Climate change and environmental collapse-ultimate challenge to the capitalist "real"?

swears

preppy-kei
gek-opel said:
That's not necessarily the be-all and end-all, but it is an important aspect.... but that goes beyond merely climate change and into social responsibility. There's no doubt then that if such real costs (and potential benefits???) could be incorporated that capitalism might garner more pleasing results- but how are they to be assessed, and how are they to be implemented? The problem really comes as competing economies refuse to accept a disadvantage to their potential economic output if others don't do likewise...

There's gonna have to be legislation. The market definately isn't going to sort this out on it's own. But no government is going to endanger jobs/economic growth and therefore votes by implementing it, so we're left with ineffective international attempts like Kyoto.
This looks like getting way worse before it gets better.
 

bassnation

the abyss
is this a private party or can anyone join in?

tatarsky said:
Is it? Throwing your weight around, criticising the very essence of a thread that had already gone on for 5 pages and that people had openly declared as being a good conversation, and doing it in a manner that was fundamentally designed to be insulting and dismissive. I don't know about you, but for me, that's called trolling.

Sure, go ahead and argue with the tenets of gek's ideas, but i question the point of doing so in the manner in which it was done. There's no point in having an argument unless you're actually trying to convince the other person of your point of view. Otherwise, you're just being a twat.

not to continue the "derailment" but this deserves a response.

nowhere in my posts can you find me swearing, being abusive or dismissive. you, on the other hand, think its perfectly acceptable to call people "twats" because you don't agree with the manner of the dissent. i don't much like your message either, maybe you could clarify whether your post is trying to persuade or simply insult?

lets just keep it polite mate.

and i'd just like to make absolutely clear that although i've disagreed with gek here, on the whole i find him to be a highly stimulating and interesting poster - there are no hard feelings. lets get a grip and move on.
 
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bassnation

the abyss
spackb0y said:
But this is a given, not a possibilty. Civilisation, the human race are finite things, and we should work from the assumption that at some point there will definately be "no future", rather than wondering about the possibility of such an event.

Global economic collapse, the sun going nova, the heat death of the universe - something, like Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" is "going to get us all". I guess you might find this a depressing thought, or that it makes everything pointless, but I don't.

i like this way of viewing it. its akin to a zen-like appreciation of lifes rhythms, which of course includes death, an end to (literally) everything.

this reminds me of the mayfly - the adult only living for a single day, lacking even a gut as there is not enough time to make feeding necessary. but at least the mayfly is procreating - death is not the end.

maybe your perspective changes when you have children, but for me (and for most of us, considering the ever-increasing population and peoples desire to see their line continue after their own death) its instinctive to want us to carry on. life just wants to be.

btw, the heat death thing is by no means inevitable. some theories actually have the universe contracting back into a singularity with time running backwards for whatever life remains. that sounds quite cool actually, despite meaning certain death for all of us.
 
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tatarsky

Well-known member
Mr B.

My comments weren't angled at you, but rather soundslike1981's bolt of anti-intellectualism. Particularly riling was his dismissiveness of gek's arguments being akin to someone still at university (which i happen to know he's not...but even if he was, surely that wouldn't make for any good reason to ignore the content of his posts. A solid argument would have been rather more constructive). Actually, I thought the manner in which you brought up soundslike1981's comments and put them forward as having some validity (i.e. that it's foolish to suggest that we're in a worse state than a hunter-gatherer society) was otm.

And to clarify, i was asserting twatish behaviour, which does not equate to actually being a twat. A pedantic point perhaps. Would you not agree that arguing for the sake of arguing without actually trying to be persuasive is not in fact, quite twatish, especially on an internet forum?

Any way...perhaps we should let this go... and get on with more interesting matters.

----

As matt b implies, at the crux of this has to be the overthrowing of the gdp model, which requires economic theory to get to grips with external/social costs much better. Perhaps even this is a little bit simplistic, as much of the necessary theory and tools of such an alternative model are very much to hand (i.e. taxation and the marketisation of pollutants, etc. - its the lack of political pressure that renders the current situation, and the dominance of the multinational over governments.

