The heading for this post comes from one of the great compositions by Stevie Winwood and the UK band ‘Blind Faith’ in 1969.
It perhaps symbolises in 2024, the journey this human world is travelling and its likely future…
A world where pointless and savage wars in West Asia, Ukraine and Africa are spurred on by the quest for power and profit and where infantile ideologies predominate.
And a world where climate change continues its seemingly inexorable march towards a planet destroyed through the pure blind stupidity and ignorance of our ‘world leaders’.
Never before have we all been able to witness the savage brutality of a war of genocide in technicolour- never before have we seen Western media and politicians proselytising so blatantly for that inhumanity. An oh so stark reminder of the difference between Western weasel words about ‘freedom and democracy’ and their support of mass-murder when it profits them.
A reminder too that this has been the Western theme for 500 years of colonial exploitation of more vulnerable populations- that these centuries of exploitation are, in the immortal words in 2022 of EU’s blatantly racist and furiously stupid foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, the reason why Europe and the West is a garden and the rest of the world (in his view), a jungle.
To support this meme, our Western mainstream media continues to idolise the fiction of Western supremacy in all things. As the evidence that this is no longer the case continues to pile up, Western media have resorted to ever greater contortions and lies to support that meme. The recent violence in Amsterdam between Israeli and Dutch football fans – characterised as ‘antisemitism’ is just one of many examples.
Time and time again we have seen European (and U.S. ) political leaders make decisions based on an outdated and irrelevant ideology which ignores all rationality and the reality of the situation.
The most telling, and likely deadly, example of this, is their farcical contortions to prove to their electorates that they doing something about climate change when they are in fact doing worse than nothing. There are no reductions in CO2 emissions, and the hype about the electrification of energy and transport is just that- electrification is not substituting for coal or oil, it comes as an addition to the continuing use of high rates of coal and oil burning.
Our ‘civilisation;’ is locked into endless ‘growth’ (an awful word given that economic ‘growth’ is the total opposite of true organic living growth) – a paradigm that is destroying the planet, but from which we apparently have no wish to escape from.
While climate and environmental scientists have long been steadily ratcheting up their estimations of the devastating impacts of global warming and biodiversity to the living fabric of our world, it is only now that economists from the ‘Network for Greening the Financial System’ are beginning to estimate the true fiscal costs to climate warming- something that could and should have been done 50 years ago, as it would have provided some leverage for real change in this money obsessed world. In the latest estimates economists estimate that global GDP will contract by 33% by 2100 from a 3C rise in global average surface temperatures. That 33% reduction in global GDP is almost certainly a huge underestimation of the real fiscal costs of global warming.
That ‘canary in the coalmine’ early warning system for economies, the cost of insurance, is already rising rapidly as a result of the rapidly increasing unpredictability of our climate systems.
We still do not know for certain what is going to happen to global sea currents and sea level rise as a result of ice melt , but early indications are that there will be a complete collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) within a few decades. When that collapse occurs, not only will much of the Northern Hemisphere become much colder, but the Southern Hemisphere will warm much much faster.
If that’s not enough, the 1972 bestseller Limits to Growth (LtG) authors (70 years ago) concluded that, if global society kept pursuing economic growth, it would experience a decline in food production, industrial output, and ultimately population, within this century. Recent remodelling of that study indicate ‘a halt in welfare, food, and industrial production over the next decade or so, which puts into question the suitability of continuous economic growth as humanity’s goal in the twenty-first century.’
And then we can go to the annual farce of the COP global conferences: the pretence that global leaders are in fact doing something about climate change, when in fact they are doing less than nothing- actively promoting more oil and gas exploration and consumption because endless ‘growth’ on a finite planet is a logical and sensible thing to do -isn’t it?
To hold everything together, so that we don’t lose our trajectory and deviate from accelerating over the climate change cliff, our mainstream and social media incessantly promotes consumption and the vital importance of the constant expansion of each country’s mythical GDP.
Have we completely forgotten our way home?
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References
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39810-w
New Antarctica 