial investment. Ultimately, you can have a pile of money but if you do not have energy, you cannot actually use that money to do anything. Money may be based upon energy circulation and energy availability – if so, it can act as a form of stored energy (for a while).

Again with no energy availability, money is worthless. Energy production and its relation to Energy input is fundamental.

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Social action and adapting to climate change

July 14, 2019

Excerpt from an old article by Craig Morris slightly paraphrased:

To deal with climate change we are suggesting that we redesign our world and our social life. That’s exciting, but it’s also not the way we talk about it.

We could, for example, ask people some questions: how would you like to improve your community? What are the important things in life that should not be lost and should made easier? What do you value? These might help to get people involved, rather than resistant.

Instead, the discussion often reduced to lowering energy emissions, and roughly breaks down into three types of propositions, largely about technology (which most people don’t really understand):

1) We need to convert from fossil fuels to renewables quickly, as they can help us live within planetary boundaries at a high enough living standard;

2) Renewable energy alone will not suffice, and;

3) If we fail to do anything, our civilization is on a path to destruction.

None of this asks people what they want to work towards, apart from technology. And they cannot make the technology themselves, so this framing of the issues implies people are at the mercy of others.

The transition may not only need to reduce carbon emissions, but also strengthen communities and overcome the isolation that people increasingly suffer from. It needs to make life better, not more of what we have now…. If people do need renewables, and that seems likely, how are they going to organize this? How will they gain power over energy?

Getting people to agree on action and work together is not always easy, but it may need to begin, now to get action on other things progressing.

The need to bring people together is one reason to be skeptical of nuclear power. Up to now, the technology has required too much secrecy, thereby undermining good governance and democracy…. Communities and citizens have never made their own nuclear power.

However, this working together is not being encouraged and the wording of the Paris agreement itself shows how marginalized the focus on social benefits still is – perhaps because it suggests a “crisis of democracy” in which people want to rule their own lives with others, rather than obey the elites or retreat from demanding service from the State.

Coal and oil are bound into social formations, they are stuck in ‘Carbon Oligarchies’, where peoples’ lives are being risked to support established sources of profit. It is possible that renewables are not yet stuck in the same way, but open to being shaped by community involvement and democratic process. If so, we should encourage it.

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Mining in Australia II

July 10, 2019

There has been a recent report which suggests that fossil fuel mining in Australia accounts for 5% of global greenhouse emissions, as well as being one of the highest per capita producers or greenhouse emissions. It is possible that with the new coal and gas mines Australia could be responsible for something like 17% of Global emissions by 2030.

see RenewEconomy and The Guardian

Obviously the country hits well above its weight, and the argument that we shouldn’t do anything because our contribution to the problem is trivial, is completely wrong.

One potential response is to suggest that we are just not going to stop because its so economically important, but as previously suggested its doubtful we make that much from this type of mining, due to export of profits overseas, low royalty rates, massive tax concessions and decreasing employment in the industry.

But, if we recognised that fossil fuel mining and burning is a problem, then another possible response is “someone has to stop fossil fuel mining first, if we are going to survive in our society, and so it might as well be us.”

However, I suspect that the real question, may well be “should we go about increasing the amount of fossil fuel mining we are doing, so that we become the one of the world’s biggest exporter of emissions, and one of the biggest causes of ecological destruction on the planet, or should we begin to phase fossil fuel mining out?”

If people agree that is a real question, then we can begin to stop opening new mines, especially mines that threaten water supplies and agriculture as do the Adani mines, and the mines in the Sydney catchment areas, and when that is done we could stop expanding existing mines into agricultural regions, and then start phasing them out altogether.

If we are about to increase exports to provide 17% of global energy emissions, then it might well appear that the rest of the world is cutting back by comparison. Certainly some countries plan to phase out coal mining. So why not us as well?

This may not happen because the parties are bought by miners…. but we probably should not let corruption stop us from doing the sensible or moral thing. Behaving morally is not always easy, and won’t always make you as much money as behaving immorally.

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Mining in Australia

July 8, 2019

9th July 2019 version

People frequently say something like we should not stop fossil fuel mining and export in Australia, because we would go ‘bankrupt’ without income from mining.

