Those waste piles can be processed into useable fuel once pesky political hurdles are cleared. The great irony of the present moment is France’s near total dependence on nuclear energy coupled with the fact that it has no capacity to deal with spent fuel, and has allowed over a 1/3rd of its power plants to be shutdown due to deferred maintenance. David: That was a great comment; scale is vital to efficiency, and unless you want to work 24×7 to meet basic needs, you’re going to need some efficiency. c. A set of migration pathways to gradually, inexorably move each household away from products produced by Economy 1.0 (degrade the planet as we make our living) to Economy 2.0 (fix the planet as we make our living). Regarding the four questions of size, scale, scope, and speed, “the modern economy created by the Industrial and Digital Revolutions is not running out of time but rather has run out of time to correct the course.” This is not the message a techno-optimist-technological-fundamentalist member of the professional-managerial class wants to hear.

AN INCONVENIENT APOCALYPSE: - Mud City Press AN INCONVENIENT APOCALYPSE: - Mud City Press

b. the ability, or not, to return materials to the place they originated. Does nature do “transport”? Geology does transport, the water cycle and rivers do transport, and that’s about it. Everything else is returned to almost the same place it was sourced. Nature recycles, re-uses, wrings every last bit of energy and nutrition from what it sources, and all of the materials are replenished via energy harvested from the sun, via plants, to feed the cycle anew. Local can recycle, but once and done linear global/national supply chains cannot do this. The migration isn’t going to happen because “it’s cheaper”. It won’t be cheaper to run E2.0 until it has enough time to optimize itself. E1.0 has had all of human history to become “efficient” (price efficient, so long as costs are externalized). Expecting E2.0 to be price competitive with E1.0 is unrealistic for a few decades to come. By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health. Is your hamburger helper and chips and soda so important to you mentally that you would destroy the planet to have them? Few books can shake up and awaken long-time climate activists, environmental activists, and sustainability activists to expansive new levels of understanding of the big picture of our major crises, but this is one of those books." — Job One for Humanity Climate BlogEd. note: This excerpt was previously published at Counterpunch. Reprinted here by permission of the author. We are one species Apocalypse in the present context does not mean “lakes of fire, rivers of blood, or bodies raptured up to heaven.” But it does require that we change our consciousness when hope for meaningful change within the existing political culture and economy is no longer productive and we must deal with our problems dramatically different ways: “Invoking the apocalyptic recognizes the end of something…not about rapture but a rupture severe enough to change the nature of the whole game.” It is way past time to climb out of that Overton Window and look around with eyes that see. In the words of James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Thus, the summation from J&J: So at a certain ethical level, I’d advocate the Metta Sutta instead of angels with fiery swords. (If one is required to have religious metaphor to engage a problem so urgent.)

An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson, Robert Jensen An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson, Robert Jensen

The most obvious answer is that it is the result of humans living under different material conditions. Other possible explanations for variations in cultures include a supernatural force providing divine guidance or simple randomness. Theological explanations—that there is some nonmaterial force that dictated or set these patterns in motion—are based in faith claims and don’t rely on evidence. We have never identified any compelling reasons to accept supernatural accounts of natural phenomena. Nor have we ever heard a coherent argument for how cultural differences are simply random. Eastern religions–DLG points to Buddhism and I’d point to the Tao te Ching, do not attribute some sort of personal relationship between any living individual and the Cosmos. The Tao te Ching puts it this way: I think that appeals to “the apocalypse” are fundamentalist and that KLG’s essay should seek to short-circuit monotheistic thinking. The apocalyptic thinking in the U S of A — and one only has to recall the Burnt-Over District, the Millerites, and the origins of the Jehovah’s Witnesses — leads to a kind of passive illogic. Well, there’s one god, one way forward through the arrow of time, and, ooops, the angel is unsealing the seventh seal. A wonderfully argued essay that diagnoses many problems. I, too, find Wendell Berry’s ideas remarkable (the essay on how any moderately sized farm can be run using horses rather than gas-powered machinery is worth seeking out). Inconvenient for the PMC of the Global North, or so they believe in their eternal but blinkered, optimism. Devastating at the same time for much of the Global South.My definition of an “economy” is “how and from where do you get what you need to operate your household”. three different relationships among systems of political and cultural power, the royal, prophetic, and apocalyptic I am late to this great discussion (thank you, KLG!) as usual, but one observation before I move on. I few weeks ago, I was terrified when I discovered the existence of the Schelling Point. I believe it was in a link here on NC, and was in the context of an explanation of why, in so many revolutions, the military take control. Size: What is the size of the human economy relative to the magnitude of the ecosphere? Too large by any reasonable measure. But the general view of our reigning political culture is that carrying capacity applies only to non-human animals in their various ecosystems. No. Although it is passing strange, the PMC (and here I am speaking of the PMC of the Classical Liberal Uniparty that comprises American politics) largely agrees with Julian Simon, who wrote The Ultimate Resource (1981, 1996). In both editions he conflates the fact that any given resource is infinitely divisible with the notion that resources are therefore infinite, practically speaking. Plus, Simon completely fails to recognize that the concept of carrying capacity applies to humans just as it does to any other animal in the ecosphere (5). He is not alone.