We Are All Chinese Now [View all]

[GliderGuider]

I’ve been re-reading Richard Smith’s eye-opening assessment of the current Chinese political, economic and ecological situation (China's Communist-Capitalist Ecological Apocalypse) recently published on Truth-Out.org. I highly recommend reading the whole article.

While the predicament Mr. Smith describes in China is admttedly more extreme than what is happening in the Western industrialized world (at least for now..) the two situations are surprisingly congruent in their broader outlines. In fact, some of the analysis applies to the United States and the rest of the developed world virtually word-for-word, by changing only the name of the player.

This similarity implies that the considerations in the article could be a useful template for thinking about what it would take to pull the USA as well as China - and by extension the whole world - out of its current charge over the ecological cliff. This examination may make it clearer what can, and can’t be realistically expected in the time we have left before the crops begin to fail in earnest.

In the rest of this note I have taken the liberty of extracting some of the salient points of Richard Smith’s argument and re-wording them slightly to place them in a global context. My own alterations are in italics. I’ve tried to change the original text as little as possible, mainly by substituting “the world” for the original references to China. I trust that Mr. Smith will find my paraphrasing acceptable under “fair use” copyright provisions.

I have formed my own opinions on the likelihood of such changes actually happening, and you can probably guess what it is.

Climate scientists tell us that, given all the failed promises to date, the backpedaling and soaring carbon dioxide emissions, we now face a "climate emergency." On present trends we're on course to a 4 to 6-degree Celsius warming before the end of this century: If we don't radically suppress fossil fuel burning over the next few decades to keep the warming below the 2-degree Celsius threshold, planetary heating will accelerate beyond any human power to stop it and global ecological collapse will be unavoidable. To have a chance of staying below 2 degrees, the industrialized nations and China must cut carbon emissions by 40 to 70 percent globally by 2050 as compared to 2010, which would require cuts on the order of 6 to 10 percent per year. China would have to cut its industrial emissions by 30 to 90 percent as compared to 2010, the variance depending upon expected growth rates and other assumptions.

The only way the world could suppress its greenhouse gas emissions by anything like that amount would be to impose a drastic across-the-board economic contraction, including radical retrenchments and shutdowns of most of the industries that have been built up in the last three decades of market mania. I'm sure this sounds extreme, if not completely crazy. But I don't see what other conclusion we can draw from the science. On the positive side, as I surveyed above, since so much of the world’s resource waste and pollution is just completely unnecessary and harmful, what sounds like extreme austerity could prove just the opposite: liberating, a move to that "better mode of life." Such an emergency plan would have to include at least the following elements:

• Shut down all but critically essential coal-fired power plants needed as a temporary measure to keep the lights and heat on and essential public services in operation until renewable replacements can be brought on line. Abandon the coal gasification projects and phase out oil- and gas-powered fuel plants as quickly as possible. Force a rapid transition of energy generation to renewable wind, water and solar energy sources but with the goal of producing much less electricity overall, closer to what the world produced in the early 1980s before the market-driven industrialization boom. The US and other developed countries should be obliged to provide extensive technical and material assistance to facilitate this transition.
  
• Shut down most of the auto industry. This industry is just a total waste of resources and is the second-biggest contributor to global warming. Most public transportation will have to shift back to bicycles, buses, trains and subways - basically a modernized and expanded version of what the Chinese had in the early 1980s before the auto craze. But the air will be cleaner, transportation will be faster, people will be healthier and immense resources will be conserved.
  
• Shut down most of the coastal export industries. Most of the world’s coastal export industries are geared to producing unsustainable, disposable products, as noted above. There is just no way to have a sustainable economy anywhere if we don't abolish the throwaway repetitive-consumption industries around the world.
  
• Retrench or close down aviation, shipping, and other redundant and unsustainable transportation industries. Abandon the "aviation superpower" boondoggle. Abandon further expansion of the high-speed train network. The world has already built more planes, trains and subways than it needs by any rational accounting of needs. Same with the shipbuilding industry, most of which is geared to container and bulk carrier shipping. This industry needs to be drastically reduced the world’s imports and exports decline with industrial contraction.
  
• Shut down most of the construction industry. Even with the world’s huge population, the planet is massively overbuilt and littered with useless, superfluous buildings, housing, highways, bridges, airports and so on. Some of this can be repurposed. Some should be demolished and the lands returned to farmlands, wetlands, parks or other beneficial use.
  
• Abandon the urbanization drive and actively promote re-ruralization. Urban life has its advantages but urban residents consume several times the energy and natural resources and generate several times as much pollution as rural farm families. Besides, most of the hundreds of millions of people who were relocated to the cities in the last three decades did not go voluntarily; they were forced off their farms by land-grabbing, profiteering local officials. Those ex-farmers who wish to return to the land should be permitted to do so. There is no law of nature that says farm families must be impoverished. In today's world, family farmers with adequate land and decent technology, who can market their own produce so they don't get ripped off by middlemen, and who are not under the thumb of banks, landlords or state-landlords, can do very well. The world’s small farmers are poor because the state and multinational corporations have been squeezing them to subsidize industrialization. The best way to raise rural living standards is to give them security in their farms and pay them fair prices for their produce.
  
• Abandon the imperial plunder colonization of the developing world. If the world’s governments abandon their market-based development strategy they would have no "need" to plunder the natural resources of the developing world; those peoples can be left in peace to develop at their own pace and in accordance with their ecological limits. And after wrecking so much of their environment, the industrialized nations owe them some help.
  
• Launch an emergency global plan for environmental remediation and restoration of public health. Environmental and health experts have called for a comprehensive integrated plan to address the world’s environmental and public health issues. Experts say it could take generations to restore the world’s farmlands, rivers and lakes to tolerable biological health though, as noted above, in places this may be impossible. A significant share of the costs of this remediation should also be borne by the Western nations whose companies callously contributed to this pollution by offshoring their dirtiest industries to the developing world.
  
• Launch a national public works jobs program. If the world is going to have to shut down so much of its industrial economy to brake the drive to ecological collapse, then it is going to have to find or create new jobs for all those displaced workers.(…) But unbreathable air, undrinkable water, unsafe food, polluted farmland, epidemic cancer, rising temperatures and rising seas along coastal regions are bigger problems. So there's just no way around this very inconvenient truth. Making bad stuff has to stop; stopping it will unemploy vast numbers of workers, and other, non-destructive, low-carbon jobs have to be found or created for them. Fortunately, there is no shortage of other socially and environmentally useful work to do: environmental remediation, reforestation, transitioning to organic farming, transitioning to renewable energy, rebuilding and expanding public social services, rebuilding social safety nets, and much else.

Pan Yue was certainly prescient: The Chinese miracle (BPC: and by extension, the global economic miracle of the last century) has come to an end because the environment can no longer keep pace. The question is, can the world find a way to grab hold of the brakes and wrench this locomotive of destruction to a halt before it hurls civilization off the cliff?

Revolution or Collapse?

One thing is certain: This locomotive is not going to be stopped so long as the unholy alliance of multi-national corporations and their tame politicians have its grip on the controls. The world is locked in a death spiral. It can't rein in ravenous resource consumption and suicidal pollution because, given its dependence on the market to generate new jobs, it has to prioritize growth over the environment like governments everywhere.

So long as this basic structural class/property arrangement remains in effect, no top-down "war on pollution" or "war on corruption" is going to change this system or brake the world’s trajectory to ecological collapse. Given the foregoing, I just don't see how the world’s spiral to collapse can be reversed short of social revolution.

Who knows what spark will light the next social explosion?