This is a response which will be updated as I do more research.

Australia does not earn much in royalties or income from mining, as we tend to give away minerals (when compared to other countries), profits are transferred overseas to tax havens and so on….

Wikipedia states: “At the height of the mining boom in 2009–10, the *total* value-added of the [entire] mining industry was 8.4% of GDP.” That is not the same as useful income to the country….

Adani predicted in court that the full coal mine would produce less than 1500 direct and indirect *job years* (not jobs) over the life of the mine, which is basically nothing (given a life of 25 years that is an average total employment of 60 jobs per year).

The Labor market information portal states that mining employs less than 2% of the total workforce. And that is from all the mines (iron, copper, lithium, uranium etc), not simply the fossil fuel mines. According to a parliamentary website mining employs much less than any of ‘Retail Trade’, “Wholesale trade’, ‘Professional, Scientific and Technical Services’, ‘Construction’, ‘Manufacturing’, ‘Accommodation and Food Services’, ‘Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing’, ‘Transport, Postal and Warehousing’, ‘Financial and Insurance Services’ and so on.

Some old surveys suggest that Australians think that mining employs about 8-9 times more people than it does. Increasing, automation, means employment in mining is decreasing all the time.

I have no idea how many mining workers are here on temporary visas, ready to take their wages back home either. The mining industry is always complaining there are not enough locals with the skills – which is odd given that there used to be, and less people are working in mining. However, overseas based workers are probably not unionized so they can earn less.

If climate change goes ahead uncontrollably, then there will be massive job losses in tourism (no barrier reef) agriculture (Adani taking all the water and poisoning the artesian basin). People will loose their homes, and so on – but that will be a boost to building.

So while Australia may go bankrupt (or at least face financial stress in the future), it will probably not be from stopping fossil fuel mines or refusing to help the world be destabilised.

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2040

July 7, 2019

I suggest that people see the film 2040. It portrays how we can start to beat climate change with the tech we have now. Its a bit glib on occasions but it gives hope that something could be done, if we could remove the corporate and governmental opposition.

First he goes to Bangladesh, to see how villages (we are talking shacks) can put solar on their rooftops and share it with other households, through a network of wiring and metres, which allows people to buy energy from this micro grid, even without being able to afford solar panels. The process allows microgrids to connect up, thus making a robust local system, which can cover the countryside. If the grid is broken by the increasing natural disasters of climate change, people can still get some power, as opposed to none.

This system would work well in Australia, but is currently illegal due to pro-corporate regulations. (We sold off our wires, and had to make them safe for private enterprise…). At the moment if i want to share my solar power with my next door neighbour i can’t. We need to make such links, installed by registered electricians, legal.

Then he looked at self driving electric cars, and how people could come to think of cars in terms of use, like they now think of music and films, rather than ownership. This would free up massive amounts of parking space which could be turned into urban farms, solving some of the food supply crisis, and relieving the need to transport food over vast distances. He also seemed to think it would reduce traffic and traffic jams, but i’m not sure about that. It might work because the cars go off after they have delivered you and don’t have to search for parking.

As far as I understand, this set up is not yet workable, making self driving cars that are relatively safe outside of small areas is still quite difficult. If it did reduce traffic, then you could also expect massive opposition from our toll road owners who have paid billions for waste property, and of course from oil companies who are not renown for their ethics, but are renown for ruthless political operation and massive misinformation campaigns. Anyone need to say Exxon? I’m not sure carpark owners would sell their property for urban farming either, but this could be solved by the State buying land and buildings back for people’s use (however unfashionable it is for the State to do anything useful).

Then there is regenerative agriculture. One person claimed that agriculture was responsible for more carbon emissions than burning fuels. This makes it important.

It turns out relatively easy to fix (apart from droughts). In Australia, industrial farming with fertilisers kills the soil, and the water runs off, taking the soil with it and taking the fertilisers into rivers where they provoke algal blooms and dead fish. Destructive ecologies spread.

The film maker visited a farmer who had simply planted a mix of grasses, sunflowers, sorgum, millet etc. and let them grow to about over a metre or so in height. Then he let in some cattle who ate them and defecated on the soil, and moved about as they are supposed to. Cattle that eat corn are unhealthy and their meat not so good for people, cattle that eat grass are pretty good alround.

