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<nettime> Mike Davis: Living on the Ice Shelf. Humanity's Meltdown
nettime's avid reader on Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:21:11 +0200 (CEST)



Living on the Ice Shelf. Humanity's Meltdown
By Mike Davis

1. Farewell to the Holocene

Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, 
has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed 
its scientific obituary.

This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of 
the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire 
State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of 
London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column.

The London Society is the world's oldest association of Earth scientists, 
founded in 1807, and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals in the 
adjudication of the geological time-scale. Stratigraphers slice up Earth's 
history as preserved in sedimentary strata into hierarchies of eons, eras, 
periods, and epochs marked by the "golden spikes" of mass extinctions, 
speciation events, and abrupt changes in atmospheric chemistry.

In geology, as in biology or history, periodization is a complex, 
controversial art and the most bitter feud in nineteenth-century British 
science -- still known as the "Great Devonian Controversy" -- was fought 
over competing interpretations of homely Welsh Graywackes and English Old 
Red Sandstone. More recently, geologists have feuded over how to 
stratigraphically demarcate ice age oscillations over the last 2.8 million 
years. Some have never accepted that the most recent inter-glacial warm 
interval -- the Holocene -- should be distinguished as an "epoch" in its 
own right just because it encompasses the history of civilization.

As a result, contemporary stratigraphers have set extraordinarily rigorous 
standards for the beatification of any new geological divisions. Although 
the idea of the "Anthropocene" -- an Earth epoch defined by the emergence 
of urban-industrial society as a geological force -- has been long 
debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge compelling evidence 
for its advent.

At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised.

To the question "Are we now living in the Anthropocene?" the 21 members of 
the Commission unanimously answer "yes." They adduce robust evidence that 
the Holocene epoch -- the interglacial span of unusually stable climate 
that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban 
civilization -- has ended and that the Earth has entered "a stratigraphic 
interval without close parallel in the last several million years." In 
addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human 
landscape transformation which "now exceeds [annual] natural sediment 
production by an order of magnitude," the ominous acidification of the 
oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota.

This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose 
closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene 
Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability 
expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that "the 
combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread 
replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is 
producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These 
effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving 
(and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks." Evolution itself, in 
other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.

2. Spontaneous Decarbonization?

The Commission's coronation of the Anthropocene coincides with growing 
scientific controversy over the 4th Assessment Report issued last year by 
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is mandated 
to establish scientific baselines for international efforts to mitigate 
global warming, but some of the most prominent researchers in the field 
are now challenging its reference scenarios as overly optimistic, even 
pie-in-the-sky thinking.

The current scenarios were adopted by the IPCC in 2000 to model future 
global emissions based on different "storylines" about population growth 
as well as technological and economic development. Some of the Panel's 
major scenarios are well known to policymakers and greenhouse activists, 
but few outside the research community have actually read or understood 
the fine print, particularly the IPCC's confidence that greater energy 
efficiency will be an "automatic" byproduct of future economic 
development. Indeed all the scenarios, even the "business as usual" 
variants, assume that at least 60% of future carbon reduction will occur 
independently of greenhouse mitigation measures.

The Panel, in effect, has bet the ranch, or rather the planet, on 
unplanned, market-driven progress toward a post-carbon world economy, a 
transition that implicitly requires wealth generated from higher energy 
prices ultimately finding its way to new technologies and renewable 
energy. (The International Energy Agency recently estimated that it would 
cost $45 trillion to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.) Kyoto-type 
accords and carbon markets are designed -- almost as an analogue to 
Keynesian "pump-priming" -- to bridge the shortfall between spontaneous 
decarbonization and the emissions targets required by each scenario. 
Serendipitously, this reduces the costs of mitigating global warming to 
levels that align with what seems, at least theoretically, to be 
politically possible, as expounded in the British Stern Review on the 
Economics of Climate Change of 2006 and other such reports.

Critics argue, however, that this represents a heroic leap of faith that 
radically understates the economic costs, technological hurdles, and 
social changes required to tame the growth of greenhouse gases. European 
carbon emissions, for example, are still rising (dramatically in some 
sectors) despite the European Union's much praised adoption of a 
cap-and-trade system in 2005. Likewise there has been little evidence in 
recent years of the automatic progress in energy efficiency that is the 
sine qua non of the IPCC scenarios. Although The Economist 
characteristically begs to differ, most energy researchers believe that, 
since 2000, energy intensity has actually risen; that is, global carbon 
dioxide emissions have kept pace with, or even grown marginally faster 
than, energy use.

