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WHY? WHAT IS WRONG? Umari Haque: Why the World is Unravelling ... An Age of Apocalypse is Telling Us: If We Don’t Change, We Die 
Original article: https://eand.co/why-the-world-is-unravelling-c5bdbd2905ed Peter Burgess COMMENTARY I like to read Umair Haque. I agree with a lot of what he writes and this is no exception. Peter Burgess | ||
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Why the World is Unravelling
An Age of Apocalypse is Telling Us: If We Don’t Change, We Die Written by Umair Haque February 26th 2023 The 2020s have been brutal so far — absolutely brutal. They’re an era in history when catastrophe doesn’t seem to end. We’ve lurched from pandemic to war to heatwave to wildfires to never-ending inflation to natural disaster. When I look at the world, at our civilization, I see one in serious and real trouble. Let’s zoom even further out for a second, and try to put all this in perspective. These catastrophes aren’t unconnected. They’re not just “bad luck” or misfortune. The gods didn’t suddenly decide to punish us. There is a message here, only we are still not listening. That message is about our global economy, our lifestyles, and our futures. Let me try to explain. Until the 2010s, we had a number of Existential Threats as a civilization. By now, you should know what they are. Climate change — which was accelerating, the temperature rising faster than even the worst predictions. Mass extinction — species were beginning to die off in vast numbers, for only the sixth time in deep history, hundreds of millions of years. Economic inequality — our economies were descending into unhealthy places, the normal distribution of a small number of poor and relatively rich but not too rich and a broad middle class bifurcating into a number of ultra rich, and a giant underclass below them. Enter the late 2010s. Those threats began to explode. Into new ones. Inequality bred political instability. Fascism arose in a giant wave across the West. Unnoticed, almost, Putin transformed Russia into a neo-fascist empire. Climate change intensified to the point of genuine catastrophe — megafires and megafloods and so forth became parts of our everyday vocabulary. Now we’re in the 2020s. And our Existential Risks are multiplying. Before, there were just five, roughly speaking. Climate change, inequality and instability, fascism. But now? We have to add more to the list. Pandemics. Mass Extinction. Ecological collapse. And we’re just three years into the 2020s. What is going here? Why is this an age of apocalypse? The message that we aren’t hearing is that our global economy is leading us to disaster. How does it work? Well, right about now, the thing we call the global economy works like this. We in the West, and notably America, have an insatiable appetite for stuff. All kinds of stuff. It doesn’t matter what it is, really. Sneakers, jeans, gadgets, computers, electronics, screens to spend our days glued to. Our lives are made of stuff. We take having all that stuff — cheaply — for granted. We don’t think about it at all, that we can stroll down to the market or mall or just click on Amazon and poof! There it is. The stuff we want. What is it today? A new pair of sneakers. Some new bedsheets. Maybe a designer towel. A handbag. Some more makeup. A new piece of athletic gear. Another phone. But there are three very, very big problems with all this. All this stuff is made of hydrocarbons. All of it. Either it’s plastic and foam — like sneakers and gadgets and electronics. Or it’s synthetic textiles, like clothes and bedsheets. Or it’s made with electricity and steel and iron still derived from hydrocarbons. Our entire world is made of fossil fuels. We in the West live lives made of hydrocarbons — and we’re completely oblivious mostly, to it. We don’t understand that we literally wear chunks of oil made of synthetic fibres called “clothes.” Or that the sneakers we wear on our feet are also quite literally chunks of oil. Or the bedsheets we sleep on, synthetic, are also oil. Our food is made with fertilisers that come from…you guessed it…hydrocarbons. We don’t understand that we live, eat, sleep hydrocarbons. Now. All that was bad enough when it only had one set of “negative externalities,” as economists call it — negative side effects. That set was climate change, mass extinction, and ecological collapse. Hydrocarbons, the way we were using them, extracting them, distributing them, were polluting the skies and rivers and warming the atmosphere and killing off life on the planet — so fast that the planet was juddering in pain, transforming more rapidly than it had for hundreds of millions of years. But now another set of negative externalities is coming from our hydrocarbon intensive lifestyles, too. We eat, live, sleep hydrocarbons. Trace the thing we call the global economy back. China transforms all those hydrocarbons into the stuff of our lives — bedsheets, sneakers, gadgets