After three months it was possible to see a marked difference between the old concrete like soil and this new spongy friable dark and moist soil. Apparently this process puts masses of carbon back into the soil and makes it more fertile without fertilisers. If we eat less meat then more soil can be let wild, we can store more carbon, and probably get a bit healthier.

We can also grow seaweed for food and fertiliser on platforms in the ocean deserts (although transport might be a bit of a problem). This provides areas for fish to grow, de-acidifies water from excess carbon, and could revitalise fish stocks – although we would have to stop industrial fishing from killing everything again. We could also do this closer to the coast. It is really easy to upscale with few negative ecological consequences.

Problem: Big agriculture will hate this, as it requires care rather than cheapness of production. They will fight against it. They want us to eat GMO foods that depend on brand name fertilisers and weed killers. However, small farmers should love it, and in the non-industrialised world saving small farmers, removes poverty (from dispossession for large farms…etc) and provides most of the food anyway. Some possible problem as crops rot releasing CO2 and methane, but still better than industrial ag.

Finally educating and empowering women and girls. Lowers population, increases care for the planet. The whole deal. What can I say?

Problem: Religions…. most of them.

Watch the film, and have a look at:

https://whatsyour2040.com/

2040

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On business confidence

July 7, 2019

Scott Morrison is following the Trump pattern attacking worker’s rights and wages, and removing environmental ‘red tape’.

Odd how business confidence nowadays seems to depend on scrapping worker’s protections and environmental care.

Is capitalism that desperate that it can no longer function without the ability to destroy everything?

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On ‘Cultural Marxism’?

July 2, 2019

Some people, usually on the Left, deny the existence of ‘cultural marxism’, while some critics claim it exists, and some of them claim it exists as a movement.

Looking at what the critics actually discuss when they refer to cultural marxism, then it seems they are pointing towards people who criticise contemporary Western culture and capitalism. Such people definitely exist and always have. There are some major conservative political thinkers who also criticise their contemporary Western culture and capitalism: Coleridge, Burke, Ruskin, and innumerable religious thinkers etc. So there is nothing necessarily Marxist about such criticism, although Marx does criticise aspects of Western culture and obviously criticises and analyses capitalism.

Gathering from what I have read those criticising cultural Marxism tend to object to objections to:

  • fixed gender roles and male authority
  • the authority of wealthy people and corporations
  • the authority of religion
  • patriotic violence
  • the authority and superiority of ‘white culture’
  • compulsory heterosexuality
  • being polite to people who are different to yourself

and so on.

To simplify the critics of ‘Cultural Marxism’ object to challenges to forms of authority and customs they approve of. They themselves challenge forms of authority and customs they don’t like, but they don’t call themselves “cultural fascists” or even “cultural capitalists”. So the name would appear to have the rhetorical function of trying to get people to dismiss what is being challenged before any argument is made, rather than any form of clarification. It may rely on an expected automatic negative reaction to the name of Marx, by people in their in-group.

One slightly weird thing, if we were to take the critique seriously, is that many of these critics do not deal with specific thinkers they identify as cultural Marxists. For example after listening and reading quite a lot of Jordan Peterson, it seems to me that he frequently makes sweeping statements, but I have never heard him give any evidence that he has read the people he might name (like Foucault) in any depth, or even have read a book like ‘Foucault for Beginners’. He does not seem to think any real engagement is necessary – and this in university lectures. Ok people may not have the space to do this in blog posts, but in university lectures they should. While I cannot guarantee that he does not have a serious discussion about particular ‘cultural marxists’ somewhere or other, it is not obviously apparent, and suggests that his criticism is not based upon much thought, understanding or work. The critique seems to be politically motivated by a need to defend certain types of authority – for Peterson this seems to be primarily male authority, and occasionally religious authority, although his relation to religion seems complicated or inconsistent.

However, rather than something dreadful I would continue say that the criticism of Western culture, capitalism and other forms of authority has been a long standing and continuing part of the Western tradition involving both Protestantism and enlightenment. We could easily push it back to Heraclitus or Plato, if we wanted to.