Coal production, especially, is undergoing a dramatic renaissance, as the 
nineteenth century has returned to haunt the twenty-first century. 
Hundreds of thousands of miners are now working under conditions that 
would have appalled Charles Dickens, extracting the dirty mineral that 
allows China to open two new coal-fueled power stations every week. 
Meanwhile, the total consumption of fossil fuels is predicted to increase 
at least 55% over the next generation, with international oil exports 
doubling in volume.

The United Nations Development Program, which has made its own study of 
sustainable energy goals, warns that it will require "a 50 percent cut in 
greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050 against 1990 levels" to keep 
humanity outside the red zone of runaway warming (usually defined as a 
greater than two degrees centigrade increase this century). Yet the 
International Energy Agency predicts that, in all likelihood, such 
emissions will actually increase in this period by nearly 100% -- enough 
greenhouse gas to propel us past several critical tipping points.

Even while higher energy prices are pushing SUVs towards extinction and 
attracting more venture capital to renewable energy, they are also opening 
the Pandora's box of the crudest of crude oil production from Canadian tar 
sands and Venezuelan heavy oil. As one British scientist has warned, the 
very last thing we should wish for (under the false slogan of "energy 
independence") is new frontiers in hydrocarbon production that 
advance "humankind's ability to accelerate global warming" and slow the 
urgent transition to "non-carbon or closed-carbon energy cycles."

3. Fin-du-Monde Boom

What confidence should we place in the capacity of markets to reallocate 
investment from old to new energy or, say, from arms expenditures to 
sustainable agriculture? We are propagandized incessantly (especially on 
public television) about how giant companies like Chevron, Pfizer Inc., 
and Archer Daniels Midland are hard at work saving the planet by plowing 
profits back into the kinds of research and exploration that will ensure 
low-carbon fuels, new vaccines, and more drought-resistant crops.

As the current ethanol-from-corn boom, which has diverted 100 million tons 
of grain from human diets mainly to American car engines, so appallingly 
demonstrates, "biofuel" may be a euphemism for subsidies to the rich and 
starvation for the poor. Likewise "clean coal," despite a vigorous 
endorsement from Senator Barack Obama (who also champions ethanol), is, at 
present, simply a huge deception: a $40 million advertising and lobbying 
campaign for a hypothetical technology that BusinessWeek has characterized 
as "being decades away from commercial viability."

Moreover there are disturbing signs that energy companies and utilities are 
reneging on their public commitments to the development of carbon-capture 
and alternative energy technologies. The Bush administration's "marquee 
demonstration project," FutureGen, was scrapped this year after the coal 
industry refused to pay its share of the public-private "partnership"; 
similarly, most U.S. private-sector carbon-sequestration initiatives have 
recently been cancelled. In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, Shell has just 
pulled out of the world's largest wind-energy project, the London Array. 
Despite heroic levels of advertising, energy corporations, like 
pharmaceutical companies, prefer to overgraze the commons, while letting 
taxes, not profits, pay for whatever urgent, long-overdue research is 
actually undertaken.

On the other hand, the spoils from high energy prices continue to gush into 
real estate, skyscrapers, and financial assets. Whether or not we are 
actually at the summit of Hubbert's Peak -- that peak oil moment -- 
whether or not the oil-price bubble finally bursts, what we are probably 
witnessing is the largest transfer of wealth in modern history.

An eminent Wall Street oracle, McKinsey Global Institute, predicts that if 
crude oil prices remain above $100 per barrel -- they are, at the moment, 
approaching $140 a barrel -- the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation 
Council alone will "reap a cumulative windfall of almost $9 trillion by 
2020." As in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbors, whose total 
gross domestic product has almost doubled in just three years, are awash 
in liquidity: $2.4 trillion in banks and investment funds according to a 
recent estimate by The Economist. Regardless of price trends, the 
International Energy Agency predicts, "more and more oil will come from 
fewer and fewer countries, primarily the Middle East members of OPEC [The 
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries]."