what have you. But the hydrocarbons come from Russia. And Saudi Arabia. And then Russia turns right around and wages war. See what’s really happening here? Oil turns into goods in one direction, which end up in Western hands — and money flows right back in other, from the West to China to Russia, further destabilising our global politics. Our global economy is at the root of all the Existential Threats we now face. It’s clearest in the example of hydrocarbons. Now it should be clear for any thoughtful person to see they have several sets of negative externalities. They cause climate change, mass extinction and ecological collapse. But they also prop up neo fascist states like Russia, and dictators like Putin. Who then destabilise us, by installing Manchurian candidates for President, like Trump, or flooding the zone, which is our public spaces, with far right propaganda, destabilising us. Pandemics, too, are connected to our global economy. Not so simply as hydrocarbons. Think about how Covid emerged. It wasn’t some kind of fluke — epidemiologists had been predicting it for years, because “zoonotic flow” was increasing, transmission of viruses between humans and animals. Why was that increasing? Because, quite frankly, we exploit China and the rest of the world. The global economy works like this. We pay China as little as possible to transform hydrocarbons into the stuff of our opulent lifestyles which we then take for granted. We don’t insist on human rights or democracy or any kind of decency at all, really. So the Chinese are still dirt poor, on average. They are exploited by us. They have to eat what they can and encroach further and further into the last few wild spaces and live in unhygienic ways — and that’s true across the globe, half of which still doesn’t have clean water, sanitation, and decent food. But in a world where billions still live without clean water, decent sanitation, or three square meals a day, how do you expect pandemics not to emerge? Of course they will. That is a simple fact of both economics and biology. Disease will spread when people cannot care for themselves in basic ways we regard as modern. And on top of that, climate change increases the chances of pandemics. So. Let me try to distill the story I’m telling you a little bit now. How does the global economy really work? We in the West have become accustomed to opulent hydrocarbon intensive lifestyles. Opulent means: artificially cheap, overinflated with far more stuff than we need, or can even make use of. We just use our hydrocarbon based stuff, throw it away when we’re bored of it, and don’t even think about it. And we are willing to exploit whomever we need to to get out hydrocarbon based lifestyles. So we pay China a pittance, one step above slave labour, which is how we treat the world. Of course pandemics emerge. The world does not reach political stability, and of course it regards us with suspicion and distrust. And in the end, petro-states, who provide us hydrocarbons, have no incentive to modernize — because we are the ones who look the other way and don’t insist on what should be our fundamental values of equality, truth, justice, and goodness when they grow corrupt and corroded and unequal. That is what sudden inflows of wealth that you don’t really have to earn — but that you’re just given, by digging up some sand or soil, do — they produce autocracy, not modern development. But we in the West don’t insist on modernization. Instead — as with Russia — when the oligarchs made by the hydrocarbon based lifestyles we take for granted arrive on our shores…with dirty money…blood money…what do we do? We look the other way. They buy our football clubs and newspapers and TV stations. We welcome them into our societies, because they have money. We become hypocrites, who overlook the obvious fact that they don’t share our values of democracy and justice and equality and peace — but stand for the very opposite ones, war and tyranny and fascism and power. Our hydrocarbon lifestyles have corrupted us, too, in the end. That is their final and most grave externality. They have made us weak and feeble. We look the other way when our own values are violated. If we need to exploit China, we will, to get our hydrocarbon based stuff. If we need to look the other way while oligarchs buy up our best neighborhoods and cherry pick our social prizes — we have. For far too long all this has gone on. And it is all coming undone. In the West, we are beginning to learn the price of our hydrocarbon intensive lifestyles the hard way. But only a little bit so far. If I say that sentence in isolation, people will think I’m talking about oil in cars and gas for heating. But I’m not — I’m talking about the fact that our entire lives are made of hydrocarbons. I’m talking about the fact that our entire global relies on them in a way we still don’t understand. So. Our entire global economy relies on this trade. We in the West demand hydrocarbon intensive