Capitalist delusion and climate drift - 1

Around the mid-nineteenth century Marx said that philosophers

had hitherto endeavoured to understand the world; and that it
was time to transform it. Seventeen decades later, this idea
screams in our ears.

Put in another way: there is no solution to environmental

problems within the capitalist model.

Summary

1 – Introduction
2 – Environmental management by capitalists and their employees
3 – Climate change - causes and effects
a) Ineluctable absence of human interference cases
b) Historical and current impacts of capitalist development
c) Environmental management as done by multinationals and their employees

1 – Introduction

Humanity has, since its remotest times, left marks on the planet. But they never,
however, had the scale and depth of present times. And the effects of this intervention
are, today, shown to be disastrous and extremely dangerous.

Studies on the subject abound and for decades, in various societies, groups and
institutions have emerged that point to the damage caused by capitalism, although
most of them treat capitalism as a given, as something external and compatible with
environmental changes. In fact, even if there was no awareness of environmental
changes, as has happened up to fifty years ago, there are many reasons to promote
the extinction of capitalism and the fight against its pseudo-alternatives.

As the image below demonstrates, the well-known neo-liberal capitalism, the "socially
responsible" capitalism – credible only for reasons of propaganda or faith – sustainable
capitalism or capitalism with a human face, has the same face, the same smell and a
lot of capacity and patience to persuade anyone who has the mind of a child of less
than five years age. Recently, in Davos, the moguls of capital assembled, always open
to using any ideological mishmash so that everything remains the same.

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Capitalism corresponds to the accumulation of capital, growing and unstoppable,
marching from crisis to crisis, from war to war, from destructing to constructing, or to
construction to be destroyed; with the necessary degree of destruction of human lives.

To accelerate this accumulation – insufficient if based only upon the production of

goods and services – the capitalist system has developed the financial artifices that,
through multiple and linked speculative operations on commodities essential to
Humanity, as well as numerical fantasies, allow the generation of large capital gains.
These operations, which benefit from the necessary support of the globalized political
classes or the nation-states, generate a fragile dynamic, the halting of which leads to
ruinous reversals to financial capital itself, to enterprises producing goods and services,
where human beings are located and, in particular, to the base, overwhelmingly
composed of workers, ex-workers or unemployed. The latter constitute the said
majority of 99% of the Humanity1 which, on the other side, has the nefarious 1%, of
bankers and speculators, holders of great wealth and the highest strata of the political
classes.

In this delusion, people are worth little and are disposable, from work or life, whether
they are anti-capitalist, neutral or ignorant of what capitalism is; they are and will be
victims whenever this situation is favourable to the march of accumulation; and the
permanently inhabited areas (oecumene) as well as the atmosphere or the oceans, will
be treated the same.

No area of human life is exempt from conditioning or being driven by capitalism;

nothing and no one today can escape its insane drift. Hence there is a huge danger for
Humanity (the current 7,200 million human beings) since the difficulties, the poverty,
the social deconstructions and the conflicts are immense; disasters that will not
diminish if human population reaches 9,600 million within thirty years. This despite it
being known, given today's technologies, that the planet can guarantee decent living

1
The marked and objective antagonism between the 99% of humans and the 1% of large capitalists and the high
levels of the political class was popularized by the horizontal mass movement Occupy Wall Street, in 2011.

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conditions for 12,000 million, according to UNESCO calculations from 1999.
Symbolically, the question is: the stock market or your life.

In this context, all the piecemeal, segmented, approaches to reality fall short, as has
been said recently, and their integration, the generation of synergies, is necessary,
setting outside, as declared enemies, capitalists and the political classes, which are
managers – factually or potentially – of the State’s apparatuses, and whose functions
are to flatten the ground for the attainment of accumulation of capital, and the vigilance
or pitiless repression in order to subdue the crowd.