Dubai, which has little oil income of its own, has become the regional 
financial hub for this vast pool of wealth, with ambitions to eventually 
compete with Wall Street and the City of London. During the first oil 
shock in the 1970s, much of OPEC's surplus was recycled through military 
purchases in the United States and Europe, or parked in foreign banks to 
become the "subprime" loans that eventually devastated Latin America. In 
the wake of the attacks of 9/11, the Gulf states became far more cautious 
about entrusting their wealth to countries, like the United States, 
governed by religious fanatics. This time around, they are 
using "sovereign wealth funds" to achieve a more active ownership in 
foreign financial institutions, while investing fabulous amounts of oil 
revenue to transform Arabia's sands into hyperbolic cities, shopping 
paradises, and private islands for British rock stars and Russian 

Two years ago, when oil prices were less than half of the current level, 
The Financial Times estimated that planned new construction in Saudi 
Arabia and the emirates already exceeded $1 trillion dollars. Today, it 
may be closer to $1.5 trillion, considerably more than the total value of 
world trade in agricultural products. Most of the Gulf city-states are 
building hallucinatory skylines -- and, among them, Dubai is the 
unquestionable superstar. In a little more than a decade, it has erected 
500 skyscrapers, and currently leases one-quarter of all the high-rise 
cranes in the world.

This super-charged Gulf boom, which celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas claims 
is "reconfiguring the world," has led Dubai developers to proclaim the 
advent of a "supreme lifestyle" represented by seven-star hotels, private 
islands, and J-class yachts. Not surprisingly, then, the United Arab 
Emirates and its neighbors have the biggest per capita ecological 
footprints on the planet. Meanwhile, the rightful owners of Arab oil 
wealth, the masses crammed into the angry tenements of Baghdad, Cairo, 
Amman, and Khartoum, have little more to show for it than a trickle-down 
of oil-field jobs and Saudi-subsidized madrassas. While guests enjoy the 
$5,000 per night rooms in Burj Al-Arab, Dubai's celebrated sail-shaped 
hotel, working-class Cairenes riot in the streets over the unaffordable 
price of bread.

4. Can Markets Enfranchise the Poor?

Emissions optimists, of course, will smile at all the gloom-and-doom and 
evoke the coming miracle of carbon trading. What they discount is the real 
possibility that a sprawling carbon-offset market may emerge, just as 
predicted, yet produce only minimal improvement in the global carbon 
balance sheet, as long as there is no mechanism for enforcing real net 
reductions in fossil fuel use.

In popular discussions of emissions-rights trading systems, it is common to 
mistake the smokestacks for the trees. For example, the wealthy oil 
enclave of Abu Dhabi (like Dubai, a partner in the United Arab Emirates) 
brags that it has planted more than 130 million trees -- each of which 
does its duty in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, 
this artificial forest in the desert also consumes huge quantities of 
irrigation water produced, or recycled, from expensive desalination 
plants. The trees may allow Sheik Ahmed bin Zayed to wear a halo at 
international meetings, but the rude fact is that they are an 
energy-intensive beauty strip, like most of so-called green capitalism.

And, while we're at it, let's just ask: What if the buying and selling of 
carbon credits and pollution offsets fails to turn down the thermostat? 
What exactly will motivate governments and global industries then to join 
hands in a crusade to reduce emissions through regulation and taxation?

Kyoto-type climate diplomacy assumes that all the major actors, once they 
have accepted the science in the IPCC reports, will recognize an 
overriding common interest in gaining control over the runaway greenhouse 
effect. But global warming is not War of the Worlds, where invading 
Martians are dedicated to annihilating all of humanity without 
distinction. Climate change, instead, will initially produce dramatically 
unequal impacts across regions and social classes. It will reinforce, not 
diminish, geopolitical inequality and conflict.

As the United Nations Development Program emphasized in its report last 
year, global warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, 
the "two constituencies with little or no political voice." Coordinated 
global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their revolutionary 
empowerment (a scenario not considered by the IPCC) or the transmutation 
of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an 
enlightened "solidarity" without precedent in history. From a 
rational-actor perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if it 
can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential "exit" option, 
that internationalist public opinion drives policymaking in key countries, 
and that greenhouse gas mitigation could be achieved without major 
sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric standards of living -- none of 
which seems highly likely.