lifestyles — because they artificially inflate our living standards. We can now have endless cheap sneakers, sheets, gadgets, TVs, computers, that we use a for month or a year and then throw away, and don’t even have to think about any of that. Whether it’s good or right or sane. Our demand is so intense that we are willing to exploit nations like China and keep them poor to do it, looking the other way while slave labour and autocracy result. So intense that we’ve looked the other way while an openly neofascist state destabilised us, with the “hybrid war” of propaganda and disinformation, spreading hate and Big Lies from every possible avenue it could. We’ve looked the other way. Just to get our stuff. All our hydrocarbon intensive stuff. We’ve grown used to it. So much so that being a “rich country” has come to mean “hydrocarbon based stuff, that artificially inflates living standards,” not “a modern democracy where people have money in the bank and there’s a broad, stable middle class.” Hydrocarbon lifestyles corrupted us to an incredible degree. So what happens next? One way to see what will happen this decade is as World War — even if it’s just a series of localised conflicts, Russia vs Ukraine, then former Soviet states, Saudi spreading fundamentalist extremism further, China expanding its sphere, or if its a true World War, which there’s a very good possibility of now. In this version of history, we go into large-scale conflict for resources. But another way to see what will happen this decade is as perhaps the greatest economic transformation in history — certainly the greatest in modern history. We in the West need to end our hydrocarbon based lifestyles. On the simplest level, that’s about using less oil and gas directly, in cars and stoves and so forth. But on a much, much more complex level, that is about decarbonising our lives for real — not living, eating, sleeping, wearing hydrocarbons anymore. That transformation won’t be easy because, well, we in the West don’t make much of anything anymore. We will need to transform our economies, and to really decarbonise them means making everything from clothes to shoes again, and making them out of sustainable and good materials, not ones with all terrible externalities that reach from climate collapse to nuclear war. That isn’t going to be an easy transformation. It will take at least a decade, and it will be a very painful decade. That decade will be made of absolutely vicious inflation, as energy prices rise, and energy supplying nations line up against us, squeezing them even further. It’ll be made of investment, too, to build substitutes for hydrocarbon based everything, shoes, clothes, sheets, electronics. That means a serious, serious squeeze in living standards. This will be a decade of hardship for the West, because inflation costs money, and investment takes money. But there is no other way out. The choices are these. We keep on living our hydrocarbon based lifestyles, which let us enjoy the illusion of artificially cheap stuff we can use for a short time, throw away, and never think about again — while its externalities go on mounting, which are everything from climate collapse to pandemic to fascism to nuclear war. Or we can change. Change the financial, material, and bioenergetic basis of our economies. Away from hydrocarbons. That means learning to manufacture things again — not just putting less oil in our cars. It means learning to use things again, not just throw them away. It means having respect for jobs and people who make things — not just “bankers” and “hedge fund managers.” It means attention and care and respect for the things we use and make and have again, too, not just acquisition for its own sake, which promotes materialism, jealous, spite, which are the very forms of division our enemies depend on to weaken us. The choice is up to us. We have barely begun this economic transformation. And don’t imagine that it will be easy, because in addition to the startling and painful costs of inflation and investment to come, energy interests and politician will dither and oppose it every step of the way. Yet this is the moment. Our hydrocarbon based lifestyles are destroying our world. Our future. Their externalities were bad enough when they stopped at climate change and ecological collapse. Now that they’ve grown into the return of fascism and annihilation by way of nuclear war? We should learn the lesson the 2020s are trying to teach us. This is the moment. We change — or we die. By way of everything from climate collapse to pandemic to social implosion to war. We change in the most profound and real ways — at the level of the material basis of our civilization, our bioenergetics, our economics, and stop politely, foolishly looking the other way. Or else the future keeps on ending in apocalypse, faster, harder. Umair ... February 2023
| The text being discussed is available at | https://eand.co/why-the-world-is-unravelling-c5bdbd2905ed and |