2 – Environmental management by capitalists and their employees

Capital accumulation causes collateral damages such as the production of more or less
toxic waste from homes, factories or hospitals; but always in increasing amounts and
with more complicated and expensive management. Lethal waste from nuclear power
plants is prone to take 10,000 years to disappear; meanwhile they drift around, pushed,
and relocated to unstructured and poor countries. Toxic gases circulate freely,
generated in power stations that burn oil or coal, or by the engines of automobiles,
trucks, boats or airplanes, instruments of the segmented production inherent to the
relocations, vital to generate higher rates of profit, besides tourism. The integration of
chemicals into human, animal, and plant nutrition has poorly studied or under-
estimated implications, but increases business profitability. Abandoned waste from
mines contaminates water and soil. The essential logistics chains for the movement of
goods from anywhere to everywhere feed businesses, lower wages, living and working
conditions, in order to respond to a consumerism induced to generate profits, and a
fleeting well-being purchased on credit. The impacts resulting thereof in aquifers, rivers
and seas are evident. All this and more, because of a supreme fixation on the abstract
growth (of GDP) which, in a more technical and political way, is translated into
accumulation of capital, to be later redistributed.

More media-appealing than pollution – although this one is more palpable, visible,
better known, and clearly originated in the neglected human performance – are climate
changes, with a global scope, more immune to spatially restricted interventions or to
the isolated action of groups of people, state, national, regional or local institutions;
and, above all, there is no consensual acquis in the area of cause and effect
relationships.

This global reality tends to be monitored by governments or in international fora, where

technicians, scientists, NGOs, politicians, members or consultants hired by large
multinationals cross. The interference of States and multinationals guarantees
situations of bastardization and bias of experiences and conclusions drawn from
scientific works; having behind them reasons related to stupid nationalisms, the fixation
in subordination to the logic of profitability, value creation, and profit-making, for the
benefit of shareholders.

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From this promiscuity a culture broth ensues that is not aggressive and even
cooperates with the action of those states and multinationals. Within the logic of
capitalism and armed with the absurd belief that States and political classes exist to
help peoples, there are groups that focus on a mania inherent to capitalism – growth –
as if admitting that once the disease is cured the world will live in peace and eternal
bliss... in capitalism.

3 – Climate change - causes and effects

There is a great diversity of views on climate change, its causes and the rhythm at
which it is happening. The IPCC - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change points
out the human causes as the most important, but there are researchers who consider
mostly natural causes. Everything points to the need to consider a cross between
human causes, on the one hand, with others, inherent to the planet and its relation with
the surrounding space.

Among scientists, there is a need to address deficiencies in the measurement methods

used and/or weaknesses in the data collected. This justifies the commitment to
compilation of climate data for longer periods, in order to make the global circulation
model (GCM) more robust, with a search for greater consistency with the results
obtained through simulations.

Current knowledge about the climate2 is quite insufficient and uncertain. The main
factors used for this end are based on cycles of 3.36 years and 22.6 years, taken
independently and which, being very short, allow for proportionally large variations.

The first of these cycles is related to the ENSO - El Niño-Southern Oscillation , which is
based on the irregular variation of winds and the surface temperature of the eastern
Pacific, that affects the climate, mainly in the tropical and subtropical areas, causing
there high atmospheric pressures in parallel with low pressures in Indonesia. These
high pressures and heating through the El Niño take turns with the cooling that
accompanies La Niña, their whole being called the Walker circulation.

The second cycle is related to the Hale sunspot cycle, that is to say, with variations in
sunspots, which are associated with strong magnetic fields and whose cycles are
irregular, the possibility of predicting them and relating them with the temperature of the
Earth being very difficult. And this is in spite of it being known that the Earth's magnetic
field deflects a substantial part of the radiation coming from the Sun.

Additionally, the effects that a millenarian cycle resulting from the conjunction of the
Sun, Jupiter and Saturn, and the specific influence that, in addition to the Sun,
enormous planetary masses – such as those of the two planets – exert on the Earth
can also be considered.

