Dangers of global resource exhaustion in the news
I haven't felt much like writing lately. New quarter, tired already or still, and not having my thoughts stimulated by new stuff yet. A little anxious about the piles of work that aren't really getting done (though parts of some of the piles have been, modestly, moving along). Most of the emotional stuff is going in the "other" lj now, so I guess this is becoming more or less a "political blog." Sounds boring, huh? Politico-philosophical, I guess. Who knows. Blogs are evolving creatures. Like toads, except they evolve and devolve quicker than a million years. More like butterflies. A few months of soot in the atmosphere is enough to completely blacken a blog, or at least a blog's descendants.
Meanwhile, my editorial team here at Cannon Fodder has been restless. They want me to spice things up. I'm not quite sure how to do that. I suggested posting some nude pictures of myself, but they suggested that driving the readership down to zero from five wasn't what they had in mind. In any case, they have been hounding me, so expect some shakeups in the near future. We may try some gimmicks or something, maybe give away free butterflies to the first 10 people to comment on a post or something.
But one predictable thing is the news: it will occasionally be maddening, even occasionally maddening enough to prompt an annoyed entry. Such is the case for the present.
The news item at hand was found in the BBC online. Look behind the cut for the text of the article. The headline is "Booming Nations 'Threaten Earth.'" The basic jist is that India and China's economies are growing too fast and earth lacks the capacity for them both to consume resources at Western, or even Japanese, rates.
The surprising thing here in a sense is what the article takes to be newsworthy and what goes without saying, what we have to take for granted. The article mentions very much in passing that the US consumes more of the earth's resources than any other country. It should be obvious, to the careful reflection of a complete layman, that if any given set of 2 or 2.5 billion additional people on the planet start consuming resources at US rates, we will have a crisis, if we don't already with what, 500 million consuming energy at that rate? It should probably follow logically that 2 or 2.5 billion people consuming energy at the somewhat-lower-but-still-high rates of Western Europe or Japan wouldn't do wonders for the environment, either. The truth is that it's very questionable whether the earth could sustain the existing 1 billion or so people who consume energy at Western rates, even if Western countries were able to impose economic stagnation on other countries. The danger to the earth is Western energy consumption and Western-originating capitalism.
Instead, the article focuses on large nations full of brown people as "threat." The language of the article is very reminiscent of the old arguments about the dangers of "population growth" in the third world. In fact, when I read the article quickly and halfway remembered it, I thought it was about population growth. When I looked through my browser history and found it, it turned out to have translated the fearmongering and rhetoric of the old population growth argument into a new fear of economic growth. Which is such a sweetly bitter irony. Since during the entirety of the Cold War, the West held out this dream to the underdeveloped world of "just let your economies grow, and you too can have a Western standard of living." Of course that level of growth is not in the works, but now even a little bit of growth in populous countries and the widening of consuming middle classes in these countries is showing the ecological unsustainability of capitalism.
This is all obvious, in fact present in the article if you read it with any care and backknowledge. But the rhetorical stress of the article isn't there at all of course, it is on these "threatening," greedy-seeming Indians and Chinese who have the audacity to want what we spent 50 years inculcating them to want. They should have known better; they should have known that to remain pure, their desires would have to remain unrequited.
Unfortunately capitalist logics were founded on a rejection of the self-denial implicit in the monastic orders of Christendom, and according to some theories (Bataille?) it was Western mobilization of desire in capitalist modalities that played the key role in bringing down "drab, grey real existing socialism" which China claimed and India aspired to in part at one time.
Related question: will capitalists themselves realize that their practices have endangered their own long-term aspirations early enough to correct for this? Or is this finally a kind of crisis that capitalism is by its nature less able to correct for until way too late? Obviously that's a huge question, and others have posed it with a lot more precision that I have here. One thing that should be clear is that unline socialist notions of capitalism in crisis, in which Good Things are growing in midst of the crisis and new, collective forms of social organization take over from outmoded private accumulation, there's really nothing good about environmental degradation--not in any dialectical picture I can think of. I mean, dialectics can find the "progressive" element in a lot of social horror--the element which is objectively progressive in terms of higher forms of human organization, not in moral terms--but it doesn't seem to me that there would, probably, be anything progressive at all about environmental destruction, in any sense--which could be an extension of the "dialectic of enlightenment" notion, the idea that "Western civilization" as a totality could negate itself (to put it very, very crudely).
***
Here's the article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4604556.stm
Booming nations 'threaten Earth' Earth lacks the water, energy and agricultural land to allow China and India to attain Western living standards, a US think-tank has warned.
The Worldwatch Institute said the booming economies of China and India are "planetary powers that are shaping the global biosphere".
Its State of the World 2006 report said the two countries' high economic growth hid a reality of severe pollution.
It said the planet's resources could not keep pace with such growth.
Important choices
"The world's ecological capacity is simply insufficient to satisfy the ambitions of China, India, Japan, Europe and the United States as well as the aspirations of the rest of the world in a sustainable way," the report added.
It said that if China and India were to consume as much resources per capita as Japan in 2030 "together they would require a full planet Earth to meet their needs", it said.
The institute's report said that in the next few years the choices China and India made could lead to political and economic instability, or they could usher in an age of better stewardship of resources and more efficient technology.
China and India are positioned to leapfrog today's industrial powers
Worldwatch Institute president Christopher Flavin
The reports said the US - which continues to consume more of the Earth's resources than any other country - needed to cooperate with China and India to help develop more environmentally friendly practices and technologies.
"China and India are positioned to leapfrog today's industrial powers and become world leaders in sustainable energy and agriculture within a decade," Worldwatch Institute president Christopher Flavin said.