I hate to have to get all 'the corporation is evil', but i'm finding it to be an increasingly unavoidable position, or at least, under current corporate governance structures.

What's most worrying about all of this, with both climate change and resource crises, is that i have pretty much no understanding of the time frames involved here, and even worse, it seems that nobody really does. Has anyone any knowledge here? It would seem pretty crucial to the question.

bassnation said:
btw, the heat death thing is by no means inevitable. some theories actually have the universe contracting back into a singularity with time running backwards for whatever life remains. that sounds quite cool actually, despite meaning certain death for all of us.

Not quite sure what you mean by this...all sounds very drowned world to me. Time running backwards? What does that mean? (Not really that up on my physics...) How does such a contraction rubbish the heat death thing anyway?
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
There's a theory which runs that if the universe (read the entire construct of space-time) expands, it must eventually contract, as it contracts not only does this warp space, but time as well, and I guess it would make sense then that time might run in reverse?

The corporation isn't evil, anymore than a virus is evil. Its not terribly nice, certainly, and will often run counter to the interests of human society, but it has no moral status. It's an abstract meme, maximising its own market position as much as it is allowed- a virus. Therefore it makes sense to regulate the shit out of them. Although I am unsure as to what body will have the necessary transnational power to properly implement an economics of "real-cost" on the world.
 

tatarsky

Well-known member
gek-opel said:
The corporation isn't evil, anymore than a virus is evil. Its not terribly nice, certainly, and will often run counter to the interests of human society, but it has no moral status. It's an abstract meme, maximising its own market position as much as it is allowed- a virus. Therefore it makes sense to regulate the shit out of them.

Not entirely sure if i buy into that argument. I'm not sure if its correct to let shareholders and executive boards off the hook entirely by declaring their activity as beyond morality.
Although perhaps from the point of view of analysing their behaviour, it is best to think about them as such, particularly with large corporations.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
In terms of large share-holder owned companies, yes. I mean, of course the individuals at the top are immoral people (or can be) and ought to be held accountable for their actions, from an economic point of view its the abstract, self-maximising nature of the corporation which needs to be taken into account....
 

matt b

Indexing all opinion
gek-opel said:
The corporation isn't evil, anymore than a virus is evil. Its not terribly nice, certainly, and will often run counter to the interests of human society, but it has no moral status. It's an abstract meme,

is this true now? i thought the multi-nationals had successfully lobbied so that they have the same legal status as people (can't remember where i read this).

they have attempted to overrule policies that protect he environment , by claiming they infringe their right to make a profit (i studied this over 10 years ago, in relation to agenda 21, so it might have changed somewhat).

'evil' is not a word i'd use, but certainly corporations act in a totalitarian fashion, grabbing more and more power and using it to their own ends (not a modern critique- adam smith warned of this).

ideally, we would do away with them because their influence in pervasive and undermines grassroots democracy. this leads to a normalisation of 'pragmatic' politics, even at a local level. something i encountered recently when talking to a local councillor, who had no sense of shame when stating that he would follow his own goals rather than those of his electorate.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Hmmm they are malignant yes, (if un-checked)... but evil is a spurious term and I just think they amoral entities, constructed (if a shareholder owned concern) to only reflect the interests of the shareholders. If said shareholders are many and only connected via pension funds, it effectively becomes only concerned with profit. It seems pretty much a virus. The legal thing is to protect individual board members/directors isn't it?

The best thing is to think that they are an effective maximiser of profits for themselves, but that they will do this by absolutely any means potentially open to them, and therefore whilst they are of potential value to society, they must be viewed with suspicion and regulated as if they were going to be amoral, (because they are). Its only when governments become weak that they can become such a grotesque threat to the public good.... A bit like the bipolar sovereignty theory (ie the executive vs the judiciary) you could think of it as the govt vs business, as a dynamic and positive process of pulling for power which results in balance for the public good. However, this would require a stronger government, with an agenda which was more definitely for social, rather than business ends...
 