2 We closely follow the article "Identification of the driving forces of climate change using the longest instrumental
temperature record" published in the renowned journal Nature, assuming our limited knowledge in these scientific
matters https://www.nature.com/articles/srep46091

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It is also known that the Earth has a slight oscillatory movement relatively to the Sun,
partially compensated by the attraction of the Moon, and that this oscillation causes
changes in temperature, in a cycle estimated to last 41,000 years.

Volcanic eruptions (see below) release CO2 into the atmosphere but that tends to be
absorbed by the rocks and included in the Earth's crust; and, within a span of millions
of years, is melted into the magma of the Earth's interior from which it returns to the
atmosphere through volcanic eruptions. And, in this case, the negative human
interference, with accelerated deforestation and CO2 emissions through, namely,
industrial activities and transportation, in addition to the irrational use of the automobile,
is evident.

Those pointing to the preponderance of non-human causes can establish three types
of reasons for this effect:

 Undoubted scientific calculations, some of which are truly applicable, as

mentioned before;

 As instruments of countries in an accelerated process of capitalist development,

anxious to recover from their historical backwardness in this process, especially
China and India (see below the energy consumption), covering up their
responsibilities behind nonhuman causes;

 And a third case, made of the articulation between the energy’s great
multinationals that, allied with the political classes of their countries, try to hide
their responsibilities behind the ineluctable changes emanating from the planet
itself and its positioning within the solar system. This situation is, therefore, in all
things similar to that stated in the previous point.

a) Ineluctable absence of human interference cases

 In 939/40 the Icelandic volcano Eldgja had the largest known eruption in the last
two millennia and caused a particularly cold summer in the northern hemisphere;
and this was used in Iceland for the burial of the "ineffectual" pagan gods,
favouring the adoption of Christianity3. Its poisonous sulphur dioxide emissions
were equivalent to 33/78 million tons and are estimated to have caused a cooling
of 0.7º/1.5o on the northern hemisphere, making it the second coldest summer in
1500 years.

Reports of the time, German, Irish, Arab, and Chinese, refer to very cold winters
with frozen rivers and lakes during the epoch following the eruption of the Eldgja;
the Nile presented an abnormal low flow in reaction to the aerosol effect; there
have been breaks in agricultural production, caused by the cold, with run-away

3
The new gods, however, did not free the Icelanders from the catastrophic eruptions of the Hekla in 1300; nor from
the black plague in 1350; or from the imprisonment of Reykjavik’s inhabitants, taken as slaves by Moorish pirates in
the seventeenth century...
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 starving soldiers and peasants in Sicily, Italy, as well as in present-day Benelux,
Germany and parts of France and Switzerland, and also in Baghdad and the
Maghreb. In China, very bad agricultural years were followed by floods caused by
the upstream thawing that followed the extraordinary snowfalls. The
spring/summer drought in the following years was particularly severe in the Atlas,
northern Alps and eastern China, where it is known that there were many
thousands of deaths (this topic is technically developed here).

 More serious than that of the Eldgja was the eruption of the Toba in Sumatra some
70,000 years ago – the most violent in a two million years interval – that caused
successive and cold winters (drops of 10oC in the temperature) and the near
extinction of the human species.

 The so-called Little Ice Age lasted from the 13th to the 17th centuries, though there
were still cold peaks in 1650, 1770 and 1850, apparently as a result of a
breakdown of solar storms. At that time, the Thames froze in 1607 (the first time)
and 1814 (the last); in 1780 the ice allowed passage on foot between the islands of
Manhattan and Staten, in New York; and Iceland was surrounded by ice in 1695.
In the fifteenth century, there were no longer Scandinavians in Greenland, one of
the causes being the migration of the Inuit to the south, beset by cooling.
Throughout this period human causes with any expressiveness, can hardly be
found. In 1783/4 another Icelandic volcano – the Laki – caused a cooling of 1-2oC.