And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of 
galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive 
elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from 
the rest of humanity? Global mitigation, in this unexplored but not 
improbable scenario, would be tacitly abandoned (as, to some extent, it 
already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective 
adaptation for Earth's first-class passengers. We're talking here of the 
prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an 
otherwise stricken planet.

Of course, there will still be treaties, carbon credits, famine relief, 
humanitarian acrobatics, and perhaps the full-scale conversion of some 
European cities and small countries to alternative energy. But the shift 
to low, or zero, emission lifestyles would be almost unimaginably 
expensive. (In Britain, it currently costs $200,000 more to build a 
zero-carbon, "level 6" eco-home than a standard unit of the same area.) 
And this will certainly become even more unimaginable after perhaps 2030, 
when the convergent impacts of climate change, peak oil, peak water, and 
an additional 1.5 billion people on the planet may begin to seriously 
throttle growth.

5. The North's Ecological Debt

The real question is this: Will rich counties ever mobilize the political 
will and economic resources to actually achieve IPCC targets or, for that 
matter, to help poorer countries adapt to the inevitable, 
already "committed" quotient of warming now working its way toward us 
through the slow circulation of the world ocean?

To be more vivid: Will the electorates of the wealthy nations shed their 
current bigotry and walled borders to admit refugees from predicted 
epicenters of drought and desertification like the Maghreb, Mexico, 
Ethiopia, and Pakistan? Will Americans, the most miserly people when 
measured by per capita foreign aid, be willing to tax themselves to help 
relocate the millions likely to be flooded out of densely settled, 
mega-delta regions like Bangladesh?

Market-oriented optimists, once again, will point to carbon offset programs 
like the Clean Development Mechanism which, they claim, will allow green 
capital to flow to the Third World. Most of the Third World, however, 
probably prefers for the First World to acknowledge the environmental mess 
it has created and take responsibility for cleaning it up. They rightly 
rail against the notion that the greatest burden of adjustment to the 
Anthropocene epoch should fall on those who have contributed least to 
carbon emissions and drawn the slightest benefits from 200 years of 

In a sobering study recently published in the Proceedings of the [U.S.] 
National Academy of Science, a research team has attempted to calculate 
the environmental costs of economic globalization since 1961 as expressed 
in deforestation, climate change, over-fishing, ozone depletion, mangrove 
conversion, and agricultural expansion. After making adjustments for 
relative cost burdens, they found that the richest countries, by their 
activities, had generated 42% of environmental degradation across the 
world, while shouldering only 3% of the resulting costs.

The radicals of the South will rightly point to another debt as well. For 
30 years, cities in the developing world have grown at breakneck speed 
without any equivalent public investment in infrastructure services, 
housing, or public health. In large part this has been the result of 
foreign debts contracted by dictators, payments enforced by the 
International Monetary Fund, and public sectors wrecked by the World 
Bank's "structural adjustment" agreements.

This planetary deficit of opportunity and social justice is captured in the 
fact that more than one billion people, according to UN-Habitat, currently 
live in slums and that their number is expected to double by 2030. An 
equal number, or more, forage in the so-called informal sector (a 
first-world euphemism for mass unemployment). Sheer demographic momentum, 
meanwhile, will increase the world's urban population by 3 billion people 
over the next 40 years (90% of them in poor cities), and no one -- 
absolutely no one -- has a clue how a planet of slums, with growing food 
and energy crises, will accommodate their biological survival, much less 
their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and dignity.

If this seems unduly apocalyptic, consider that most climate models project 
impacts that will uncannily reinforce the present geography of inequality. 
One of the pioneer analysts of the economics of global warming, Petersen 
Institute fellow William R. Cline, recently published a country-by-country 
study of the likely effects of climate change on agriculture by the later 
decades of this century. Even in the most optimistic simulations, the 
agricultural systems of Pakistan (a 20% decrease from current farm output 
predicted) and Northwestern India (a 30% decrease) are likely to be 
devastated, along with much of the Middle East, the Maghreb, the Sahel 
belt, Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Twenty-nine developing 
countries will lose 20% or more of their current farm output to global 
warming, while agriculture in the already rich north is likely to receive, 
on average, an 8% boost.

In light of such studies, the current ruthless competition between energy 
and food markets, amplified by international speculation in commodities 
and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could 
soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource depletion, 
intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger is that human 
solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture 
and shatter into a thousand shards.


Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire 
(Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb 
(Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, 
and global change. 

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