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swears

preppy-kei
gek-opel said:
....you could think of it as the govt vs business, as a dynamic and positive process of pulling for power which results in balance for the public good. However, this would require a stronger government, with an agenda which was more definitely for social, rather than business ends...

Pah, wet liberalism! ;)
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
@ Swears: Yeah Im not sure how entirely I buy that argument myself-- but it is correct that corporations are very effective profit maximising entities, so why not exploit that?
 

swears

preppy-kei
gek-opel said:
@ Swears: Yeah Im not sure how entirely I buy that argument myself-- but it is correct that corporations are very effective profit maximising entities, so why not exploit that?

Yeah, I was kidding a bit....
I have to say though, if we could get to that stage it would be an improvement on how things are at the moment. But, if that's all society ever aspired to, it would be sort of depressing.
 

tatarsky

Well-known member
And the answer is...

tatarsky said:
What's most worrying about all of this, with both climate change and resource crises, is that i have pretty much no understanding of the time frames involved here, and even worse, it seems that nobody really does. Has anyone any knowledge here? It would seem pretty crucial to the question.

... ONE YEAR.


(Potentially)


This is some scary shit: http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1191932.ece

"As we report today on pages 28 and 29, the Amazon now appears to be entering its second successive year of drought, raising the possibility that it could start dying next year. The immense forest contains 90 billion tons of carbon, enough in itself to increase the rate of global warming by 50 per cent.

Dr Nepstead expects "mega-fires" rapidly to sweep across the drying jungle. With the trees gone, the soil will bake in the sun and the rainforest could become desert."


Oh good.
 

bruno

est malade
i wonder if lack of sunlight rather than lack of rain didn't kill off those trees. i can't find a reference to that experiment anywhere.

but it's true, it's the end of the world.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
It is difficult to model cos climate-biomass interaction is very intricate, but its likely that relatively modest incremental change eventually leads to events such as say forest fires in the amazon or the melting of large polar ice-masses (which would lead to a change in the total reflectivity of the earth, therefore meaning we absorb more heat from the sun) which have catastrophic impact, meaning a sudden increase in temperature. There are probably things we haven't even considered yet which will be affected profoundly by relatively small changes in temperature... jolly good eh?
 

tryptych

waiting for a time
heat death, time's arrow, etc

bassnation said:
btw, the heat death thing is by no means inevitable. some theories actually have the universe contracting back into a singularity with time running backwards for whatever life remains. that sounds quite cool actually, despite meaning certain death for all of us.

tatarsky said:
Not quite sure what you mean by this...all sounds very drowned world to me. Time running backwards? What does that mean? (Not really that up on my physics...) How does such a contraction rubbish the heat death thing anyway?

As I understand it, the "reverse arrow of time" was shown to be a possibility by Lawrence Schulman in 2000. He showed that time can be made to run backwards in a closed system, but only by imposing boundary conditions on the final state of the system, as well as the initial state. His example was of a gas diffusing in a closed box - the gas starts in one corner (initial boundary condition) and over time diffuses throughout the box, ie the entropy increases. By imposing a final bounday condition - that the gas molecules all end up in the small region they started from - time "runs backwards".

See here for brief report:

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20000101/fob5.asp

and more here (subscription only):

http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/mg16522244.600.html

Relating to the "heat death" thing - even if we live in a closed finite universe (which seems unlikely on current data), although the universe won't end up in such a state of uniform, very low temperature, it would have to go through a point where time and entropy slowly grind to a halt before reversing. This sort of thing tends to make my brain feel like it's melting out of my ears, but there's quite a good wikipedia entry on the entropic time's arrow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(arrow_of_time)
 

jenks

thread death
I have read in a couple of books on Linguistics that the ancient Greeks also had the concept of the past being in front with the future behind.

Makes sense - you can see the past but not the future.

Also it makes sense of the line Marvell stole - 'and at my back I hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near'. (the future comes from behind us)

I use this example in teaching ideas about the effect of culture on language, whilst refuting Sapir-Whorf.
 
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