 In 1883, Krakatoa’s brutal eruption caused the lowering of the temperature

(approximately 1ºC) for years, following the dust and ash surrounding the Earth;
and, in the immediate moment, generated 36,000 dead, with the noise of the
explosion being heard 5,000 km away. After some time (very small in geological
terms), its effects dissipated and today, after more than a century, only the
memory remains.

 In 2014 the Bandarbunga volcano in Iceland began a six-month period of activity

and emitted more pollutant gases – sulphur dioxide – than the whole of Europe in
three years. Already in 2010 the Eyjafjallajökull had caused the closure for a week
of the airspace of twenty European countries, due to the emission of ashes; and
therefore had more media attention, since it affected the march of business... in
the midst of the financial market crisis.

 In the examples mentioned so far, there is always a demonstrable cause for the
known effects; when there are no such conspicuous elements, things are much
more complicated. Currently, calculations point to 140-year cycles of great volcanic
activity in Iceland, with the emission of toxic gases that certainly impact the
planet's temperature.

 Whether or not the regularity of 140-year cycles in volcanic activity is true,

volcanoes have been major active agents in the climate configuration, causing
warming with the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases; or causing cooling

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 by sending into the atmosphere ash and aerosol droplets that reflect the sun's
rays, preventing them from reaching the surface of the planet.

These facts show a plan of causes-effects that until now have been leading to an
approximate return to the situation previously known; in fact, there has never been a
homogeneous variation of temperature for the planet. Any synthetic measure of
climate change is based on dispersed data in geographic space and time, with the
introduction of averages and deviations in statistical forecasting models. However, any
synthesis of these localized, crossed and weighted data, each with high ranges of
randomness, leads to another variable which, being global, will reproduce a larger
interval, where the parameter chosen as an indicator of this synthesis will lie. This
fallibility has led, for example, that the catastrophic predictions, years ago, of experts
such as Lovelock have failure materialize.

b) Historical and current impacts of capitalist development (see the second part of
this text, to be published)

 Capitalist development, in particular after the Industrial Revolution, took place in

completely oblivious way to the impact of the production of goods and services to
the market (such as wars) and, secondarily, to meeting peoples’ needs; a process
which includes deforestation, a process that accounts for 30% of greenhouse gas
emissions, as much as the global transportation activity. And yet, the reduction of
forest space continues, in the name of progress; in Amazonia, for the production of
soy or establishment of pastures, a new impetus being expected with the
Bolsonaro4 government; and in Gabon or Borneo for the planting of palm trees that
will supply the "markets" with palm oil.

 In the last century the planet has warmed more vigorously due to industrialization,
even in processes of "democratic" distribution through relocation; as a result of the
growth of the circulation of vehicles of all the kinds of transport and to the human
activity in general. The forecasting models – with some inconsistency margin,
given the narrowness of the period of time concerning the collected data – say that
we should already have entered a new cooling era; however, effects that are more
related to warming continue to preponderate, resulting in a higher incidence of
hurricanes and droughts, with effects on animal and plant life.

 The shrinking of low-lying islands in the Maldives or the Andaman, the effects on
corals of the acidification of marine waters, major environmental disasters such as
the oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, the creation of uninhabitable areas in Chernobyl
or Fukushima... will have little relation with climatic oscillations inherent to the
planet. Its responsible lies not with the Earth but with the homo economicus,
focused on the maximization of yields and profits by time interval.