"We were encouraged to find that a growing number of opinion leaders in China and India now recognise that the resource-intensive model for economic growth can't work in the 21st Century," he said.
China already has a solar-powered heating system which supplies hot water to 35 million homes, while India has pioneered a system bringing clean water from rainfall, the report said.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4604556.stm
Published: 2006/01/12 05:56:12 GMT
© BBC MMVI
Meanwhile, my editorial team here at Cannon Fodder has been restless. They want me to spice things up. I'm not quite sure how to do that. I suggested posting some nude pictures of myself, but they suggested that driving the readership down to zero from five wasn't what they had in mind. In any case, they have been hounding me, so expect some shakeups in the near future. We may try some gimmicks or something, maybe give away free butterflies to the first 10 people to comment on a post or something.
But one predictable thing is the news: it will occasionally be maddening, even occasionally maddening enough to prompt an annoyed entry. Such is the case for the present.
The news item at hand was found in the BBC online. Look behind the cut for the text of the article. The headline is "Booming Nations 'Threaten Earth.'" The basic jist is that India and China's economies are growing too fast and earth lacks the capacity for them both to consume resources at Western, or even Japanese, rates.
The surprising thing here in a sense is what the article takes to be newsworthy and what goes without saying, what we have to take for granted. The article mentions very much in passing that the US consumes more of the earth's resources than any other country. It should be obvious, to the careful reflection of a complete layman, that if any given set of 2 or 2.5 billion additional people on the planet start consuming resources at US rates, we will have a crisis, if we don't already with what, 500 million consuming energy at that rate? It should probably follow logically that 2 or 2.5 billion people consuming energy at the somewhat-lower-but-still-high rates of Western Europe or Japan wouldn't do wonders for the environment, either. The truth is that it's very questionable whether the earth could sustain the existing 1 billion or so people who consume energy at Western rates, even if Western countries were able to impose economic stagnation on other countries. The danger to the earth is Western energy consumption and Western-originating capitalism.
Instead, the article focuses on large nations full of brown people as "threat." The language of the article is very reminiscent of the old arguments about the dangers of "population growth" in the third world. In fact, when I read the article quickly and halfway remembered it, I thought it was about population growth. When I looked through my browser history and found it, it turned out to have translated the fearmongering and rhetoric of the old population growth argument into a new fear of economic growth. Which is such a sweetly bitter irony. Since during the entirety of the Cold War, the West held out this dream to the underdeveloped world of "just let your economies grow, and you too can have a Western standard of living." Of course that level of growth is not in the works, but now even a little bit of growth in populous countries and the widening of consuming middle classes in these countries is showing the ecological unsustainability of capitalism.
This is all obvious, in fact present in the article if you read it with any care and backknowledge. But the rhetorical stress of the article isn't there at all of course, it is on these "threatening," greedy-seeming Indians and Chinese who have the audacity to want what we spent 50 years inculcating them to want. They should have known better; they should have known that to remain pure, their desires would have to remain unrequited.
Unfortunately capitalist logics were founded on a rejection of the self-denial implicit in the monastic orders of Christendom, and according to some theories (Bataille?) it was Western mobilization of desire in capitalist modalities that played the key role in bringing down "drab, grey real existing socialism" which China claimed and India aspired to in part at one time.
Related question: will capitalists themselves realize that their practices have endangered their own long-term aspirations early enough to correct for this? Or is this finally a kind of crisis that capitalism is by its nature less able to correct for until way too late? Obviously that's a huge question, and others have posed it with a lot more precision that I have here. One thing that should be clear is that unline socialist notions of capitalism in crisis, in which Good Things are growing in midst of the crisis and new, collective forms of social organization take over from outmoded private accumulation, there's really nothing good about environmental degradation--not in any dialectical picture I can think of. I mean, dialectics can find the "progressive" element in a lot of social horror--the element which is objectively progressive in terms of higher forms of human organization, not in moral terms--but it doesn't seem to me that there would, probably, be anything progressive at all about environmental destruction, in any sense--which could be an extension of the "dialectic of enlightenment" notion, the idea that "Western civilization" as a totality could negate itself (to put it very, very crudely).
***
Here's the article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4604556.stm
Booming nations 'threaten Earth' Earth lacks the water, energy and agricultural land to allow China and India to attain Western living standards, a US think-tank has warned.
The Worldwatch Institute said the booming economies of China and India are "planetary powers that are shaping the global biosphere".
Its State of the World 2006 report said the two countries' high economic growth hid a reality of severe pollution.
It said the planet's resources could not keep pace with such growth.
Important choices
"The world's ecological capacity is simply insufficient to satisfy the ambitions of China, India, Japan, Europe and the United States as well as the aspirations of the rest of the world in a sustainable way," the report added.
It said that if China and India were to consume as much resources per capita as Japan in 2030 "together they would require a full planet Earth to meet their needs", it said.
The institute's report said that in the next few years the choices China and India made could lead to political and economic instability, or they could usher in an age of better stewardship of resources and more efficient technology.
China and India are positioned to leapfrog today's industrial powers
Worldwatch Institute president Christopher Flavin
The reports said the US - which continues to consume more of the Earth's resources than any other country - needed to cooperate with China and India to help develop more environmentally friendly practices and technologies.
"China and India are positioned to leapfrog today's industrial powers and become world leaders in sustainable energy and agriculture within a decade," Worldwatch Institute president Christopher Flavin said.
"We were encouraged to find that a growing number of opinion leaders in China and India now recognise that the resource-intensive model for economic growth can't work in the 21st Century," he said.
China already has a solar-powered heating system which supplies hot water to 35 million homes, while India has pioneered a system bringing clean water from rainfall, the report said.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4604556.stm
Published: 2006/01/12 05:56:12 GMT
© BBC MMVI