Protestantism almost begins with the assertion that the worshipper should not accept the authority of the Catholic Church to tell worshippers the details of the Christian religion. Protestants claimed individuals should have to power and ability to challenge the teachings of the Church based upon their reading of the bible, their direct experience of God and the power of their own mind. The declarations of the pope and the Doctors of the Church were largely irrelevant. Sometimes this went as far as the free spirit antinomians who may have argued that being saved by faith you can commit no sin, and all is permissible.

Protestants in many cases then came to accept the authority of their own Churches and leaders, but they had challenged authority, and they constantly broke apart from each other over differences of doctrine. They often also challenged the authority of aristocracy, and the sins of culture (art theatre etc) especially if they were merchants. They also often broke the socially sanctioned ties between rich and poor, deciding that charity had to involve discipline of those who received charity, or that people who needed charity were sinners and thus should not receive charity. This breaking of demands may have helped the acquisition of capital, and other people attacked that. Whether intended or not, this created a tradition of ‘free thinking’, which allowed attacks on Protestantism itself.

In the enlightenment supposedly irrational forms of authority were also attacked, again primarily focusing on the Church, but also on wealth. The idea took root that people should be able to govern themselves to the extent that was possible. Authority should be acceptable, rational and ideally non-repressive. This is expressed in the American Revolution, the abolition of slavery, further challenge to the aristocracy, the formation of worker’s unions, the growth of science as a middle class activity, the promotion of religious freedom, the acceptance of less orthodox religious people into politics and so on.

The enlightenment both promoted and attacked capitalism. Adam Smith is a good example. He points to the benefits of capitalism, how merchants conspire to defraud the public, how the organisation of labour corrupts people, and how military activity defends merchants interests at the cost of the general taxpayer. John Stuart Mill likewise has a complicated attitude towards capitalism, being heavily aware of how it can further oppress those who have to labour.

Karl Marx uses the labour theory of value to argue that capitalist’s profit is stolen from the workers, that capitalism is incoherent and inevitably self destructive, and that capitalist culture and ideology is all about supporting the ruling class and crushing opposition to that rule. According to Marx, the culture that gets spread is that which the ruling groups promote and help spread and which fits in with social organisation and experience. Famously Marx declares religion to be equivalent to opium, at best a distracting fantasy – not something all Marxists believe – see ‘Liberation Theology’ and the people around the young Paul Tillich….

Later on, Marxists will allege that the workers are not that passive with respect to ruling class culture, they can transform it and use it for their own purposes. People can discard the distortions of reality produced by ruling culture and come to see the truth of their oppression and work towards liberty through revolutionary action. Ultimately, the Marxist position, is that all culture comes out of ‘material’ action or ‘praxis’.

Currently some people recognise further oppressions other than that of the capitalist dominant class, that stem from the irrational oppressions of the past. They ask, why should women be considered as secondary citizens, badly represented in areas of official power, subjugated by male violence, mocked for being female, considered to have less of the right intelligence, and so on. They ask why should homosexual people be threatened or attacked because of their sexual/romantic preferences, condemned to hell, unable to marry and so on. Why should poor people be treated like dirt and ruled by those who can make money or have inherited money. Why are the monied considered to be better human beings and more entitled to rule, when clearly there are things they do not know about most people’s lives. Why should we have to cheer or face exile when our country goes to war with another that has not attacked us, or is so much less powerful than us that we shall be responsible for massive death, and undesired abortions? Why should we not try for something better? Why should capitalists have the force to poison workers or destroy the environment and people’s futures?

All these kinds of questions are part of the Western tradition, and to me much of what is labelled as ‘cultural Marxism’ seems to be part of the search for liberty. Both the liberty from interference and restriction, and the potential liberty to act. Of course, for those who support restriction of the liberty of others, it can seem that their liberty to restrict is being removed, and that therefore they are not being respected as much as they should, or that they are being constrained.

Perhaps we could think that the Cultural Marxists are the defenders of that tradition while their attackers are those who ally with authority and attempt to fossilize that authority, or increase that authority as when they promote the extension of capitalist power, through winding back the checks and balances which have evolved to balance out that power.

At the least, they appear to want to shut discussion down by lumping the critical western tradition along with something they think should be despised.

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