4
In the annual period beginning in August/2012 the Amazon lost 5843 km2 of forest and the murdering of Indians
already in Bolsonaro consulate is not a good omen; neither for the environment nor for the natives.
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  In Siberia, permafrost shows the effects of the slight warming that is being felt and
reminds us that a few millennia ago – time, in geology and climatology has a
different dimension from that which so afflicts Papalagui5 – there were mammoths
in Siberia, a river ran through Petra, Pasargadae or Persepolis were large cities
inserted in green areas, etc. In addition, there are clear cases of human
intervention such as the extinction of the lions in the Middle East, the aurochs
grazing in the Iberian Peninsula, the European monkeys, now reduced to those
resisting on the rocky cliffs of Gibraltar, in addition to the shameful extinction of the
Caribbean natives and of the Brazilian coast, the Eastern USA...

c) Environmental management as done by multinationals and their employees

A third case is the covering of big multinationals responsibilities in climate drift – in

collusion with the political classes linked to them – endorsing the causes of climate drift
to the natural dynamics of the planet itself and its positioning in the solar system. And
to this smokescreen, there is a strong contribution of the neoliberal theology, as we
shall further specify:

 In the actions and positioning of the political classes there is the presence of the
induction of belief in their virtues, in their commitment and sacrifice for the well-
being of the people, necessarily coming from free private initiative, the source of all
Goodness. In the political classes it is appreciated that people are passive
collaborators, taxpayers, voters, compulsive consumers, debtors, spectators, and
patriots but never define their own destinies or take any initiative that dispenses
with the existence of the political class. Never ever!

5
Reference to the personage of the book Papalagui by Erich Scheurmann “… a collection of speeches by a Samoan
aborigine chief from Tiavéa on the island of Upolu, deals with the speeches of a Tuiavii and describes his vision of
the European in a pre-World War I period ... Papalagui is a Samoan term that translated literally means the one who
pierced the sky, an allusion to the white man, or, the European.” Adapted from the Wikipedia article (TN).

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 Within these attitudes of states and political classes is the logic that each person
ought to individually seek solutions to problems that are collective, within the scope
of the ideological and political directive decreed by Thatcher, in the early days of
neoliberal subversion – "there is no such thing as society". This tirade leads to
directly leaving to the sacrosanct private initiative those collective problems of
which the state exempts itself; or placed before individuals and families that will
directly support the costs of problem solving6.

Thus, anyone wanting to refuse plastic food will have to pay more for healthy food
because the said neoliberal State only wants the market to work, with a "healthy"
competition between plastic food and healthy food; it being known that the first,
less judicious in the choice of ingredients, with more massive production and
advertising-induced, will be the first choice7.

The use of solar energy at the domestic level is relegated to the competence and
will of the family nuclei, whose investment will be greater, because equipment
suppliers will be able to exploit the atomization of their customers to apply higher
prices; in the Portuguese case, without the State waiving the VAT charge... at the
maximum rate. The alternative is the use of majestic energy supply companies
which, although incorporating a share of renewable origin, will be able to include in
the invoice regular increases in prices, with the VAT bond coupled, among other
charges; those do not exist when families directly capture the solar energy.
Probably because the "raw material" extracted from the sun is increasingly
expensive…

 The global discourse is not restricted to wait with benevolence for the family
initiative to emerge. But points to each individual as the culprit of all evils; be it
through the increase of the public debt or deficit, lack of competitiveness, pollution,
climate change, through their small current and everyday actions. Who does not
remember, in Portugal, during the time of the troika, the speech of "we have spent
beyond our means"? The plural “we” is downright offensive to the overwhelming
majority of the population!

In order to brush off this guilt (well contained in Christian eschatology), families
must re-equip their homes, replace the lamps and the car, buy food labelled bio...
which, by the way, is a more expensive alternative... all of which is in blatant
contrast with stagnant or shrinking incomes, in the name of crisis, recurrent in
political speeches. This applies to those the market considers to be competitive
and qualified (rich), as well as to those who are considered ear marked to heavy
and disqualified tasks (poor).

6
Even if the problems are real idiocy. Years ago, a well-known ecologist association advised families to put out the
small lights distributed throughout the Christmas tree whenever they left home. The energy savings are... huge!
7
In Portugal, the recent tax on sugary drinks has been aimed at obtaining tax revenues tolerable by the
plebs - and that the manufacturers will proceed to include in the prices without any difficulty. However,
anyone standing in the supermarket queues still has at hand’s reach a bundle of treats, full of sugar and
dyes, to entice them, children in particular.
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 This higher cost is, simultaneously, a punishment to those careless, polluting
individuals who do not invest enough in green technologies. This discourse on
energy-saving and healthy practices feeds more sophisticated "markets" and more
expensive goods and pushes into consumption and indebtedness; which is by no
means a contradiction. These solutions make the industry and the financial system
smile and have positive effects on GDP; how convenient…

 Far worse is something that the media and the political classes are silent about, so
that multinationals and large energy companies can continue to pollute with
impunity, avoiding technological changes and investments that would impact the
profits and value of their shares. That is why it is good to know who has greater
responsibility for climate change8.

o In 1988/2015 the CO2 emission was 833 Giga tons. Slightly more than all the
emissions between the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and 1988.

o In the same period that began in 1988, the 100 largest companies engaged in
fossil fuel production promoted 71% of industrial emissions of greenhouse
gases; and among them, 25 private companies, state companies or countries
accounted for 51% of the emissions. The top ten and their contributions are:

1 China (Coal) 14.32%

2 Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco) 4.50%
3 Gazprom OAO 3.91%
4 National Iranian Oil Co 2.28%
5 ExxonMobil Corp 1.98%
6 Coal India 1.87%
7 Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) 1.87%
8 Russia (Coal) 1.86%
9 Royal Dutch Shell PLC 1.67%
10 China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) 1.56%

o These data are not disclosed by the corporate media. The large global and
national institutions that manage energy production cannot be penalized – with
regulations and taxes – because they would reach the stock market’s diffuse
interests and the price levels of the already volatile oil market. They are not only
too big to fail but also untouchable, because a financial crisis, of trust in the
functioning of the capitalist system, is something that the financial system, the
very rich, the speculators and the political classes do not want at all.

8
According to “The Carbon Majors Database” – Report 2017
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 In parallel with the G20 summit in 2017, a report was issued9 revealing the role of
States in supporting big capital, contrary to the scholastic thinking that the State
fulfils the satisfaction of the common good. Well, this support for fossil fuels is four
times higher than that given to renewable energy, as you can see from this extract
of published data (annual average in 2013/15, in millions of dollars).

Clean (b) /
Fossil
Energies (a)
energy (b)
(a) times
South Africa 229 352 1.5
Germany 2357 3461 1.5
Saudi Arabia. 13 1276 98.2
Australia 524 152 0.3
Brazil 1165 2985 2.6
Canada 171 2953 17.3
China 85 13532 159.2
South Korea 92 8907 96.8
USA 1271 6008 4.7
France 650 609 0.9
Great Britain 172 972 5.7
Italy 123 2149 17.5
Japan 2657 16466 6.2
Mexico 235 288 1.2
Russia 0 1092 -

Regarding multilateral financing through development banks, the situation is less

severe.
ADB (Africa) 132 166 1,3
ADB (Asia) 935 674 0,7
ERDB (Europe) 919 1012 1,1

9
TALK IS CHEAP: HOW G20 GOVERNMENTS ARE FINANCING CLIMATE DISASTER

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 EIB/BEI (Europe) 4011 3485 0,9
I-A DB (Inter-Americ.) 532 151 0,3
The World Bank Group 2428 3228 1,3

And the global situation shows what we have said above, that the financing of fossil
energies is clearly preferred to clean energies, with the high patronage of the political
classes, managers of the sanctified State.

Grand Total 18739 71781 3,8

“The problem of today’s world is that intelligent people are full of doubts, and idiotic
people are full of certainties” – Bertrand Russell

(to be continued)

Soon, Capitalist delusion and climate drift - 2

This and other texts in:

http://grazia-tanta.blogspot.com/

http://www.slideshare.net/durgarrai/documents

https://pt.scribd.com/uploads

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